The Austere Cinema Of

'SAtti:4110--*. Control and Redemption The Austere Cinema of The Bresson Project is one of the most Jean—Luc Godard says, "Robert Bresson is comprehensive retrospectives undertaken by French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian Cinematheque Ontario. Robert Bresson, now novel and Mozart German music." Yet few of in his early 90s, is described by many critics as Bresson's films are available in any form in the world's greatest living filmmaker. Starting North America and little has been written on with what he considers to be his first film, Les him in English. Accompanying the new series Anges du peche in 1943, Bresson made 13 of 35mm prints by Cinematheque Ontario feature—length films in 40 years. (An earlier for The Bresson Project, is Robert Bresson, a comedy, Les Affaires publiques, filmed in 1935, 600—page collection of essays in English from was considered lost until its discovery in 1987 writer/critics such as Andre Bazin, Susan at La Cinematheque Francaise.) Although Sontag, Alberto Moravia, Jonathan Rosenbaum perhaps not as prodigious as the output from and Rene Predal. Following its debut showing other directors, Bresson's body of work, with at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto last fall, all its passionate austerity, has had an The Bresson Project travels to more than an inestimable influence on the history of cinema. dozen centres across North America this year. T ravelling across central France this route more times than I can recall, toward Lyon, as you near Bromont- more often than not on the way to Lamothe, the spare hillside village Robert the Cannes Film Festival. But Bresson came from more than 70 years Bromont-Lamothe is hidden from view ago, you find yourself climbing up the from the road, the houses tucked into spine of the country—the Massif Central. folds in the hills to the north. You have to want to go there. It's mostly unoccupied Even if you turn the words around into this morning except for an old guy fussing English, you get the idea of it, the feel and over his geraniums. I ask if anyone named weight of it. The world weighs in on you Bresson still lives here, but he says no, here; gravity seems to pull harder. What it smiles, and goes back to the pink flowers. lacks in spectacular Alps-like heights or The central square has a war memorial luxury resorts, the Massif Central makes and a dumpster nearby. I go looking for up in bulk. It's the national backbone. Bressons in the phone book. No one. Driving to the far eastern side of it, then down into the Rhone Valley, takes you It's not Bresson himself I'm after in over great humps of black rock bunched Bromont-Lamothe—he's lived in central like muscles. This, you cannot help but Paris his entire adult life, after all. Maybe think, is the landscape of Bresson's Le there was an old acquaintance, a relative, Journal d'un cure de campagne from 1951, although that wasn't likely. Bresson is with its many metal crosses and severe 91 (at least by most accounts). I'm after memories. George Berenanos's book something else, really—a way of provided the director with his story for Le describing what I see in his films. I've Journal, but it's in the memory of these always felt I've been seeing something rocks and hills where the film was born. that supposedly is not there. It's less than an hour's drive to Clermont I don't see this "poetry of precision," as Ferrand and its massive Michelin tire Cinematheque Ontario calls its massive factory, and not much more to Thiers, the Bresson retrospective to be shown in the hillside town devoted to cutlery making United States after its October Toronto where Francois Truffaut shot L'Argent de debut. Anything but. I see—and hear—in poche in 1976. So it's less than an hour to Pickpocket and Lancelot du lac the sort of modern France and modern multifreeway refined, absolutely pure, distilled Europe, where turbo Saabs and the big expressiveness that I first met-up with in Mercs roar south down the autoroute France before it became part of modern from Cologne and Copenhagen at 210 Europe; the France of out-of-the-way kilometres per hour, honking, blinking places like this, in its bars and the and threatening to crush the lagging old mornings when the farmers come in for Renaults which have been driven out onto that first little glass of rouge. It's the kind the highway by the poor, cowering locals of expressiveness that can only come from who are only looking for a quick short-cut those who can't imagine a life that's not to their cousins in the next town. daunting in one way or another; those who don't