Reprinting an old article Bresson because--well, because there's no good reason not to read about Bresson (list of my posts on him as follows):
Au hasard, Balthazar, 1966), Journal d'un cure de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951), Mouchette (1967), and Un condamne a mort (A Man Escaped, 1956)
On bread alone
(Note: plot discussed in close detail)
The ostensible subject of Robert Bresson's last film L'Argent (1983) is money (hence the title), and in fact Bresson uses the pulling out, counting, and passing over of franc notes from one person to another as a kind of repeated motif throughout. But it's the love of the stuff that causes the real trouble (a distinction Catholic priests like to remind us of in Sunday mass) and initiates the central movement in the film, the downward slide of Yvon Targe (Christian Patey) from heating-oil deliveryman and husband to convict and axe murderer.
Joan unornamented
(Robert Bresson's film is available for streaming on Filmstruck, which will shut down by November 29; is still available though less readily on Amazon; should ideally be on a streaming service accessible everywhere including the Philippines (Filmstruck is confined to the USA) but alas isn't.)
The first film to come to mind viewing this stony ground of a picture is Carl Th. Dreyer's silent film, a series of gigantic closeups shuffled through at speed, arguably the most revered and the best-known version of the story.
Robert Bresson's response? "Grotesque buffooneries."
(The last of my previously unpublished Bresson articles)
Bresson goes to war
Robert Bresson's Lancelot du lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1974) comes as something of a shock if you've been watching Bresson's films in chronological order. Not so much the fact that it's in color (it's his third color film), but because the opening sequence shows violence; not just violence, but graphic violence, the lopping off of heads, the spurting of blood in bright arterial red.
(Some old articles I never got around to publishing; a couple of more Bressons in the following weeks)
Gift of a Magi
What's so remarkable about Au hasard, Balthazar is that Bresson uses the simplest things--a donkey; a girl; a camera that tends to look at things askance; some piano music--and with them creates (as Godard puts it) the whole world, or about as beautiful and complex an evocation of that world as anything I've ever seen.
Bresson eschews most special effects, most camera moves, uses only one lens for the entire film (50 mm), doesn't resort to surrealism or trick cutting or even makeup, yet what he creates is as immediate as anything by de Sica or Rosellini, and as strange as anything by Bunuel or Godard. His lead actress hardly twitches a muscle throughout the film, yet you feel you know her inside out; his lead actor--a donkey--has at most a pair of darkly liquid eyes and a head of unkempt fur yet you're moved by his predicament, and ultimate fate.
Bresson throws in the story of a man accused of murder who comes to believe he is guilty (even if he isn't), and it's of a piece, as integrated into the film as if the film had wrapped roots around the man's story and just kept on growing into maturity. From an encounter between an old miller and the film's heroine (insomuch as the film actually has a heroine) Bresson manages to sketch an outline of the girl's father without the man being present, just the miller contrasting the father's philosophy against his own (honor vs. material wealth; pride vs. avarice); with every word he speaks the miller condemns her father's philosophy, then, for good measure, his own. In the end the girl succumbs to the miller, corrupt and decrepit as he is, partly because she must (he's taking her in for the night), partly because it appeals to her sense of perversity, her need for degradation. All this psychologically plausible, the simplest realism, yet somehow poetic, stylized, cinematic.
Bresson believes he's trying for a film where everything "is in its place," and cites the story of Bach reacting to a student admirer, saying what he does is not all that special: he just hits a note at the right time, and the organ does the rest. Bresson claims to be doing the same infuriatingly simple, mysterious act: he points the camera, then glues the resulting footage together. The projector, or so he would like you to think, does the rest.
The classic reading of the film is that the donkey stands for Christ, and all who abuse it are the sinners of the world. Recent critics think otherwise: the village folks' cruelty and vice, the village priest's ineffectuality contradict a strictly Christian interpretation and suggest, among other things, that the donkey is more the victim of an unfeeling materialist world. Bresson immerses us in the textures and sounds--the materials, in effect--of that world, presenting to us through Ghislain Clouquet's crystalline photography the rough weave of the characters' clothes, the crudely hewn rocks that make up their houses; his soundtrack emphasizes specific sounds--clacking cart wheels, clanking chains, Balthazar's defiant, pathetic bray.
