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Bresson

Bresson’s best works attain an air of perfect reverie through a conception of framing and montage that seems equally contrary to the classic idea of what an image, or sequence of images, should represent.

Bresson
Photo: Film Forum/Photofest]

The essential Robert Bresson moment takes place in a stifling jail cell, two men stuffed in a space barely big enough for one, as murder crosses a man’s mind. It’s the definitive juncture of 1956’s A Man Escaped, the point where its protagonists’ thirst for freedom meets its first human obstacle, and it seems to call for an accordingly large presentation. Instead the scene is fragmented, brief, and decidedly anticlimactic. Our hero, Fontaine, whispers to his bunkmate, attempting to wake him, to implicate him in his escape or kill him if he resists; the man stirs, but keeps his eyes shut, pretending to be asleep. Fontaine gives up. His face, despite the conflicting emotions undoubtedly roiling beneath, is as stony and immutable as the walls of his cell.

Like a sculptor, Bresson worked in terms of negative space, less involved with the direct shaping of his final product than the painstaking removal of the matter surrounding it. He took the conventions of the theater, the straight lines that dictated the rise and fall of a story, the clean field of play afforded for the action to exhibit itself, the presentation of feelings through active faces and inter-related bodies, and sanded it down to a jagged, nearly unrecognizable fragment. It’s a process most famously expressed through his actor-model theory, which prescribed a grueling succession of takes to strip any hint of pretense from the actor’s performance. As he noted in 1975’s Notes on Cinematography: “If, on the screen, the mechanism disappears and the phrases you have made them say, the gestures you have made them make, have become one with your models, with your film, with you—then you have a miracle.”

So the most basic, and most instantly recognizable, element of Bresson’s work is this absence, the assurance that there will be no acting with a capital A. This kind of emoting was in his opinion not only impure and artificial, it distracted from the image-making power inherent to cinema, where the story isn’t fixed to the fusty dictates of the stage, on which perspective is forced and unyielding. It’s a style that often seems alienating, and if presented on its own might have been simply that. But Bresson’s best works attain an air of perfect reverie not only through their blank-slate performances, but a conception of framing and montage that seems equally contrary to the classic idea of what an image, or sequence of images, should represent. The result is a matchlessly ascetic form of filmmaking, drawing poetic grandeur out of abject simplicity.

Bresson’s rhythms form their own collective vocabulary. There’s the slashed framing of bodies, hacked down into the legs and feet that creep into the shot alone, their upper parts left tantalizingly out of view. The staccato cadences formed from often frenetic montage, quick actions repeated until their sequencing becomes musical. Close-ups on faces, which seem to suggest offered meaning but provide no emotional recourse. Plots that pluck an ordinary individual out of the crowd, telling their story through an accretion of anecdotal events rather than a traditional three-act arc.

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These are markers that, in sharp contrast to their omnipresence in most of his work, are noticeably absent in the director’s first two films. Les Anges du Péché, from 1943, and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, from 1945, operate in a much more conventional fashion, betraying their auteur’s later formal experimentation through only the slightest hints of incipient oddness. They apply theatrical methods, use their sets and settings to communicate the inner lives of characters, feature big performances by famous actors, employ stories that ripple with revenge and betrayal and other literary devices. They’re also great, albeit entirely different, movies, ones which serve as useful guideposts to Bresson’s more distinctive work.

And despite the formal differences present, these two efforts still share a lot with such work. Their stories, both of which deal heavily with religion, forgiveness, and weighty questions of inter-personal turmoil, could easily be imagined, with some necessary stripping, as classic Bresson. Like all of his films, they concern fundamentally isolated individuals struggling mightily against the expectations of society, fighting exaggerative versions of the everyday battles that are part of being human. They act out, responding to the systems of cruelty and coldness that seem endemic to life. Their isolation reminds us that Bresson’s later formal experimentation isn’t just a difficult visual choice, but instead a technique to compound this developing focus on personal and internal seclusion.

By the 1950s, Bresson’s visual and narrative approaches have aligned. The resultant style is one that operates in broad strokes, portraying doomed individuals whose lives, despite their outwardly Spartan nature, are fraught with issues and complications. They’re morality plays twisted into brutal contests, anecdotal case studies that feel like parables torn from 16th-century philosophy, more Montaigne or Thomas More than Diderot. This is a specific brand of cinematic theater. Unlike so many other directors, who reveal the medium’s freedom from stage-bound convention by broadening its horizons, Bresson constricts, highlighting the tiny, compressed lives of his characters by shrinking the walls around them. The resultant worlds, like those of Ingmar Bergman’s movies of the same period, are both timeless and stifling, part of a remotely relatable universe operating within a defined set of repeating rules.

In Bresson’s case, this universe is one where the grammar of the theater—the communicative power of a face, an arm, the placement of the body in a fixed frame—is still intact, but its power is purposely dulled. He creates an environment of dense isolation by chopping such static images into defined beats, namely the titter tatter of shot/reverse shot that punctuates so many of his character’s conversations—deep, potentially dramatic discussions where the words are reduced to the level of props. Language has no power and no ability to convince, no capacity to pierce these people’s outer shells. Their diminished reactive capacity identifies their impenetrability, the words bouncing weakly off their sad visages.

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The resulting style is relatable to that of silent film, due not only to its reliance on images over dialogue, but through the primacy given to the face. Only here it’s not a communicative tool, but a murky bellwether for how restricted and alone these characters remain. In his 1958 essay on Diary of a Country Priest, André Bazin identifies a key element of Bresson’s world: “The words themselves are so much dead weight, the echo of a silence that is the true dialogue between these two souls.”

