Bresson

[Dan Warburton]

.

[_duif]

I'm a massive fan, but only of his black & white films (say, the first half of his career), with the exception of his last film, 'L'Argent', which is also very good. 1951-1967 is the period I'm most interested in, from 'Journal' to 'Mouchette', my favourites being those 2 and especially 'Au Hasard, Balthazar'.
can't say I get much pleasure out of his later films, from 'Une femme douce' to 'Le diable probablement'.. hard to say what it is, but there's an awkwardness to all of them, especially 'Lancelot du Lac', which is hard to sit though.
one thing I regret is the music in 'Journal'; if he had toned that down as in his later films, it might just have been even more amazing.
I have those MK2 DVDs you mention, seem to recall that the extras were subtitled too, though I'd have to check to be sure. on the other hand I think my French is good enough to manage without them.
has anyone ever seen 'Les affaires publiques' (1934), his 25 minute debut, supposed to be some slapstick comedy? it seems impossible to find, and in all likelihood it won't be of much interest, but I'd like to see it anyway.. just to have seen them all, you know.

[surfer]

The only Bresson I've seen is Balthazar, which I loved, one of my top 15 or so films ever. He was my big cinematic "discovery" last year. I've queued up everything else Netflix has and will slowly be working my way through them.

I dont have anything really to add right now other than looking forward to other's contributions and recommendations.

[user_4840]

Bresson's Movies
by Robert Creeley


A movie of Robert
Bresson's showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched

by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one

one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,

knew his almost complacent
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film

of Bresson's has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,

dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of

no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are

in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.

[fearandpanic]

Balthazar I've seen a few times, and, while it looks nice, it exudes from its core an annoying whiff of Christianity. The highlight for me the is eerie appearance of Pierre Klossowski as the miser. Mouchette I consider a kind of twin film. The saint-like demise of both characters and the director's delight in martyrdom hold little appeal for me.

Of the later films, L'Argent is interesting enough.

[jon abbey]

I also have trouble with Bresson, the one exception thus far is A Man Escaped, which I loved.

[surfer]

it exudes from its core an annoying whiff of Christianity.

This is a common criticism. It just didnt bother me much. Balthasar's and Marie's "martyrdom" (put in quotes because, after all, he is a donkey) seems completely natural within the context of that environment. Its not a forced and obvious religious metaphor to me. It reminded me of early Fellini, with its perfectly-paced narrative and Christian undertones, combined with the strong compositional eye of Antonioni, but less severe. Having been raised a Christian (though I havent been one for many years) I "get" Fellini's and Bresson's and Kieslowski's use of Christian themes. Its not something I or they can get away from as it is part of who we are, for better or worse. Its also a part of French, and Italian, and Polish culture.

To me, AHB was nothing more than a story about country people who are flawed, prideful, kind, mean, selfless, and petty.
Their relationship with Balthazar revealed much about their inner self. To call this a "religious fable" is wrong I think, its more like a Steinbeck story.

Bresson does seem to be saying something about our shared humanity, and how empathy for fellow humans and animals can provide a sort of spiritual transcendence, which I dont think is an exclusively Christian theme or idea.

[fearandpanic]

Balthasar's and Marie's "martyrdom" (put in quotes because, after all, he is a donkey) seems completely natural within the context of that environment.

What I like about it is the tension between the rather mystical, elliptical tone and the prosaic, realistic manner of filming it.

However, Mouchette is a person and not "just" a donkey (though clearly the donkey is anthropomorphised and "elevated"--the other animals in the film look back at him rather blankly), and the two films, made in quick succession, have more than a little in common. I wasn't won over by Balthazar, but it was Mouchette that turned the tide for me against both films. And it's the second film (which you say you haven't seen) that really confirms the martyr vibe, so I think you can leave off the quotation marks for that one. He seems to me to delight in the filmed suffering of Mouchette, much like Christians in bygone days delighted in depicting the suffering of Jesus and the saints.

To call this a "religious fable" is wrong I think, its more like a Steinbeck story.

To be clear, I don't mean that it's only a religious fable or that either film can be reduced to one. It's just one crucial aspect of them that prevents me from actually liking them as films (though I can admire certain aspects of them).

I like other films with Christian themes (like Dreyer's), but I also happen to enjoy watching them and find them moving, probably because there's more of a human feeling in them (like the long childbirth sequence in Ordet).

[P. Wretch]

I'm on the Bresson-sceptic side. I sort of admire what he's aiming at with the totally dead-pan acting and monotone vocal delivery, producing a sober, anti-naturalistic style which clearly influenced various experimental filmmakers (e.g. Straub & Huillet). However, I share Fearandpanic's reservations about the religious tone. His Trial of Joan of Arc, instead of subtle and reserved, just seemed excessively pious and dull to me, lacking any of the expression of Dreyer's more famous version.