If I may throw in my own two centavos (into a pot probably brimming over with currency): Balthazar's behavior in the film is like a base line for all living creatures; the animal acts the way man would act, bereft of human intelligence and given only a basic level of consciousness--move when able, resist when tired, ignore pain when struck, flee when the pain is unbearable. Simple yet, I would say, sane.
The donkey reacts as any animal would react; everyone else reacts differently, self-destructively you might say, because they're cursed with self-conscious intelligence and are capable of doing things against their immediate interest. They are for much of their lives insane, and the film continually compares the donkey's behavior with theirs to sometimes comical, sometimes tragic, effect. The girl sleeps around, her father refuses to compromise, the boy who loves her allows himself to be humiliated, the boy she loves is allowed to humiliate her, the accused man drinks heavily, the miller counts his virtues as covetously as he does his money; through it all Balthazar ambles along, a braying, four-legged condemnation of humanity's perverse craziness. If the donkey dies, that's because the world itself, or the part of it infested by human civilization, has gone mad, and no sane, sensible creature can long survive in it.
August 26, 2007
My Senses of Cinema article is finally out:
Journal d'un cure de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, Robert Bresson, 1951)
Excerpt:
It's strange how Bresson's Journal d'un curé de campagne (Dairy of a Country Priest, 1951), a film considered by many to be so spiritual, is so thoroughly immersed in the physical. But Catholicism--and the film is steeped in it--is full of paradoxes: loving one's enemies; believing in one God with three incarnations; needing to die to gain eternal life. Bresson at an early point of his career--using the Georges Bernanos novel--seems to be telling us that to present matters indefinite (the spirit, or soul), you need for material matters definite (the body, the world it lives in); more, to break free of the world of the physical you must first take a firmer hold on said world--for traction, if you like.
The film's first image is of the eponymous diary. You see the texture of the journal's thick paper cover; behind that, a blotter splotched with ink; behind that, a page full of scribbling. The act of writing--scratching ink on rough paper, carefully blotting it, just as carefully closing the cover to keep the contents safe--will become a repeated motif, emphasizing the act of physically capturing and putting down on sheets of flattened pulp one's thoughts and ideas and emotions. Capturing and rendering on paper, so to speak, such elements of the soul as one can record.
Girl, interrupted
In Frederic Bonnaud's essay on Journal d'un cure de campagne (Dary of a Country Priest, 1951), he calls the character of Seraphita (a young girl who torments the eponymous priest) "scary" and "a mistake," her conversion scene being "too literal and obvious" and I suppose she is; I don't mind taking Mr. Bonnaud's word for it. What I do see myself, however, is not so much an obviousness as a kind of inconclusiveness--we have some hint of a conversion of this "monster" (as she's described), but not the whys and wherefores of her transformation. The titular priest is cracked open and thoroughly examined, the other character are mostly types meant to give an unyieldingly hostile face to the town (for the Countess--the one notable exception--Bresson hands over to us a swiftly and masterfully executed sketch of her soul). Seraphita arouses our curiosity as an entity with intelligence and awareness enough not to buy the town's line of thinking; Bresson leaves her in a lurch, swaying towards the priest, but without anything conclusive coming out of her conversion. Could Bresson's taking on a second Bernanos novel be his way of returning to what he'd left unexplored the last time?
Bill Mousoulis in his Senses of Cinema essay considers Mouchette a "reworking of some aspects" of Bresson's arguably most highly regarded film, Au Hasard, Balthazar, and points out the many similarities. Granted, but considering the chronology, wouldn't it be just as plausible to say Bresson very possibly took inspiration from Bernanos' novel to make Balthazar, later deciding to adapt the source novel itself to the big screen as well? Either way, one might say Bresson was unsatisfied with his earlier incarnations of the girl, and felt he had to tackle the character full-on.
Watching the film, one can't help but be reminded of yet another film--Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939).
The similarities are striking--a poacher and gamekeeper after the same girl; a rabbit hunt summing up the filmmaker's view of the world. More on this later.
