The Predetermined Fatalist
Diary of a Country Priest
A Man Escaped
Pickpocket
Au Hasard Balthazar
L'Argent
Four Nights of the Dreamer
Lancelot du Lac
The Devil Probably
For cineastes, the name Robert Bresson inspires ardent reverence. His defenders will tell you he is an eminent figure whose films are works of art and they will become impassioned if you disagree. One of his biggest defenders is Paul Schraeder who wrote a book (Transcendental Style in Film) and made a movie (American Gigolo) with similar themes.
His films are at once bleak and exhilarating with a cinematic level of purity reserved for only the finest directors. Thus, you have to earn an understanding and respect for his films, which means they are not always easy to comprehend. For many film viewers today brought up on the pabulum of Hollywood and television this isn’t an easy concept, but patience is rewarded if you spend a couple hours watching and absorbing one of his films.
There are only a few things any first time viewer of master French director Bresson need to know. First, that his films are predicated on the concept of predetermination. Second, that his cinematic style is uncompromisingly rigorous yet essential to the stories he tells. Third, his stories can be as darkly thematic as anything can in the Old Testament yet the salvation his characters achieve is seen through a rational atheistic lens.
One notable thing about Bresson is the way he directs his actors. He isn’t interested in acting per se; no actor would ever win an Academy Award in his films. Instead he deliberately puts them in an austere environment where they are rendered expressionless and distant and made to internalize their turmoil. His films can, at times, feel as if he has turned the camera on his actors in between takes. In fact, one of the best performances he ever captured was from a donkey in his 1966 movie Au Hasard Balthazar.
In Bresson films actor’s communication with one another is kept to a minimum too. Instead he employs interior dialogue narratives (such as in Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest) in which his characters keep mental notes, make observations and ultimately find their salvation. Or later by just using silence (in two of his little seen films The Devil Probably and Lancelot du Lac) in which characters seem placed into a spiritual void where they don’t find salvation.
The other notable cinematic aspect of his films is the controlled framing of objects and actors (or what he refers to as “models”) within each scene. He stays away from extravagant cinematic tricks and instead gives the screen a “flat” look. In his early films actors seem withdrawn and laconic like they are sick. And with significantly pared down style in his later films he tilts the camera away from their faces and focuses on their body to show the character’s attitudes and emotions through posture. This device too shows that his characters are one with the ground and the Earth on which they walk.
Bresson only directed 13 features and they roughly fall into two phases:
Black and White films such as Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket
and Au Hasard Balthazar, where characters are redeemed through suffering and Color films such as Lancelot du Lac, The Devil Probably and L'Argent where characters suffer with little hope of redemption.
Matt Langdon
