bresson on film quaterly

8/3/2019 Bresson on Film Quaterly

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Robert BressonAuthor(s): Marjorie GreeneSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring, 1960), pp. 4-10Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1210428 .

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MARJORIEREERobert Bresson

Bresson has been acclaimed as the greatest living master of cinema;he has also been accused of practicing a kind of mystic anticinema. His reputationin any case, is worldwide, and his new film, PICKPOCKEwill command careful attention wherever it is shown. Bresson has made onlyfive films previously: LES AFFAIRES UBLIQUES1934), which has completelydisappeared; ESANGESU ECHE1943) ; LESDAMESUBoISDEBOULOGNE1945)LE JOURNAL 'UN,CUREDE CAMPAGNE (1950), and UN CONDAMN' MORS'ESTECHAPPE (1956).

Marjorie Greene saw M. Bresson several times in Paris in January;quotations not otherwise identified in the following article are taken

from her conversations with him

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket begins quickly.Credits, in severe gothic letters on the regula-tion black-and-white screen, disappear in sec-onds. Suddenly, you are motionless, caughtwith the impact of the simple beauty and in-credible perfection of the discovery of Michel,the pickpocket.Bresson's camera-a continuously, impercep-tibly moving camera-finds Michel at a racetrack as he watches hands transferring moneyand tabs his victim. He appears as he is-a manpoorly made for a normally moral circumstance.He looks uneasy. He is suspect. He is apart.And he is with you every moment-even whenyou do not see him.Michel is plagued with the restlessness of theman unmotivated except toward a debasing ob-session. He moves always, afraid of his separateexistence, circling in a dreary rut: from, to, up,down, out, in-his destinations the poor room inwhich he lives with his few possessions, or the"open market" where he plies his trade. He isnot safe or comfortable in either. In a fleetingtransformation in his face or in a transientglimpse of his eyes, you feel his consuming de-sire to use his pickpocket's hands with theskill of a magician-but not for the money inthe wallet or the value of the watch.

The doubts which beset Michel do not prevent his thievery. And he has doubts, latentbursting forth in a rare moment of sorrow as hekneels in prayer at his mother's funeral andwonders how her life will be judged. Or intense moment with Jeanne, who loves him, andhe finds she knows him as a thief. Or in hirefusal to treat Jacques, his friend who wants toreform him, with other than impatience andcontempt. Or, and perhaps more than any otherin his relationship with a hovering police inspector with whom he debates the question othe value of his life, his right to live as he wishesOnly that which permits us to discover Micheis shown. We know nothing of Michel's formelife. There are no "neighborhoods" to which wecan attach him. Those who touch his life trano other identification except as they arshown: friend Jacques, "ma mare," the questioning detective, Jeanne, the girl whose fate iis to love him.The precisely effective, constant mediumshots, relieved only when the camera moves infor the detail of an intricate hand movementare part of this control. The swift pace of thefilm, so many times using a "waiting" frampregnant with suspense, participates in Michel'revelation.


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MartinLassallein PICKPOCKET.

When the film is over, you have experiencedanother human being. You may have found himcold, unfeeling. You may not believe in hisredemption through the love of Jeanne-and,again, this may not be important. You may nothave become passionately involved in his prob-lem-but you know him. His very thoughts havebeen unveiled to you. Yours has been an in-credible-almost miraculous-motion picture ex-perience. Michel has come to you totally. Youmay not know how.A great many who talk about Bresson andwrite about him use the term "mystic," perhaps,and logically, trying to find the proper categoryfor the uncommon sensitivity with which hecollects the qualities of the cinema into a com-munion-an intimate rapport-with a man's innerself.One reviewer (so many have written somuch!) says: "A Robert Bresson film is not acollection of tricks: gray walls, low skies, im-mobile faces, abstract dialogue; it is, on the con-trary, one of the most extraordinary of existingcinematographic languages: the perfect meet-ing of form and substance, of the written wordand thought."*Asked about mysticism, Bresson has an-swered: "I do not know what you mean bymysticism."f Of the cinematographic language

