Emptying the Pond to Get the Fish: On Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson | Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943–1983 | NYRB | Nov 2023 | 304 Pages
Robert Bresson | Notes on the Cinematograph | NYRB | Nov 2016 | 112 Pages
A popular and probably apocryphal story about Nietzsche goes that during an especially prolific stay with a patron family in Turin—in the span of a year he had written The Case Against Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo—he saw a horse being beaten. He began to weep and ran to shield the horse from the blows, hugging the animal's neck. He was removed by the police and returned to the patron family's home. He never spoke or wrote another word for the rest of his life.
In his 1969 book-length essay Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, Pierre Klossowski avoids the horse story entirely, instead focusing on Nietzsche’s use of pseudonyms in correspondence during his year in Turin. I couldn’t help, however, thinking of it while watching the French miller played by Klossowski whipping the eponymous donkey in Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar. How grateful I would have been for a weeping Teuton to appear on screen and defend him. Balthazar, a series of episodes in the life of a donkey in rural France, is no ordinary film. Godard said it “contained the world in an hour and a half,” and Jerzy Skolimowski, in a promotional interview for his Balthazar-inspired 2022 donkey movie EO, said that, after viewing the film in its initial run, “I was completely taken by surprise by the power of that moving effect achieved by Bresson. And I have kept that in mind, as you see, for over fifty years now.”
Klossowski was many things: critic, painter, philosopher, and seminarian. What he was not was a professional actor. Bresson did not like casting professional actors. After 1946’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, which featured French stars Paul Bernard and María Casares, he stuck entirely to amateurs, whom he called models:
An actor is supposed to stop being himself and become someone else. So a strange thing happens: this piece of machinery, the camera, captures everything. That is, it captures the actor who is both himself and someone else at the same time. If we look very closely, we can see that there is something false; the result isn’t true.
He gave the above statement in a 1957 Cannes press conference with critics from the French film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, following a screening of A Man Escaped. The text of the press conference is collected in NYRB’s Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943–1983, the publisher’s second book related to the filmmaker. The first was the 2016 reissue of Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, a collection of aphorisms on the artist’s theory and practice as a filmmaker. Bresson on Bresson contains interviews, profiles, and press conferences from Bresson’s career, organized chronologically by the films which occasioned them.
Bresson is the most notable French filmmaker to emerge between Renoir’s major period and the New Wave, and one of the only fellow countrymen that the New Wave filmmakers respected. Still, Bresson remains relatively unknown. His films have neither the populist classicism of François Truffaut nor the chic experimentalism of Jean-Luc Godard; and unlike with Eric Rohmer, no one is curating Instagram accounts with outfits from his oeuvre.
Bresson began his artistic career as a painter peripheral to the French surrealist movement. To hear him tell it he remained one. “It’s impossible to have been a painter and to no longer be one. Painting has done many things for me, including push me, and teach me, to make films,” he explained in an interview during a 1987 retrospective of his work at Paris’s Cinémathèque française. He made a couple short films in the 1930s but did not complete his first feature film until 1943’s Angel of Sin, which he quickly (for him) followed with 1945’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Neither are particularly characteristic of the filmmaker that Bresson would become. Les Dames, however, was Bresson’s first of many literary adaptations.
His next film was arguably his breakthrough. Bresson’s distinct style and thematic concerns emerge in 1951’s Diary of a Country Priest, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. The plot is familiar to fans of Bresson disciple Paul Schrader, who wrote a book on Bresson, Yasujiro Ozu, and Carl Dreyer before working as filmmaker, and who drew much of his wonderful First Reformed from the earlier movie. A young parish priest, played by theater actor Claude Laydu in his first role, is suffering from a strange stomach illness, for which he refuses to seek treatment. He is also experiencing a spiritual crisis and struggling to pray. He faces various challenges to his dwindling faith as his health worsens, though he remains ultimately steadfast in his belief in God. Things get worse. There is no happy ending. Nonetheless, there is hope to be found in the priest’s quiet bravery and in his faith under fire. Laydu gives the first great Bressonian performance, by which I mean the po-faced inscrutable acting that the director preferred. While trained actors might choose to signify the priest’s inner torment through expressive speech or movement, Laydu simply is, forcing the viewer to intuit the character’s feelings. Over the course of the film, this lack of expressivity comes to seem like poise. In a world where people increasingly model their behavior on the endless spectacle of media present both online and in everyday life, there’s something to be said for watching people react to hardship with a reserved dignity. I even find it a little aspirational.
