Three Notes on Robert Bresson

Pickpocket (Directed by Robert Bresson)

Bresson is the exemplar of transcendental style: his form is predictable and is “the operative element,” the subject matter itself simply the vehicle or pretext for expressing the Transcendent. His thematic of confinement and liberty in the prison cycle (Diary of a Country Priest [1951], A Man Escaped [1956], Pickpocket [1959], The Trial of Joan of Arc [1962], and later L’argent [1983]), allows for a productive exploration of “theological questions”. Schrader first outlines the presentation of the everyday in Bresson’s cinema by way of plot, actors, cinematography, editing and sound. Each of these components stifles the viewer’s desire to be “distracted” by “screens,” Bresson’s term for something like narrative absorption and character identification. In his non-expressive stylization of the everyday, Bresson “blocks the emotional and intellectual exits, preparing the viewer for the moment when he must face the Unknown”. By doubling processes such as an image of an action and a voiceover describing that very same action, the director’s tactics also block the representations of the everyday from becoming “screens” themselves. Second, contrasted with Ozu’s characters, Bresson’s protagonists’ disparity is external, e.g., the titular Priest’s sickness and social and spiritual solitude. Third, after the decisive action, Bresson ends with stasis that generally take shape as an icon, e.g., the charred stake after Joan’s execution. It is this recourse to iconicity that takes Schrader into the realm of Byzantine iconography. 

– Troy Bordun on Paul Schrader’s “Transcendental Style in Film”.

Un Condamne A Mort (A Man Escaped) is a minute-by-minute account of a condemned man's getaway. Indeed, it is a fanatical reconstruction of an actual event, and Commander Devigny, the man who lived the adventure thirteen years ago, never left the set, since Bresson kept asking him to show the anonymous actor who portrayed him how you hold a spoon in a cell, how you write on the walls, how you fall asleep.

But it isn't actually a story, or even an account or a drama. It is simply the minute description by scrupulous reconstruction of what went into the escape. The entire film consists of closeups of objects and closeups of thi face of the man who moves the objects.

Bresson wanted to call it Le Vent soufle ou il veut (The wind blows where it will), and it was a perilous experiment; but it became a successful and moving film, thanks to Bresson's stubborn genius. He figured out how to buck all existing forms of filmmaking and reach for a new truth with a new realism.

The suspense – there is a certain suspense in the film – is created naturally, not by stretching out the passage of time, but by letting it evaporate. Because the shots are brief and the scenes rapid, we never have the feeling that we have been offered ninety privileged moments of Fontaine's sentence. We live with him in his prison cell, not for ninety minutes but for two months, and it is a fascinating experience.

The laconic dialogue alternates with the hero's interior monologue; the passages from one scene to another are carried out with Mozart's assistance. The sounds have a hallucinatory quality: railroads, the bolting of doors, footsteps, etc.

In addition, Un Condamne is Bresson's first perfectly homogeneous film. There is not a single spoiled shot; it conforms to the author's intentions from beginning to end. The "Bresson acting style," a false truthfulness that becomes truer than true, is practiced here even by the most minor characters. 

– Francois Truffaut on Robert Bresson’s “Un Condamne a Mort s'est échappé (“A Man Escaped”).

SAMUELS: You've said you don't want to be called a metteur en scene but rather a metteur en ordre. Does this mean that you think the essence of film is editing rather than staging?

BRESSON: For me, filmmaking is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing with that extraordinary instrument — the camera — things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

S: That puts you in the tradition of the silent, film, which could not rely on dialogue and therefore created its effects through editing. Do you agree that you are more like a silent than a sound film director?

B: The silent directors usually employed actors. When the cinema became vocal, actors were also used, because at that time they were thought the only ones able to speak. A rather difficult part of my work is to make my nonactors speak normally. I don't want to eliminate dialogue (as in silent films), but my dialogue must be very special — not like the speeches heard in a theater. Voice, for me, is something very important, and I couldn't do without it. Now, when I choose someone to appear in one of my films, I select him by means of the telephone, before I see him. Because in general when you meet a person, your eyes and ears work together rather badly. The voice tells more about anyone than his physical presence.

S: But in your films all the people speak with a single, a Bressonian voice.