Film critic Tony Rayns in his mostly excellent commentary for the Criterion DVD of the film tells us that the film is about the disappearance of a human being from human society--what's left when one is gone? He points out that absence is a recurring motif in the film, what with Mouchette's mother in the opening images crying out in despair about her coming death, Arsene the poacher describing his epileptic fits as like a kind of blanking out, and later the daughter herself deliberately walking away from human society. I'd add further that absence is a great theme or method in Bresson's filmmaking too--no melodrama, no acting in the conventional sense, all extraneous details wiped out. Rayns says he doesn't think Bresson is a minimalist but that his films feel minimalist, and I agree--Bresson pares away much if not everything that doesn't conform to his idea of "cinematography" (real filmmaking, according to Bresson, as opposed to "cinema" which he considers a mere reproduction of dramatic theater), instead packing his work with enough strange details (strange to you, not Bresson, for whom it presumably made perfect sense) to keep the viewer endlessly fascinated, if he knows how to look.
Mouchette is a sad little thing. Rayns mentions that in Bernanos' novel she's even more repulsive, with plain face and bad skin; he believes Bresson captured her attitude but otherwise cast one of his beautiful waifs in the role--something I can't quite agree with, because attitude (I think) goes a long way towards determining one's attractiveness or lack of (one of the documentaries on the film shows Nadine Nortier in between takes; she smiles often, and when she does she's radiant). Ms. Nortier's Mouchette is a peasant lump: a toad, practically, with pigtails, hand-me-down clothes, an awkward, almost amphibious gait (you can imagine she's more graceful in water; when someone shoves a table aside under which she's hiding, you expect reptilian legs to be folded under her, ready to leap). She has no friends, her mother is in bed, chronically sick, and her father and older brother are too busy smuggling liquor to pay her any attention. She jumps into mud puddles on the way to church, she tosses clods of dirt at her classmates; when someone calls out her name (at the film's beginning, in effect introducing her), she pointedly ignores the caller and continues plodding her way into school.
Before Mouchette takes her leave of the world, though, she needs to know just what she's leaving, and the film sets about this task with blunt efficiency. She's watching her classmates sit on a railing when they suddenly flip upside-down, flashing their underwear. She's passing a doorway when a boy inside calls out to her; when she stops to look he drops his pants. She's mute witness to a sexual farce played out between the aforementioned gamekeeper Mathieu (Jean Vimenet) and poacher Arsene (Jean-Claude Gilbert, perhaps the only actor to have appeared in two Bresson films (he never likes to repeat casting)) over Luisa, the barmaid (Marine Trichet). She even manages to have her own dalliance--at a fair she climbs into a dodgem and (perversely, as is her nature) zooms away backwards; a young man crashes into her from behind, the collisions (again, perversely), being his way of showing interest.
Like the priest in Bernanos' other novel she's shunned by much of the town or held in contempt; like the priest she has a crucial encounter with another soul that Bresson shoots in a style markedly different from the rest of the film.
The sequence starts off with Mouchette looking at the moon, a tiny orb surrounded by huge storm clouds--she's lost in the forest, apparently. Through the brush she sees Mathieu approach Arsene, confronting him about Luisa. One falls on top of the other and they struggle; Mathieu bites Arsene's hand, and blood gushes out (one can't help but think of the blood from a deflowering). Afterwards, they have a (post-coital?) drink together, become friends. If, as Rayns suggests, Bresson abandons the skewed but otherwise realist look he uses for most of the film to evoke a dreamlike quality in this passage (the moon and passing clouds, the unreal howl of wind), we may be looking at the fight through Mouchette's half-hysterical eyes, already primed by previous incidents to see everything and anything as vivid, suggestive, sexually charged.
Mouchette sees no more; she's found by Arsene and brought to a shelter. Arsene notes the shrieking wind (Bresson, who orchestrates sound effects much as if they were a music score, uses what I think is his single most memorable effect here) and calls the storm outside "a cyclone." He explains that he believes he's killed Mathieu and wants her to be his alibi; he outlines an elaborate story for her to follow, going so far as to scatter the ash in the shelter (to show that he hadn't been there), and start a fire in his own house (to show that he had been home all night).
