Copyright by James Michael Churchill 2020

The Thesis Committee for James Michael Churchill Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Thesis:

Zen and the Art of Minimalist Maintenance: Eastern Philosophy in the Cinematic Method of

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Charles Ramirez-Berg, Supervisor

Thomas G. Schatz

Zen and the Art of Minimalist Maintenance: Eastern Philosophy in the Cinematic Method of Robert Bresson

by

James Michael Churchill

Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin May 2020

Abstract

Zen and the Art of Minimalist Maintenance: Eastern Philosophy

in the Cinematic Method of Robert Bresson

James Michael Churchill, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2020

Supervisor: Charles Ramirez-Berg

This study examines the presence of Zen in Robert Bresson’s unique method of film construction. I argue that Bresson’s minimalist choices regarding film form and his emphasis on sensory experience at the expense of intellectual analysis overlap significantly with Zen. In addition, I explore Bresson’s unique theory of film acting and discuss the parallels between his idea of the actor-as-model and the process of transcending the self through Zen . The aim of this thesis is to open the door to a new approach to film studies: a method that highlights direct experience and the achievement of a meditative state as opposed to the Western tradition of critical thinking and conceptual analysis.

iv Table of Contents

List of Figures ...... vii

Introduction: Zen Meditation and Perceptual Transformation ...... 1

Definition of Terms ...... 5

The Western Mind and the Limits of the Intellect: Literature Review ...... 6

The "A" Word: Can We Still Use It? ...... 12

Meditation and Decontextualization ...... 18

A New Method...... 21

Chapter One: Cinema as Meditation—The Classic Films ...... 23

A Man Escaped (1956) ...... 23

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)...... 33

Mouchette (1967) ...... 41

Maturation of Bresson’s Style: The Later Films ...... 50

Chapter Two: Cinema as Meditation—The Later Films ...... 51

Une Femme Douce (1969) ...... 52

Lancelot du Lac (1974) ...... 60

L’Argent (1983) ...... 69

Chapter Three: Zen Mind and Bressonian Acting ...... 79

True Self and the Nature of Being ...... 80

A Man Escaped (1956) ...... 83

Pickpocket (1959) ...... 88

Mouchette (1967) ...... 94

Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)...... 99

v Models and Meditation ...... 103

Conclusion: From Tarkovsky to Tarr, Antonioni to Akerman—Topics for Further Research ...... 105

Andrei Tarkovsky ...... 106

Béla Tarr ...... 111

Michelangelo Antonioni ...... 115

Chantal Akerman ...... 118

Zen and Film Studies ...... 121

Susan Sontag and Against Interpretation ...... 122

The Democratization of the ...... 124

Conclusion ...... 125

References ...... 127

vi List of Figures

Figure 1: Object transformation in A Man Escaped (1956) ...... 25

Figure 2: Isolated details in A Man Escaped (1956) ...... 27

Figure 3: Collapsing the scene in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) ...... 39

Figure 4: Cinematographic decontextualization in Mouchette (1967) ...... 45

Figure 5: Minimalist style—the soap exchange in Une Femme Douce (1969) ...... 55

Figure 6: Theme shots in Lancelot du Lac (1974) ...... 66

Figure 7: Perceptual transformation of the ax in L'Argent (1983) ...... 76

Figure 8: The actor as model in A Man Escaped (1956) ...... 85

Figure 9: The intelligence of hands—criminal team in Pickpocket (1959)...... 92

Figure 10: Direction of models—Mouchette (1967) ...... 97

Figure 11: The ideal model—Au Hasard Balthazar (1967) ...... 101

vii Introduction: Zen Meditation and Perceptual Transformation

“The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.” —Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematograph

Bresson’s commitment to stylistic minimalism, manifested in his unique theories regarding film acting, editing, and cinematography, has made him a source of considerable study ever since the Cahiers du Cinéma critics began to champion his work in the 1950s. His eccentric notion of film realism, the idiosyncratic performances that he draws from his actors and actresses, and his disdain for the theatricality of the films of his contemporaries contribute to an instantly recognizable film style that has generated a substantial body of scholarship. A significant amount of this academic work examines Bresson’s films in relation to Jansenism, a branch of Catholicism that places a heavy emphasis on determinism. This critical trend is most likely the result of a scholarly desire to put what little biographical information that we have about Bresson to good use. We know that Bresson had a Jansenist background and considered himself Catholic (at least for a substantial portion of his life), and the fact that this is one of the few things that we know about him with relative certainty makes it a desirable lens through which to view his work. The convenience of this reading allows many critics to reduce his work to a single theoretical framework. Pinning the tail on Balthazar, many of Bresson’s admirers settle on Catholicism as a sufficient explanation of his cinematic universe. If such a claim sounds like overstatement, consider the following assertion from Kent Jones: “Bresson’s entire concept of the cinematographer and his models as opposed to the director and his actors is an integral part of his ‘Christian

1 universe’” (Jones, 2011, p. 518). As I hope to illustrate over the course of this analysis, Bresson’s approach to filmmaking, as well as the effect that his films have on the viewer, is more complex on this point than the scholarly literature would currently lead us to believe. Countless other scholars have foregrounded Catholicism as a theoretical framework for understanding Bresson. From Paul Schrader to René Prédal, Raymond Durgnat to Tony

Pipolo, academics have consistently placed his films in relation to his religious beliefs. While this criticism is undoubtedly useful, I would argue that using Catholicism as the primary theoretical framework for analyzing Bresson’s cinematographic method leads to an incomplete assessment of his work. As counterintuitive as it may first appear (given the explicitly Catholic subject matter of many of his films), I hope to prove that the unique cinematic style of Robert Bresson finds a strong philosophical correlative in the Far East, and that his unorthodox approach to film construction bears a striking resemblance to the core tenants of Zen Buddhism. Bresson shares with Zen a paradoxical fixation on the importance of cultivating a type of mental discipline completely divorced from critical thinking. Like Zen teachings, the films of Bresson are ascetic1 and minimalistic yet motivated by intuition and the pleasure that comes from processing sensory information. And finally, Bresson’s filmmaking philosophy and Zen philosophy are both concerned with being instead of doing, being acted upon instead of acting. By understanding Zen, we

1 Some scholars might push back on the claim that Zen embraces asceticism. While Zen is in alignment with the larger school of Buddhism on this issue, encouraging the idea of a “Middle Path” between indulgence and self-denial, it is important to examine how the idea of balance differs across cultures and time periods. When Siddhartha Gautama came to this conclusion thousands of years ago, his interpretation of self-mortification was motivated by his decision to spend a period of time starving himself under a tree. By the standards of first-world countries in the past two centuries, the “Middle Path” of Buddhism looks much more like the type of ascetism often attributed to Bresson. I will expand on this idea in later chapters, particularly when referencing D.T. Suzuki’s writings on Zen living and practice. 2 understand the intentions of Bresson as a filmmaker, who sets up his films like sessions to help his audience to see a familiar world in an unfamiliar way. While this connection seems to have been neglected by most scholars who have discussed the work of Bresson, notable exceptions exist. The first is filmmaker , who, in a collection of filmmaking reflections titled Sculpting in Time, displays his admiration for Bresson with a brief reference to Zen:

Paul Valéry could have been thinking of Bresson when he wrote: ‘Perfection is achieved only by avoiding everything that might make for conscious exaggeration.’ Apparently no more than modest, simple observation of life. The principle has something in common with Zen art, where, in our , precise observation of life passes paradoxically into sublime artistic imagery. (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 95). A second critic to use the word Zen in relation to Bresson’s work offers an assessment that is less convincing than Tarkovsky’s. Exploring the possible presence of “negative theology” in Bresson’s work, Durgnat claims, “‘Negative’” theology may evoke Zen

Buddhism, often described as an atheistic religion. But Christianity is essentially vitalist, whereas Zen seeks liberation, not only from consciousness, but from life itself” (Durgnat, 2011, p. 581). In short, Durgnat raises the question but then negates it, and he seems to suggest that Zen is not the most precise lens for viewing the work. Though he is justifiably referring to content as opposed to form, the problem here is that Durgnat appears to be more authoritative on matters of film criticism than Eastern philosophy, and he doesn’t seem to have a full grasp of Buddhism. Inquiring about the ambiguity of Balthazar, he writes, “Is Au hasard Balthazar (1966) a meditation on ‘Christian vitalism’ versus ‘Buddhist-like’ nihilism? It contemplates, without clearly answering, a perennial Christian problem: animal versus spiritual” (ibid. p. 581). The conflation of Buddhism with nihilism is problematic. In Chapter Two, the distinction between these worldviews will be explored further. 3 The third significant critical voice to connect Bresson to Zen philosophy is author J.M.G. Le Clezio, who, in his introduction to Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, highlights this comparison:

Reading these notes, we may think also of oriental artists, Hokusai for example, in connection with Zen Buddhism. There is the same sense of economy, the same liking for what is sensual, and the same play on all the senses. Life drifting, in its continuous, unpredictable flow. Life inimitable. Japanese Buddhism teaches us that art (or bliss) is surprise, it cannot be calculated. It is a prey, a catch: “Be as ignorant about what you are going to catch as a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod” (the fish that arises from nowhere). (Notes, 2016, p. viii) While Clezio’s observation is of enormous importance, this analysis has not been developed. This third example, an excerpt from a single paragraph, seems to constitute the most comprehensive examination of Zen Buddhism in Bresson’s work currently available. As far as I can discern, a systematic study of Bresson’s work in relation to Zen has never been attempted. A historical assessment of the critical reception of Bresson’s work makes this gap obvious. My aim is to correct for this critical omission, and to reframe

Bresson’s films through an Eastern lens. René Prédal’s reference to Bresson’s artistic inspirations is telling: “Bresson likes to quote Renoir’s advice to Matisse: ‘You must paint the bouquet from the side it wasn’t arranged’ (Prédal, 2011, p. 98).2 It appears to me that Bresson’s cinematic bouquet has been historically arranged from the vantage point of Catholicism, and that to reposition the films more subtly from the perspective of Zen is in itself a Bressonian enterprise. While I don’t wish to belabor this point, a striking comparison can be found between the Renoir proverb that Bresson loves and a claim made by D.T. Suzuki: “to understand Zen we are to turn up the whole piece of brocade and examine it from the other side, where we can trace at a glance all the intricacies of woof

2 Prédal’s translation is most useful for our purposes here. In Jonathan Griffin’s translation of Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph, a different translation is used: “I often paint bouquets from the side where I have not planned them” (Notes, 2016, p. 23). Bresson says that he is quoting from memory.

4 and warp. This reversing of the order is very much needed in Zen” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 112). I must reiterate that the purpose of this analysis is not to eradicate the important scholarship already established or to devalue the unquestionably valid Catholic readings, but rather to broaden the philosophical context in which these films may be assessed: in short, my goal is to use Zen as one more interpretive framework for assessing the films of Robert Bresson.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

I hope to illustrate the striking theoretical similarities between Zen and Bresson’s filmmaking philosophy as detailed in Notes on the Cinematograph, his famous collection of writings on his filmmaking process, as well as his interviews. In addition, I will show how these similarities are manifested stylistically within Bresson’s films. But before delineating this process, it will be useful to first define two key terms. Zen is a particularly broad term, and one that is notoriously difficult to define. By

Zen Buddhism, I refer to a type of Japanese Buddhism3 that values sensory experience over concepts and intuition over logic. D.T. Suzuki claims, “Zen is decidedly not a system founded upon logic and analysis. If anything, it is the antipode to logic, by which I mean the dualistic mode of thinking” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 38). In short, Zen is an emptying of the mind of all labels, constructs, and abstractions. It is a return to a pure awareness of what can be observed in one’s immediate surroundings—an awareness that Bresson cultivates in the viewer through his innovative approach to film construction.

3 While Zen is most commonly associated with Japan, it originated in China in a form known as Chan which still exists today. A useful historical account of the development of Zen as it spread through China to Japan can be found in the first two chapters of Kaiten Nukariya’s The Religion of the Samurai (2004). While will be most frequently referenced in relation to Bresson’s filmography, I refer periodically in this thesis to the work of Chan master Sheng Yen, who offers many points that overlap with Japanese Zen. 5 It is also important to identify the meaning of the term cinematography as used by Bresson. Traditionally, the term cinematography is used to refer strictly to the visual characteristics of film as they pertain to the movie camera—lighting, camera angle, lens choice, camera movement, etc. However, Bresson uses the term more broadly, implying that cinematography is a healthy alternative to cinema, which he believes is too heavily influenced by the theatre. Bresson writes, “CINEMATOGRAPHY IS A WRITING WITH

IMAGES IN MOVEMENT AND WITH SOUNDS [capitalization his]” (Notes, 2016, p. 7). By including image and sound under the banner of cinematography, Bresson implies that cinematography is essentially anything that goes into the aesthetic construction of a film, anything related to form as opposed to content. For the purpose of my research, I will use the term cinematography according to its traditional definition (referring strictly to the film image) to avoid unnecessary confusion, but it is essential that I clarify the difference between the term as it may appear in Bresson’s writings and the term as it applies to film more generally. At times when I use the term according to the definition that Bresson employs, I will make note of this distinction for the reader.

THE WESTERN MIND AND THE LIMITS OF THE INTELLECT: LITERATURE REVIEW

In assessing the academic literature pertaining to the films of Bresson, one might conclude that there is a significant discrepancy between the cineliteracy of Bresson’s admirers and Bresson himself, who was disdainful of most of the films that he saw and seemed to be proudly unconcerned with many of the films that his contemporary culture deemed important. The demographic of scholars who write on the films of Bresson seem to possess a high degree of cultural capital, and one can easily get swept up in a sea of cross-references and esoteric discoveries that are relatively insignificant when examining

6 the films themselves. This is the potential problem with an analysis by David Bordwell, a brilliant film scholar who nevertheless succumbs to the Western tendency to emphasize Bresson’s cinema in the context of the traditional cinematic canon. In “The Exchange: Narration and Style in Les Anges du péché,” Bordwell analyzes Bresson’s first film while referencing his later work, claiming, “the way he cuts his scenes in A Man Escaped and later films owes a great deal to Soviet constructive editing in the silent era” (Bordwell,

2011, p. 234). While this specific claim isn’t much of a stretch, given the fact that Bresson once cited the film as one of his favorites, my concern lies with the degree to which we stress its importance. Throughout the essay, Bordwell manages to offer some highly thoughtful formal analysis of Bresson’s first film, but Bordwell’s analytical, cineliterate eye is perhaps anti-Zen and even anti-Bresson. A similar approach is utilized in Paul Schrader’s legendary 1972 essay Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, in which he attempts to draw a connection between the films of Ozu in the East and Bresson in the West (Dreyer’s use of the transcendental style is more complicated, and Schrader argues that Ozu and Bresson use it in its purest form). While Schrader doesn’t over-contextualize Bresson within film history, he does mis-contextualize Bresson within art history. Schrader claims that Ozu arrives at this transcendental style through the influence of the artistic tradition of Zen painting, while Bresson arrives at it through the Western tradition of Byzantine iconography. Schrader’s creation of a neat dichotomy, an East/West split to explain the cultural context of the two filmmakers, makes for a tidy but ultimately reductive thesis. The fact that Schrader compares Bresson to Ozu seems to suggest some of the Zen elements in the formal composition of Bresson’s film, but for Schrader to claim that Zen is one of the points of difference between the two filmmakers is inaccurate. For example, Schrader suggests that painting (which he associates with Zen) is the artistic medium that has the 7 strongest influence on the films of Ozu, and that iconography had the strongest influence on Bresson. But this stands in direct contradiction to the evidence that is apparent throughout Notes on the Cinematograph, Bresson’s notes on his filmmaking process. Bresson worked as a painter before becoming a filmmaker, and references to painting abound throughout his work. “I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter’s eternally fresh canvas” (Notes, 2016, p. 79), Bresson writes, and his reference to Renoir’s advice to Matisse, quoted above, is equally revealing. Schrader seeks a neat explanation and a tidy framework—the cultural traditions of the East influenced the films of the Japanese director Ozu, and the artistic heritage of the West influenced the films of the French Bresson. This is a characteristically Western move on the part of Schrader, and the potential danger for readers of this type of analysis is the temptation to treat the issue of Bresson’s aesthetic inspiration as a puzzle to solve. If Bordwell leans too heavily on film history and Schrader too heavily on art history, Mark Le Fanu overemphasizes literature in viewing Bresson’s work. In “Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Contemporary Pessimism,” Le Fanu compares Nostalgia and L’Argent, two films released in 1983 that allowed Tarkovsky and Bresson to share the Best Director award that year at Cannes. Le Fanu examines L’Argent by comparing it to the Tolstoy novella that it was based on. While Tolstoy’s story moves from corruption to redemption,