Bresson’s other two films of the 1950s, A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959), are similarly masterful. The former might be the greatest of all prison escape films, and its greatness stems directly from Bresson’s style. While later Hollywood jailbreak films like The Great Escape or The Shawshank Redemption will make recourse to adventure movie cliches or rousing music, A Man Escaped withholds. A member of the French Resistance is imprisoned by the Gestapo and spends the film plotting and executing his escape. Visually, the film is lucid; middle distance shots which provide a clear sense of the geography of the prison and the prisoner’s cell, close-ups not of expression but of gesture. The film respects the silence of the plotting prisoner and trusts that his plans for escape will be made plain through his actions. In Notes on the Cinematograph, Bresson writes “a sound must never come to the rescue of an image, nor an image to rescue of a sound.” To supplement the suspense of the image with suspenseful music would end up cheapening the power of the image. A voiceover keys viewers into the prisoner’s thoughts as they occur—it is contemporaneous, not retrospective. Bresson’s use of voiceover in this film and others complicates rather than supplements the action, often describing an emotion opposite to that performed by the actor, capturing better than most films the ways that action and feeling can contradict each other. In a retrospective interview in 1959, Bresson said, “In A Man Escaped, the drama stemmed from the relationship between the tone of the voice-over and that of the dialogue and images. It was like painting with three colors.” Pickpocket, a film about a man falling into a life of crime at the expense of those closest to him, uses heightened versions of the same techniques to great success.
Bresson returned to an explicitly religious topic for 1962’s The Trial of Joan of Arc. The dialogue for the film came directly from the transcripts of the real trials and sought fidelity to the facts and to not “locate the greatness of Joan’s life in uncertainties.” The film is thus restricted primarily to court scenes, with a couple scenes set in Joan’s bedroom and only one in which she expresses an emotional response, crying, appropriate to the situation. The Trial of Joan of Arc is one of Bresson’s most challenging films. Unlike the previous two, which conjured drive and narrative from gesture and the counterpoint between image and sound, Joan of Arc lacks tension, every narrative step feels inevitable, there is no real chance for surprise or revelation. But its documentarian presentation of the historical record without sentimentalism or overdetermined drama, and Joan’s stoic resolve in the face of cruel questioning, make the final moments of the film—Joan’s execution by fire—quite moving.
Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), about the life of a donkey in rural France, is often considered Bresson’s masterpiece. The donkey playing Balthazar is perhaps the ultimate Bresson actor. An animal and thus unable to emote, beyond some admittedly harrowing whinnying and honking, Balthazar becomes the perfect model, a blank who reflects the cruelty of the humans who interact with him, as well as the occasional kindness. The interviews and articles about the film occupy the most space of any film in Bresson on Bresson.
After his following film, Mouchette (1967), another Bernanos adaptation, Bresson began using color. For years Bresson extolled the virtues of black and white over color as being more suggestive and less mechanistic, and in it suggestive closer to color than an inaccurate reproduction: “A black-and-white film comes closer to painting. For example, the way it suggests the green of a tree comes closer to the truth of the tree than the fake photographic green of color film.” Nevertheless, his final five films use color film stock without sacrificing the non-sensational quality of the black-and-white work and clarity of action.
These color films, A Gentle Woman (1969), Four Nights of a Dreamer (1972), Lancelot of the Lake (1974), The Devil, Probably (1977) and L’Argent (1983), consist of, respectively, two Dostoevsky adaptations, a synthesis of various chivalric romances, an original screenplay, and a loose adaptation of Tolstoy. They represent a darkening of Bresson’s vision, the result of despair about the state of the world. Pressed on the bleakness of The Devil, Probably, the director said that if he’s “spreading news it’s bad news . . . whether in nuclear research or in medicine, we’re doing things that have immeasurable consequences.” The Devil, Probably is the remarkably contemporary story about a group of disaffected young people moved to despair by a world of looming ecological disaster and religious hypocrisy. The main character, Charles, a young punk, spends the film in search of meaning. The movie begins with his dead body and the rest is a flashback. It is not a spoiler to say that he does not find what he is looking for.
L’Argent is almost perversely bleak, adapting only the downward trajectory of the first half of Tolstoy’s novella, The Forged Coupon. The film’s protagonist, Yvon, accidentally passes off some counterfeit money, setting off a series of events, an “avalanche of evil,” to quote Bresson, that ends up with him in jail without a job or a family. Upon release he becomes a murderer, killing not only his wife and a hotel worker but the saintly country woman who took him in and gave him a hearing without judgment. While the film ends with Yvon turning himself in, unlike the novel it does not follow him through his redemption. It simply ends. In a review after the film’s release, Bresson says of Yvon that “society has abandoned him. All that carnage is like the explosion of his despair.” Though Bresson lived nearly twenty more years, dying in 1999 at the age of 98, he never made another film.