Arsene is a proven playboy (I can't see the appeal myself--but I'm hardly an expert); it isn't his meager charms that capture Mouchette, though, but his helplessness--he has a grand mal seizure, and Mouchette (much like Seraphita when her priest collapses) has to watch over him, singing a song she willfully sang off-key at school, this time note-perfect. More than sexual attraction, I think tenderness is a dangerous emotion--it can inspire the kind of foolish actions and heedless decisions that can change a life, and Mouchette is irrevocably changed.
The rest of the film shows the town's reaction to this new Mouchette. She comes home to her mother in bed, her father and older brother out (smuggling, presumably), her baby sister crying; she offers the raging cyclone as an excuse, and her mother responds "what cyclone?"--putting Mouchette's experiences the previous night into doubt. Her mother asks her to warm some milk for the baby; Rayns points out that her futile gesture of warming a bottle of milk on her breast (her father had taken the matches with him and she can't start a fire) is a sign of her inability to take over the family as surrogate mother, but the way Bresson lights and frames her (in half-profile, half in shadow) she's also suddenly a beautiful Madonna lovingly (if ineffectively) nursing her child. Her sad experience has made her bloom into a woman, Bresson seems to be telling us--the corniest of notions, but Bresson presents this in such a straightforward manner it's easier to accept here than in almost any other film I can think of.
The mother dies that night; the father prays by her bed; Mouchette goes out to fetch more milk for the baby. The townspeople greet her in a kinder tone, offering condolence for her mother, but it's a hypocritical kindness--seeing a long scratch in her bosom, a shopkeeper calls Mouchette a 'slut;' an old woman offering Mouchette a muslin dress informs her that she has evil in her eyes; the boy who earlier flashed Mouchette calls to her again (this time she ignores him--possibly because she's seen bigger). People are more aware of her, ostensibly because of her mother's passing, but you can't help but wonder if it isn't also because Mouchette herself has changed. She has more presence now, more awareness of herself and of the world; she's made contact with another person--her conversation with Arsene is the longest, most intimate encounter she's had in the film, probably in her entire life--sworn loyalty to him, is bound to him beyond mere reason or social convention. She's a relatively stronger entity, not to be ignored or taken so lightly, and the townspeople have responded accordingly.
And then we come to the rabbit hunt. Rayns thinks Bresson stretches things a bit by asking us to believe that Mouchette, who grew up in a rural town, has never seen a hunt before, or at least acts as if she has never seen one. I submit that, in effect, she hasn't--not since her encounter with Arsene and her mother's death. These two tectonic changes may have created in her a sensitivity towards death, made her look at death with fresh eyes. It may seem odd that her mother's passing leaves her relatively unmoved while the rabbits' utterly shakes her up, but coming home from Arsene's the shock may not have completely worn off; the rabbits' deaths, on the other hand, may have been the straw that broke the already strained camel's back.
Renoir may have read the Bernanos book while making his 1939 film and borrowed details for his dark comedy, choosing to use the hunt as his defining image. Seeing Renoir's borrowings from Bernanos' novel echoed in Bresson's film of the same is a strange experience; one can't help but wonder if Bresson, remembering Renoir's and recognizing it for what it was, decided to reinforce the echo, to evoke Renoir's cutting patterns (as in Renoir, the scene contains some of the swiftest editing in the film) but magnify the horror (Bresson includes one painfully extended shot of a rabbit blasted in the rear, getting up, struggling feebly, collapsing, again and again). This is Mouchette's apocalypse, the film's--or God's, if you like--revelation to her of what this world is really about; surely any response she can have to this would be equally extreme.
In footage of the making of the film, Bresson talked of not having too many preconceived ideas, of wanting to be surprised, of taking advantage of the spontaneous; yet when we see him direct he worries over the smallest detail of an actor's movements, how the light would strike their hands or faces, how different objects--a table, a hanged coat--would reveal or obscure them. Presumably Bresson meant he needed to be at the place and time of making, to let the actual sets, occupied by his 'models' (what he calls his actors) determine how he's going to shoot a scene.