Bresson ends his film by cutting out a significant section of Tolstoy’s narrative. Le Fanu maintains that this “constructional mutilation” (Le Fanu, 1985, p. 54) causes the film to unintentionally succumb to nihilism, and he claims, “The film thinks that it is about grace; but really, if anything, it is about damnation” (ibid. p.55). Le Fanu then goes on to claim that “Cinema is a narrative medium,” and that “Its contours, like the contours of drama, are moral and literary” (ibid. 59). While it is common for Western critics to employ the techniques of literary analysis in assessing the works of filmmakers, Bresson counters that 8 “The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theatre, nor the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting” (Notes, 2016, p. 9). While other of Bresson’s notes seem to suggest that he believes that the truth of painting may come closer to the truth of film than the other two mediums, it is of primary importance that Bresson views filmmaking as a unique medium (one that cannot be tied down to reason and abstract thought). Even Susan Sontag, whose groundbreaking Against Interpretation is highly conducive to Zen-cinema studies, occasionally falls prey to the tendency to over- intellectualize Bresson’s films. In “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” Sontag compares Bresson to Bertolt Brecht, who famously used the “alienation effect” in his plays. While the comparison is useful to a certain degree, Sontag problematically concludes that the effect is used to “elongate or to retard the emotions,” and that “Awareness of form does two things simultaneously: it gives a sensuous pleasure independent of the ‘content,’ and it invites the use of intelligence” (Sontag, 1966, p. 179). While Bresson’s films are certainly ascetic and minimalist in terms of style, Sontag is on shaky ground in claiming that the intended effect is intellectual rather than emotional. Bresson instructs himself to “Stick exclusively to impressions, to sensations. No intervention of intelligence which is foreign to these impressions and sensations (Notes, 2016, p. 24). Sontag’s comparison of Bresson and Brecht’s use of actors is an important contribution to the field because it provides a possible precedent for Bresson’s seemingly revolutionary approach, which discourages acting at all costs. However, Bresson and Brecht used understatement with different intentions, and this historical comparison is perhaps overstated and overextended by Sontag. Ironically, the Sontag essay that deals specifically with Bresson seems to fall into a Western tradition of interpreting Bresson’s films (and is thus less pertinent to my argument), while her argument concerning the general study of aesthetics fits nicely with my study. Against Interpretation is discussed in greater detail in my concluding chapter, 9 being an extremely useful text for areas of potential further research regarding the relationship between Zen and film more broadly. Just as scholars have tended to overemphasize the Western artistic traditions to which Bresson is shackled, so too have they engaged in the Western tendency to psychoanalyze the filmmaker, finding parallels in his personal life to inform the work of the film. Tony Pipolo’s Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is a brilliantly written and well-argued book that attempts to analyze Bresson’s films from a psychological perspective. He claims that “Bresson’s work…bears the signs of one raised Catholic as well as the doubts of a deeply engaged modern thinker. Pivoting on the line between the two, his cinema reflects an authentic mind-set of mid-twentieth-century thought” (Pipolo, 2010, p. 7). Pipolo moves film by film through Bresson’s career, assessing the psychological motivations of the film characters while simultaneously using the films as opportunities to psychoanalyze Bresson as an individual. While Pipolo is actually a psychoanalyst and thus provides a fascinating alternative reading of Bresson’s films, it is important to note that Bresson famously rejected character psychology and preferred to focus on what he considers to be the purity of the characters themselves, their is-ness as opposed to their psychological profiles, the what as opposed to the why. To be fair, Pipolo is aware of Bresson’s intentions, and nevertheless attempts to carve out a new field of study that he feels is important in examining the films. When assessing the writings of film theorist Andre Bazin, we begin to move away from the Western academic pitfalls of over-intellectualization and biographical interpretation towards a better understanding of Bresson’s primary artistic intentions. Bazin manages to think critically about Bresson’s films while simultaneously recognizing that the primary power of the films is intuitive, not cerebral. In “Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” Bazin discusses Bresson’s doubling 10 effect—the use of seemingly redundant narration to accompany the visual information— in Diary of a Country Priest, and shows how this approach draws attention to the differences between the medium of film and the medium of literature (as opposed to Le Fanu, who stresses the similarities between the two). Bazin claims that if the film “impresses us as a masterpiece…it is primarily because of its power to stir the emotions, rather than the intelligence, at their highest level of sensitivity” (Bazin, 2011, p. 25). Like

Bazin, filmmaker emphasizes the emotional power of Bresson’s films. In “Terror and Utopia of Form Addicted to Truth: A Film Story about Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar,” Haneke blends textual analysis with his personal experience of watching Bresson’s films. Haneke writes, “One senses in Balthazar, as in all Bresson’s films, its author’s almost physical aversion to any type of lie, especially to any form of aesthetic pretence [sic]” (Haneke, 2011, p. 389). One might argue that this “aesthetic pretence” is what many of these admittedly brilliant scholars have unintentionally brought to Bresson’s work. Haneke and Bazin’s emphasis on the filmmaker’s emotional impact on the viewer is precisely the kind of literature that is generally lacking in this field. However, neither of these writers discuss Bresson in relation to Zen, and I think that this Eastern approach is what is currently needed. An Eastern viewpoint is to some extent apparent in an essay by Japanese film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, which is useful for examining my argument in relation to Bresson’s final film, L’Argent. While never referring to Zen specifically, Hasumi’s writing suggests the value of an Eastern lens. I reference all of this literature to suggest that Zen Buddhism is an oft neglected but useful theoretical framework for examining Bresson’s unique cinematic style. In addition, I attempt to provide a base for a rudimentary understanding of Zen philosophy. Introductory works to Zen Buddhism in book form by D.T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, and Alan Watts are used throughout. In addition, works by scholars such as Philip 11 Kapleau, Hakuyu , Christmas Humphreys, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, and Sheng-yen will be useful for laying out a general picture of Zen Buddhism. J.D. Loori’s The Zen of Creativity is also valuable for exploring the relationship between Zen and the artistic process. While I refer to D.T. Suzuki, Shunryu Suzuki, and Watts in the most depth, these other scholars (many of whom published later), should be useful in part to support the claims of my primary Zen sources.

D. T. Suzuki is the most famous and influential importer of Zen philosophy to the West, and thus his Introduction to Zen Buddhism will be the primary text of my Zen research. Watts has also been an incredibly influential Zen scholar, and Shunryu Suzuki and Humphreys are other significant contributors in the process of importing Zen ideas to the West. Obviously, there will be gaps in my assessment of the literature on Bresson and the literature on Zen—time and space necessitate a great deal of selection—but by examining highly influential figures in both fields, I hope to adequately synthesize the academic literature at my disposal and provide a new way of examining the unique power of Bresson’s cinema.

THE “A” WORD: CAN WE STILL USE IT?

As might be obvious by this point, my analytical approach utilizes the auteur theory, which is a potentially rusty hinge upon which to swing open the door to a new area of study. While auteurism is an old-fashioned and often problematic theory, its degree of utility as a theoretical lens varies drastically depending on the specific filmmakers and films that it is applied to. I would argue that when applied to certain visionary filmmakers, a nuanced approach to auteur studies is extremely useful. An important model for this belief is offered by critic Robin Wood, whose book on the films of Alfred Hitchcock was 12 reworked over the years as he updated his ideas concerning auteur criticism. In the introduction to the revised edition of Hitchcock’s Films Revisited, Wood concedes the limitations of the auteur theory as he had envisioned it in early versions of his book, but he also stresses the importance of auteurism to film studies:

Hitchcock generally knew—I repeat, on certain levels—why he wanted to place his camera where he did, why he wanted to move it, why he wanted to cut, why he wanted his actors to move in certain ways, turn their heads at certain moments, speak their lines with certain intonations. This fully conscious, intentional level cannot possibly account for everything in the film and cannot account for the more important, deeper levels of meaning; but I cannot see that it is irrelevant or unworthy of consideration (Wood, 2002, p. 20). I would argue that Wood’s support for a type of auteurism, which in this case relates to a highly commercial filmmaker who worked in the Hollywood studio system (and in the period immediately after its demise), applies even more so to the films of Bresson. Before proceeding, it is perhaps necessary to provide a rough sketch of the different types of film directors and the degree to which auteur studies can aid in approaching their work.

Commercial feature filmmaking is of course a collaborative medium, a product resulting from the combined efforts of a production team, but the degree of influence which the director exerts over the final project is extremely different from filmmaker to filmmaker. It may be best to illustrate this point by thinking in terms of concentric circles of influence. In the largest circle, we have the majority of film directors, who take on projects that they have not written and function as craftsmen, organizing and overseeing the collaborative efforts of the production team, which includes actors, actresses, cinematographers, editors, set designers, costume designers, and so on. In a smaller circle, we have directors who are assigned to direct projects that they have not written, but who are able to use the collaborative efforts of the team to shape a sort of distinctive individual style (for example, a cinematographic characteristic that remains consistent in film after

13 film despite a shift in cinematographers, or a theme that appears again and again despite a shift in writers). Another circle is composed of those who have forged a distinctive and recognizable style and also write their own material. These writer-directors follow a project from the origin of the story to the end of post-production. These three circles make up the vast majority of films produced, and even at the smallest of these circles, the auteur lens should be used only with great discretion.

But a tiny fourth circle also exists: the film director who doubles as a film theorist. The film director/theorist not only directs a film, but also writes about and investigates the nature of the medium of film—what it currently is and what it should be—and forges his or her unique idea on how film should function. These directors are few in number: the Soviet filmmakers Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, and Vertov count among them, and one could argue that Tarkovsky, Godard, and Truffaut do as well. , the Danish film movement of the 1990s that gave birth to the career of Lars von Trier, could be included, though the “Vows of Chastity” developed by these filmmakers were perhaps to some degree a publicity stunt. Bresson also qualifies as a sort of film theorist/director, and his degree of influence is further expanded by his work as a writer on his projects. Though most of his films are adaptations of famous literary works (written by the likes of Bernanos, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy), Bresson was able to maintain sole writing credit on the adaption process for every film he created from Diary of a Country Priest to the end of his career (his third film, Diary marks for many scholars the beginning of Bresson’s mature period as a director). Thus, while auterism is admittedly a reductive way for assessing film history more broadly, when used specifically for the films of writer/director/theorist Robert Bresson, it reveals itself to be a tool of remarkable utility. This is not to say that it is the sole method for studying Bresson’s films, or that Bresson does not rely on a team to build a final project. 14 However, Bresson’s special degree of control over these projects do make his role a valid starting place for an analysis of films such as Au Hasard Balthasar (1966), A Man Escaped (1956), and L’Argent (1983). With this in mind, I hope readers will appreciate my attempts to use the most effective tools available to grapple with the presence of Zen philosophy in these films. It is also important to note that the validity of the auteur theory as a lens for viewing films extends beyond a mere glance at the director’s hyphenated credentials. While many now view auteurism as a dated theory, and perhaps for good reason, it was particularly well suited to a specific place and time: Europe in the 1950s—1970s. The utility of the auteur lens differs drastically when examining films such as The Informer (1935), Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), or Avengers: End Game (2019). The limitations of the auteur theory are clearly apparent in the first and last examples. The Informer was produced in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. RKO, one of the five major studios, utilized an “assembly line” mode of production to craft a commercial product, using directors, writers, cinematographers, set designers, and actors the way a baseball team trades players. While John Ford is almost universally praised as a great director, critics of auterism rightly recognize that a dismissal of the 1930s commercial production context leads to a reductive and incomplete assessment of his work. The last example also emphasizes collaboration. While the rigidity of the old studio system is gone, Avengers: End Game is still American commercial entertainment, and any film produced by Marvel and distributed by Disney with a budget exceeding $350 million is certain to spread authorship across a large team. But the context of a film’s production is shaped by the culture in which it is produced, and when the French critics formulated the auteur theory in the 1950s, their ability to popularize the idea actually legitimized its utility. The very fact that auteurism 15 became so fashionable in Europe throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s changed the context in which European art films of this era were produced. In other words, when a culture accepts and celebrates the auteur theory, then it cultivates a production environment that privileges the unique style of an individual director. The value of auteur studies in assessing the postwar European art film thus extends beyond examples like Bresson and Tarkovsky, who proved the degree of their influence through their additional role as film theorists.

For this reason, in considering topics for further research in the conclusion, my discussion of European art films emphasizes director studies. The Belgian filmmaker

Chantal Akerman may not have written as extensively on the language of film as Bresson or Tarkovsky, but her style of filmmaking is equally distinctive. When examining her feminist classic Jeanne Dielman, it is extraordinarily useful to use Akerman’s earlier film Hotel Monterey (1972) to trace similarities in the exploration of film space. Examining these two films in relation to each other enriches our understanding of both, and the bridge between the two is Akerman. Significantly, this example counteracts the widespread fear that the auteur theory will continue to contribute to an unfair privileging of powerful men. While current attacks on director studies are often fueled by an understandable socio- political frustration, to throw out director studies entirely is to take power from the groundbreaking feminism of Akerman, Agnes Varda, and more recently Kathryn Bigelow and Greta Gerwig.4 With this in mind, I would argue that the examples of films cited in the final chapter, produced within a European art film context that is predominantly fixed in the 20th century, are best organized and classified by an assessment of the director’s stylistic contributions

4 Bigelow and Gerwig, contemporary Hollywood directors, exist in a different production context than the one described above in relation to Akerman and Varda. Thus, an auteur lens should here be used with great discretion. Still, one could easily envision how someone might devalue these women’s contributions to film by operating under the guise of a more collaborative theoretical framework. 16 to the medium. In weighing the pros and cons of applying a Zen approach to Stalker, L’Avventura, or Jeanne Dielman, I resort to organizing the films within the context of other works directed by Tarkovsky, Antonioni, and Akerman, respectively. , director of Sátántangó (1994) and (2011), is a more complex case, perhaps resulting in part from his filmography’s awkward straddling of the year 2000 divide.5 I will address the question of authorship in relation to his work more specifically in the conclusion. But even if we can demonstrate that a given director truly has a distinctive style, is this information useful enough to warrant further investigation? To what degree does formalist, or even neo-formalist, analysis matter? Critics of director studies notice a tendency to downplay ideology and content, and they may argue that studies focusing on directors’ aesthetic contributions, while not untrue, lack utility. But in the case of Bresson and the related filmmakers discussed in the conclusion, I argue that form is an aspect of content. This is not to say that the content and the form of the films are necessarily identical, but that the technique contains content. In other words, a Zen approach to the formal elements of Bresson’s film does not just reveal the unique skill of the director. Rather, it provides an in-depth look at the process of meditation. Bresson’s film form is the process of Zen mind and Zen being, and to look merely at narrative, theme, or ideology outside of film form is to miss these insights. For this reason, I examine film form as a type of meditation in Chapters One and

Two. By dividing this analysis into two chapters, one dealing with black-and-white films of Bresson’s middle period (the classics) and one dealing with color films of his later period, I hope to illustrate not only how the style mirrors Zen, but also how the style

5 Note for example the difference in directorial credit between the two films. Sátántangó is credited as being directed by Tarr alone, while The Turin Horse lists his wife Ágnes Hranitzky as co-director. 17 changes, develops, and matures over the course of Bresson’s career. In this way, I also hope to avoid an additional pitfall that occasionally plagues director studies—the tendency to note similarities across films while downplaying differences. I have chosen to organize these two chapters in a way that will allow me to track the development of Bresson’s style over time while doing more holistic analysis of scenes, examining elements like cinematography, editing, and sound. While at first glance the classic film/late film split of these two similar chapters might seem arbitrary, I believe that it is the most effective way to trace the development and maturation of meditative aspects of Bresson’s cinematic style.

Chapter Three will deal specifically with Bresson’s approach to film acting, and given the relatively straightforward nature of his writings on the topic, I believe that this topic can be fully confined to one chapter.

MEDITATION AND DECONTEXTUALIZATION

Having settled on auteurism as the most useful approach to reveal the Zen-like characteristics of Bresson’s films and the writings about the films’ construction, I will examine a possible factor that contributes to the presence of Zen Buddhism in his work. While there is no historical evidence of Bresson’s exposure to Eastern ideas of spirituality, the existence of Zen in his work could very well be partially the result of the 18 months that he spent as a prisoner of war in Germany. A description of the Zen process of meditation will first be necessary for understanding how the prison experience could potentially explain, or at least contribute to, Bresson’s Zen-like cinematic preoccupations. The practice of Zen meditation is the process of stripping away cultural context and linguistic interference. The goal is to abandon critical thinking, abstract theorizing, and all of the mental energy that leads to suffering: to think is to cause distress. D.T. Suzuki writes 18 that “Zen thinks we are too much of slaves to words and logic” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 61). Describing the purpose of Zen meditation, Christmas Humphreys writes, “It is, presumably, first to calm the mind and reduce to a minimum the distraction of ideas…The intellect is gently but firmly trained to transcend its own limitations…Idle thought is reduced to a minimum” (Humphreys, 1966, p. 83). By focusing on the repetition of the breath or on the simple sights or sounds available by direct experience, the meditator begins to lose the sense of self and experiences a transformation of perception. For example, after several hours of focusing on the rising and falling of the chest, one might open his or her eyes to discover that one sees a tree without thinking of a tree. There is a complete rupture of the signified and the signifier—the object is not a tree in relation to other trees—it simply is. The result is a radical shift in the way that the individual sees the world: the most mundane objects suddenly become objects of extraordinary significance. Spending a year and a half in a prison cell is a perfect microcosm for this Zen experience: it forces one to engage in a life of minimalism, a minimalism born not necessarily out of a theistic devotion to a higher power (as would be the case in a convent), but out of necessity and practicality. The pragmatic and functional nature of this minimalist approach to living results in a radical transformation of perception. The prison experience strips the social context of one’s life, causing the individual to simply exist. The act of watching Bresson’s films is an exercise in gaining this awareness. With this analysis, I hope to illustrate how Bresson functions as a sort of Zen guide, carefully arranging sights and sounds to reveal the significance of details that would otherwise seem mundane. Having briefly examined a key biographical event (Bresson as prisoner of war) in relation to Zen meditation practices, I examine how this process of transformation is apparent in Bresson’s interviews and on almost every page of Notes on the Cinematograph, his collection of writings on filmmaking. Bresson’s notes reveal that his intention as a 19 filmmaker is remarkably similar to guided meditation: his goal is to use ordinary sounds and images and organize them in such a manner as to bring about a transformation in the way that we see them. In the broken, fragmented style that mirrors the minimalism of his films, Bresson writes, “A thing expressible solely by the cinematographically new, therefore a new thing” (Notes, 2016, p. 40). As in Zen Buddhism, Bresson is disinterested in logic and the rational mind. He once claimed in an interview for his film Pickpocket,

“I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. I’d rather feelings arise before the intellect” (“Cinépanorama,” n.d.). The subordination of intellectual reasoning to the immediacy of sensory experience is a primary characteristic of Zen Buddhism. As D.T. Suzuki notes, Zen “has more affinity with feeling than with intellect” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 117), and again, “Zen has nothing to teach us in the way of intellectual analysis” (ibid., p. 38). Suzuki’s writings bear a remarkable resemblance to Bresson’s claim that in his films, there is “No intellectual or cerebral mechanism. Simply a mechanism” (Notes, 2016, p.