Of the ones I've seen, Mouchette is probably the favourite - the surly young girl works well as the central focus. I also saw Lancelot du Lac last year, which is a refreshingly anti-heroic take on the Arthurian legend (perhaps the serious counterpart to Monty Python's version, made a year later). Yet Bresson seems to belong to an earlier era of conservative Catholicism, for all his stylistic originality; I can't appreciate him alongside Resnais, Robbe-Grillet or Antonioni.

[fearandpanic]

Sure, there's more than a whiff of Christianity - especially in Diary of a Country Priest - but why should that worry you? I'm not in the least religious myself but stand me in front of the Van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent and watch the tears flow.

This is only one feature of his work. I don't mean to let it dominate every other: the photography and his visual style, his curious ideas about acting and dialogue, his editing style, etc.

One of the things I like especially about Balthazar is the use of music. The title sequence forcing together Schubert's late piano sonata in A minor and a donkey braying is a touch of brilliance.

[user_548]

I saw L'Argent with no prior knowledge of Bresson, his techniques or his reputation. Therefore it was one of those strange and novel movie experiences where you slowly start to realize that there is a very specific unfamiliar intentionality to the film you're watching, though you're not entirely sure what it is initially. As the film (or book, or piece of music) goes on you start to build your perception of what's happening in terms of technique and your viewing of the film changes quite dramatically as it goes on.

Of course this happens to most, if not all, of the media we consume but it was especially fun for me to be exposed to Bresson without having any precedent for the work in knowing who he was and the characteristics of his movies. So L'Argent will probably always be my favorite Bresson no matter how many of his films I see, both because of the experience I just mentioned and because, I've heard, it's one of his better films.

I also saw Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped. I have to say, I honestly didn't enjoy Diary of a Country Priest but wouldn't be adverse to trying it again. A Man Escaped is great: that scene at the beginning where he runs out of the car and the camera stays coolly inside.

[user_1082]

"What I am looking for, it's not really the expression through gesture, words, mimics, but expression through rhythm and a combination of images, through their position, their relation and their amount. Before anything else, the purpose of an image must be the exchange. But for that exchange to be possible, it is necessary that these images have something in common, that they participate together in a sort of union. That's why I try to give to my characters a sort of linkage, and ask my actors (all my actors) to speak in a certain way, to behave in a certain way, which is always the same one."

Where's this from?

[fearandpanic]

Here's an excellent short article on Bresson by the American novelist Denis Cooper, who makes a particular case for his later colour films:

--

IN THE EARLY '80s, A FRIEND INVITED ME TO a screening of Robert Bresson's The Devil, Probably, on the condition that, no matter what, I not say a word about it afterward. He claimed that Bresson's films had such a profound, consuming effect on him that he couldn't bear even the slightest outside interference until their immediate spell wore off, which he warned me might take hours. He was not normally a melodramatic, overly sensitive, or pretentious person, so I just thought he was being weird--until the house lights went down. All around us, moviegoers yawned or laughed derisively; some even fled the theater. But, watching the film, I experienced an emotion more intense than any I'd ever have guessed art could produce. The critic Andrew Sarris, writing on Bresson's work, once famously characterized this reaction as a convulsion of one's entire being, which rings true to me. Ever since, I've imposed basically the same condition on those rare friends whom I trust enough to sit beside during the screening of a Bresson film, and I'm not otherwise a particularly melodramatic, sensitive, or pretentious person.

Bresson isn't just my favorite artist. There's a whole lot more to it than that, though the effect he has had on me is too enormous and personal to distill. On a practical level, his work constructed my sensibility as a writer by offering up the idea that it was possible for an artwork's style to embody a kind of pragmatism that, if sufficiently rigorous and devoted to a sufficiently powerful subject, would eliminate the need within the work for an overt philosophical or moral standpoint. Every artist tries in some way to find that least compromised intersection of planes where his or her ideas meet and slightly exceed the world's expectations, but I don't think anyone has found a more perfectly balanced style than Bresson. His work communicates an unyielding, peculiarly personal vision of the world in a voice so sterilized as to achieve an almost inhuman efficiency and logic. The result is a kind of cinematic machine whose sets, locations, narrative, and models (Bresson's preferred term for actors) function together as an unhierarchical unit so perfectly self-sufficient that all that is revealed within each film is the disconcerting failure of the models to fulfill Bresson's requirements. Their emotions resonate, despite a conscientious effort on Bresson's part to make them move about and speak as though they have none. The fact that the actors, unlike any other aspect of Bresson's films, are driven by individual feeling draws attention almost by default, and creates a relationship with the audience so intimate that it's almost unbearable in its aesthetic restrictions.

A full appreciation of Bresson's work requires moviegoers to approach his films as though starting from scratch. This is a huge thing to ask of an audience, which is why Bresson's films will always select their admirers with care and infrequency. But the films earn that degree of commitment because, despite their intensive demands, they ask almost nothing for themselves. They're too plain to be considered experimental or avant-garde, and require no suspension of disbelief. But they're antitraditional as well, although their respect for the tradition of storytelling borders on the fanatical. They're neither difficult nor easy to watch, at least not in the usual senses of those words. Instead of flaunting their difference, or feigning modesty by deferring to the conventions of Hollywood film, they offer up an art so unimpeachably fair, so lacking in ulterior motivation that the effect is a kind of mimicry of what perception might be like were one capable of simultaneously perceiving clearly and appreciating th process by which perception occurs. The only thing these films ask is that one share a fraction of Bresson's single-minded concern for the souls of young people whose innocence causes them to fail at the cruel, irrevocable task of adulthood.