like to give too much away But Bromont-Lamothe seems decades, least they give it all away. It's all very not minutes, away from this. And you can conservative, very old-Catholic. It's very, sense something here you wouldn't very old country. It's also very, very expect from this austerity—the sensuality tough-minded. Only Bresson could say: it radiates. It's the sensuality of feelings of "Bach's music is always sentimental." longing, not of having; of silence, not of talking; of hiding behind an As a young student, Bresson, who's expressionless mask; of what's left, not tight-lipped about his youth here— what once was. In Bresson, it's translated tight-lipped about everything, really— into the sensual pewter colour of the excelled at those very disciplines that armour in Lancelot du lac, 1974, or the priests in cold places teach best: Latin, professional, noncommittal expression of Greek, philosophy and desire. But the faces in Pickpocket from 1959, or in just knowing full well what happens if one about every dramatically desolate scene stays in places like this, he got the hell out in Le Proces de Jeanne d'Arc, 1962. of town as fast as he could and headed to Paris. He had thoughts of becoming an Turning this mid-morning into artist as did so many filmmakers of his Bromont-Lamothe, brings a surprise. It's generation like Raymond Borderie or a bit larger than I imagined. I've followed Claude Autant-Lara. He settled in and and at 19 was married (those priests, a Dominican order of nuns, again). which cared for former prisoners. Control and He found French cinema in turmoil. Its redemption, the two great genius was emerging—the mid-1930s themes of Les Anges du peche, would be glorious with radiant realism— made in 1943—which Bresson but so was its conscience. Artists were has always maintained was organizing on various fronts, even the his first film—can be found in Dada/lunatic fringe and Le Groupe all the extraordinary 12 films Octobre. In the little magazines, the that followed. newspapers and cafés, there was a growing argument in favour of the "The Poetry of Precision: The filmmaker as artist and this attracted Films of Robert Bresson" is Bresson the most. His first screen credit the title of Cinematheque came in 1933 on C'etait un musicien. "This Ontario's travelling Bresson new age of the cinema," wrote critic movie show. And as titles go, Alexandre Astruc, "(implies) that the it's pretty good. And pretty scriptwriter himself shoot his films. Or ominous. It means to evoke rather, that there should no longer be certain aspects of the director's scriptwriters, for in such a cinema, that methods and style; the distinction between writer and director is rigorous refutation of any meaningless." actorly expressiveness, the controlled editing, the use of The following year Bresson directed his music-as-effect and not as first film, the short Les Affaires publiques, a an emotional underpinning. kind of knock-down comedy he later This portrait of a severe, thought was like Buster Keaton, "only thin-lipped hectoring Bresson worse." A long-lost print was found in gives rise to the use of the 1987 at La Cinematheque Francaise, doing word "parametric" in the little to to dispute Bresson's own dour Une Femme douce Cinematheque's notes on the conviction of the film's merits. Yet, as series, whatever that means. William Johnson notes in Cinematheque Bresson lived on his screenwriting ("Parametric" is used often in the notes. I Ontario's Robert Bresson, the collection of through the 1930s; however, he was wish the Cinematheque had found new essays devoted to the director, the young tossed into prison by the Nazis and was parameters to rein in the use of director's decision to use the famous kept there for some 18 months. It proved "parametric.") In the book Robert Bresson, clown Beby in a two-dimensional comic to be an experience that informed the Gilles Jacob, who is the head of the Cannes romp, "certainly prefigures his later making of Un Comdamne a mort s'est film festival, uses the phrase "spire of a exfoliation of expressiveness from echappe in 1956. It also further sharpened cathedral" to describe Bresson. Yikes, more his players—or, as he prefers to call his interest in a book, The Dominicans of pointy, needle-like imagery. If you did not them, modeles." the Prisons. Here was a history of Bethany, know otherwise, you might think that BRESSON Balthazar and Pickpocket—what results is If Bresson has a film that doesn't work, it's refined past any point of original Au hazard, Balthazar, where the story of a recognition.

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