24). Bresson sees the resources of filmmaking as tools for transcending the intellect, and he wants to train the viewer not to think about the object, but to view it as it truly is. But while Bresson favors intuition and direct experience in his cinematography, this spontaneity is not easily achieved, and the process of filming is anything but a casual enterprise. While Bresson wants the actions on screen to feel as light and intuitive as life itself, his process is rigorous and exacting. Zen philosophy and Bressonian philosophy share a tendency for intuition and spontaneity that is paradoxically cultivated by mental discipline. Emphasizing the rigor of Zen practice, Suzuki notes that the monks “keep the monastery, inside and outside, in perfect order” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 122), and that “The life in a Zen monastery is minutely regulated” (ibid. 124). Suzuki also claims, “There is a period in the monastic life which is exclusively set apart for the mental discipline of the monks…This period is known as sesshin… Sesshin means ‘collecting or concentrating the 20 mind’” (ibid., p.126). Bresson’s films require this mental discipline of the viewer, who must be trained to surrender his or her attention completely to the mundane objects that Bresson chooses to depict. As a sort of guided meditator (or ), Bresson works with the viewer to cultivate this intensity of attention: all he requires is that the viewer meet him halfway.

A NEW METHOD

After establishing the link between Zen and Bressonian philosophy, I illustrate the presence of Zen philosophy within the films themselves. Bresson’s Zen-like approach to filmmaking is apparent to some degree in all 13 of his feature films, but for the purpose of this study, in-depth analysis of scenes from six films will suffice. By placing Zen in relation to Bresson’s unique theory regarding cinematography, editing, and sound, we can better understand the process by which Bresson uses the cinematographic and aural tools at his disposal to transform the viewer’s perception of ordinary objects and sounds. Chapter One focuses on three key Bresson works from the 1950s and 1960s, when Bresson shot his films in black-and-white. I have chosen to start this chapter with his fourth film, A Man Escaped, because in the first three films (including the acclaimed Diary of a Country Priest from 1951), Bresson was still finding his footing as a director, and his Zen method is less pronounced. Additionally, the more traditional studio context in which the 1940s films were produced imposed limits on his ability to operate as a theorist-director. Chapter Two extends my analysis to three important color films from Bresson’s later period, the late 1960s-1980s. Chapter Three explores the unique similarities between the obtainment of “Zen Mind” and his approach to film acting. I argue that Bresson’s distinctive and understated approach to the direction of his “models” contributes to the meditative

21 experience of viewing the films. I will conclude by extending the discussion to the relationship between Zen and film more broadly and will explore films that link up well with Zen meditation. My assessment of Zen will be far from exhaustive, but I believe that it is an important first step. This research could begin to pave the way for a new way of watching Bresson’s films, ultimately allowing scholars to look at the process of film viewing and film analysis in a different light. By focusing on the relationship between filmmaker and film viewer and analyzing the techniques that are used to create specific emotional effects, we not only gain a clearer understanding of the films Robert Bresson, but also open the door to a new way of approaching film aesthetics.

22 Chapter One: Cinema as Meditation—The Classic Films

The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the manner by which Bresson uses his tools— camera and tape recorder—to lull the viewer into a state of heightened awareness. As I suggested in the introduction, this sensitivity is an awareness of sights, sounds, and the spontaneous feelings that arise through the careful organization of these elements. It is not an awareness of concepts, constructs, theories, or anything generated from abstract thought.

This heightened sensitivity to the immediate environment is achieved by decluttering the mind—cinematographic minimalism lends a spiritual purity to the actions of the characters.

A MAN ESCAPED (1956)

After Diary of a Country Priest (1951), in which Bresson began to refine and pare down the melodramatic touches of his films of the 1940s, he turned to subject matter of obvious personal significance: a historical account of a prisoner of war. A Man Escaped is concerned very simply with one man’s journey into and out of confinement. The story, based on the true account of French prisoner André Devigny’s escape from a Nazi prison, could not be more straightforward. The film opens with the protagonist Fontaine’s capture, and details his daily life in a solitary cell. His methodical preparation for escape is examined in detail, and when a young man is thrown into his cell, the two work together, escaping in a climactic scene and disappearing into the night as Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor consumes the soundtrack, ending the film. Most important to my analysis of A Man Escaped is an examination of the unique way in which Bresson arranges simple, plain images and sounds to allow us to experience the world as Fontaine perceives it. Through Bresson’s careful minimalist arrangement, the most mundane images and sounds become charged with a dramatic intensity and spiritual purity that the viewer experiences viscerally. A hand presses the handle of a spoon into the 23 wooden crevices of a prison door; the wood creaks loudly. A small piece of paper is passed from one hand to another; running water from wash basins pervades the soundtrack. Fontaine clutches the bars of his cell window; a motor is heard, followed by silence and then the clinking of a bell. In and of themselves, none of these visual or aural details hold much dramatic intensity. The shots are plain, the sounds are commonplace, and music is minimal.6 But by isolating these elements and organizing them (decontextualizing them in order to recontextualize them), Bresson allows us to meditate on these objects with the focus of his prisoner. Through Bresson’s transformative gaze, the objects become imbued with extraordinary dramatic significance (Fig. 1). But this significance does not rely on the symbolism that pervades Western thought. For example, the sound of a bell is not a mere symbol of death or salvation, or perhaps it is not even a symbol at all. It is simply the right sound to allow the viewer to experience what Fontaine experiences. A Man Escaped opens with a wide shot of the prison, overlaid with text of the filmmaker’s note to the audience: “The following is a true story. I present it as it happened, without adornment.” For Bresson, the minimalist process that he engages in is so essential to an understanding of the film that an explanation of it must precede the opening credits. It is important to note that the phrase without adornment does not indicate an absence of cinematic style—on the contrary, Bresson’s cinematic style is as distinctive as that of

Welles, Hitchcock, Kurosawa, Fellini, or any of the notable directors of the time period. However, it does imply that none of the drama will be conveyed to the audience through the conventional pleasures or hooks of film-viewing—beautiful cinematography, emotional performances, or a booming score.

6 That is to say, minimal by the standards of conventional narrative film. By Bresson’s standards, the occasional non-diegetic bursts of Bach that fill the soundtrack as the prisoners empty their pails are somewhat operatic. As we will see, Bresson’s later films use music even more sparingly. 24

Iron spoon used as chisel

Cloth tied for rope

Lantern frame bent into hook

Bedframe netting twisted into wire loop

Figure 1: Object transformation in A Man Escaped (1956)

25 After the credit sequence, the first scene depicts Fontaine’s journey to the prison and his futile attempt to escape from the back of the car in which he is being transported. In a series of 24 shots, we witness the preparation for the escape, the escape attempt itself, and the capture. The scene is predominantly composed of shots of Fontaine’s face, his hands, the door handle beside him, and the view of the street in the windshield in front of him. With the exception of the opening and closing shots of the scene, the other 22 shots are relatively short. The average shot length of the scene is 4.79 seconds, but if we subtract the shots that bracket the scene, it’s reduced to 2.68 seconds (many of the shots run for merely a second or two). Thus, emphasis is placed on the opening shot and on the escape attempt, which is locked entirely within the 24nd shot. In a static long take, the camera coldly examines the empty car seat, refusing to pan with the action. The prisoner runs from the car while guards from the vehicle behind stop him. Fontaine is slowly brought back into the foreground and re-enters the frame, returning to his spot in the car.

One could view the scene as a microcosm of the film as a whole, except for the fact that the story will end with liberation as opposed to capture (the macro-narrative being a redemptive inversion of the micro-narrative that opens the film). But to think about the scene along these lines as an audience member is to lose sight of Bresson’s priorities. Of far greater importance in the construction of the scene is the careful manipulation of mundane shots and the manner by which these shots imbue ordinary objects with an extraordinary significance. With no music, no elaborate shots, and subdued performances,

Bresson carefully edits images of the ordinary world and orchestrates them in a way that allows us to feel the tension of a prisoner about to make a run for it (Fig. 2). The handle of the car door thus becomes an object of almost holy significance, and the simple movement of a train, which temporarily blocks the road and brings the car to a halt, is just as monumental. 26

Door handle Fontaine

Car gear Fontaine (repeat)

Train approaches Fontaine (repeat)

Train block Escape attempt (Fontaine leaving the frame)

Figure 2: Isolated details in A Man Escaped (1956) 27 The objects in the film derive their power from their scarcity. Bresson writes, “The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows,” (Notes, 2016, p. 5), and reminds himself that he must “Empty the pond to get the fish” (ibid, p. 59). There are few proverbial fish in this scene, and the objects that are apparent have no deeper symbolic meaning—they simply are what they are. But Bresson’s approach to filming highlights the utility of the object. A handle is essential because it can open the car door, a train is essential because it can block traffic. The spiritual charge of the objects is born not out of symbolism or representation, but out of pure functionality. Car handles and trains contain no spiritual content until the viewer experiences a transformation of perception— in this case, a transformation born out of the perception of the objects from the vantage point of somebody with the spiritual need to be free. The scene described above is indicative of the process by which Bresson decontextualizes in order to recontextualize. Stripping his scene down to the minimal number of necessary details, he then isolates them, carefully rearranges their order and position in the story, and brings them together in a way that conveys new meaning. This process is a perfect cinematic representation of Zen meditation, in which one clears the mind and enters a state of no-thought. The result of this clearing is a recontextualization of the world—in Bresson’s films, a fresh way of seeing objects. Chan Master Sheng-yen claims, “If people pursue the intellectual path and forego meditation, they also forego the spiritual experience of the practice, which directly affects body and mind” (Sheng-yen,

2001, p. 201). This spiritual experience stems from a mind that has been stripped of all idle distractions, a mind that perceives with the very precision that Bresson pursues in scene after scene. This transformation is poetically expressed in a Bressonian proverb: “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I 28 use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water” (Notes, 2016, p. 11-12). The creative process Bresson describes here is strikingly similar to the process of enlightenment described by Shifu: “There is a famous Buddhist saying: First mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. Then mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers. In the end, mountains are again mountains and rivers are again rivers” (Sheng-yen, 2001, p. 202). The second phase—decontextualization—gives way to recontextualization. The mountains and rivers return, this time freshly perceived by the individual who has transcended the self. In the opening scene of A Man Escaped, Bresson’s mountains and rivers are door handles and trains, which come alive in a new way through the process of his editing. Bresson accomplishes this by first isolating the details he films. With the exception of the first and final shots (the latter being the pay-off to the preceding 23), there are no long takes, and each individual shot contains very little visual information. A hand, a door handle, a face, a train—the details are captured individually by the camera, stripped of their context in the real world. These details are then carefully reassembled and transformed by their unique combination to take on new meaning, fulfilling Bresson’s declaration that “An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it” (Notes, 2016, p. 34). Certain details are repeated throughout the scene, not to add new narrative information, but to juxtapose the images in a way that allows us to perceive the scene unfolding in a new way. This “new way” of seeing is not concerned primarily with narrative comprehension, but with allowing us to see the world according to Bresson’s vision—to allow him to guide us through a meditative experience. The opening scene is demonstrative of the manner by which Bresson relates images to other images. Before moving to a discussion of Bresson’s next film, I will examine one more scene, this time with an emphasis on sounds and their relationships with images. 29 After escaping from the cell and onto the main floor, Fontaine and his cellmate, Jost, use a rope that they have fashioned to climb out of a skylight in the roof of the prison. In voiceover,7 Fontaine describes the location as a terrace over the prison courtyard. As Fontaine and Jost move slowly and methodically across the terrace, they wait for noises (predominantly trains running along a track) to drown out the soft sounds of their escape. The scene contains no music, focusing instead on the diegetic sounds within the prison grounds and in the surrounding area. The use of sound in the scene is not merely realistic—the crunching of footsteps on gravel, the train whistles, the sound of trains rumbling on the track, the voices of guards, and the tolling of the midnight bell all punctuate the moments of silence, thus drawing attention to them. Bresson writes in his notes that “THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED

SILENCE” [capitalization his],8 and that there is “Absolute silence and silence obtained by a pianissimo of noises” (Notes, 2016, p. 28). As Fontaine and Jost attempt to escape, the repetition of mundane sounds paradoxically increases the effect of the silence, and the act of watching the scene becomes a process of quieting the mind. The use of sound lulls the viewer (and listener) into a state of mental quiet. Idle thought—words, concepts, and abstract ideas—are cleared and replaced by a heightened state of sensory awareness.

7 The use of voiceover narration was a common feature of Bresson’s films of the 1950s: Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket. In the closing escape scene, Fontaine communicates to the audience periodically. While the voiceover is used sparingly, I would argue that it is a flaw in an otherwise brilliant sequence, and that it is a tendency that Bresson will grow out of as his career progressed. In later films, as Bresson’s approach to his filmmaking grew even more rigorous, he abandoned the voiceover track, taking the viewer even further into a state of meditation. For the next 25 years of his career, Bresson only decided to use the technique again once in Une Femme Douce. Even then, it is used primarily at the beginning and end of scenes to mark shifts in time, not to provide detailed commentary on events unfolding before the camera. 8 For audiences raised on Hollywood film, the word soundtrack has a connotation that suggests music. But Bresson uses the word here to refer to cinematic sound more generally. 30 This heightened state is born partially out of the suspense generated by the film’s narrative,9 but the suspense does not cultivate in the viewer the same degree of anxiety as a Hollywood thriller such as a Hitchcock film. Rather, the rhythmic and repetitive use of sound lulls us into a state of calm, a state that mirrors the composure of the protagonist, who navigates his way through the stressful situation with quiet resolve. Describing the process of Silent Illumination, Chan Master Sheng Yen claims, “To practice Silent

Illumination means putting body and mind to the task at hand…If you do it single-mindedly and with your best effort, you will complete the work with a very stable and relaxed mind”

(Yen, 2008, p.47). Sheng Yen also writes, “silence means being free from words and language, free from the activities of the rational mind, while illumination refers to clarity and expansiveness of mind” (ibid. p. 62). Fontaine’s quiet determination to complete the work before him is Silent Illumination in action, and Bresson’s hypnotic and repetitive use of sounds is Silent Illumination in cinematic form. The effect of his marriage of images and sounds is to quiet the viewer’s mind by taking us away from thought. Fontaine and Jost crawl slowly across the gravel on the rooftop, and while they try to use the sounds of the railway to drown out the noise, they are sometimes forced to proceed in silence, and the crunching of the gravel under their feet pervades the soundtrack. A medium close up of Fontaine’s face, with Jost hovering in the background in the top

9 It is widely believed that Bresson intentionally ruins any suspense by giving away the ending of the film with his title. This reluctance to classify his film as suspenseful is misleading but to some extent understandable. Bresson is keen to avoid associations with commercial filmmaking, which he believed to be stylistically overblown. For example, in the opening text to his following film Pickpocket, Bresson is anxious to point out that “The style of this film is not that of a thriller” (Pickpocket). To admit that the film is thrilling is to risk the arrival of an audience ready for sensational entertainment. Bresson’s aim is not to thrill the spectator, and he doesn’t want to reduce his film to this status. However, Pickpocket contains scenes of extraordinary suspense, as does A Man Escaped. To deny that the scenes of Fontaine’s escape are suspenseful, or create a certain degree of dramatic tension born out of risk that has been clearly evoked, is to deny viewer identification with the character of Fontaine. As Bresson continued to pare down his style in later films, suspense becomes less and less apparent. But at this early stage in his career (and particularly in dealing with this subject matter), a great deal of suspense ends up in the film. 31 right pocket of the frame, is held momentarily as we hear the sound of a guard’s voice and a closing of the door below the terrace. Bresson’s famous use of off-screen sound is particularly complicated in this scene. The resonance is achieved partially by denying the audience the visual source of the sound and laying the sound over Fontaine’s face, and his searching eyes indicate his alertness. But Bresson also gains power by shifting the source of the sound. He holds the shot momentarily after the sound of the guard has ceased— before employing in crescendo the sound of the train. This journey from Sound A to Sound B is all played out over the image of Fontaine’s face. This sophisticated layering of sound is provided with greater force by the continuation of the shot of Fontaine’s mobile eyes. The protagonist’s eyes transfer alertness to the viewer, and by holding on his face, the commonplace noises are transformed into sounds of the utmost significance. As they reach the edge of the courtyard, Fontaine’s voiceover addresses the creaking heard over the soundtrack: “What was that creaking we heard at regular intervals?” (Poiré, 1956). The source of the sound is not made known until a later scene, in which it is revealed to be the bicycle of a patrolling guard. The mystery of the sound lends it a hypnotic quality. Bresson’s temporary refusal to acknowledge the source of the sound keeps Fontaine and the audience from being able to construct a category for the object, and thus it communicates to us at a spiritual level. Loori describes the process by which labeling an object limits our appreciation of it:

Take a simple object—a cup for example…Once we’ve identified the cup, the process of perception stops, and all other aspects of the cup are lost to us. We tacitly believe that when we’ve got a name for something, we know it. And once we know it, we stop knowing its qualities…The art of attention developed in [seated meditation] lets us stay alert to the moment... When that kind of attention informs our life, we see beyond our ideas into reality itself (Loori, 2004, p. 73).