he has said simply, implying that this shoulassumed: "At the moment, I am more occuwith the special language of the cinemawith the subject of my films."For Bresson, this language begins andwith the director. Pickpocket is his entiOne step beyond Un Condamnd a' Mort Echappd, he conceived the idea. He wrotescript, accumulated the cast and crew, direit, selected music, supervised the editing.He works alone. He needs no advisorsassistance except in the technical operationproduction unit. All decisions are his. Theresult is an expression of himself. No one has participated creatively except himself.For this, Bresson conquered the "unconqable": the dissident, illusive, distorting, probelement of the film-the actor. This conquereverberating around the motion picture win a delayed reaction pattern, distributing shwilling disbelief, and uneasy curiosity. Teven serious film students tend to say, is mea personality, a style; or Bresson is a geniusa method; or this is no concept, nothing hiical for film except that it represents the arachievements of a talented man.Examine this."There is no art-if the cinema must bart,"Bresson says, "there is no art without trformation. There is no art where the thwhich you use to express yourself do not chwhen you put them together. The film ougbe a perpetual transformation of all its elemin contact with each other. All these elemmust change. These changes give the filmlife."It is not the characters or actors)thatlife to the film, but the filmwhich gives lithe characters oractors)."I do not want the actor to express himWhat he gives me, he gives me without king. It is I who must express myself. I phgraph things that might be nothing or nenothing in themselves-and which become sthing only in relationship to what is nexthem-like a color blending with another c"From the first moment I arrived atstudio to make my first film, I felt about pr

* Claude Choublier, "RobertBresson ou de l'id6efixe,"France Observateur,December 24, 1957.f "Proposde Robert Bresson,"Cahiersdu Cinema,October 1957. The following three quotations alsocame from this source.


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7sional actors exactly as I do now. 'If they aregoing to act like this,' I said to myself, 'there isno film at all. I cannot make a film.' "As a director-a term which he decries forhimself-Bresson controls the actor much as hecontrols the sound, or the camera movement:he gets what he needs. No more.This control begins with the selection. Hedoes not use professionals."An actor, and especially a talented one, canno more be himself," Bresson says. "He mustbe another. This brings about an odd circum-stance: this apparatus, which is the camera,takes everything . . . that is to say, it takes theactor who is himself and another at the sametime . . . there is phoniness . . . the result isnot true. Through the cinema you must makecontact only with those things which are true-and you are profoundly touched with these verysubtle truths."

Beyond using the nonprofessional, Bressonselects for his principals those having a strong"moral" resemblance to the characters in hisfilms. This takes an intuitive sense, Bresson ad-mits. He has to feel himself that the person isright, but he does not take chances. After selec-tion he "lives"with them for quite a time, study-ing movements, gestures, listening to them talk-ing in the flattened tone which for him as a di-rector is mandatory. Of Frangois Leterrier, theyoung philosophy student who played Fontainein Un Condamne' he says "... before theshooting we saw and conversed with each otherevery day, and I was sure that I had not made amistake, that I had found in him the person orcharacter that I searched for. This [contact]continued for a long time.""The cinema is not a show," he says, "it is akind of 'scripture' through which one tries to ex-press himself in the face of terrible difficulties,because there are so many things between your-self and the screen. You must move mountains. . .hains of mountains to get to the point ofself-expression. But you cannot change the in-ner nature of the principal character; an authen-tic expression is one thing that you are not ableto invent; to capture it, is an admirable achieve-ment

This means, of course, that Bresson cannotuse the same individuals again. Almost a legendis the story of Claude Laydu, the aspiring youngactor who was the tortured little priest inJournald'unCurdde Campagne. "Willyou usehim again?" Bresson was asked. "No," he re-plied. "How can I? For Journal I robbed himof what I needed to make the film. How couldI rob him twice?"Provided Bresson has not erred in the selec-tion of his principal character-and for a givenfilm he goes through the same process for allimportant characters in the story-his film-mak-ing will then give him great joy, the fulfilling joythat the artist in him cries out for when he isidle, and he says: "I want to make another film.My joy is in making the film.""I set out on a road," he says of film-making."I do not look for things. I find them. It is inthat moment of discovery that I rejoice."*It is from the total submission of the man tothe medium that art results-art of the highestorder. For the man has let himself be immersed,because this immersion frees his own extraor-dinary abilities. He discovers, he says, be-cause he is intuitive, he sees instinctively. Orig-inality, sensitivity, the "stuff" of art - arespawned only in the exceptional intellect. The"moving audio-visual" which is the film is anexploratory mechanism, its creativity limitedonly by the mind which uses it. Bresson says:". .. that which is beautiful in a film, thatwhich I look for is the movement toward theunknown. The audience must feel that I gotoward the unknown, that I do not know in ad-vance what will happen. I do not know this be-causeI do not knowthe depth of my characteralthough I have chosen him with a? much pre-caution as possible. It is marvelous to discovera man gradually, and it is to this degree thatone progresses in a film, instead of knowing inadvance what will come to pass, the result .which, in fact, would be only the false personal-ity of an actor. In a film, there must be this* Ren6 Guyonnet, "Entretien Robert Bresson,L'Express,December 17, 1959.


