Bresson

FILM FESTIVAL

by Jesse Cataldo on January 5, 2012 Jump to Comments (1) or Add Your Own

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.

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.

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.

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