32 By giving us an unidentifiable sound, Bresson allows it to permeate our conscious minds while refusing to let us categorize it. In other words, the fact that we do not have a name (a linguistic and cultural association) for the sound enhances our perception of the sound itself. The fact that Bresson draws attention to this process through the use of his protagonist’s words (in voiceover) is problematic, but indicative of Bresson’s journey as a director. In later films, we will see how Bresson becomes more adept at constructing scenes similar to the escape sequence of A Man Escaped without resorting to the voiceover track to explain his process. But even at this early stage, Bresson’s creative use of off-screen sound lulls us into a state of . As the creaking continues over the soundtrack, unaccompanied by words after Fontaine’s cursory remark, the sound continues to grow in power even as its meaning remains unclear. This examination of images, sounds, and the relationship between them in specific scenes of A Man Escaped speaks to Bresson’s role as a cinematic guided meditator. By using the cinematographic and aural tools available to reconstruct reality according to a distinctive vision, Bresson allows the audience to experience a transformation of perception that shares strong affinities with the philosophy of Zen. My analysis of Au Hasard Balthazar, released ten years later, will show how Bresson continues to experiment with cinematic guided meditation while illustrating how his theory of filmmaking matures and evolves.

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966)

Perhaps Bresson’s most famous work, Au Hasard Balthazar is certainly his most distinctive in terms of narrative content. The film is a loose sort of biopic, charting a life from birth until death. The selection of the protagonist is what sets the film apart: Bresson 33 focuses primarily on a donkey, while also interweaving a B narrative focused on a young girl. As the donkey Balthazar is passed from owner to owner, the film provides the audience with a unique examination of a spectrum of human behavior, with vice and virtue at opposite extremes. Au Hasard Balthazar is the ultimate slice-of-life film, allowing plot to be consumed by atmosphere and character motivation to be subordinated to an exploration of film time and space.

Unlike the examination of A Man Escaped, my analysis of Au Hasard Balthazar approaches the film not by breaking down individual scenes. Rather, it examines the relationship between events, and how the uncertain boundaries separating these events makes us question whether they can even be construed of as scenes at all. An analysis of narrative structure is particularly pertinent to this film because Au Hasard Balthazar is the only screenplay that Bresson did not adapt from preexisting source material. The fact that it is an entirely original conception makes it uniquely suitable to this type of analysis.

Bresson’s cinematographic style and elliptical editing are fused with the narrative—to speak of the narrative structure of the film is to speak of its structure directly in relation to its cinematography and editing. But before illustrating this relationship and its ties to Zen Buddhism, it is first important to clear up a popular misconception about his work. While Bresson is certainly a minimalist director, and while he is no stranger to accusations of boredom, it is important that we do not conflate minimalist cinema with . Tarkovsky’s films are slow. Ozu’s films are slow. Bresson’s films are fast, and Au Hasard Balthazar in particular is one of the swiftest European arthouse classics ever produced. Over the course of 95 minutes, Bresson manages to pass his donkey protagonist across at least seven different owners (assessing the precise number is difficult given the elliptical nature of the narrative), explore the love interests of a young woman, depict daily struggle in the life of an alcoholic, analyze cruelty in the form of a sadistic and 34 pampered young man, introduce a murder mystery subplot, critique the town’s version of Ebenezer Scrooge, and glimpse a man’s loss of reputation as he is consumed by legal battles for a farm. This is just a sample of the jumble of events that occur. Au Hasard Balthazar is a far cry from the tight narrative of A Man Escaped; what we have here seems closer to a Robert Altman ensemble piece. On paper, this overstuffed narrative would seem to have little in common with the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, which emphasizes focus, simplicity, and the beauty of the minimal. But in Bresson’s hands, the result is far from a rambling Altmanesque film. While the scope of the narrative is big, the details are carefully selected. Ever committed to depicting only that which is essential, Bresson distills the essence of grand events to a few seconds of screen time in the simplest shots. The fact that narrative is often governed shot by shot (as opposed to scene by scene) is indicative of his unique priorities. As Maezumi writes, “the most realistic life and death is the life and death of each instant. We are being born and dying 6,500,000,000 times every twenty-four hours” (Maezumi, 2001, p.114). Similarly, Bresson’s goal is not a comprehensive biography of the donkey, but a continual process of cinematic destruction and .10 By ridding the film of conventional narrative context, Bresson destroys the boundaries of the traditional film scene—the entire runtime of Au Hasard Balthazar could as easily be interpreted as having one scene as it could seventy-five.11 Narrative is replaced

10 I refer again to the quotation cited above in reference to A Man Escaped: “My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water” (Notes, 2016, p. 11-12). 11 Determining the exact number of scenes that the film contains is a somewhat subjective process, as each viewer will no doubt have a different opinion of what constitutes a shift in scene. Loosely defining a scene transition as a jump forward in time or place (often accomplished by dissolves in this film), I counted about 77 different possible scenes over the film’s 95-minute runtime, making the average scene length about a minute and 14 seconds. The average Hollywood film contains 50-60 scenes, each about 3 minutes long, and in the 1960s, scenes tended to be even longer. In traditional films, scenes often function as micro- 35 by moments selected for their sensory and emotional significance—the events depicted are not necessarily the most essential to the donkey’s development from a historical perspective, but from a spiritual one. In an interview on Balthazar, Bresson claimed, “I want all narrative precision to be eliminated from a film” (Bresson, 2016, p. 170). The fact that the narrative is overstuffed is precisely the point: it collapses in on itself, until the viewer no longer attempts to follow the plot threads from A to B to C, and instead allows the purity of the most important details of the characters to stand out. The fact that Bresson’s elliptical editing can reduce entire scenes to a few shots that each run a few seconds in length contributes to the hypnotic quality of his cinema. A plot- oriented director is strangled when given too much narrative ground to cover; when one is concerned with selecting the details that propel the plot forward, the end result is rushed. But Bresson intentionally selects all the wrong details. The viewer leaves the film confused about the guilt or innocence of Marie’s father, but there’s no denying that Balthazar was cold when we saw him waiting outside in the snow. The priorities of Bresson’s camera are Zen-like—whether we can judge the father according to the conventions of narrative cinema is less important that the image of snow collecting on a donkey’s face. Part of the difficulty determining the boundaries between scenes is the result of Bresson’s ever-increasing reliance on the dissolve as a device for shot transition. Consider the following scene. A donkey walks along the road in a shot lasting several seconds. The camera dissolves to a new location. The dissolve implies a passage of time, and the content of the following shot implies a shift in place. Thus, several seconds of screen time, in which nothing of narrative importance occurs, is given the same weight as an individual unit of

narratives, sometimes building to micro-climaxes. As we shall see, Bresson’s “scenes” function more as moments.

36 narrative as an extended scene in which Marie argues with her mother over her relationship with her boyfriend.

What appears to be a lack of organization is a strategic12 structural choice on the part of Bresson, who constructs a film out of a collection of moments (hence the title, roughly translated as Balthazar, at random or Balthazar, by chance). Life is not constructed of scenes, but of happenings, some of which appear to be stretched in length, some of which seem to be shortened. Perhaps Jean Luc Godard had this realization when he made his famous claim about Au Hasard Balthazar: “This film: it’s the world entire. Truly: In an hour and a half, an hour and a quarter, we see a life from infancy to death, including...well, including everything” (Bresson, 2016, p. 160). Bresson’s disregard for narrative convention is not born out of a lack of structure (on the contrary, he plans his projects very carefully), but out of a desire to capture on screen the spontaneity of life, in which one moment is inseparable from the whole. This refusal to separate the moment from the entirety of experience is precisely what Watts describes when he claims, “Zen is a liberation from time. For if we open our eyes and see clearly, it becomes obvious that there is no other time than this instant, and that the past and the future are abstractions without any concrete reality” (Watts, 1999, p. 199) The fact that the film has no clear narrative boundaries—no points of division except for a narrative opening in youth and closing in death—is indicative of the eastern concept of nonduality. An examination of the first three shots of Balthazar provide an example of the way in which Bresson rejects the conventional film scene and instead captures life as a series of moments, or happenings. After the title sequence, Bresson fades in on a shot of Balthazar

12 “I know this film has less unity than the others, but I’ve done what I can for it by presenting it as one thing, thinking that because of the donkey it would wind up forming a kind of unity on its own…The film also has, perhaps, a unity of vision, a unity of angle, a unity in the way I cut the scenes and shots together” (Bresson, 2016, p. 147).

37 suckling his mother. A hand enters the frame, and the camera pans left to reveal that it belongs to a girl. The camera continues its movement, bringing her brother and her father into the frame. The children ask to keep the donkey, to which the father replies: “Impossible, children” (Bodard, 1966). The camera then dissolves to a ten-second shot of the family leading the donkey down the hill before dissolving again to a shot of Balthazar being baptized by the children. In these three shots, three separate events occur at three different moments in time, each separated by dissolves. In less than a minute of screen time, we witness Balthazar with his mother, Balthazar traveling to his new home, and

Balthazar’s baptism (Fig. 3). From a conventional narrative standpoint, the organization is already disjointed. Immediately after the father denies ownership of the donkey, the viewer sees the father bring him home, with no explanation for this change of heart. The omission of the process by which the children change the father’s mind is the result of its lack of significance. If narrative clarity was the goal, the audience would need a clear through-line to understand the father’s motivations as we pass from event to event. But Bresson’s elliptical editing includes only the purest details, and the sights and sounds associated with these three moments from Balthazar’s life are emphasized by the removal of unnecessary narrative baggage or character psychology. Once again, Bresson takes the audience away from ideas and towards an awareness of the simplicity of the donkey’s life. Balthazar doesn’t know why the father decides to take him from his mother, and he doesn’t know why the children choose to baptize him. By denying the context, Bresson allows the audience to see the events from the purity of the donkey’s vantage point, and since a donkey is a wonderful

38

Shot 1a Shot 1b

Shot 1c Dissolve

Shot 2 Dissolve

Shot 3a Shot 3b

Figure 3: Collapsing the scene in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) 39 embodiment of the Zen way of being,13 adopting his point of view allows us to see the world from a lens that is as Zen-inspired as it is Bressonian. It is important to acknowledge here that while these individual moments echo the mental state of the donkey, the film as a whole is intentionally inconsistent in this respect, choosing instead to interweave the story of the donkey with the story of Marie. Bresson claimed,

the donkey had to be present at all times (or nearby, not far). And then it was difficult not to make a film composed of sketches, or one that would be too stiff, too systematic. I wanted it to generate itself…this stable life would not in itself provide enough of a dramatic arc. So I thought of attaching it to a parallel character [Marie] who would appear and disappear, but who would always be there in the background, and who would provide a subject for the main storyline (Bresson, 2016, p. 133-134). Bresson is disciplined enough in the construction of the film to include a dramatic arc, but intuitive enough to allow this drama to unfold in a manner completely dissimilar to that of conventional narrative film. The systematic method by which Bresson attempts to avoid the appearance of being “systematic” very much reflects the paradoxical nature by which Zen encourages both mental discipline/structure and intuition/spontaneity. Thus, while Marie’s more conventional screen presence may initially seem to detract from the dramatic potency that would be achieved by focusing solely on the donkey, her presence brings the story closer to the messiness of everyday life and keeps Au Hasard

Balthazar from being reduced to a narrative gimmick. This choice seems to be in keeping with Bresson’s Zen-like desire to avoid ostentation. Just as he avoids beautiful shots or powerful performances that call attention to themselves, so too does he disdain flamboyant displays of avant-garde narrative style.

13 The link between the donkey and Zen philosophy will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Three, in which I argue that Balthazar is the purest and most Zen-like of all of Bresson’s models.

40 Bresson achieves the Zen balance described by Philip Kapleau: “Be direct, go right to the point, and don’t be either foolishly sentimental or special and show-offish” (Kapleau, 2001, p. 99). Most directors would lack the courage to make a film that focuses primarily on a donkey, but it is equally difficult to believe that the few who have the potential for such boldness wouldn’t adulterate it with a penchant for provocation. Had Godard, Antonioni, or Buñuel conceived of this project, the radical appeal of having a donkey as a protagonist would likely have overwhelmed the film. One can imagine that these other European art-house filmmakers would have buckled under the weight of the narrative conceit. But in terms of cinematic style, Bresson remains a class act, undeniably original but unwilling to foreground his innovations. This cinematic modesty is evocative of the radical simplicity of Zen.

MOUCHETTE (1967)

Bresson’s next film continues to toy with conventions of storytelling, removing important narrative context and replacing it with details that connect with the viewer on a visceral level. Mouchette is similar to Au Hasard Balthazar in that it uses a passive protagonist as a lens for viewing humanity: in other words, what the character does is less important than what happens to the character, and the way that other characters treat both Balthazar and Mouchette is of primary importance. Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos (author of the novel Diary of a Country Priest), Mouchette is the story of a fourteen-year- old girl living in a poor village. Her father is an alcoholic, her sickly mother is dying, and she is socially alienated from her peers at school. After being raped by a poacher who she attempts to connect with emotionally, she wanders through the village and is treated poorly

41 by the locals. Like Balthazar, the film ends with a death scene—Mouchette rolls down a hill into a pool of water, committing suicide. While it may seem counterintuitive to describe the subtlest of directors as visceral, I hope to illustrate that emotional immediacy is indeed the primary aim of Bresson’s cinema. In Mouchette, Bresson removes not only the narrative context, but also the psychological context—his protagonist doesn’t interpret the world, but experiences it directly. This lack of character psychology is obviously an element of Au Hasard Balthazar (a donkey being an ideal Zen model). Like Balthazar, Mouchette does not plan or orchestrate anything. Things happen to her, and she responds. In this section, I will focus primarily on one of the film’s most gut-wrenching scenes, in which Mouchette attempts to connect with a boy and is reprimanded by her father. In the scene, Mouchette wanders away from her father in the city square and approaches a fairground with a bumper car attraction. A woman is seen purchasing a token to use at the fair, and as Bresson cuts back to Mouchette, the woman’s hand suddenly enters the right side of the frame, placing the coin in Mouchette’s hand. Bresson robs the scene of narrative baggage and conventional filmic context. The motivation for this arbitrary act of generosity is never alluded to. The suddenness with which the woman’s hand appears in the frame—a suddenness achieved by a lack of photographic context created by the borders of the frame—allows the subtlest of actions to take on the most extraordinary dramatic significance. Again, Bresson is not concerned with Mouchette’s interpretation of the act of kindness. Rather, he is interested in conveying the purest and simplest of emotions: the excitement that Mouchette feels at the sudden emergence of an opportunity for entertainment. Mouchette passes the token off in exchange for a ride on the bumper cars, and Bresson uses the volatile nature of this attraction, which derives its pleasure from violent 42 collision, to keep the viewer on edge. The audience clearly hopes for Mouchette to experience a moment of relief, a few minutes of joy and escape from the pain of her daily existence. Bresson provides the audience with a moment of joy, but he doesn’t hand it over easily. Instead, he generates momentary anxiety, utilizing sounds and images to juggle between the possibility of two outcomes: 1. Mouchette’s excitement at the chance not only to move around freely, but also to

flirt with a young man who is insistent on bumping into her car in particular. 2. Mouchette’s discomfort at being tossed around violently. Several shots of the

collision look particularly jarring, and in one-heart-stopping moment, she grimaces as her head jerks backwards suddenly, leaving the viewer wondering if she is experiencing whiplash. The act of collision, which causes the bumper cars to spiral out of control, could certainly be read as an apt metaphor for Mouchette’s position in the narrative as a whole—the victim of a society that cares for her not at all, and in which each social interaction is a collision that propels her to the next injustice. But if Bresson played a conscious role in constructing this metaphor, he certainly is not interested in foregrounding it. Rather, he is concerned with the viewer’s immediate, visceral reaction to the juxtaposition of images and sounds, some of which convey pleasure at the activity, others displeasure.