I wonder what on-the-spot stimulus, then, inspired him to create the film's final image. Rayns points out how stylized Mouchette's drop into the water is--the splash hardly seems loud enough, and you don't see a body. More, Bresson for some reason repeats the final image over and over again, an effect so subtle I only noticed it by accident. Bresson's films often show the mark of the Surrealists (I'm thinking of the arrows shot into the ground in Lancelot du Lac (1974), or the crowd staring into the café long after the arrested party has been escorted out in L'Argent (1983), or even the momentary frozen poses people sometimes struck in Pickpocket (1959)). Could this be that one odd touch he likes to put in his films? A suggestion--what with the waves moving out, freezing, moving backwards, freezing, then moving out again--that Mouchette's soul doesn't really end, that an eternity exists out there somewhere?
Bresson has insisted many times he's not interested in 'recording theater," in doing pictures that don't have qualities unique to film, that merely combine elements from other arts. If there's a medium that Bresson's films come closest to resembling--or, conversely, a medium that comes closest to approximating the spirit of his works--I submit it would be poetry. In his films images carry more than their weight of narrative meaning, sequences are spare, elegantly wrought, and connections are not always made through logic or linear thinking; in his films extensive use is made of repetition, rhythm, visual rhyme, even a kind of alliteration (Bresson seems able to link (or at least inspire one to link) the mud caking Mouchette's boots to the holy water at the church entrance to the rainstorm pounding on Mouchette's body to the liquor she drinks at Arsene's to the drops of cold milk hanging from the baby's lips to the tears on Mouchette's face (wiped away by the diaper she picks up to replace the baby's soiled ones) to the pool that ultimately receives Mouchette's body--moisture in its many forms, following, enabling, shaping, accepting the girl's direction in life and ultimate fate). A case can be made, I think, for Bresson being the poet of cinema, and Mouchette being his elegy for a young girl who suffered, rebelled, found peace.
Is Pickpocket Bresson's most famous film? It's Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, of course, only Bresson gives himself the additional challenge of dealing with petty thievery instead of (as was in Dostoevsky) a double murder (it's as if Bresson disdained the larger-than-life drama inherent in killing, and instead decided to focus on the minutae of common larceny). Paul Schrader talks about how its portrait of a man outside of society influenced Taxi Driver, filmmakers (including Scorsese) talk about the erotic and visual thrill the pickpocketing sequences give them, how watches and wallets and pens are passed around like so many prized fetishes, how fingers touch, lightly slide over, and slip into pockets, coats, handbags.
The first theft for me is the most telling: Michel at the horserace, behind the woman, hand poised above the handbag. Bresson cuts to a head-on shot of the two figures as they watch the race (depicted, in typical Bressonian fashion, entirely on the soundtrack). Michel's eyes, always hooded, droop an extra millimeter here: you can see how absorbed he is at what he's doing.
This isn't sex, or at least it isn't interactive sex: it's onanism, self-absorbed violation of a man or woman without the man or woman's awareness that he's being so intimately molested. It's a game people play, and yes, it is actually possible to ejaculate just from the friction created by textile alone. Whether the person you're doing it to is aware or not you're not quite sure, and that's the one thing that felt so freakishly right about it all, that paradoxically frank stare Michel gets from his victims sometimes: it's as if they're sizing him up, and in that millisecond of contact, seeing his soulful eyes and handsomely ascetic face, giving him consent to proceed. Is Pickpocket also Bresson's most most openly erotic film? Could be.
Looking at the DVD's extras, I found a fascinating documentary by a filmmaker who, confusing a vaguely familiar man she's met for an old childhood friend, discovers she's looking at Pierre Laymarie, who played Jacques in the film. She goes on to hunt down the rest of the cast, discovering Marika Green, who played Jeanne as the 16 year old virgin that she really was (and at 60 years old looking remarkably fit and lovely). Martin LaSalle, who played Michel, was unrecognizable (he was bald and bearded) except for the intense heavy-lidded eyes. Unlike most of Bresson's 'models' (as he called them sometimes) and like Anne Wiazemsky and Dominique Sanda, Green and LaSalle went on to have long careers (LaSalle, I'm surprised to learn, was in among many films Missing, Under Fire, Alamo Bay, and even an episode of Crime Story--like his character, he slips in and out of films I've seen without my noticing; he's even finished a film this year).
