Cinematheque celebrates the spare, transcendent vision of Robert Bresson
In the retrospective Secret Laws of the Cinematograph, the enigmatic French director’s hugely influential career comes into intense focus
L’Argent.
The Cinematheque presents Robert Bresson: Secret Laws of the Cinematograph from May 15 to July 2
DOMINIQUE SANDA WAS one of the very few professional actors to work with Robert Bresson, making her screen debut in his 1969 feature Une Femme douce. She described the unusual experience in the 1984 doc The Road to Bresson.
“Usually, when I speak, I look people in the eye,” she said. “Every day, systematically, he told me to look at the person’s ear. Always the ear. Whatever happened, I had to look at the person’s ear.”
Sanda went on to an auspicious career in European cinema, granting her rare comparative insight into the methods of French cinema’s most enigmatic master, who otherwise exclusively used non-actors (or “models,” in his words).
Dominique Sanda in Une Femme douce.
She continued: “He managed to get you to empty yourself of any thoughts. Once you work with Bresson, it’s hard to really act afterwards, to show off.”
Robert Bresson completed 13 features in a career that exists outside of any conventional notions of cinema, although his influence is boundless. The Cinematheque brings all of them to Vancouver starting May 15 with two of his most widely admired films, 1956’s A Man Escaped and 1977’s The Devil, Probably—although a quick scan of the Cinematheque program reveals the thin line between one masterpiece and the next, and the scope of reverence inspired by a filmography that includes Diary of a Country Priest (1950), Pickpocket (1959), and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962).
Sanda’s interview was conducted on the occasion of his final work, 1983’s L’Argent, which saw the 81-year-old Bresson share the director’s prize that year at Cannes with one of his greatest admirers, Andrei Tarkovsky. It’s arguably the ultimate distillation of his themes and his practice, inevitably described as rigorous, ascetic, spare, but also, finally, spiritual and transcendent.
That’s the true Road to Bresson: austerely presented morality tales of endurance and suffering that achieve, through their relentless abnegation, a kind of shuddering, irresistible passion. As such, Benny Safdie claims that he cries at every viewing of A Man Escaped. Naturally, Michael Haneke would appreciate 1966’s devastating Au hasard Balthazar—about an abused donkey, but also so much more—as “the most precious of all cinematic jewels.”
The otherwise publicity-shy and somewhat cranky filmmaker was very forthcoming about his vision in the 1975 book Notes sur la cinématographe. The flat affect and seemingly perfunctory line readings from Bresson’s “models” are mobilized, he writes, to “create emotion by resisting emotion.” His camera scans their near blank faces for “internal movements which can be seen.” In his ponderous but immaculate cutaways of feet, legs, and hands, Bresson is “applying myself to insignificant images” and “teaching the audience to imagine the whole when you are only giving them a part.” We quickly become his willing students.
Finally, Bresson’s films grope—with unreasonable success and power—toward a sense of something in the human experience that is always present but forever eludes comprehension. His response to a complaint at the press conference for L’Argent is illuminating. When a critic beefed that he didn’t understand a certain character’s motivation, Bresson testily responded: “I didn’t understand it either. No one understood it. It’s not a question of understanding, it’s a question of feeling. Which is not exactly the same thing.” From one setup to the next, there’s a strict and compelling logic to the exterior of a Bresson film. The interior, meanwhile, is up to you. Here are three we recommend:
A Man Escaped (1956) This key title begins with one of Bresson’s most arresting (no pun intended) and emblematic sequences. Three French resistance fighters sit silently in the back seat of a Nazi car as it speeds through Lyons. Two are handcuffed. The third, Lieutenant Fontaine, contemplating escape, carefully raises his unbound wrists toward the door handle in a pose that mimics prayer. The most conspicuous “acting” in Bresson is done with hands inside stringently framed cameos like this one. The filmmaker did time as a prisoner of war, which no doubt informs this meticulous work, where Fontaine’s penury and the film’s minimalism become one. In its methodical progress, A Man Escaped makes holy objects of wood splinters, secreted pencils, and painstakingly crafted rope and hooks, while the appearance of a spoon, in a film about salvation, takes on the power of a miracle.
Lancelot du lac (1974) It’s jarring to learn that Robert Bresson, always in need of funds, reached out to none other than George Cukor when he first conceived of this extraordinary post-Camelot comedown, hoping to cast—wait for it!—Burt Lancaster and Natalie Wood. Ten years later, Lancelot du lac appeared with his customary unknowns inside one of Bresson’s most precise designs, wherein Lancelot returns, minus Grail, to a Round Table fallen into disarray and paranoia. Demonstrating what Jonathan Rosenbaum dubbed “the Bressonian law of contrast”, this is a film heroically stubborn in its resistance to the kind of scale and excess invited by the material—giving rise to an incredible jousting competition captured in a small handful of repeated, close-cropped images and sounds—and then stripped of mysticism, in turn conjuring a staggering sermon on human weakness and cruel destiny that no amount of money or Hollywood star-power was likely to achieve.
L’Argent (1983) This is a film perfect in every Bressonian detail: in its precise calibration of the action, in its revelatory use of sound, and in the charity it extends to human souls corroded by the material world. Based on a Tolstoy story, L’Argent traces a counterfeit bank note as it moves from hand to hand, bringing devastation to more than one life. This is how Robert Bresson signed off in his early 80s, with a delicate and brightly lit tale pared to its essence, but carrying the heaviest wallop. As the central protagonist Yvon, Christian Patey is an all-timer in the field of volcanic stillness, assaulted by cosmic happenstance and reduced to depravity. Still our hearts break for him. Even the way his suit hangs from his sloped shoulders is affecting. Almost every Robert Bresson feature has a high-powered champion calling it his absolute best, but it’s hard to argue against this one. 
Lancelot du lac.
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