By the time the ride ends, it is clear that Mouchette has enjoyed the experience (indeed, she smiles for one of the only times in the film during this scene, a subtle and beautiful emotion achieved by Bresson’s restraint in other scenes). Exiting the ride, Mouchette follows the boy who had flirted with her as he approaches another attraction: a gun and a target. Again, the gun could be tied to the film’s central hunting metaphor, which is utilized periodically throughout the narrative to compare Mouchette’s plight with that of wounded and dying animals. However, none of these associations are immediately 43 apparent to the viewer, and they are certainly not of primary importance. We are concerned solely with the anticipation that follows a second pair of possible outcomes: 1. Mouchette forms a social connection with the boy that momentarily leads her out of the isolation and suffering of her daily life. 2. The disintegration of this connection, which would undoubtably leave Mouchette, who is currently filled with hope, worse off than she was before.

In the viewer’s subconscious, Bresson has inverted the probability of these two outcomes in relation to the possible outcomes of the bumper car ride. In the first set of outcomes, the audience has become so accustomed to witnessing the oppression of Mouchette that one’s hope for this new possibility of joy is overshadowed by paranoia— only gradually does the viewer begin to trust that Mouchette is actually enjoying herself. Now, having witnessed a scene of apparent joy, the audience, like Mouchette, begins to let its guard down. The anxiety has not disappeared entirely, but it has been subordinated to the anticipation of romantic connection. In a shot that closes the bracket established by the gift of the coin, Mouchette’s father suddenly appears on the left side of the frame, violently pulling Mouchette away and slapping her. Again, Bresson carefully chooses to remove extraneous (conventional film) context. The viewer is given no indication of where Mouchette’s father has been, why he lost track of her whereabouts, or how he happened to find her again. By chaining the audience to Mouchette’s subjectivity, Bresson allows us to experience the immediate sensations, the sights and sounds that convey a series of basic emotions: excitement, anxiety, pleasure, anticipation, and finally, pain and disappointment. For Bresson, any metaphorical reading of the film must be subordinated to the film’s primary goal: to allow the viewer to experience the world as Mouchette experiences it (Fig. 4).

44 Bracket 1

Mouchette watches the ride, stranger and child to Stranger purchases token the right

The gift: disembodied hand de-emphasizes the Mouchette sees an opportunity, the stranger starts stranger to exit Bracket 2

Mouchette follows the boy Father suddenly appears left of frame

Mouchette is hit Mouchette is guided away

Figure 4: Cinematographic decontextualization in Mouchette (1967) 45 This experience is not motivated by psychology in any traditional sense. While many famous filmmakers, such as Scorsese and Hitchcock, use subjective cinematography to reveal the psychological motivations and worldviews of their characters, Bresson’s use of character identification is more primal. Our experience of Mouchette’s point of view tells us little about her interpretation of the world and more about the arrival and passage of temporary feelings and sensations. Thus, to perceive the world as Mouchette is to live out the Zen ideal of transcending the trappings of human concepts. Mouchette is neither an optimist nor a pessimist. She does not respond to her suffering with the perseverance that characterizes the traditional heroine of western narrative convention, nor with the calculated bitterness of a nihilist. One can attach no labels to her: she is simply Mouchette. Mouchette and Bresson’s shared preoccupation with the now, their disregard for interpretation, is the motor that drives beauty and meaning through this bleakest of narratives. On paper, the story of a girl’s life of drudgery and social oppression culminating in suicide seems to contain little hope for meaning and no alternative to despair. And yet, Bresson’s clarity of purpose transforms a depressing narrative into a life-affirming work. While Mouchette’s life is filled with suffering, the viewer never gets the impression that her life is meaningless. Like so many of Bresson’s great films, the spiritual significance of Mouchette—that which separates the film from nihilism—lies in its approach to form, not content. Through his use of cinematography and editing, Bresson captures in Mouchette’s experience the eternal now, a character through which he can show that the very act of living is beautiful, even holy. If we view the film according to the logic of linear time, the film seems far more pessimistic than earlier Bresson classics such as A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, which climax with freedom and redemption, respectively. In contrast with these films of the 1950s, Mouchette gets darker as it progresses. But it is only through a Western 46 understanding of filmmaking that a viewer allows events occurring at the end of a film— later in chronological time—to determine the philosophical arc of the piece as a whole (optimistic or pessimistic). As Watts writes,

Buddhism has frequently compared the course of time to the apparent motion of a wave, wherein the actual water only moves up and down, creating the illusion of a “piece” of water moving over the surface…Connected, then, with the pursuit of the good is the pursuit of the future, the illusion whereby we are unable to be happy without a “promising future” for the symbolic self. Progress towards the good is therefore measured in terms of the prolongation of human life, forgetting that nothing is more relative than our sense of the length of time (Watts, 1999, p. 123-124). Watts is describing here the Buddhist concept of transcending time—viewing time as a circle as opposed to a line. Living a life in the eternal now (capturing the sensations of life as they occur) does not guarantee an end of suffering, but rather an end to anxiety, which is the anticipation of suffering to come. Viewing Mouchette through this lens, we see the closing act of suicide not as a culmination of anything, but rather a decision born out of a moment in time, a moment that operated for Mouchette as an eternal now to the same degree that Mouchette’s joyous ride on the bumper cars operated as an eternal now. Bresson is able to have his cake and eat it too, criticizing a society that undoubtedly contributes to Mouchette’s decision without making this individual decision representative of her life as a whole. Thus, Bresson’s film does not advocate suicide any more than Zen advocates nihilism.14 It is unlikely that Mouchette commits suicide because her life is not worth living, or because she has not experienced joy. Given the impulsive and spontaneous nature of her behavior throughout

14 At first glance, the line between Zen and nihilism appears to be razor thin and yet in practice, the two philosophies couldn’t be more different. Confusion on this point was so widespread that D.T. Suzuki found it necessary to defend Zen against accusations of nihilism in An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. For an examination of the differences between Zen philosophy and nihilism, see Chapter III: “Is Zen Nihilistic?” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 48-57).

47 the film, it seems quite likely that the decision to take her life is born out of a temporary feeling in a temporary moment. The beauty of Mouchette’s life was found in her ability to capture the Zen ideal of the eternal now. The tragedy of her life is found in her inability to reconcile this truth with the Zen understanding of the transience of experience— paradoxically, each moment must be lived in its entirely without a planning of or conception of the future, and yet each moment must be understood as an illusion of permanence and an experience of transience. Unable to see that the moment’s suffering will pass, Mouchette ends her life.

For the Western viewer trained to view the closing act of the film as the definitive moment (Schindler’s List is inspirational, Million Dollar Baby is depressing), the final action is given the most weight. And yet from the vantage point of Zen, the prioritization of an event’s importance based on its chronological position in a narrative is arbitrary. The experience of watching Mouchette is an eternal now, and thus the beautiful simplicity of her life shines through despite her suffering. Kapleau writes that Zen discipline is “a willingness to scruff off the nonessentials…A complex life means a life filled with anxieties and helter-skelter impulses, a life without a genuine center” (Kapleau, 2001, p. 98). Bresson’s films have a genuine center, as do most of his protagonists. This center is not a characteristic that can be easily identified by the GOTE (Goal, Obstacle, Tactics, and

Exploration) methodology favored by many actors in theater and film in the West. Actress Nadine Nortier would likely be as unable to verbalize this “genuine center” as Mouchette would. Rather, it is manifested within the cinematographic method of Bresson, who allows us to see the world with the beautiful, matter-of-fact simplicity of Mouchette. For Bresson, form is content—the meditative manner in which he reveals the world to the viewer is worth as much, if not more, than any narrative or thematic information he could impart.

48 Thus, while Mouchette is as powerful an examination of human cruelty and societal decay as a film by Pier Paolo Pasolini or Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the act of watching it cultivates in the viewer a feeling of calm, quiet compassion. From an intellectual standpoint (analysis of narrative content, character, and theme), it appears to fit in well with the bleakest of late 20th century , but the actual cinematic experience is as far removed from Lars von Trier as Zen is from nihilism. The difficulty in describing the distinction between these two very different strands of arthouse cinema is the result of the Western thinker’s reliance on concept over sensation, word over image, to make sense of art. The true difference between Bresson and the other directors mentioned is a difference of style. When Fassbinder or Pasolini examine the world, cinematic technique is a way of communicating coldness—the evil that they see in the world is quite often simply evil. In contrast, the Bressonian lens is rooted in mysticism, and the simplicity of his camera reveals a world of endless beauty. Zoori describes the process of mysticism in art:

The term ‘mystical’ means: ‘Having a spiritual meaning that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intellect. It is direct subjective communication with ultimate reality.’ It’s the kind of communication that we can’t process intellectually…Yet we’re somehow aware of its presence, and it has a real impact on us (Loori, 2004, p. 192). The mysticism that Zoori identifies is what Bresson is after, and it is at the heart of Zen

Buddhism. It is apparent in the scene discussed above, in which Mouchette moves across the spectrum of human experience, from pleasure to suffering, each of which are equally authentic moments in her life, captured with the quiet, compassionate eye of a director who has mastered the Zen concept15 of immediate experience and communicated its beauty.

15 The term “Zen concept” is something of an oxymoron, given that Zen itself is the absence of concepts. Yet the term is useful here for communicating the spirit of Zen—just as it can be useful to a reader to picture Zen as a philosophy (the philosophy of no-philosophy), so too can it be useful to view Zen as a concept (the concept of no-concepts). 49 MATURATION OF BRESSON’S STYLE: THE LATER FILMS

This point will become increasingly important as we examine Bresson’s later works, which become ever darker in terms of content, but continue to affirm life in their mystical approach to form. Many critics and scholars, operating under the influence of Western (intellectual, verbal, content-driven) analysis of Bresson’s works, began to question the Catholicism in the later works, wondering if the faith-driven Bresson succumbed to despair in the last decades of his life. But Bresson’s worldview doesn’t change—rather, he becomes more skilled at transferring meaning into the cinematographic style of his films. I have tried to illustrate that Bresson’s approach to filmmaking has as much in common with Zen Buddhism as it does with Christianity. If we continue to view Bresson’s films through the lens of Zen, then the films will appear less nihilistic than certain critics have perhaps claimed. In the films from Mouchette on (the more superficially punishing

Bresson films), we should see no inconsistency, but rather a clear through-line from A Man Escaped (1956) to L’Argent (1983). The color films examined in the next chapter are relentlessly bleak in terms of narrative content and theme, but like Mouchette, their Zen- like simplicity contains a spiritual beauty that is lacking in most of the films of his contemporaries.

50 Chapter Two: Cinema as Meditation—The Later Films

In this chapter, I extend the type of analysis explored in Chapter One to the later films of Bresson’s career. In these three films, all shot in color, Bresson continues to advocate the theory that he outlined in Notes on the Cinematograph and exemplified in his more famous films from the black-and-white era. For whatever reason, the films that Bresson shot in color (beginning with Une Femme Douce in 1969 and ending with

L’Argent in 1983) were less well received than his earlier works. While critical reception to these films was generally positive, they tend to be cited less frequently and have had less of an impact on film history than A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, or Au Hasard Balthazar. In the British Film Institute’s 2012 critics poll of the 250 greatest films of world cinema (conducted every ten years), Bresson was the most represented director with seven films (Perez, 2012, n.p.). But only two of these (L’Argent and The Devil, Probably) were produced in Bresson’s color period, and the three listed in the top 100 (Au Hasard

Balthazar, Pickpocket, A Man Escaped) are all black-and-white films produced in the 1950s and 1960s. It is quite possible that the reason for the mixed reception to the color films is the result of Bresson’s ever-increasing fidelity to cinematic ascetism. These later works do not represent a shift in Bresson’s filmmaking philosophy, but rather a stricter adherence to his theory. This chapter continues to trace the evolution of Bresson’s filmmaking style in terms of cinematography, sound, and editing, arguing that this style functions as a form of cinematic guided meditation that bears a strong resemblance to Zen Buddhism. To the extent that the color films differ from the black-and-white films, this difference is only a matter of degree. In the later films, the Zen connection seems even clearer—gone is the

51 redundant voiceover track in A Man Escaped,16 and the bursts of music that occasionally punctuate Au Hasard Balthasar and Mouchette become ever sparser. In the five films that Bresson made during this period, the three under examination in this chapter provide a good illustration of the increasingly radical nature of Bresson’s cinema.

UNE FEMME DOUCE (1969)

With Mouchette, Bresson returned to a source by Bernanos, the first time he had done so since Diary of a Country Priest 16 years earlier. With his next film, Une Femme Douce (also known by its English translation, ), Bresson returned to the influence of Dostoyevsky, whose Crime and Punishment had provided a loose backbone for Pickpocket (1959) ten years prior. Based on the short story A Gentle Creature, the film begins with a woman’s suicide and is told primarily in flashback from the perspective of her cold and distant husband, a pawnbroker who attempts to come to terms with her decision. In a contemporary urban setting (Paris in the 1960s), the film charts the birth and destruction of the marriage. With Une Femme Douce, Bresson finally conceded to cinema’s inevitable shift to color. But he provides an alternative to the color cinematography of mainstream film, and his subtle use of color proves to be yet another example of stylistic restraint. Excited by the opportunities provided by color, Bresson was equally wary of its potential for indulgence. Perhaps for this reason, Bresson commits himself in Une Femme Douce to dull greens, grays, and browns, using bold color very rarely.

16 The exception is Une Femme Douce, the first of these later films, which uses voiceover narration. While the use of voiceover is to some degree a necessary bridge between scenes occurring in flashback and scenes in the present, Bresson occasionally succumbs to the temptation to use words to explore character interiority. 52 Bresson’s approach to color cinema is even more radical given his background as a painter. Trained in the power of the still image, a painter might be expected to capitalize on the poetic power of individual shots. It is no surprise that Michelangelo Antonioni worked as a painter and a still photographer, or that Jean Renoir was the son of a famous French Impressionist. But Bresson’s approach to cinema is counterintuitive for someone experienced in the color image. In an interview conducted around the time of the release of Une Femme Douce, Bresson addressed the relationship between his former work as a painter and his work as a filmmaker:

I don’t paint any more at all, and I avoid anything like painting in my films. I live in horror of anything that brings to mind a kind of postcardism…A color film cannot represent the end of painting because it is only a mechanical reproduction. If it pleases the eye, it’s a different kind of pleasure, not at all analogous to the pleasures of looking at a canvas. A black-and-white film comes closer to painting. For example, the way it suggests the green of a tree comes closer to the truth of the tree than the fake photographic green of color film” (Bresson, 2016, p. 210). For Bresson, the relationship between the shots provides the tension that distinguishes film from other art forms, and too much emphasis should not be placed on the individual shot. With color cinema, the danger of crafting an eye-popping image is intensified, leading the director very close to what Bresson sees as false. Bresson’s audacity is even more apparent when viewed within the context of the time period. Successful European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by flamboyance: critics were dazzled by the whirling camera of Fellini, the staggering close- ups of Bergman, the striking long takes of Tarkovsky, the dream-like landscapes of Herzog, and the mod colors of Godard. Even Buñuel, less remembered for a distinctive visual style, went trigger happy with the zoom lens in films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise and That Obscure Object of Desire, and Bertolucci indulged in handsome sets and elaborately choreographed camerawork in Last Tango in Paris. With a

53 cinematographic style informed by an obsession with eyes, hands, boots, and guns, Leone made the Western artsy, and Argento’s bold colors and compositions did the same for the horror genre. In a time when Antonioni’s picturesque long shots in L’Avventura were praised for their minimalism (to say nothing of the garish color scheme of Red Desert), the shots favored by Bresson seem nothing short of spartan. Avoiding the fashion of the era, Bresson remained obsessed with the ordinary and the subdued. When a bathing wife drops bar on the floor, the husband picks it up and returns it to her in a scene of 7 plain shots that efficiently communicates a marriage defined by isolation (Fig. 5). When the woman leaps to her death, this information is conveyed to the audience by a shot of the table rocking on the balcony behind her and a shot of her white scarf falling to the ground. And when the husband selects a coffin for his wife and briefly addresses her, a medium shot of the coffin lid being screwed on suddenly cuts to black, ending the film. Bresson’s ascetism extends beyond his use of color—the camera angles are simple and the lengths of the shots are relatively short. True to form, the relationship between the shots propels us into the next moment, and there is little pictorial beauty on display within each individual shot. The setting of the pawn shop is an extreme example of the austerity of Bresson’s approach to color. In the first scene at the pawn shop (and the first time we see her alive in the film), the future wife enters through a set of brown double doors. Her suit is of a pale green that seems almost gray against the brown walls, and even the red of the book that she carries is a sort of dull maroon. The camera pans right as she waits in line, before cutting to the shop owner examining an object in the light. His suit and the wall behind him is gray, and the only color comes from the objects behind him—a blue-and-white container and one of green glass. The camera pans down as the shopkeeper retrieves bills to hand to the customer, and another cut reveals the customer to be a woman dressed in gray-white against 54

Wife exits to the bathroom Soap slides across the floor

The husband The wife

The exchange Repetition

Repetition Husband leaves

Figure 5: Minimalist style – The soap exchange in Une Femme Douce (1969)