The lynchpin of this style may be 1962’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, which stands out as a distantly linked cousin to Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Dreyer and Bresson have a lot in common: fixations on intellectual religiosity and profound loneliness, close-ups that segregate faces and other body parts, insistent twisting of theatrical principles. They’re fixations that get heavy consideration in both of these treatments, which find the two working from roughly the same source material (the minutes of the actual trial), producing interpretations that are both similarly spare and wildly divergent.

In Dreyer’s film, subversion occurs via a distortion of traditional space, all canted angles and deformed sets, which suggests both the vision-addled strangeness of Joan’s world and the irrational nature of the case against her. Her face probably gets no more attention than in Bresson’s treatment, but it has a completely opposite use. This may in fact be the most expressive use of a face in movie history, and René Maria Falconetti’s performance, while still that of a non-professional actor, is enthralling, a magnetic collection of cinched looks and pained glances that surges with unleashed emotion.

Bresson’s response, filmed 36 years later, is much drier and far more dramatically inert. If Dreyer’s version is an opera, this one is an antiphon, with scenes of Joan’s questioning by church leaders, alone under their contemptuous glare, alternating with the more literal seclusion of her cell. The action is blocky and uneven, working off a back-and-forth rhythm between questioner and questioned, and the film’s pacing is rough. The final act, which lurches between condemnation and forgiveness, candor and self-betrayal, is a narrative mess. But the whole thing works as a kind of jagged mosaic, one that’s not nearly as exciting as Passion, but still comparably beautiful. Dreyer subverted theater rules by magnifying them, giving more power to individual images and sensations than would be possible on stage. Bresson responds by paring them down, restricting feelings and sensations, fashioning his tale of sacrifice into an abstemious hymn.

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By the point of 1974’s Lancelot du Lac Bresson’s style has reached full flower. The film takes a romantic saga and bleeds it of any trace of romance, a process that leaves it in an amazingly fractured state of blankness. Opening with an entire military campaign compressed into a grisly death-blow montage, the film might be seen as a postmodern commentary on blustery period epics, were it not so rigorous and unique. The result is an epic of a different kind, a masterpiece of minimalist aggression, which finds its mostly male characters fumbling to connect with one another, in a world where a botched order or a rejected handshake can have deadly implications. Bresson’s characters are never empty vessels, but their surfaces are more vacuous here than ever, a consequence of all the inexpressible emotions that remain clogged inside them. This is a film where men do everything wearing armor, striding about swaddled in their own pride and hurt feelings, a treacherous world that acts as a subtle exaggeration of our own.

The modern-day parallels become clearer in Bresson’s last two movies, which share this idea of a world hectic with blockage and suffering, tempering it with a humanist fondness for such damaged characters. These films once again push the director’s template into new directions. L’Argent is bookended by two crimes—one seemingly petty, the other fatal—and fleshes out the connections between them through an ensemble cast, bonded by one of Bresson’s signature troubled youths. The Devil, Probably finds its college-aged protagonist on a bleak journey, searching for a reason to live in a world that seems to betray his trust at every turn. Both find new ground to explore, and new formal ideas to riff on, but their core stories are the same: Once-hopeful characters become bitter, betrayed by a ceaselessly callous world, and end up consumed by violence.

So to sum up Bresson’s vision: The world is chaotic and cruel. God exists, but he does nothing to mediate evil, or bridge the broad gulfs yawning between individuals. It’s a harsh conception, containing nothing like the hope offered by Dreyer at the end of Ordet: young priests wither and die, children are orphaned, Christ figures sacrifice themselves over vague and pointless motives. At the end of The Trial of Joan of Arc, Joan doesn’t get a glorious exit, she simply disappears. Her apparent transfiguration into two white doves does suggest some measure of hope, but it’s distant hope, glimpsed briefly through a dirty window.

Yet Bresson remains one of cinema’s foremost humanists, and perhaps the preeminent Catholic filmmaker, not because of his relationship to evil, but his connection to good. His films exist in words seemingly ruled by disorder, but they employ God’s articulate silence as proof of a hidden overarching structure. Returning to the Bergman example, in the Swedish director’s oeuvre such a state is indicative of the terrifying emptiness of the cosmos, with a god who’s gone out to buy cigarettes, never to return again. The fact that Bresson’s god does not intervene doesn’t mean he’s not there, but that he’s plotted life as a kind of monitored test. That silence functions in the same way as the blank features of these characters—hiding a richness that cannot be expressed. Joan’s face is vacant, but she’s not empty. She dies unfairly, but not alone, accompanied by her voices and the eventual assurance that she was right all along.

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It’s a depiction of life geared toward personal responsibility and personal salvation, contingent on a formally expressed vision of perpetual isolation. In this light, it’s clear that A Man Escaped isn’t just a thrilling escape story, or even a series of events leading up to a man’s eventual salvation, but a succession of trials he undergoes to prove himself capable of such salvation. The rigorous Bressonian method challenges us to understand these characters without any of the usual clues, while identifying and mirroring the isolated states in which they exist. Like so many of the director’s stories, the film ends with an escape, one which grants its protagonist a reprieve from a lifestyle of suffering. The man sins, he steals, he kills a guard who blocks his way, but he does these things in good faith and his actions are rewarded. He and his companion jump the fence, transitioning from prisoners back to regular citizens, then move further on into the shadows.

Film Forum’s retrospective “Bresson” runs from January 6—19. For more information, click here.

Jesse Cataldo

Jesse Cataldo hails from Brooklyn, where he spends his time writing all kinds of things, preparing elaborate sandwiches, and hopelessly trying to whittle down his Netflix queue.

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