Robert Bresson: Fire and Ice
by Tony Pipolo

Though one of the greatest narrative filmmakers, Robert Bresson remains little known or appreciated beyond the most discerning of filmgoers. While the retrospective of his work that traveled throughout the U.S. in 1998 and elsewhere—organized by the redoubtable James Quandt, senior programmer of the Cinematheque Ontario—helped to change that situation, many viewers still resist Bresson for the very qualities that define his uniqueness. Focusing less on what he offers than on what he withholds, even foreign film aficionados preferred his flashier contemporaries—e.g., Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman—who embodied their existential angst in star personalities and emotive performances. Bresson not only renounced the star; he banished professional actors altogether from his increasingly detheatricalized, rigorously cinematic universe.

For many, a Bresson film is a punishing experience thanks to the alleged ‘severity' of his style and the bleakness of his narratives. I have heard viewers claim that while they were moved by some of his films, it was despite the style not because of it. Yet the frugality of that style—exactness of framing and editing, elimination of excess—has undeniably influenced a slew of contemporary European filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Laurent Cantet, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Eugene Green, Michael Haneke, Benoit Jacquot, and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose most recent film, L'Enfant, is yet another variation of Bresson's Pickpocket, among others—although none of these reject actors and expressive performances. Still, the adjective ‘Bressonian,' no less than ‘Hitchcockian,' is misused and overused. In the end, both filmmakers are inimitable because their styles are inseparable from a stern moral vision. Hitchcock distilled it with humor, a substantial dash of entertainment, and, of course, stars. Bresson, as uncompromising as his filmic style, offered it straight up: no ice and no water on the side.

While André Bazin discussed Bresson with limited mention of his religious aspects, American champions, taking their cues from the subject matter of the first half of his career, christened his style “spiritual” (Susan Sontag, among others) or “transcendental” (filmmaker Paul Schrader). These terms continue to haunt anyone writing on Bresson, even in light of the more cynical tone of the later films. Bresson was out of sync with the ecumenical spirit that seized the Catholic Church in the 1960s, and while many of his films employ Catholic imagery, they are characterized by a particularly harsh strain of religious thinking, closer to that of one of his literary sources, Georges Bernanos, whose novels inspired two of his best-known films, Diary of a Country Priest (1951) and Mouchette (1967). In both, the gray gloom of the French provinces is matched by an unrelieved focus on bleakness and cruelty. His priest is no cheery uplifting humanist but a man whose youth belies an uncanny ability to penetrate the hearts of parishioners who hardly acknowledge his existence, and whose fierce dedication parallels his own slow death from cancer. Christian kindness is barely in evidence in Mouchette, in which a poor and miserable young girl, beset by a dying mother and callous father, is raped by the village poacher she has befriended and, out of confusion and shame, is driven to end her life.

Some view the religious dimension of the first half of Bresson's career as the reason for his insularity, his stubborn refusal, in their eyes, to address contemporary social realities. This made him the target of criticism from leftist French periodicals, such as Positif, and marginalized his work for many American critics who preferred more politically engaged filmmakers. The Devil Probably (1977) was judged as more of a disillusioned critique of the world's vanities than a scrutiny of specific ideologies or institutions. Indeed, the film's mockery of all ‘solutions' to personal and social ills—whether religious, political, or psychoanalytic—affirms a rather global, apolitical pessimism, symbolized by the youthful protagonist's hiring of someone to kill him as a gesture of protest against society. In its hard, uncompromising look at the world, then, Bresson's later work courted neither the left nor the right and appeased no one.

Subjects, themes, and point of view aside, the films, from first (Les Anges du péché, 1943) to last (L'Argent, 1987) trace one of the most disciplined, intricate, and satisfying artistic achievements in the history of the medium. No less than Griffith and Eisenstein, Bresson sought to advance the art of the cinema, to create a purely filmic narrative form through a progressive refinement of its tools and strategies—through the mastery, in his words, of “cinematography” over the “cinema” (i.e., ordinary movies). Like a dutiful student of Rudolf Arnheim and the theory that called for film to free itself from the established arts and discover its “inherent” nature, Bresson discarded, film by film, the given conventions—not only the actor but the dramatic structure of “scenes” in favor of a neutral series of sequences, often using sound to avoid visual redundancy. This meant not only renouncing such memorable performances as those of Renée Faure and Sylvie in Les Anges du péché and Marie Casares in Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945), but even L.H. Burel's atmospheric cinematography in Diary of a Country Priest, which was subsequently thought too picturesque. The importance of precise framing and editing in the films that followed— A Man Escaped (1956) , Pickpocket (1959) , and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962)—was a move toward an increasingly minimal filmmaking style in which every gesture, every image, and every word counted. Getting to the essence of each narrative was synonymous with getting to the essence of the medium. Sontag characterized the watching of his films as an experience requiring a discipline and reflection on the viewer's part as demanding as the tests of will his protagonists had to endure.