Apart from his first feature, the comedy Les Anges du peche, and perhaps the curiously terse if fascinating Une Femme douce, Bresson never made a film that's less than sublime. For whatever reason, his early, black-and-white films like Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Mouchette are the most celebrated. But, if anything, his later, less widely circulated color films--Four Nights of a Dreamer, Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably, and L'Argent--are the masterpieces among his masterpieces, to my mind. Many of the aforementioned stylistic tropes for which Bresson is alternately reviled and admired reached their full significance in this latter part of his oeuvre, as the lapsed Catholicism that gave his early, doomed characters the remote possibility of redemption and allowed viewers to interpret his work's introversion as a metaphor for religious self-erasure loses ground to an even more thoroughly hopeless notion of fate as the random and godless chain of events that structures a life. In Bresson's earlier films, the protagonist's almost inevitable suicide is a tragic segue into the comforting delusion of heaven; in the later films, suicide is the inexorable outcome, given the bleak circumstances; and the staggering numbness induced by Bresson's cold, mechanical witness to these deaths forms the least opinionated, and therefore only accurate depiction of suicide's consequences that I've ever come across. -- Dennis Cooper

[_duif]

yeah, good news indeed. my copy of "A man escaped" already got here... looking good.

[P. Wretch]

Do you recommend Lancelot du Lac? I'm sort of hesitant about buying it, having read some decidedly mixed reviews.

It would make an interesting double bill with Monty Python and the Holy Grail (incidentally, made the following year)*, since both films work in a vaguely similar way. Instead of undermining the heroism of the Arthurian myth with absurd humour, Bresson does it with an anti-climactic lack of special effects or emotion. Everyone walks around like sullen zombies; there is a monotonous jousting match. Actually it's one of my favourites of his, since the acting style consciously jars with the tradition it's working with (or maybe not - aren't Thomas Malory's characters pretty monotonous to begin with?).

*I see I already made this point back in March - nothing if not predictable.

[fearandpanic]

Jurrien Rood's documentary De Weg naar Bresson ("Road to Bresson"

Yes, it's good, and it benefits from the interviews you mention. Long extracts from the films are iluminating if you've seen them (but annoying otherwise, since they show you the end of each one without warning). The fleeting moments with Bresson are especially interesting, but I'd prefer a slightly less reverent tone. A lot of what's argued for in it--contempt or at least total disregard for audiences, purism in cinema (or in cinematography as Bresson would have it)--is at least arguble. I'd like to have seen some response from the documentary makers (or a dissenting voice) to it rather than instant, off-putting adulation. Including shots of the documentary makers repeatedly trying and failing to get hold of Bresson gives their subject a mythical aura I'm sure he could do without. It's interesting to see Bresson's scornful attitute to those interested in his work returned to him on stage at Cannes when he wins a prize for l'Argent--he's jeered and whistled at in an oddly moving moment, before he takes Tarkovsky's arm.

It's also useful for its inclusion of extracts from Bresson's book, practically a personal manifesto.

[Tanner]

I have to say I enjoy Pickpocket and A Man Escaped the most so far. A Man Escaped created such a terribly tense environment, something I find in his other films, but never to such an extent, possibly due to what amounts to a pretty basic story. Pickpocket has that explosion of emotion at the end which was pretty transcendent for me when I saw it-- it worked so well in putting into relief the previous dead pan, almost-static action beforehand.

L'Argent just didn't do it for me-- I found it more frustrating than usual. Mouchette I found interesting, but ultimately left me cold. I have Lancelot du Lac sitting around somewhere and haven't watched it all the way through, having received it in a drunken/drugged stupor some night years ago... I hope I still have it. There's a slightly interesting /humorous commentary by Naomie Harris in Tristan Shandy about Bresson and the battle scenes in Lancelot Du Lac, enjoyable mainly for the look of total incomprehension by Steve Coogan.

Interesting Denis Cooper article, Fear. Thanks.

[Jesse]

Agreed that this is probably the one to serve as a Bresson entry point, Dan.
Not my favorite (I'd choose a prior film, Diary Of A Country Priest, and a subsequent work, Au Hasard Balthazar, as faves), but very good.

[jon abbey]

A Man Escaped is definitely my fave (I've seen maybe five so far), on my top 20 films of all time list.

http://www.shompy.com/jon-abbey/l17011_ukuk.html" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;

[fearandpanic]

A Man Escaped is definitely my fave (I've seen maybe five so far), on my top 20 films of all time list.

A favourite of mine also. I agree with Dan about the use of sound--not just the Mozart Mass, but every scrape against his door, the guards rattling their keys, off-screen voices, distant trains, and so on.