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8sense of discovery of a man, of a profound dis-covery . . . the thing given is nature, man;it is not the actor. It is necessary to return tonature: you must search always, you must haveat your disposal the means to keep on search-ing."*This concept of discovery suggests the "non-preconception" of Robert Flaherty. It may alsosuggest the approach of the neorealists whotake life as they find it. It does, of course, sug-gest immediately the probing cameras of docu-mentary film-makers - the non-propagandists.But it goes beyond any of these, because Bressonis concerned with the one element of film-mak-ing which has eluded "discovery"-the "innerman." Flaherty, the "neorealists," the docu-mentary film-makerswork with the exterior man,photographing him as he appears. Bresson seeksto discover what this exterior can tell him aboutthe man-how he is "constructed inside."How?His work with his principal character callsfor interminable rehearsal. He has to arrive bothin movement and voice-tone at a certain level of"automation." This, because he believes thatbody-movement, words spoken and reactions tothem are in fact in the daily routine of living forthe most part, "automatic." "I may," he ex-plains, "have my character walk to a desk andplace a book on it for as many as 10, 20, 30, 40times. When I see what I want, when he givesme what I want-this tiny glimpse of him-Itake it. With the voice, it is the same. I willhave him read-just read for me-until I havethe tone, the flattened tone I desire. During thefilming, he does not know what he gives me."(Claude Laydu, the priest in Journal, was saidto be shocked when he saw the saintly figurehe had become on the screen.)"You see," Bresson continues, "it is yet not somuch the words he says or the movements hemakes which are important. It is what they pro-voke. That constitutes the 'essence' of the film."How does the interpreter feel under thisregimen? When Leterrier was asked this ques-tion, he replied: "Quite frankly, I had the feel-

ing of being very much circumscribed, totally directed.""This is not difficult to understand," Bressoncountered. "I try to arrive at the truth by way osome mechanical way, if you wish. This feelingthat Leterrier had of being maneuvered by meis due to this mechanical way without whichit is not possible to arrive at that which lies be-yond the truth, namely himself."*And again he says: "Perhaps, during the filming this feeling that [the interpreters] mighthave (but they have not) of being treated asobjects, comes from the fact that I prevent themfrom 'exteriorizing'. What I am trying to cap-ture is not what they show me, but what theyconceal from me, that which is marvelousunique: their personalities."tThis admittedly mechanical use of the nonprofessional to permit total expression by thefilm author is perhaps the most controversial oBresson's film concepts. It would not, naturallybe popular with actors. He has been obliged toinsist, time and again: "I have nothing againstactors. In fact, I am always amazed by theirextraordinary performances in the theater. Buthe film is not the theater."Even those who do not write kindly of Pickpocket find it a faultless film technically. It isimpressive in its perfection: exquisite framingbeautifully clear images, camera angles as pre-cise and effects as subtle as Bresson's own mindThe rhythm of the film is so skillfully enmeshedin the over-all impression of the film itself that itis not identifiable as rhythm."I know what I want-in all elements of thefilm," says Bresson. "I ask for it. I ask for ifrom those who work with me in a technicalcapacity."But each element is his-his alone.He reviews the rushes-first with the crew(but not the cast), and then alone. It is whenhe is alone that the decisions on the day's shoot-ing and necessary re-takes are made, to be announced when shooting begins again.

* Cahiers du Cindma, October 1957, op. cit.* Both quotations from Cahiers du Cindma, Octo-ber 1957, op. cit.f Ren6 Guyonnet, op. cit.