55 an almost identical background of gray-white. A man in a brown suit enters the frame before a fourth shot takes us back to the husband, who examines another small object before a tilt down to the counter displays a case. A fifth shot reveals the contents of the case, some sort of collection of small tools in a blue velvet interior. In shot six, money is exchanged (Bresson’s fidelity to repetition on full display here), and in shot seven, the man exits the frame as the future wife approaches the counter, setting a brown camera on it as the camera pans down to the counter and back up to the face of the woman. A close shot of the camera in shot eight fills the frame with brown, and shot nine again shows the husband’s gray suit against a gray backdrop. In the tenth and final shot of the sequence, the woman takes her camera back and exits the store as Bresson pans right, revealing the hands of an assistant on the counter. The scene is remarkable for its blandness. The image is dominated by browns, grays, and whites, and the isolated instances of color, which seem to pop out against the drab background, are still quite subdued (the grayish green of the woman’s outfit, and the dull red of the notebook). The blue and green objects behind the counter are perhaps the most pronounced colors in the whole scene, but they are hardly decorative. Bresson tends to avoid red, using it to striking effect in isolated moments, such as the blood on the wife’s head after she jumps to her death. While Bresson’s fellow French filmmaker and long-time admirer Jean-Luc Godard was decorating his interiors with the fashionable bold colors of the swinging 60s in Contempt (1963) and Week End (1967), Bresson, one of the most respected directors of world cinema, may have seemed out of touch with the times. In reality, he was demonstrating his disdain for the bright hues of Technicolor. Bresson’s decision to forego the stylistic abundance that characterizes the era requires discipline, a clarity of purpose born out of a theory of the minimal. This visual restraint finds a correlative in Zen practice. Comparing D.T. Suzuki’s description of the 56 daily life of the Zen monk to the life of the average person in a first-world country is a useful picture for envisioning Bresson’s relationship to other famous directors of the time period: “The monks often have not enough clothes for comfort, not enough food to satisfy hunger, not enough time to sleep, and, to cap these, they have plenty of work, both menial and spiritual” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 123). Suzuki fears that “the merciless tide of modern commercialism and mechanization is rolling all over the East, so that almost no corners are left for a quiet retreat, and before long even this solitary island of Zen may be buried under the waves of sordid materialism” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 124). This rapidly disappearing way of life—a dedication to poverty and simplicity that paradoxically leads many to experience a sense of spiritual richness—is also a way of filmmaking. The awareness of the differences between black-and-white and color cinema perhaps consciously led to significant alterations in Bresson’s style. With his two previous films, Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette, Bresson had mastered a type of minimalist editing rooted in ellipsis. The elliptical editing of Bresson relied on a carefully conceived selection of specific shots, but the seamless nature of his editing, the unity of his films, was also achieved by frequent use of the dissolve. With the shift to color in Une Femme Douce, Bresson found himself in a difficult situation. The dissolve was a significant aid in achieving the effect of unity (the sense that we are experiencing the series of “happenings” described in Chapter One that cannot be easily differentiated), and yet to consistently use the dissolve in a color film is to create an effect more self-conscious and more eye-catching than that apparent in a black-and-white film. The gradual replacement of one color image by another evokes a painterly surrealism that he rejected entirely. To maintain his minimalist style, Bresson needed to find new ways of bridging his images, new ways of collapsing the boundaries of traditional film scenes without resorting to jump cuts or other loud techniques. The result was an innovation that he used throughout 57 the rest of his career, a technique that would become an essential component of L’Argent, his final masterpiece, but that he also experimented with at certain points in Une Femme Douce: anticipatory sound (referred to in editing terms as a sound advance or J cut). By allowing the sound of the next scene to play over the image of the current shot, Bresson could more seamlessly merge two scenes into one. This aural-visual disunity achieves a Zen-like effect: two events, occurring at different moments in time and in different locations, bleed into each other. A comparison of the marriage sequence in Une Femme Douce to the opening sequence in Au Hasard Balthazar reveals the continuities and innovations of Bresson’s style. As we saw in Chapter One, the three separate shots in Balthazar contain enough narrative information for three different scenes, and yet the boundaries between the scenes are merged by the dissolve. In Une Femme Douce, a similar effect is achieved in three separate shots in three separate locations. In the hallway outside of her door, the pawnbroker proposes to his wife. The camera then cuts, without a dissolve, to a shot of the couple signing off on the marriage. Over the image of the woman’s hands, soft music is introduced for several seconds, and another cut takes us to the couple seated at a restaurant where the music is playing in the background. Avoiding dissolves, Bresson manages to achieve the effect of Balthazar, giving us the before, during, and after of a marriage in a few seconds of screen time, forming a sequence that is three scenes in one. Bresson again uses anticipatory sound to bridge the gaps between the present, in which the husband paces around the body of his wife, and the past, in which events from the marriage are revealed to the viewer. The sound of footsteps in scenes from the past are heard over the image of the husband in the room, and the rhythm of the footsteps on the soundtrack have a -inducing effect. Throughout the film, Bresson populates the soundtrack with sounds of contemporary city life (predominantly footsteps and the hum of 58 vehicles) to lull the viewer into a meditative state. The lack of clear boundaries between scenes contributes to this effect, in which the logical mind is subordinated to the senses— sights and sounds revealed moment by moment. While anticipatory sound is used sparingly in Une Femme Douce, its presence is a noteworthy development in Bresson’s style that will become even more important later in his career. It is also a vital tool for achieving a sense of structural unity in a film containing frequent flashbacks. Watching Une Femme Douce, we experience a sense of timelessness not dissimilar to that discussed in relation to Au Hasard Balthazar—the sense that we are witnessing a story with no real beginning, middle, or end. Starting and ending with the wife’s suicide, Bresson takes the viewer full circle, and as the husband walks around the body of his wife and reflects on their marriage, Bresson slips the viewer seamlessly from the past to an ever-shifting present. The lack of clear boundaries in Une Femme Douce evoke the “one-ness” that characterizes Zen Buddhism and many other schools of Eastern philosophy. Loori claims, “Just as with Zen art, life is a process that is constantly unfolding. It is boundless, without edges” (Loori, 2004, p. 201). Bresson’s films unfold like life itself, and it is often difficult to identify the markers of a classical three-act structure. The shot of the coffin that ends the film is followed by a blunt cut to black, with no credits or even a “The End” to cue the audience that we are exiting the world of the film. The credits are instead transposed over the opening image of the film, in which we witness an equally flat and mundane shot: cars moving through traffic. In effect, not only does Bresson collapse the boundaries between scenes and create a sense of the constant now, but he pushes himself further than in any previous film to do away with film “openings” and “endings.” The film starts and stops on

59 a dime.17 But the effect does not indicate a clumsy handling of narrative, because the cinematography is the narrative. The story is told within the shot, moment by moment, as life itself.

LANCELOT DU LAC (1974)

With Une Femme Douce, Bresson proved that his distinctive approach to filmmaking could survive the transition to color. With Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake), he extended the challenge, testing his theory in a new genre: a period piece18 exploring Arthurian legend. The narrative examines the period directly after the failed quest for the Holy Grail—bloody carnage opens the film, and Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere causes a rift of loyalty among the knights. Lancelot du Lac is perhaps the riskiest gamble of Bresson’s career, but surprisingly one of his most successful in aesthetic terms.

It is relatively easy to envision how Bresson’s minimalist style could be applied to stories such as a man escaping a prison cell or a donkey being passed from owner to owner. But a period piece with medieval battles, bloodshed, and fiery passion is a far cry from the narrative content that Bresson usually employs. But Bresson embraces the challenge head on, refusing to compromise stylistically as he turns an MGM-worthy story on its head. Just as Bresson’s first color film muted the

17 Lancelot du Lac is similar in this respect. While Lancelot contains a text scrawl that is unusual for Bresson before taking us into the opening credits, this information is preceded by an opening shot that appears abruptly. The film closes on a similar note. Amidst a pile of bodies on the ground, one wounded figure attempts to rise before falling back limp against the carnage. Cut to black. 18 (1962) was technically Bresson’s first period piece, but its narrative is much more subdued than what we usually expect from the genre. The script for the film was a transcript of the actual trial, and thus the content of the film had less potential for sensationalism. The story of Lancelot du Lac, however, is more of a traditional period piece from a Hollywood perspective—bloody battles, forbidden romances, epic tournaments—and thus Bresson’s mundane approach to the material is more radical. 60 color as much as possible, so too does Bresson’s medieval adventure emphasize the simplicity of the production design.19 In an interview for the film given in 1974, Bresson claimed, “the subject is only a pretext for expressing what I feel about it. So the century, or the setting, don’t matter: in this case, I resisted any kind of medieval picturesque” (Bresson, 2016, p. 239). In another interview, Bresson proudly responds to a question regarding the scale of the production: “There are horses, knights in armor, a tournament…all as anachronistic as possible…You have to bring the past into the present if you want to make it believable” (ibid., p. 233). Indeed, the costumes and sets of Lancelot du Lac are functional, nothing more. The soldier’s armor looks cheap, but it clanks and rattles as the characters walk in a way that suggests a type of realism that is lacking in most medieval adventures. The encampment settings contain only a few details which are carefully emphasized, and while the cumulative effect of these details is powerful, these locations lack the visual splendor that usually characterizes the genre. The rooms of the castle are plain and contain few adornments, standing in stark opposition to a filmmaking culture that sees Braveheart (1995), Macbeth (2015) and Game of Thrones (2011-2019) as touchstones of epic medieval drama. Bresson’s passion for simplicity and his rejection of cinema’s penchant for spectacle and sensationalism have never been more apparent. Bresson’s claim about bringing the past into the present is a particularly useful lens for examining the film’s use of sound. The mundane sounds of urban life in Une Femme Douce (and later L’Argent) that lull the viewer into a state of meditation—vehicles humming, footsteps clapping on the sidewalk—find their medieval correlation in Lancelot du Lac. The sounds of horses’ hooves, rattling armor, heavy footsteps, and horses’ neighing

19 For this brief discussion of Bresson’s production design, I stray from the traditional definition of “cinematography.” However, Bresson’s looser definition of cinematography described in the introduction includes production design. Nevertheless, a discussion of production design is less central to the main aim of this chapter, and I will examine the set design of Lancelot du Lac as briefly as possible. 61 populate the soundtrack throughout and are perhaps the most frequently utilized sound effects in the film. Many of these sounds occur in moments of transition as humans or animals walk or travel. Music is utilized in the opening scenes (a historical text scrawl and then a credit sequence) and a closing scene, bracketing the film. But other than these instances, music only appears briefly during a scene of a jousting tournament (and in this case the music is diegetic, a ten-note pattern played periodically to announce a new round in the tournament). The effect of the sparse use of music and the ubiquitous sounds of clumsy human and animal movement create a hypnotic effect, and the presence of the sounds paradoxically emphasize the moments of silence. As referenced in the analysis of A Man Escaped, Bresson draws a distinction between “Absolute silence and silence obtained by a pianissimo of noises,” and he claims, “THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE” [capitalization his] (Notes, 2016, p. 28).20 The paradoxical nature of the latter claim sounds like a Zen —the birth of silence through sound seems like an alternative ending for the Zen phrase “Empty-handed I go, and behold the spade is in my hands;/ I walk on foot, and yet on the back of an ox I am riding” (Suzuki, 1991, p.58). And yet, Bresson’s claim is not a mere assault on logic (which is the primary function of a koan), but rather an illustration of a primary state of Zen being, exemplified by Chan master Sheng Yen:

the mind is like water, so clear and transparent that fish have yet to appear. Similarly, the sky-like mind is vast, without any boundaries—sheer openness. But this sky is not lifeless; birds fly in it without leaving traces. These images use motion to convey stillness and existence to convey emptiness [italics mine]. This emptiness is not dead but full of life (Yen, 2008, p. 85).

20 “Just as sound contains not-sound, so, too, does form contain not-form” (Loori, 2004, p. 224). 62 There is a lot to unpack in this description of a saying from Hongzhi,21 but most useful for our purposes here is not Sheng Yen’s main point, but rather his method for arguing it. In describing a famous saying, Shen Yen collapses conventional dichotomies: motion and stillness, existence and emptiness. These opposites reinforce each other, drawing attention to the potential of the other. Likewise, the use of sound in a Bresson film draws attention to the soundtrack, and thus the viewer is as alert to the cessation of sound as he or she is to the sound itself. This phenomenon is not dissimilar to Bresson’s desire “To TRANSLATE the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing” (Notes, 2016, p. 46). This indirect, paradoxical route for communicating an effect, this focus on opposites, is ever-present in his films and his writings. As discussed in relation to Au Hasard Balthazar, Lancelot du Lac’s stylistic minimalism and meditative focus on simple sounds and images is coupled with a general disinterest in narrative clarity. Narrative logic is once again subordinated to immediate sensory experience, and the 80-minute film works better as guided meditation than as a SparkNotes summary of Arthurian legend. Certain details of plot and character are confusing to the viewer,22 but the sounds of the horses and the close shots of their eyes, the sight of a forgotten scarf and the aural-visual experience of the shattering of lances, remain in the viewer’s mind long after the story has faded from memory. Bresson’s emphasis on objects and his fascination with visual and aural detail are of primary interest, and the cinematographic style is the spiritual motor through which the apparently nihilistic world of the film becomes imbued with poetry and meaning.

21 “The water is so clear, transparent to the bottom./ Late, late, fishes have yet to appear./ The sky is so vast, without boundaries, distant and out of sight./ The birds have left no trace” (Yen, 2008, p. 84-85). 22 While an in-depth analysis of the narrative structure of the film (what we know about the story and what we don’t) is beyond the scope of this discussion, a closer look at the narrative ambiguities of Lancelot du Lac can be found in Kristin Thompson’s essay, The Sheen of Armour, the Whinnies of Horses: Sparse Parametric Style in Lancelot du Lac. 63 Nowhere is this Zen-like fascination with sensory detail more apparent than in the film’s celebrated jousting tournament sequence, one of the most breathtaking accomplishments in Bresson’s entire oeuvre. Many of the typical Bressonian tools— repetition of shots and sounds, visual synecdoche, elliptical editing—are synthesized to hypnotic effect. The sequence, as plain and sparse in its specifics as expected, achieves a rhythm that puts the viewer in a meditative state. Running 6 minutes and 8 seconds, the scene contains a total of 92 shots.23 The average shot length of the scene is almost exactly 4 seconds, a modest length that puts the emphasis on the relationship between the images.

Bresson includes 7 identical shots of a bagpipe playing (the ten-note pattern it plays is heard a total of 9 times, twice off camera), 8 shots of a flag raising, 10 wide shots of Arthur and Gawain watching (shot from the right of the characters), 8 wide shots of Arthur and Gawain watching filmed from the left24 (3 shots slightly wider than the remaining 5, which vary slightly), and 6 medium shots of Gawain watching filmed from the right. While camera placement of the other shots is less precise, there are also numerous repetitions of actions—lances thrust into the air, knights falling from horses, shots of horses’ feet on the ground preparing to gallop, and body shots of knights.25

23 Thompson counts 93 shots, a discrepancy that might be explained by different interpretations of the scene’s ending. I mark the end of the scene with the shot of the gate opening as Lancelot leaves the tournament. If one were to include the walk through the wilderness, where a wounded Lancelot falls from his horse, the scene could be slightly longer. 24 The shots of the crowd, though repetitive, occasionally vary slightly in terms of the borders of the frame. Thus, a wide shot of Arthur and Gawain surrounded by several members of the audience varies at certain times, perceptible when examining the audience members on the corner of the frame who are cut off. 25 I think it is useful to delineate the mechanics of this scene to set a base for a brief examination of Zen in the film’s form. However, it is important to note that many other scholars have offered similar breakdowns of this scene, and the analysis of repetition here is far from original. For similar layouts, see Rhythms of Images and Sounds in Two Films by Robert Bresson by Luíza Alvim and Kristin Thompson’s previously mentioned The Sheen of Armour, the Whinnies of Horses: Sparse Parametric Style in Lancelot du Lac. My use of the term “theme shots” in the following paragraph differs slightly from the common method of organizing the scene into “cells” or “elements” (terms that I think problematically relate only to content and not to camera angle, therefore clustering shots such as “the crowd” that should be broken into smaller units). However, many of the alternative descriptions of this scene are more detailed than my brief sketch, and worthier of exploration by serious fans of Bresson’s work. 64 Bresson’s use of repetition gives a rhythm to the images, and disruptions from the pattern give certain images additional power. For example, Bresson will suddenly introduce a shot of a jousting lance in motion from the perspective of a soldier on a horse, or a shot of a wounded knight carried off on a stretcher. The dramatic force of these shots lies not in the ingenuity of their composition or in their pictorial beauty, but rather in the careful juxtaposition of the unique shots with the repetitive shots. Bresson’s method here is consistent with his claim that ideally in a film, “the images, like the words in a dictionary, have no power and value except through their position and relation” (Notes, 2016, p. 10).”26