Green proudly shows a small painting LaSalle's given her in 1996, with the words written "with great love" or something like that. One wonders--that final image, of the two pressed together through prison bars, how intense was it that the memory of it should inspire so vivid an expression of affection after so many years? Michel, after years of alienation, finally discovers simple human contact--ironically when he's physically isolated, in prison. It's about as moving an image of love as any I can think of; one remembers the singularly intense sexual thrill Michel had (and Bresson so memorably evoked to us) of picking pockets, however, and wonders how long the relationship will last.
Escape Plan
(Plot discussed in close detail)
Who'd have thought Bresson, he of the austere aestheticism and rigorous philosophy, could make such an effective thriller as A Man Escaped? That opening sequence of Lt. Fontaine about to attempt a break from a car is as superbly timed and edited--with the suspense stretched out into a thin, taut wire--as anything from Kurosawa or Eisenstein.
Bresson's visual style couldn't be more fitting for the setting--the whole movie is focused on the title character, in a series of tight medium shots and close-ups. The camera is trained on him, and since he operates in such a small space, it rarely strays elsewhere. The impression of claustrophobic confinement is thus emphasized, even magnified--about an hour of the way through you dearly wish for a shot of a tree, of the sky, of something outside the prison walls, which Bresson refuses to grant (the final shots are of more walls, glimpsed through thick fog, and at night). A voiceover keeps you constantly inside Fontaine's head, telling you what he thinks and feels with direct simplicity.
Bressson builds tension here in ways Hitchcock might have approved of--the emphasis on deadlines and time limits, the constant fear of being detected or searched, the treachery of the Nazis (a promise of release is always suspect until you've actually been shown out the door, something we never actually see--or hear--happen). And it isn't just the circumstances--when he's finally ready, with hooks and ropes and all, Fontaine experiences a failure of nerve (a crisis of faith?), and can't seem to bring himself to actually escape.
It's almost all escape, all the time, but Bresson manages to take a moment to speculate about God's role in all this. "Trust in God," a priest says, but Fontaine is more practical: "we have to help him," he says. The prison break might be Bresson's way of dramatizing a spirit being redeemed, but he's not very didactic about ways and means: if anything, his hero is microscopically narrow-minded, focused only on the minutiae of his coming flight. Interesting to compare him to the hero in Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest--Fontaine is more physically restrained, but he has an outward focus, a definite goal he has his eyes trained on that keeps him going; the cure in Diary roams where he pleases, but his soul is trapped, maimed in some fatally hidden manner.
Bresson's sound design is as strong as ever, with tappings on the walls reminding us of neighboring prisoners (potential allies or informers) listening on either side, the loud chatter of the machine gun reminding us of the penalty of being found out. Two moments in the use of sound stand out: when Fontaine first taps on a wall and gets silence as a reply, it turns out the old man on the other side is too frightened to answer. As Fontaine gets to know his neighbor, the old man begins to open up to him, whisper to him from his window, confide in him, at one point (in a rare burst of motion so sudden as to be almost spectacular) tossing him a blanket for making rope.
On the very night of Fontaine's escape, the old man makes a single request: he should knock before he leaves. Fontaine does this, and the reply--the sound of tapping where before there had been fearful silence--is inexpressibly moving, like a baby's long anticipated first words finally uttered.
The second moment comes when Fontaine is on the roof; he's thrown the hook across the gap between two walls, the final obstacle, and stopped; Bresson inserts a fade, possibly the most exasperating in all of cinema, because you realize that time has passed; Fontaine is again experiencing a loss of nerve, and can't bring himself to climb across. The clock strikes, and you count the beats--one, two, three, four.
With the chimes Bresson has indicated just how much time is left, just how close Fontaine is to succeeding (it's the first time we actually hear a clock), and just how close to catastrophic failure (a hundred and twenty minutes more or less--about the length of a motion picture--till sunrise, and capture).
The final scene has Fontaine tightly embracing his escape partner Jost, who murmurs "if only my mother can see me now." One wonders about the gesture: an expression of brotherly affection and friendship in an especially intense moment? Or, as David Thomson channeling Bogart might put it, "the beginning of a beautiful friendship"?
11.28.06