B: No. I think that in other films actors speak as if they were onstage. As a result, the audience is used to theatrical inflections. That makes my nonactors appear unique, and thus, they seem to be speaking in a single new way. I want the essence of my films to be not the words my people say or even the gestures they perform, but what these words and gestures provoke in them. What I tell them to do or say must bring to light something they had not realized they contained. The camera catches it; neither they nor I really know it before it happens. The unknown S: If it is true that your goal is the mystery you drew out of your nonactors, can anyone besides you and them fully appreciate the result?

B: I hope so. There are so many things our eyes don't see. But the camera sees everything. We are too clever, and our cleverness plays us false. We should trust mainly our feelings and those senses that never lie to us. Our intelligence disturbs our proper vision of things.

S: You say you discover your mysteries in the process of shooting...

B: Yes. Because what I've just told you was not something I had planned for. Amazingly, however, I discovered it during my first moments behind the camera. My first film was made with professional actors, and when we had our first rehearsal I said, "If you go on acting and speaking like this, I am leaving."

– Robert Bresson, interview with Charles Thomas Samuels.

Bresson on Bresson

A Man Escaped (Directed by Robert Bresson)

A Man Escaped is based on the memoirs of Andre Devigny, who was imprisoned by the Gestapo in France during the second world war for his work with the French Resistance. Bresson filmed A Man Escaped at Fort Montluc prison in Lyons, where Devigny was imprisoned, in an effort to maintain the credibility of his tale. In fact, the jail retained Devigny's ropes and hooks when he tried to escape, Bresson reproduced them diligently. Although Devigny is referred to in the film as Fontaine, the narative is so similar to his experiences that Devigny merits his remarkable preface: "This story is true. I give it as it is, without embellishment." Bresson had the moral right to claim such authenticity, he, too, had been imprisoned by the Germans during the war.

The way Bresson recreates the physically constrained picture of war is through the use of sound. Because the views of Fontaine from his confinement are so limited, he can only develop his cognitive map of the world which he cannot see, through noises, many of them terribly faint and sprinkled about him. These noises begin to grow and mutate inside his head and inside our minds, to become essential, to be weighted with fatal peril for a moment, and the next with faint optimism. 

There is no cohesive explanation of these noises at first. Fontaine merely attempts to put them together to work out what is happening beyond his surroundings. The initial sequence of the film establishes the tone of this strict restriction of information, and is well-known as one of the most understated passages of a film predicated on understatement. But soon, an escape scheme is formed in the feverish brain of the tireless Fontaine. Then there is only one question for him and us as we listen to every sound for the rest of the film: can they hear me? 

Bresson took painstaking care with all his films; throughout his lifetime he only finished 14 movies. A Man Escaped was the first film to be created without aid for a whole script, and, like every picture, it's defined by a precision of detail and reality, which Bresson thought was not just a filmmaker's grasp, but a moral request, the art of cinema made to all those who would practise it. 

Ascetic and idealistic, Bresson was one of his generation's very few directors who would be taken up by French New Wave film revolutionists. Eric Rohmer, who was a reviewer for the prominent cinema journal Cahiers du Cinema during the publication of A Man Escaped, was one of the best New Wave directors. Rohmer named his assessment of the film "The Miracle of the Objects" Because, even although the noises in the picture have been "explained" carefully, every sound has an incredible role in the desperate Fontaine's existence.

This is an extract from a 1970 interview with Bresson by Charles Thomas Samuels in which the great French director reflects on his career up to that point. In this section Bresson discusses ‘Pickpocket’ (1959) and the compelling ‘A Man Escaped’ (1956) based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a prisoner of war held at Fort Montluc by the Nazis during World War II. 

S: I want to ask some questions about A Man Escaped, which, by the way, seems to me your greatest film. Incidentally, does that judgment upset you?

B: I don’t know how to make such comparisons. But there may be something in what you say. When I finished it, I had no idea about its value. Yet I had, for the first time in my life, an impulse to write down everything I felt about the art of filmmaking, and for that reason A Man Escaped is precious to me...

S: A Man Escaped shares with The Trial of Joan of Arc an implication of French nationalism. Did you want that?

B: No, the prisoner could have been a young American or a Vietnamese. I was interested only in the mind of someone who wishes to escape without outside help….

S: Though you create very well the experience of being in prison, you never show the brutality. For example, you don’t show Fontaine being beaten. You only show him afterward. Why?