A Man Escaped and Pickpocke t , for example, are first-person narratives of impeccable integrity, yet neither film wastes time establishing narrative and character in a conventional novelistic vein. Instead, each relies on actions to reveal the psychology of each protagonist. As we watch Fontaine, condemned prisoner of the Vichy government, convert the objects of his cell into the means of escape, we discern the qualities of his character—determination, discipline, patience, perseverance, resourcefulness. We are told at the beginning of Pickpocket that Michel has embarked upon an adventure to which he is not suited, but the internal conflict this implies is expressed less in complex dialog or voice-over narration than in the increasingly detached filmic manner in which his thefts are rendered. In both films, physical actions, meticulously framed and edited, consume a great deal of screen time, constructing adventures in audio/visual perception as acutely tuned as those of the protagonists.

Having achieved what he believed was a truly “cinematographic” art, Bresson turned to The Trial of Joan of Arc, at sixty-five minutes his shortest work, in which the dominating principle is language. Still inadequately appreciated, it is perhaps the most extraordinary rationale for his style, perfectly suited to the sober business of presenting the texts of Joan's two trials—the one that condemned her and the one that rehabilitated her years after her death—without drama, excess, or theatrical flair. Next to Dreyer's eloquent, expressionist meditation on the same subject, Bresson's film, an exercise in control and reserve, is as committed to a “documentary” style approach to history as The Battle of Algiers.

All of these films end in spiritual triumph for their protagonists. Even in Joan of Arc, Bresson abandons his clear-eyed approach in the final shot: a smoke-filled view of the empty stake on which Joan has burned—a leap to the spiritual that makes her a true Bressonian protagonist. It is the absence of this leap in the later work—in such films as Au hasard Balthazar (1966) , Une femme douce (1969), The Devil Probably (1977) , Lancelot of the Lake (1974), and L'Argent (1983)—that turned—and continues to turn—many viewers off. For example, Richard Roud, an early admirer of Bresson and director of the New York Film Festival during his peak period, was disenchanted with the downbeat direction he believed Balthazar signaled. Jean-Luc Godard (in the 1966 interview included on Criterion's Balthazar disc) agreed that the film presented a “dreadful vision of the world and the evil in it,” but goes on to say that “it is the world and should be seen by people who only go once a year to the movies.”

The film was a radical departure in many ways, not leastly because as an allegory of the Christian story, its use of a donkey was the first indication that Bresson had left behind narratives with noble figures in the mold of the country priest, Fontaine, and Joan of Arc. In addition, as a passive creature, Balthazar prefigured the protagonists of much of the later work, who, out of indifference or weakness, fail to significantly affect the world around them. Lancelot of the Lake is an account of the collapse of the age of chivalry, a theme that seems to prefigure the dissolution of Western values in The Devil Probably and the la ronde -like study of the nefarious effects of capitalism in L'Argent.

Arguably, Bresson's work from the beginning may have been misunderstood, or, at least, conveniently reduced to a simplistic view of the world, in which however dark things seemed, there was always redemption to offset it. But many aspects of his work were overlooked. His alleged rejection of psychology discouraged many from applying enlightened psychological insight to his construction of characters and narratives, not to mention to an analysis of Bresson himself through close examination of the themes to which he was drawn and the minimalist style he perfected.

It is my view that, like the work of any major, idiosyncratic artist who follows such a focused and uncompromising path, all of Bresson's films have an autobiographical value that warrants close and extensive study, a conviction that guides my forthcoming book. This is not just a matter of subjects and themes, but of his preoccupation with form, his insistence on nonprofessional “actors,” and on the nuances of his style.

For example, there is his affinity with all three male protagonists of the films of the 1950s. Like the priest (in Diary) whose zealousness to save souls stirs up disquietude and vexation, Bresson, says Godard, is the “Grand Inquisitor, less dangerous than religious or political inquisitors because he is a filmmaker and a humanist.” Like Fontaine (A Man Escaped), Bresson was once a prisoner of the Nazis and in this film enacted a formal breakthrough, escaping the confines of the narrative cinema just as Fontaine does the walls of his prison. Like Michel (Pickpocket) whose displaced activities deny the real source of his desires, Bresson worked furiously to conceal the traces of the work of Dostoevsky— Crime and Punishment —that inspired his film.