Bresson on Bresson marks new territory for NYRB, but not in publishing. Visit any bookstore with a film section and you might find Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Scorsese on Scorsese, Lynch on Lynch, Hawks on Hawks, Fellini on Fellini, Godard on Godard, and others. Some, like Bresson on Bresson, are miscellanies—Godard’s book, which is organized chronologically, is composed primarily of the director’s youthful film criticism for Cahiers du Cinema, with interviews only at the end, when he switched from criticism to filmmaking full-time. Others, like the Cassavetes volume, are a collection of interviews with a single interlocutor. The gold standard book defies the now-standard “director-on-director” title conventions: Hitchcock/Truffaut. Published in French in 1966, it lacks Hitchcock’s comments on his final few films, but otherwise covers his entire career through conversations with fellow filmmaker and Hitchcock fanatic François Truffaut. The elder artist was wary of interviewers throughout his life, but Truffaut is able to put him at ease, and the resulting conversations are full of relevant biographical details, theories about filmmaking, explanations of technical decisions, and a little bit of film criticism from both parties. It is a wonderfully rich book, insightful both on Hitchcock’s work and film in general.
Bresson on Bresson is not as good. Much of what he says in the book is found in sharper and more concise form in Notes on the Cinematograph. In an interview on Au Hasard Balthazar, Bresson says, “the actor’s art is about projection,” and elaborates, “he projects this character while at the same time looking at it and surveilling his work. If that happens in a film, if an actor projects away from himself, what’s left? Nothing. The character is empty.” In contrast, in Notes he writes the director must “radically suppress intentions in your models.” The terminology is strange, but the language is direct and clear, provocatively so. Prolix and repetitive explanations of various technical decisions abound in Bresson on Bresson, such that reading multiple sections of the book in a row can become tedious. Nothing is tedious in Notes on the Cinematograph.
Notes belongs to a different film book subgenre: the “director’s guide to making movies” book. Some, like Robert Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew or Alexander Mackendrick’s On Film-making, provide a practical guide to the everyday mechanics of putting films together: everything from budgeting, to independent film distribution, to writing for and working with actors. Others, like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, are more like aesthetic manifestos. Notes is one of the latter.
The book features a unique vocabulary, with idiosyncratic usages for various commonplace filmmaking terms. This stems from Bresson’s desire to distinguish the committed from the complacent. “As they are intended, CINEMA films can only use actors, films of cinematography models only.” Explanation of terms: “cinema films” are like filmed stage plays, whereas “films of cinematography” more resourcefully employ the unique characteristics of cinema. “Actors” are professionals, trained to project emotions, whereas “models” are nonprofessionals who unselfconsciously display their essence through the absence of technique. While Bresson’s thoughts touch on a variety of issues, certain artistic principles emerge as thematic centers: precision (“not to use two violins when one is enough”), “automatism” (“nine-tenths of our movements are habit and automatism”), the insignificance of individual image or shot (“no absolute value in an image”); efficiency, invention, improvisation. Bresson expresses these principles through a variety of styles. Sometimes the notes are gnomic: “empty the pond to get the fish.” Other times they are pithy: “art films, the one most devoid of it.” Occasionally he provides specifically technical advice; regarding music, he dictates, “no music at all, except, of course, music played by visible instruments.” Most of the time, however, the ideas apply to all art-making ventures. This wide-ranging aspect is perhaps what drew NYRB to the book, as opposed to more cinematically-specific texts in the same vein.
At one point in Notes on the Cinematograph, Bresson asks, “is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?” The first time I read the book, I understood Bresson as a sort of nightingale, forever dealing with the same themes in films with the same style. The filmography itself tells a different story. While Bresson worked towards his principles, he was only human, and his career does follow a familiar artistic path of experimentation, refraction, technical development, and the accompanying variation in quality. Whatever the flaws in Bresson on Bresson as an aesthetic manifesto à la Notes, it is a wonderful testament to Bresson as a working artist. In Notes, he can seem unapproachable, uncompromising in his fidelity to his maxims and principles. In the interviews collected in Bresson on Bresson, however, you get a sense of him thinking and questioning himself. Earlier I quoted some of his thoughts on sound in film from Notes. An interviewer in 1968 pressed Bresson on these ideas, pointing out the higher incidence of music at the beginning of his career. The filmmaker responds, “I made mistakes with the use of music in my early films.” I realized the book’s true value when I began thinking about it more as a reference, reading the relevant interviews after watching his films for this piece.
The two volumes here are complementary, working together as guides to Bresson’s incredible work and his thinking about filmmaking and art in general. If the books do anything to bolster interest in Robert Bresson, then NYRB has done us all a great service.