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When the shooting is over and editing begins,Bresson occupies the cutting room. He aloneknows what he is looking for as he views thefootage sequence by sequence. "It is character-istic of M. Bresson," says Raymond Lamy, thevery proficient editor of Un Condamne andPickpocket, "that he works until he has what hewants. He does not begin with any precon-ceived notion-he is "discovering" as he edits-but you may be sure that whatever pleases himwill be right."Bresson edits each sequence within itself,until all are edited. If a sequence does not givethe effect he wishes as it is placed with others,he takes them apart and starts over again.Dubbing and mixing sessions receive his con-stant attention. Every element of the film isvital to him-and sound especially. Each soundhe uses must contribute to the transformation hemust have. One of the most brilliant examplesof his use of sound is in Un Condamnd wheneach sound heard stirs, or excites, or moves insome way. He does not use the sounds as hefinds them on location, or on a studio set. In aroom, for instance, if there are to be noises ofconversation, doors opening, and closing, a clockticking, a baby crying, he must record eachseparately. The result is an endless number ofsound tracks to be used thereafter as he sees fit.Music for Bresson is never background. Itis for a purpose selected by him. In Un Con-damnd he uses the somber, beautiful strains ofMozart to accompany the daily march of theprisoners carrying their waste cans from theircells to the cesspool for dumping. How closethis came to the ridiculous! But it worked, andbrilliantly. "You see," Bresson explains, "this isan example of what I mean by transformation:when things come together. This music liftedthis scene to another level. It is not possiblenow to think of those men without rememberingtheir dignity, and they were dirty, ragged anddishevelled."It is a tribute to Bresson's great perceptionand sensitivity, to the profound inquiries whichdrive him to astounding discovery, that his filmsprovoke sometimes unexplainable emotions andimpressions. They are so completely an expres-

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UN CONDAMNEI~'MORTS'ESTECHAPPE

sion of himself that his own inner nature isexposed."I am after the truth," he says. And again,"My interpreters must have a moral resemblanceto the character in my film." And again, "I dis-cover.When asked if in Un Condamnd there wasnot to be found extraordinary praise of the per-severance of faith, his answer was: "This praiseis not the subject, but follows from the subject.I put very simply a certain man in a cer-tain danger and I followed him closely with mycamera. The important thing, more than thefacts or the events, was this man whom thesefacts and events permitted me to portray."*"Was this man in Un Condamne predestined?""Aren'twe all?""The mysticism which many of us see in yourfilm, have you put it there, or is it there in spiteof you, or it is your opinion that it is not there?"

".4.. I do not believe that everything in afilm is put there. You include some things with-out including them. What you call my mysti-cism must derive from this. In Un Condamnd(as the subtitle indicates: "The Wind BlowsWhere It Will") I tried to make the audiencefeel these extraordinary currents which existedin the German prisons during the Resistance,the presence of something or someone unseen:a hand that directs all."tBresson lives on the Seine across a footbridge* Rene Guyonnet,op. cit.f Cahiersdu Cindma,op. cit.


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from Notre Dame, on the curved tip of the IleSt. Louis, in one of the oldest, loveliest spotsin Paris. It is easy to imagine the ghosts ofPascal, the Jansenist, referred to.so often bythose who discuss Bresson, and of Montaigne,whom he himself loves to re-read and quote,haunting the cobblestone quay. He lives withaustere elegance. A part of his house is a largeroom overlooking the Seine, in which he seemsto spend much of his time. When one looks atit, it is so much his that it is impossible to con-ceive of it being any other way. The walls andhigh ceilings, white and bare; tall bookcasesalong the fireplace wall packed with rows ofbooks; a rough-hewn madonna and child on themantel, reflected in a mirror framed in an in-tricately woven design; ivory coverings on thelovely period chairs and sofa-a warm, com-fortable room.Bresson is free in this room-free to pace andtalk. And you are left free to accept his kind-ness, his eagerness to give; to follow his move-ments and his words. His eyes are young,younger than his face. His whole aspect is thatof a handsome man, unaware that he is so. Al-though he talks easily, sometimes rapidly withenthusiasm or impatience, he is impatient with

LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNEthe words he uses to express himself. His Elish is excellent, but he insists that it is adequate-and this because he feels it inaquate to the business of expressing himselfrapidly as he thinks, and as he does in his olanguage.You are left free to listen, to watch, andto understand. You see the sorrow he feelsthe tragic death of Albert Camus, who wasfriend. Again, you stare fascinated as he stra match with the expert toss of a match box,see his fleeting pleased smile. Or you listenhe expresses disgust with every aspect of theexcept that of making the film. This he loIt is easy to see why.For all that is seen and heard, there ismuch about him that is not understood. Perhit is the genius given to so few; the imporobjectivity, the precise mind, the power of pception, the ability to unveil.Bresson says of himself, as he commentsthe narration he had read in Figaro LittirairUn Condamnd:". .. I remember that it affected me as sothing of great beauty; it was written in antremely precise tone, very cold, and evenstructure of the narration was very beautiIt had great beauty. There was at the stime that coldness and simplicity, by meanwhich one senses that it is the work of a mwho writes with his heart. This is somethvery rare. . "

"Youwere a painter once, M. Bresson.""I am a painter," he said. "I will alwaysa painter. But I had to stop. When I hadstop I had to fill up an emptiness."

* Cahiers du Cindma,op cit.

bresson on film quaterly

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