There is his preoccupation with virginity, real and symbolic, both within his fictions—in Les Anges, Les Dames, Diary, Joan of Arc, Balthazar, and Mouchette —and in his preference for unspoiled nonprofessionals, “models” as he called them, who, he once said, he could not use again, “having taken something precious from them.” And while one must be wary of the literalness that led one writer to predict that the filmmaker would, like several of his characters, eventually kill himself (Marvin Zeman, “The Suicide of Robert Bresson,” Cinema 6, Spring, 1971), the later preoccupation with self-destruction was certainly a radical shift from the redemptions that ended his earlier films.

This issue, too, warrants further examination. For example, while we continue to divide the corpus of Bresson's work into early films that end in redemption and later ones of increasing pessimism, the force of the latter should inspire us to examine the former more closely. Can we dismiss the possibility, for instance, that however deeply spiritual the priest is, his consumption of bad wine and poor diet is an unconscious death wish that allows him to feel closer to the sufferings of Christ with which he identifies? Bresson was no less seized and passionate about his art, every facet of which was infused by his personal and religious convictions, down to shaping and cutting the world in his own image, an enactment of the artist as God that exhibits more control over the filmic universe than the God of most religions exerts over the actual one.

What closer examination reveals is that however assured and clear Bresson's narratives, early or late, seem—and the lean, uncluttered style certainly contributes to that impression—they are never as simple as critical judgment has often made them appear. The darkness that characterizes almost every film from Balthazar to L'Argent is already discernible in the image of human nature in Les Anges, in which the corruptions of the world outside are barely contained within the convent. From the beginning, Bresson's characters are consumed by an arrogance and pride that has the capacity to destroy. It is precisely these flaws that the novice Anne-Marie must overcome in Les Anges before she can die and redeem Therese. Helene, the femme fatale of Les Dames, believes she has gotten her revenge only because in her all-consuming narcissism she cannot fathom the possibility of genuine love. These are the only films of Bresson's with mature women in leading roles; thereafter, he would concentrate on young men and female adolescents.

All of these characters, as embodied by Bresson's lean and ascetic-looking “models,” seem poised, sometimes precariously, on either side of the adolescent/adult divide so that whatever their activities—soldiering, thieving, murdering—they convey an impression of innocence that must in some way be reconciled with what they do. Initiation into sexuality is either through violence or ambivalent surrender (Marie in Balthazar, Mouchette), or obsessively avoided and neurotically displaced (Joan of Arc, Chantal in Diary). In all cases, despite the fact that “original sin,” according to Catholic doctrine, marks the human race from birth, loss of virginity seems to be a critical indicator for Bresson of giving in to the materiality of the world, to the carnal nature that makes it all the more difficult to achieve sanctity.

On the one hand Bresson's work seems to play out the sentiment once voiced by Leon Bloy, the nineteenth/early twentieth-century writer who helped bring about the Catholic renaissance in France that certainly marked Bresson's life and thinking: “the only tragedy is not to be a saint.” On the other hand, the force of such a notion may have been the product of his reaction against the Sartrean existentialism that dominated postwar French cultural life—the very period of Bresson's emergence as a first-rate filmmaker. Ironically, however, while (spiritual) essence clearly precedes existence in his films of that period, it could be argued that the films after Balthaza r incline toward the reverse, and that Lancelot, Devil, and L'Argent go beyond existentialism in chronicling a total collapse of ethical values. The latter, in fact, is an endorsement of Bloy's early attack on the corruptibility of money.

Apart from the personal and autobiographical, the concerns of Bresson's later films are hardly politically disengaged. What may be truer is that lessons about greed and the consequences of capitalism are usually better delivered—and so easily forgotten—by way of Hollywood entertainments like Wall Street. Bresson's ethics and tactics are far too blunt and deep to be ignored because he sees that the problems are not just the social systems but the inherent and pathetic flaws of God's misguided creation.

Speaking of inherent flaws, let us now turn to the DVD's of Bresson's films that are slowly becoming available. Of course, they are a welcome phenomenon and make it possible to study his work more closely. So far, however, they are a mixed group. At this writing, seven of his thirteen features have made it to DVD in the U.S., and three others have been released in France within the past few months. That leaves three films not yet available on DVD— Les Anges du péché, Four Nights of a Dreamer (1972) , and Une femme douce. Only the last of these is available on VHS, and given the rights difficulties that have haunted it for years, it is unlikely that Four Nights will find its way to DVD in the foreseeable future.