Thus, poetry is born out of repetition and ritual, and the frequent employment of the same shot simplifies the scene by breaking it into bigger units. The sequence does not feel like 92 shots, but rather several theme shots27—the bagpipe, the flag, the crowd, the horses, Gawain—woven together and edited at a specific rhythm to heighten viewer involvement. Disruptions from the theme shots provide a visceral response in the viewer, but again, this response is not born out of stylistic indulgence, but out of a careful arrangement of minimalist details (Fig. 6). Even the images of soldiers falling violently to the ground are shot in a relatively straightforward manner. To imagine this scene being filmed by any of the famous European directors cited in relation to Une Femme Douce is to envision more visual flamboyance within the individual shots. Tarkovsky might start wide, emphasizing the grandeur of the setting while slowly tracking forward to meet the bloody carnage in greater detail. Bertolucci’s interpretation would probably burst with color, Buñuel might employ a reverse zoom to slowly reveal the big picture, and Antonioni’s composition,

26 Also applicable is Bresson’s claim that “An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation” (Notes, 2016, p. 9). And yet again, “The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine” (ibid., p. 70). 27 I use this non-existent term to describe clusters or groupings of shots as opposed to individual shots. These theme shots are not identical (minor variations may exist in terms of content and composition), but similar enough that the differences would not be readily apparent on a first viewing. 65

Theme 1: Music Theme 2: Flag

Theme 3: Hooves Theme 4: Crowd from right

Theme 5: Gawain from right Theme 6: Crowd from left

Theme break: Moving lance Theme break: Stretcher

Figure 6: Theme shots in Lancelot du Lac (1974)

66 stately and still, would suggest an epic medieval painting. But Bresson builds piece by piece, taking shots of little interest, such as a crowd, a face, a flag, an instrument, and a lance, and finding the necessary combination to provide a transformation in the viewer’s experience; the tree described in Chapter One is no longer the same tree when the meditator’s eyes open. The repetitive employment of Zen-like rituals, paradoxically coupled with the Zen-like openness to experience and appreciation of spontaneity, is manifested in the cinematographic structure of the sequence—a continuous process of pattern creation and pattern disruption. Sound is also of central importance within this scene, and Bresson constructs and breaks his patterns aurally as well as visually. The central sound that organizes the scene is the 10-note burst of music coming from an instrument which is difficult to identify. Seven times the sound is accompanied by the image of the bagpipe, twice more the sound is off camera. The musical pattern played is not particularly engaging or dramatically involving—in fact, one could make a fair case that the sound is a nuisance. And yet, it organizes the scene, signaling the beginning of each new round of jousting. The sound unifies the flurry of activity, just as the theme shots simplify the visual information that the viewer receives, and its ultimate function is strikingly similar to “the bells of mindfulness” described by Thich Nhat Hanh:

Sometimes we need a sound to remind us to return to our conscious breathing, we call these sounds ‘bells of mindfulness’ [sic]. In Plum Village and the other practice centers in my tradition, we stop whenever we hear the telephone ringing, the clock chiming, or the monastery bell sounding…Sometimes our bodies may be home, but we’re not truly home. Our mind is elsewhere [sic]. The bell can help bring the mind back to the body (Hanh, 2005, p. 20). In a similar way, the repetition of the music grounds the viewer, bringing him or her further into a state of meditation every time the mind begins to stray. The roar of the crowd, the

67 trampling of hooves, the raising of the flag, the pride on Gawain’s face, and the pain of a knight’s fall are all experienced from a state of heightened awareness fueled by the repetition of a burst of music heard almost ten times in a scene running just over six minutes. The sequence is also notable for its use of a cinematographic technique known as synecdoche, which is generally employed as a literary term. Encyclopedia Britannica describes synecdoche as a “figure of speech in which a part represents the whole, as in the phrase ‘hired hands’ for workmen or, less commonly, the whole represents a part, as in the use of the word ‘society’ to mean high society” (“Synecdoche,” n.d., n.p.). The translation of this concept to the language of cinematography is an essential component of Bresson’s work and is particularly prominent in the tournament scene. The borders of Bresson’s frames constantly cut off important information, inhibiting the viewer from receiving the full picture. Hooves trampling the dirt communicate the presence of a horse, arms holding lances suggest the bodies of knights, and a hand holding a bagpipe evokes a musician. These carefully selected details suggest a reality existing beyond the frame, keeping the film’s diegetic boundaries open and uncertain. A perfectly composed wide shot, providing the viewer with all of the necessary information, often provides the impression that the entirety of the world of the film is contained within the shot. In such an instance, the proverbial bouquet that Renoir spoke of in his message to Matisse is painted from the side that it was arranged. But Bresson’s pieces of reality suggests a world existing beyond the boundaries of the screen frame, a world of boundless potential. Bresson’s use of off- screen space and sound correlates with one of Loori’s descriptions of Zen art: “This quality of simplicity or lack of complexity opens up a creative space that is filled with possibility. In simplicity there is a touch of boundlessness. Nothing limiting, like a cloudless sky”

68 (Loori, 2004, p. 135).28 In the celebrated tournament sequence, the visual synecdoche (as well as the use of of-screen sound) creates shots of loose boundaries. As we have seen in films such Au Hasard Balthazar and Une Femme Douce, Bresson is interested in collapsing the boundaries between scenes. But he also collapses boundaries within the individual shot, allowing each shot to evoke a rich and detailed world that extends far beyond the limits of what the viewer is currently seeing at any given moment. Rarely has this been more effective than in the simple execution of this acclaimed six-minute sequence.

L’ARGENT (1983)

With Lancelot du Lac, Bresson extended his singular style to one of the most challenging genres, and in the tournament sequence, he illustrates that his theory of filmmaking, which functions as guided meditation, had reached a level of maturity that he had been striving after for decades. Bresson’s final film, released almost a decade later, works out the few remaining indulgences apparent in Lancelot du Lac (predominantly the use of non-diegetic music at the beginning and end of the film, which is arguably less necessary than the diegetic music in the tournament sequence). In L’Argent, Bresson moves his protagonist seamlessly across various backdrops, returning to the urban life that he explored in Pickpocket and Une Femme Douce, the prison environment apparent in A Man Escaped and The Trial of Joan of Arc, and the rural setting of Au Hasard Balthazar and Mouchette. Having refined his style, Bresson depicts these familiar arenas with a degree of minimalism that is exceptional even by his exacting standards.

28 Also significant is a saying of Hongzhi Zhengjue, quoted in a later chapter of Loori’s book: “Silently and serenely one forgets all words. Clearly and vividly, it appears before you. When one realizes it, it is vast and without edges” (ibid., p. 228). 69 In this scathing indictment of capitalist culture, a man falsely accused of passing a counterfeit note falls victim to a Job-like chain reaction of misery. Bresson’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s didactic novella The Forged Coupon cuts the story off before its redemptive ending, leading us ever downward as Yvon (Christian Patey) loses his job, becomes a getaway driver for a robbery to earn money, is caught and sent to prison, and receives a letter from his wife Elise (Caroline Lang) that his child has passed away. On his release, a bitter and disillusioned Yvon becomes a cold-blooded murderer, killing hotel owners and massacring a rural family before calmly confessing to the crimes and returning to prison.

The film ends abruptly, with a crowd of onlookers watching the arrest of Yvon before the camera cuts to black. Like Une Femme Douce and Lancelot du Lac, L’Argent not only lacks a closing credit sequence, but also refuses to provide the audience with the cushion of a fade out or a “The End.” The story is Mouchette-like in its bleakness, and to outline the narrative is to invite superficial comparisons to the strand of European misery cinema discussed previously— Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2014). But like Mouchette, the events of the film are transformed through Bresson’s cinematographic and aural choices, and the most depressing material becomes spiritually charged in a manner that isn’t immediately apparent at the level of narrative. A careful and attentive eye to detail and an ear for the subtle potentialities of simple sounds reveals

L’Argent to be an ultimately life-affirming work. The use of sound here is particularly noteworthy, and worth comparing and contrasting to Bresson’s previous works. The sounds of footsteps and humming cars that permeate the soundtrack in the city setting, the clatter of a metal eating utensil against the floor that resonates in a prison scene, and the sound of running water in the rural scenes all 70 lull the viewer into Bresson’s rhythm in a manner that is entirely in keeping with his filmography. But now Bresson removes all traces of non-diegetic music, and he strips away even the presence of recorded music that exists in the world of the characters (as heard in Une Femme Douce). The only music heard in the entirety of the film occurs near the end, when an old blind man plays Bach’s Fantasie Chromatique and Fugue on his piano in his living room. Even this piece of music, beautifully placed and particularly powerful in contrast to the lack of music on the rest of the film’s soundtrack, was selected with ascetic motivation. In a characteristic interview, Bresson claimed to have chosen this piece

“Because I didn’t want my pianist to play sentimental music. But Bach’s music is always sentimental—so I fooled myself” (Bresson, 2016, p. 273). The assertion is quintessential Bresson in every respect: an attempt to avoid sentimentality coupled with a subtle criticism of his finished project. While L’Argent is filled with scenes of extraordinary power that embody the essence of Zen in their simplicity and practicality, the climactic murder scene is perhaps most worthy of examination. The challenge of filtering brutal content through a Zen approach to formal construction is not new for Bresson, but this scene is particularly bold in the degree of this transformation. Bresson films a scene as potentially ruthless and nihilistic as any that he has ever filmed—the slaughter of an innocent family at the hands of an ax murderer—but through a cinematographic process of guided meditation, he manages to imbue the scene with poetry and meaning.

This claim to meaning is controversial to make: the critical response to L’Argent is mixed regarding the film’s potential positive or negative philosophy. Some critics see the film as Christian in worldview and consistent with Bresson’s entire filmography. Other critics see L’Argent in particular (and the color films more generally) as representative of a shift in Bresson’s worldview, a gradual movement towards a type of pessimism fueled 71 by the exchange of Christianity for atheism. Still others view the film as an attempt to explore theology that ultimately fails—Mark Le Fanu, referenced briefly in the introduction, suggests that Bresson’s perhaps Christian intentions are unsupported by his finished film. La Fanu writes that “The film thinks that it is about grace; but really, if anything, it is about damnation” (La Fanu, 1985, p. 55). But almost all of these critics view the film from an oversimplified dichotomy: the Christian vs. the Not-Christian, the optimistic vs. the nihilistic. Interestingly enough, one of the most powerful assessments of this final scene comes from Japanese film critic Shigehiko Hasumi, who writes that “despite the brutality of what has transpired, a peaceful impression still lingers in our hearts” (Hasumi, 2011, p. 545). In keeping with Zen, Hasumi does not see this peace as evidence of a religious presence. Rather, he claims, “Bresson believes that film alone is capable of describing this reality, a conviction that sends the spirit soaring into a domain far removed from religious belief” (ibid., p. 545). Significantly, the word “Zen” is not used a single time in his essay, and none of his commentary is explicitly Zen. And yet, it is noteworthy that one of the most convincing assessments of Bresson’s climactic scene exists in an English translation of a Japanese text. It seems that a movement away from the West, a movement away from the polarity of this theocentric criticism (which implies a Christian/Not-Christian division as unhelpful as the Europe/Not-Europe of eurocentrism), yields fascinating insights. The much-discussed scene in question is remarkably succinct: it runs just under three minutes and contains 22 dimly lit shots.29 Over the course of these shots, Yvon pries

29 There is room for debate about the precise moment at which the scene ends. One can, with relative certainty, identify the start of the scene with a shot of dark door that Yvon is about to enter because the shot is a jump forward in time which takes us to the specific time and place of the murders. The ending could be determined as the end of the final shot of the murderous act (Shot 20), or it could include 2 additional shots of Yvon’s disposal of the weapon and his reflection on the act. The additional shots seem essential to me, as they seem to occur directly after the murder and in the same location. The next cut takes us forward to a 72 the locked door of the house with his ax and murders two young adults upstairs, an old man downstairs, and an old woman in a separate room. Before the death of the old woman, a young boy is seen crying alone in his adjacent room, and his fate is unknown. His death is not visually shown or implied, and yet in the final moments of the film, Yvon confesses to murdering “a whole family” (Henchoz, 1983), and the audience is uncertain whether the boy escaped unnoticed or was killed off camera.

The elliptical editing of the scene is tied together by the journey of the family dog through the house. Cinematographically speaking, the scene is a microcosm for the narrative of Au Hasard Balthazar, which interweaves the narrative perspective of an animal with that of a human. In this case, the camera starts with Yvon and shifts to the dog, allowing their two perspectives to overlap and diverge periodically throughout the scene. The dog leads the camera through the house, discovering various bodies before arriving in the room of the old woman, where Yvon bluntly asks her, “Where is the money?”

(Henchoz, 1983), before responding to her silence with a swing of the ax that sends the lamp toppling over. The light of the overturned lamp barely illuminates a wall speckled with blood for several seconds before falling into darkness. A Zen interpretation of the scene hinges upon the characters of the dog and of the old woman, the latter accepting death with a calmness and serenity that is communicated to the audience in large part through the precise nature of the film’s elliptical editing. Building to the climactic moment of her death is the persistent presence of the dog, crucially functioning like Balthazar as an animal witnessing the cruelty of human behavior. Thus, by allowing the dog to operate as a sort of narrative30 motor for the scene, Bresson

bar in town where Yvon is sitting, a significant jump in time and place that clearly marks the beginning of a new scene. 30 I use the word “narrative” here not to describe the story at large, but merely as a piece of content existing within the world of the film that drives the cinematographic structure. 73 finds a good guide for the aural and visual experiences that he wants to communicate to the viewer through the use of the tools at his disposal. The pronounced use of simple sounds, such as doors creaking and footsteps on the floor, calm the viewer’s mind, and even the barking of the dog falls into a sort of aural rhythm that is more hypnotic than alarming.31 As always, the shots are significant for their simplicity. Whether Bresson is accentuating the wooden texture of a door, examining a section of the ax murderer’s body walking through the hall, or emphasizing the unique positioning of a dead body, every shot is composed with a matter-of-factness that places the emphasis on the relationships between the images, fulfilling Bresson’s vow to himself regarding film editing: “Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh” (Notes, 2016, p. 55). The purity of Bresson’s approach is at once calming and absorbing, dramatically engaging but far from anxiety-inducing. As the dog finds Yvon in the old woman’s room, the shocking nature of the content is transformed by the juxtaposition of shots, which allow us to see the woman, not Yvon, as the main character of the climax. Bresson cuts directly from a shot of the dog barking in the doorway to a shot of the woman sitting up calmly in bed, watching Yvon. This elliptical edit, which leaps forward in time past the moment of the woman rising to her current position, is key. Whether the woman had been sleeping or awake is open to debate, but surely the woman must have risen from her bed at some point to occupy her current position in the frame. But the act of the rising is never shown, and Bresson keeps his camera out of this bedroom for the entire scene until this moment. This decontextualization of the old woman’s behavior, the lack of visual information concerning her reaction to the sounds of her family’s slaughter over the

31 “Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of footsteps, etc., for the sake of rhythm” (Notes, 2016, p. 30). 74 previous several minutes of screen time, imbues her with a spiritual quality. When we see her, she is already risen, poised and prepared for death as if she had been positioned like this for hours. This cinematographic choice places the emphasis on the quiet, Zen-like serenity of the woman, who calmly accepts her death with nobility. Thus, the scene’s primary emphasis is not on the continued corruption of Yvon’s heart, but rather the martyrdom of a woman who is completely at peace. The ax, seen in close up in the next shot, is thus transformed from a weapon of terror to a tool of grace. As in Zen meditation, the recontextualization of this object is the result of decontextualization; by removing unnecessary visual information, Bresson gives the power of the scene to the passive woman. In other words, what Bresson accomplishes here is a transformation of an object’s connotation (the ax as cruelty/violence) by a stripping away of conventional narrative context that we usually deem necessary for fluid storytelling (the moment of the woman’s realization of what is occurring). Instead of focusing on character psychology and narrative fluidity, Bresson places the emphasis on images and sounds that will quiet the viewer’s mind. He then introduces the woman, and her calm acceptance of her death is not merely the result of her performance, but also tied directly to film editing. Having achieved a sense of calm in the viewer that parallels that of the old woman, the sudden cut to the ax loses its conventional power to frighten or intimidate. The ax is simply the object that accentuates this calm by emphasizing the steadfastness of the woman. The use of anticipatory sound, discussed briefly in relation to Une Femme Douce, is employed several times in the final act of L’Argent, most effectively at the end of the murder scene (Fig. 7). As the ax knocks the lamp off of the bedside table, sprinkling the woman’s blood on the wallpaper, the room remains partially illuminated for a moment before the lamp light is extinguished entirely. The camera holds on the darkened wall for several seconds as the sound of running water fills the soundtrack. The next shot reveals 75

The dog The woman’s composure

The ax Lamp shot 1a

Lamp shot 1b Lamp shot 1c

Lamp shot 1d: anticipatory sound—running water Ax disposal

Figure 7: Perceptual transformation of the ax in L’Argent (1983)

76 the source of the sound, a small body of water (a river or creek) near the house where Yvon disposes of the bloody ax. The sound of running water exists in dialogue with the shot of the bloody wall, and the sound is intended to aid in the task of transforming the mood of the scene. For Western critics fully aware of Bresson’s Jansenist background, it is easy to read this scene through a lens of Christian symbolism. The apparently heinous act of Yvon is perhaps the beginning of his road to salvation, and the sound of the water and the subsequent cut to the shot of the ax thrown into it seem to carry rather obvious baptismal connotations. Such readings are not without some —Bresson stated in an interview, “I regret not being able to spend more time in L’Argent on Yvon’s atonement, on the idea of redemption, but the rhythm of the film in that moment wouldn’t allow it” (Bresson, 2016, p. 278). And yet, he claimed many times over the course of his career that he was not interested in symbolism. Even the apparent Christian-themed symbolism of The Trial of Joan of Arc, which seems obvious to the point of being trite, was rejected by Bresson himself. Asked by an interviewer if the presence of the flying birds in the scene of Joan’s death was “symbolic,” Bresson replied,

While Joan burns, pigeons perch on the canopy of the tribunal and then fly away—they simply represent the life that continues on around the transfixed spectators…I don’t want to create symbols. I avoid them as much as possible. But the audience seems to see a profusion of them (ibid., p. 102). Given Bresson’s history of rejecting symbols and his insistence on sights, sounds, and feelings over intellect, it is not a stretch to entertain an alternative intention to the presence of water in the murder scene. The sound of the water cultivates a feeling of peace in the viewer on a primal level—not because of its cultural association with baptism or any meaning attached to it at the level of symbol, but rather because the sound is inherently calming in and of itself. 77 The manner by which an object communicates something “in and of itself,” and not by way of its cultural coding, is at the very heart of Zen. As Watts writes of a Zen master’s proverbial answer to a monk, “Here again, as in painting, is the expression of a live moment in its pure “suchness” (Watts, 1999, p. 183). This “suchness” is precisely what Bresson is after in the murder scene, and to interpret the scene on symbolic grounds is perhaps to take us away from the suchness that Bresson suggests when he claims, “The real, when it has reached the mind, is already not real any more. Our too thoughtful, too intelligent eye” (Notes, 2016, p. 48).32 The Judeo-Christian culture of the West has an aesthetic history of symbolic, or intellectual, interpretation that finds no correlative in the Zen culture of the Far East, which emphasizes direct experience. The peace that the viewer experiences in the midst of the worst depravity in L’Argent, the meaning that sets the scene apart from nihilism, is a cinematographic meaning, not an intellectual one. Like all of the scenes and films discussed in the past two chapters, the climax of

L’Argent illustrates the role of cinematography in transforming viewer perception. Bresson’s unique method for achieving this effect parallels Shunryu Suzuki’s claim that “We must exist right here, right now! This is the key point. You must have your own body and mind. Everything should exist in the right place, in the right way” (Suzuki, 1980, p. 27). Bresson’s insistence on arranging simple sounds and images, each in the right place and in the right way, to help the viewer exist in the now, has led to the creation of a body of work that operates as a cinematic expression of Zen meditation.