B: Because it would be false to show the beating since the audience knows that the actor isn’t really being beaten, and such falsity would stop the film. Moreover, this is what it was like when I was a prisoner of the Germans. Once I heard someone being whipped through a door, and then I heard the body fall. That was ten times worse than if I had seen the whipping. When you see Fontaine with his bloody face being brought back to the cell, you are forced to imagine the awfulness of the beating - which makes it very powerful Furthermore, if I showed him being taken from his cell, being beaten, then being returned, it would take much too long.

S: There is another wonderful effect of concentration in this scene: Fontaine says, ‘After three days I was able to move again,’ although only a few seconds of film time have passed. This suggests how quickly he restores himself and how much courage he has.

B: That is very important. His will to go on establishes a rhythm of inexorability that touches the public. When men go to war, military music is necessary, because music has a rhythm and rhythm implants ideas.

A Man Escaped (Directed by Robert Bresson)

S: Whenever we see the window in Fontaine’s cell, it glows like a jewel. Was that a special effect?

B: No, but I do remember that I worked with my cinematographer to obtain just the right degree of light from both window and door.

S: There is one thing in the film that seems uncharacteristic in its patness. When Fontaine is sentenced, the scene takes place at the Hotel Terminus...

B: Every city in France had such a hotel where the Gestapo stayed during the occupation.

S: You didn’t desire the pun?

B: Of course not. Everything in this film is absolutely factual. I had no trouble inventing details and was familiar with the history of the place. All of the characters’ actions take place exactly where they occurred in real life.

S: You search for mystery in your films. It seems to me that here you really attain it because although the title tells us that he will escape, the film is very suspenseful.

B: The important thing is not ‘if’ but ‘how’. Here is another mystery: Although every detail of the film came from the report of Andre Devigny, I invented the dialogue with the young boy who is finally brought to Fontaine’s cell. When I read it to Devigny, I was very worried about his reaction. Do you know what he said? ‘How true!’ This shows that truth can be different from reality, because in the actual event, as Devigny told me, he behaved as if the boy were a woman he needed to seduce in order to make good his escape. In my film, on the other hand, I show Fontaine dominating the boy. You know, I wanted to call the film ‘Help Yourself,’ and that’s why I showed Devigny as dominating in the last scenes. Help yourself and God will help you.

S: There are other great moments in the film. For example, when Fontaine tells the old man in the next cell that his own attempt to escape is being made for the old man, too, or the moments when a community is achieved by means of men tapping on the walls. I could go on. This film is your greatest, I think, not because it is technically superior to the others but because it is richer in content.

B: Mouchette is rich, too!

S: I would place Mouchette with A Man Escaped among your greatest films.

B: But it seems to me there is a little too much spectacle in Mouchette.

Pickpocket (Directed by Robert Bresson)

S: You added a lot to the Bernanos novel in Mouchette. Conversely, Pickpocket, which is an original, appears to be inspired by Crime and Punishment. For the viewer aware of this parallel, there is a problem in Pickpocket. In Crime and Punishment, whether justifiably or not, Raskolnikov thinks of his crime as benefiting humanity and thus earns a measure of sympathy. Your hero has no excuse for the crime and thus seems a little pretentious in his desire to be taken as a superior being.

B: Yes, but he is aware that pickpocketing is very difficult and dangerous. He is taken with the thrill of that. He is pretentious perhaps, like Raskolnikov, but on quite a lesser scale. Like Raskolnikov, he hates organized society...

S: What I am trying to explore with you is the emotional problem for the spectator.

B: I never think of the spectator.

S: But you can see that your hero might appear unsympathetic.

B: He is unsympathetic. Why not?

S: I am also puzzled, in view of your uninterest in psychology, at the heavy psychological emphasis in this film. Let me explain. As we see the hero stealing, we don’t know his motive, but toward the end of the film we find out that he previously stole from his mother. We then realize his psychological motivation; he stole from his mother, felt guilty about that, was ashamed to confess to her, and, therefore, commits crimes so as to be punished and fulfill his need for penitence.

B: Perhaps, but only a psychiatrist would explain it like that. As Dostoyevsky frequently does, I present the effect before the cause. I think this is a good idea because it increases the mystery; to witness events without knowing why they are occurring makes you desire to find out the reason.

S: But this doesn’t answer my question. Here, in the first of your films from an original story, you, who profess to dislike psychology, are at your most psychological. Why?

B: You think it’s psychological? I didn’t mean it to be. I simply showed a man picking pockets until he was arrested. I included the fact that he stole from his mother simply to provide evidence the police needed in order to be put on his track.