The range of the existing DVD's, however, is sufficiently broad to give one a sense of the stylistic differences between early and late Bresson. We have all three films from the 1950s— Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket —and one each from the 40s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, respectively— Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Au hasard Balthazar, Lancelot of the Lake, and L'Argent. With an all-regions player, one can also see The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette, and The Devil Probably.

Even within the limited expectations some of us have of DVD technology, the results are not all gratifying, unless one subscribes, as I do not, to the palliative that something is better than nothing. It's not as if someone had discovered the only surviving and fragile print of a lost film of a great director and DVD was the only safe way to make it widely available. The first one out— Les Dames du bois de Boulogne —produced by the ever-adventurous Criterion Collection, is a great disappointment, struck no doubt from an inferior print. On the other hand, the same distributor's editions of Diary , Pickpocket , and Balthazar are probably as good as we can expect. On my fairly new Sony monitor, the shades of gray of New Yorker's A Man Escaped came across much better than I was led to expect from other reports. On the other hand, the colors of Lancelot are uneven, often too saturated, and require periodic adjustment. Both are acceptable, however, compared to the inexcusable edition of L'Argent . Taken from the better PAL version—available in the MK2 box set—rather than a direct transfer from a good print, the image quality throughout is blurry—even though the English subtitles are crystal clear. To produce such a DVD of a work of any important filmmaker is bad enough; to do so with Bresson's last film, a triumph of meticulous framing, composition, and use of color, is an insult. Anyone interested in a visual comparison of what is lost in the film to DVD transfer in general should consult the eminently useful “Senses of Cinema” website and click on Bresson.

A similar unevenness characterizes supplementary materials. I confess upfront that I find most commentaries over films irritating, if not useless—like being trapped next to someone at a theater who won't shut up. The only justification I can think of is pedagogical—i.e., when a first-rate scholar actually addresses what we are looking at moment by moment and provides critical and historical insights that bear directly on actual shots and scenes, formal and technical decisions, and observations we are not likely to perceive on our own or without the filmic example in front of us. A preeminent model of this is David Bordwell's superb commentary over the Criterion edition of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky.

While all three commentators in the present batch of DVDs are serious, respected scholars, the results are mixed. Judging from his soft-pedaling style over the New Yorker L'Argent, Kent Jones seems almost reluctant to the task, perhaps ambivalent about intruding on the viewer's experience; his insights can be better appreciated in his BFI book on the film, which I highly recommend. Unfortunately, Peter Cowie's more aggressive approach on Criterion's Diary is not warranted by what he provides. Much of it ranges from the obvious to the irrelevant and is delivered with a confidence often belied by a failure to back things up, or simply by the facts. Concerning the former: in an effort to place Bresson's Catholicism in a more palliative light, he asserts that the director was really an agnostic, but offers no supporting evidence. Concerning the latter: he remarks that “all prints” of Bresson's 1934 short Affaires publiques —shown seven years ago during the traveling retrospective—are “apparently lost”; he also seems unaware that Marie-Monique Arkell, the actress who plays the Countess, had a prominent stage career under the name Rachel Berendt. The background information and comparisons with the novel Cowie provides is fine for uninitiated viewers, but there is no reason we should hear it over the film.

More irritating are descriptions that contradict what's on the screen. In the opening sequence, the priest is not “staring” through the large gate of the Count's estate and there is no “alarming exchange of looks” with the adulterous couple. They see him but not the reverse, as a later scene confirms. Bresson was as meticulous as Hitchcock about who sees what, and in a first-person narrative, this is crucial to our understanding. Cowie evidently took this from Raymond Durgnat, whom he quotes more than once and who made the same mistake—although Durgnat didn't have a VHS or DVD to check his facts.

Hands down, James Quandt's commentary over the Criterion edition of Pickpocket is the most rewarding. He provides a wealth of information and provocative ideas, unlike Paul Schrader's introduction to the film. While Schrader says Pickpocket was “the most important film of his life,” he does little more than rehash the thesis he set out in the book on transcendental style he wrote over thirty years ago. Against his idea that the final scene is a burst of emotion and revelation that signals the redemption of the protagonist, Quandt suggests that Pickpocket 's “ambiguity” and “density” allows for several contradictory readings, including a psychosexual one, something I've always found difficult to ignore. Most refreshingly, Quandt stresses not the “ascetic” or “austere” or “spiritual” or “disciplined” nature of Bresson's work but its eroticism, sensuality, and seductive power.

Of the American releases, the best of the extras is the excellent interview with Bresson on Criterion's Balthazar disc. Conducted by Roger Stephane, cofounder of the newspaper L'Observateur, shortly after the 1966 release of the film, it is intercut with short exchanges with Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle, both lauding the film's originality, and with three actors from the film—Anne Wiazemsky (Marie), François Lafarge (Gerard), and Pierre Klossowski (the merchant). When Stephane questions Bresson about the fundamentals of his esthetic, he denies that he is a director at all. “I am simply one who imposes order,” he says. Bresson is often cagey but truly poignant when he discusses his conception of the model and how his method extracts a genuine psychology from the inner person in contrast to the programmed responses of the professional actor.

This interview is far more satisfying than the two brief and later ones on the L'Argen t disc, following the film's premiere at Cannes, both taken from the MK2 edition. Apart from a rather slight appreciation of the film by Donald Richie on the Balthazar disc and the printed essays slipped into the Diary, Les Dames, and Balthazar boxes (by Frederic Bonnaud, François Truffaut/David Thomson, and James Quandt, respectively) there are no other extras—none at all with NewYorker's Lancelot or Man Escaped releases.

Nouveau Pictures's PAL edition of Mouchette may be the best of the European transfers so far. Other than a curious “picture gallery” of images from the film, though, it has no extras. On the other hand, the MK2 box set is a good buy and all three transfers generally of good quality. There is one quirky feature of the image in all three transfers that might not have been visible if the aspect ratios were not correct. There is a slight but annoying broken line along the upper edge of the letterboxed frame between the black border and the image itself. Minor as it is, some viewers may find it distracting.

The highlight of the package is Babette Mangolte's invaluable documentary The Models of “Pickpocket” (on a second disc in the MK2 set, but part of the same disc as the film in the Criterion edition). Mangolte tracked down the three performers of the film—Martin Lassalle (Michel), Marika Green (Jeanne), and Pierre Leymarie (Jacques). Their accounts of Bresson's working methods are all interesting, but the viewer who has just seen the film and Michel's lean and hungry look may be startled by the sight of a jovial, overweight, and scruffily-bearded Lassalle hanging loose in Mexico.

There are two other interesting items on the extra Pickpocket disc. The first is a discussion following a screening of the film in 2000 with Marika Green and filmmakers Paul Vecchiali and Jean-Pierre Ameris, both of whose insights are well worth hearing. The second is from a highly amusing 1962 French variety show called La Piste aux etoiles, the star of which is Kassagi, prestidigitator and pickpocket extraordinaire, who was technical advisor on the film. If one finds any of the maneuvers in the film hard to believe, watch Kassagi as he goes through his audience on the pretext of having spectators examine a table he holds to insure that it has no unusual features, only to reveal that in the process he has stolen everyone's watches and wallets.

The most pleasant surprise of the MK2 set is the interview with Florence Delay, Bresson's Jeanne d'Arc (included on the disc of The Trial of Joan of Arc), conducted at the site of an old castle where the scenes in Joan's cell were shot. Delay's warm, intelligent, moving account attests to the lasting effect that work on the film had on her. It is a refreshing contrast to the dourly delivered chauvinistic speech by André Malraux (heard over a photograph of him) at Orleans on May 8, 1961 on the 532nd anniversary of its “liberation” by Joan of Arc and the feast day of “the only historical figure shown loyalty over the centuries.”

In her one-and-a-half minute appreciation of Bresson on both the MK2 and New Yorker discs of L'Argent, novelist Marguerite Duras remarks: “Each film fills me with turmoil as if I am seeing cinema for the first time in my life, as if he is working in a secret medium to which only he has the key.” Most viewers, if they hear this at all, will puzzle over what it could possibly mean. For me, it touches the heart of what makes Bresson the singular artist he is, striving with every work to reinvent the cinema, to cleanse it and us of its familiarity, and by doing so, to give us a sense of the origins of existence itself. If Balthazar is the world, as Godard put it, Bresson is its creator, taking us out of the Garden of Eden time and time again to relive that loss of innocence and experience its fallout. That neither Duras nor Godard espouses a religious view of the world should be enough to assure us that Bresson's vision is beyond Catholicism and belief in an afterlife.

To complain that he had withdrawn the possibility of redemption in his stories is to undervalue the convulsive and healing powers of art and the way Bresson fused his art with morality. In a sense, the religious or spiritual nature of his work is the burden he imposed on the art of the cinema, which he said more than once was only in its infancy. This is the significance of the distinction between “cinematography” and “the movies.” The movies are for enjoyment, edification, and information. The art is salvation, the Holy Grail—beyond reach but faintly detectable in that lost innocence which his films perpetually strive to retrieve. It is no surprise that Bresson's most cherished unfulfilled project was the Book of Genesis. Had he made it, we can be sure it would have seemed that we were witnessing the moment of Creation.