S: In other words, you didn’t put it in as explanation but rather as plot device?

B: Yes. It is only to make the chief of police certain that Martin is a thief. What interested me is the power this gave the inspector, because the inspector liked to torture him – as in that long scene, where the hero doesn’t know how much the inspector knows. In fact, I originally wanted to call the film ‘Incertitude.’

S: There is something else I rather doubt you wanted in the film. The hero of your film is a criminal in two ways: He is a thief, and he denies God.

Pickpocket (Directed by Robert Bresson)

B: On the contrary, I make him aware of the presence of God for three minutes. Few people can say they were aware of God even that long. This line of dialogue is very personal; it shows that although influenced by Dostoyevsky, I made my story benefit from my own experiences. At his mother’s funeral, a singer sings the Dies Irae in exactly the same simple way another singer sang it at my mother’s funeral in the Cathedral of Nantes, where, apart from ten nuns, my wife and I attended the service alone. Somehow this Dies Irae made a strange impression on me; I could have said then, like my pickpocket, ‘I felt God during three minutes.’

S: This raises another question. You are famous for maintaining your privacy. I didn’t even know you were married, and it was a great surprise when your wife came to the door. Isn’t Pickpocket a game of hide-and-seek since, according to you, it reflects so much of your personal experience, although if you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have known it?

B: I hate publicity. One should be known for what he does, not for what he is. Nowadays a painter paints a bad painting, but he talks about it until it becomes famous. He paints for five minutes and talks about it on television for five years.

S: That reminds me of Godard. He makes bad films, but he defends them so interestingly.

B: His films are interesting. He upsets the official cinema, which cares only for profits. He taught films how to use disorder.

S: Don’t you think his purpose is more important than the individual results – which aren’t very good?

B: When he uses professional actors, I don’t like his films, but when he doesn’t, he makes the best that can be seen.

S: On this matter of your zeal for truth: There are moments in Pickpocket which seem to me to be true only to your peculiar style. For example, in the opening scene where the hero steals the purse, the people at the racetrack are preternaturally calm. I can’t believe that people watch a race so impassively.

B: But not every part of a racetrack crowd reacts in the same way. There are always certain people who watch impassively. I didn’t want him to commit his theft when people were shouting; I wanted it to happen in silence, so that one could hear the crescendo of the horses’ galloping.

S: But such a scene, even among sympathetic viewers, raises the question of whether we are seeing truth in your films or the reflection of a very deliberate and personal style. I ask myself that question occasionally in Pickpocket and almost always in The Trial of Joan of Arc.

B: If that happens, it is my fault. My style is natural to me. You see, I want to make things so concentrated and so unified that the spectator feels as if he has seen one single moment. I control all speech and gesture so as to produce an object that is indivisible. Because I believe that one moves an audience only through rhythm, concentration, and unity.

Interview with Robert Bresson – Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors, New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1972.

Paul Schrader: On Bresson’s ‘Pickpocket’

The above video is taken from Paul Schrader’s excellent introduction to the Criterion Collection edition of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket: ‘the most influential film in my creative life’.

Bresson’s consummate tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a lonely young pickpocket whose days are spent working the streets, metros and train stations of Paris. His devotion to the art of pickpocketing becomes a compulsion. As his obsession grows he experiences fear, elation, a world of feeling. He takes lessons from a master and works with a criminal gang. This underworld milieux brings him into contact with his interlocutor and confessor, a police detective who resolves to apprehend him.

Schrader draws intriguing parallels between the character of Michel in Pickpocket and Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, tracing Bresson’s film back to Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (Bresson’s inspiration for the film) and how the idea of a ‘soul in transit’ then became the inspiration for the screenplay of Taxi Driver. 

Schrader first saw Pickpocket in Los Angeles in 1969, ten years after it was made, and wrote a celebrated two-part review which he later refined in his seminal book Transcendental Style in Film. 

Schrader calls Bresson a ‘perverse’ director, in that Bresson’s style works in ways that run counter to traditional narrative filmmaking. Instead of adding elements and flourishes to underscore the story, Bresson strips things away, leaving the audience off-balance, paring the story down to its fundamental aspects. Bresson uses a rigid and austere style to ward off superficial emotional responses, intent instead on creating a ‘transformation’ – from the material to the spiritual realm. For Bresson this transition is key: ‘There must, at a certain moment, be a transformation; if not, there is no art.’