32 Also, “Cinematography films: emotional, not representational” (ibid., 62). 78 Chapter Three: Zen Mind and Bressonian Acting

The previous two chapters explored the striking overlap between the transformation of perception caused by Zen meditation and Bresson’s unique cinematographic method for organizing pieces of the material world. Having examined Bresson’s cinematographic style, I now shift to an analysis of the similarities Bresson’s unique theory of acting and Zen beliefs regarding the nature of self and the experience of being. Like a painter referring to the subject of a canvas, Bresson famously referred to actors as “models.” His use of this term downplays the importance of performance and foregrounds the role of casting. Bresson writes to himself, “BEING (models) instead of SEEMING (actors)” (Notes, 2016, p. 6). This method of achieving authenticity depends on the selection of the right model for the role before shooting begins. In this chapter, I will illustrate how Bresson’s specific approach to working with these models is mirrored in the teachings of Zen. Since his theory of acting is one of the most controversial aspects of his career, I believe a full chapter on his unorthodox process is warranted. Notes on the Cinematograph is once again a key text for this chapter, as well as Bresson on Bresson. As I have done in the previous chapters, I will start by drawing comparisons between Bressonian literature and Zen literature33 before discussing Bresson’s theory of acting in relation to specific films.

33 Just as D.T. Suzuki was the key source in relation to the study of cinematography, so too is Shunryu Suzuki essential to the study of Bressonian modeling. Thus, while I cite from a wide variety of Zen sources in this chapter, Suzuki’s magnificent Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind is perhaps most important for this chapter, as useful for our purposes as Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph. 79 TRUE SELF AND THE NATURE OF BEING

Bresson famously rejected acting in films entirely, finding the concept of performing for the camera false and self-serving. Bresson’s opinions regarding performance, or lack thereof, are apparent in an interview given in 1966 regarding Au Hasard Balthazar, in which he claims:

I want the mind to be completely absent from what is happening. So we rehearse, we repeat something fifty times if we have to, until the mind no longer has anything to do with the words or the gestures: once this automatism has set in, then I throw the character into the world of the film. Things happen that are completely unpredictable, but that are one hundred times truer than they would be in the theater, where the actor would have learned his dialogue by heart, along with his thoughts and gestures. There is no chance for that to lead to truth (Bresson, 2016, p. 167). Bresson achieves spontaneity through mind-numbing repetition, a paradox that makes far more sense in the context of Eastern philosophy than in Western thought. Zen simultaneously focuses on the spontaneity of life and the importance of achieving it through the establishment of simple daily ritual. Shunryu Suzuki claims that Zen “is like studying a foreign language; you cannot do it all of a sudden, but by repeating it over and over you will master it” (Suzuki, 1980, p. 46). And yet, Watts states that “the aimless life is the constant theme of Zen art of every kind, expressing the artist’s own inner state of going nowhere in a timeless moment” (Watts, 1999, p. 181). The claims from Suzuki and Watts represent both sides of the Zen coin: discipline, training, and effort for future improvement coupled with an emphasis on an eternal present that encourages the individual to live “in the now.” In both Zen living and Bressonian acting, repetition is necessary to obtain spontaneity, not because it allows one to learn something, but because it allows one to unlearn something: to forget oneself until one is completely absorbed in the activity. In his notes, Bresson writes: “To your models: ‘Don’t think what you’re saying, don’t think what 80 you’re doing… Don’t think about what you say, don’t think about what you do” (Notes, 2016, p. 13). Similarly, Watts writes:

When reading a difficult book it is of no help to think, ‘I should concentrate,’ for one thinks about concentration instead of what the book has to say. Likewise, in studying or practicing Zen it is of no help to think about Zen. To remain caught up in ideas and words about Zen is, as the old masters say, to ‘stink of Zen’ (Watts, 2016, p. 127). The importance of automatism is central to Zen and central to the theory of actor- as-model. This thoughtlessness is often cultivated by the repetition of mundane details. Bresson develops his thoughts on spontaneity and automatism further by tying them to the nature of the true self. To Bresson, the consciousness of one’s activity, manifested in the form of thoughts, ideas, and concepts, constructs a false self. This concept-driven consciousness must be stripped away to return to one’s true nature: in other words, no-self leads to true self. Criticizing conventional film acting, Bresson claims, “The actor learning his part presupposes a ‘self’ known in advance (which does not exist)” (Notes, 2016, p.

57). In contrast, Bresson favors the model, and “His pure essence” (ibid., p. 32). In order for this to be accomplished, “‘One must not act either somebody else or oneself. One must not act anybody’” (ibid., p. 40). This process is remarkably similar to Shunryu Suzuki’s description of Buddha nature:

Buddha nature is just another name for human nature, our true human nature. Thus even though you do not do anything, you are actually doing something. You are expressing yourself. You are expressing your true nature. Your eyes will express; your voice will express; your demeanor will express. The most important thing is to express your true nature in the simplest, most adequate way and to appreciate it in the smallest existence (Suzuki, 1980, p. 48). Suzuki’s phrase “true nature” occurs multiple times in Bresson’s notes. Bresson claims that the model’s voice “takes on automatically the inflections and modulations proper to his true nature” (Bresson, 2016, p. 22), and again, “The words they have learned with their lips

81 will find, without their minds taking part in this, the inflections and the lilt proper to their true natures” (Notes, 2016, p. 42). The belief that true nature is best expressed by freeing the mind from conscious thought runs counter to the whole idea of Western acting and Western thought more broadly. To the western mind, identity is tied up in individual thought: Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” In Zen philosophy, to think is to lose one’s true identity. Likewise, in conventional narrative film, the goal of constructing a “true” performance is obtained through the process of research and preparation, by the actor’s conscious desire to act as a vehicle for expressing a character’s identity. However, for Bresson’s models, any strategy for character identity is the wrong strategy, and the unconscious act of expressing oneself is simultaneously the process and the goal. Bresson grew more firm in this belief and stricter in his approach as his career developed. While the performances were undeniably subdued in Bresson’s earliest films, they still made use of some professional actors, a decision that he would later reject entirely. In Les Anges du Péché (1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1946), we see the professional actors of conventional 1940s melodrama forced to constrain themselves to the direction of a filmmaker who favored subtlety. These early films are still a far cry from the near-invisible acting of Claude Laydu in Bresson’s third feature, Diary of a Country Priest. But even here Bresson’s theory has not fully developed and he continues to employ some professional actors; the acting is stripped down, but it is still a form of acting. With A Man Escaped, in which Bresson casts a philosophy student in the lead role as Fontaine, Bresson solidified his theory. Later in his career, he would claim that he could cast his models more quickly and intuitively, but his general approach to directing the non-performances in his films was relatively consistent from A Man Escaped to L’Argent, his final film. 82 For the rest of this chapter, I will focus primarily on the use of models in four films: A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Mouchette, and Au Hasard Balthazar. This four-film structure does not encapsulate the entirety of the Zen-model connection, which could be examined in relation to almost any of Bresson films, but the films selected here are not quite chosen arbitrarily. Short documentaries on the making of both Pickpocket and Mouchette reveal fascinating insights about Bresson’s work with models, while a third documentary includes an invaluable interview with the lead actor in A Man Escaped. The selection of the fourth film, Au Hasard Balthazar, stems from my belief that the use of the donkey is the greatest

Zen model that the writer/director ever put on film. While all of the films from A Man Escaped to L’Argent would hold up to such analysis, these four films serve as particularly strong examples of Bresson’s approach to film acting. In the preceding chapters, I stuck to a strictly chronological organization of the films discussed. This decision was intended to provide a sense of Bresson’s maturation as a director. For this chapter, I have inverted the ordering of Mouchette (1967) and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) in order to build context for my final point.

A MAN ESCAPED (1956)

As previously discussed in Chapter One, A Man Escaped possesses a particularly striking unity of content and form. The minimalism of production design required by the film’s primary setting (a prison cell) and the simplicity of the hero’s work make this an ideal Zen project. For the first time in his career, Bresson chooses a protagonist with no professional experience at all. While countless notes and interviews with other actors and crew members confirm the unique way in which Bresson attempts to strip the model of self during the stage of production, an interview with François Leterrier (the lead actor in A

83 Man Escaped) is particularly useful for its insight into Bresson’s treatment of actors in recording sessions during post-production. In The Essence of Forms, a short documentary filmed in 2010, Leterrier recalls that the sound was added in post, and that Bresson would call each actor to the editing room to sync dialogue without allowing them to see themselves on screen. He would give no indication of the rhythm or tone at which the dialogue would be delivered, making the actor repeat the simplest sentences over and over until the sentence happened to match what was on-screen (Fig. 8). His perspective reveals the exhausting nature of the process of losing oneself in the line:

You’d been waiting outside. Now you could enter the studio. He said the phrase for you and you repeated it. It took time. You might repeat it 40, 50, or 60 times until he got what he wanted. I remember doing lines over and over. A famous one was, ‘Go to bed and sleep…’ He didn’t tell me what I was doing wrong. He waited until the phrase came out the way he imagined it (Essence, 2010). Leterrier also claimed that Bresson was so particular about intonation that he would splice individual words from various takes into the soundtrack to capture the precise uttering of a single sentence. This process wildly contrasts with traditional methods of acting in film and theater by rejecting the work of the actor in his or her unique interpretation of the role. Leterrier continues:

Once the sound was postsynchronized [sic], it had to be edited. Lamy, an excellent editor, tore his hair out because Bresson had five or six good takes of the same phrase, but he’d say ‘Use the ‘I’ from the third take, the ‘am’ from the second take’—Word by word. Bresson wanted him to take words from different takes. If you listen carefully, you can hear it on certain lines (ibid.).

Throughout this entire process, Bresson refuses to coach the actor with examples for delivery. Paradoxically, he wants the actor to arrive unconsciously at a predetermined utterance. Having already filmed the scene, Bresson knows the pace and tone of the dialogue needed to match the visual content, and yet he provides the actor with no hints. 84

François Leterrier as Fontaine

The line recalled by Leterrier: repetition and automatism

Figure 8: The actor as model in A Man Escaped (1956)

85 Bresson’s obsession with automatism and spontaneity is so complete that even after the work is done, once the actor’s voiceover is limited to the structure set by the movement of the mouths on a pre-recorded scene, Bresson refuses to allow the actor to arrive at the achieved result without stumbling across it accidentally. But concerning physicality and movement while shooting, Bresson was far more direct about his intentions, at least in terms of the character’s outer experience. He provided very precise instructions as to how the character would gesture and where the character would move. All of this was of course accomplished without resorting to discussion of character motivation, which would make the actor conscious of his performance in a manner that could potentially be distracting. Leterrier claims, “Bresson never gave me a direction in terms of emotion or feeling. He’d say, ‘move from here to there, Look here, then there.’ And we’d do it over until it was exactly how he wanted…He never gave directions about interiority the way other directors do on their films” (ibid.). To ask Bresson for answers on character interiority, on the reason for why the characters do what they do, would be like questioning a Zen master on the reasons for training. Hisamatsu claims, “People often ask questions about the nature of Zen, the Buddha, or the , but their questions cannot be answered by those who are questioned. The answer is in the questioner. There’s no need to ask…There is nothing that ought to be discussed in Zen” (Hisamatsu,

2002, p. 59). Similarly, Bresson quotes Pascal to himself when describing his work with models: “They want to find the solution where all is enigma only” (Notes, 2016, p. 51).

To attempt to reduce the enigma to human concepts is to create a performance constructed in a manner which is false. Hisamatsu could just as well be speaking to a Bressonian model when he claims, “not being just as you are is false, a sort of lie, as it were” (Hisamatsu, 2002, p. 59). The purity and plainness of Leterrier’s movements on- screen and the automatism that Bresson coaxes out of his line readings give rise to a screen 86 presence that has been freed from the individualistic thinking of Western culture. Out of Bresson’s rigid structure, the model accidentally lets his or her inner self shine through. The movement of Fontaine’s hands creating a makeshift rope out of cloth is as important a revelation into his nature as the blank expression on his face when he hears the gunshot that signals the death of a fellow prisoner. Rather than allow Leterrier to chase Fontaine, Bresson merges the character of Fontaine into Leterrier. In other words, Leterrier does not adjust to fit the shape of the character; rather, under the guidance of the director, the character adjusts to fit the shape of him.

This unorthodox method was difficult to assess in the 1950s, but the critics of Cahiers du Cinéma were aware (if imperfectly) of Bresson’s intentions. In a 1957 interview at Cannes for A Man Escaped, Bresson was asked by the Cahiers critics, “Were you trying, in a way, to reveal François Leterrier to himself [italics mine] through your film, or to integrate him into your film according to your own conception?” (Bresson, 2016, p. 51).

Bresson responds, “Both…that is to say, I invent what he is. But before shooting, we saw each other every day; we spoke, and I became convinced I hadn’t been wrong—that I had in fact found in him the character I was looking for” (ibid., p. 51). While the parallels between Bressonian acting and Zen Buddhism (self-revelation through unconscious activity) went unrecognized, contemporary French critics were asking pertinent questions about a directorial approach to acting that was clearly unique. Bresson was making a name for himself not only with his special approach to cinematography, editing, and sound, but also with a highly unusual approach to performance that avoided the self-conscious nature of traditional film acting.

87 PICKPOCKET (1959)

Given the space constraints of this analysis, I was forced to sidestep a cinematographic examination of Pickpocket in the previous two chapters, but it is an essential work in the director’s filmography. Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Bresson’s narrative concerns a pickpocket’s unexpected route to redemption in a contemporary urban setting. The protagonist Michel (Martin La Salle) becomes morbidly fascinated with the art of pickpocketing, and distances himself from his friend Jacque (Pierre Leymarie) and neighbor Jeanne (Marika Green). Michel flirts with danger, talking with the police in thinly veiled conversations of criminality that parallel Raskolnikov’s behavior in Crime and Punishment. He is ultimately arrested, trying for the second time to rob a bystander at the racetrack setting that opened the film. It is not until he is imprisoned that he finds redemption in Jeanne’s love, inverting the narrative conceit of A Man Escaped: liberation is found not by release, but by confinement.

Michel’s moral and professional arcs are inversely proportional: as he falls to a life of destitution in prison, he finds redemption in the love of a woman who he had previously neglected. But while Bresson’s narrative and thematic concerns are similar in spirit to Dostoevsky’s, he is in no way the cinematic correlative to his Russian literary hero. Dostoevsky’s book is sprawling (a small narrative stretched over more than 400 pages), hastily written, wordy, and most importantly, psychological. Bresson’s film is short (75 minutes), carefully constructed, physical, and less concerned with psychological motivation in the traditional sense. To downplay psychology in Pickpocket is perhaps a controversial move. Although Bresson insisted that he minimalized character psychology in his films, many scholars have offered Freudian interpretations of the film. Psychoanalyst Tony Pipolo went so far as to write an entire book interpreting each of Bresson’s films through a psychologist’s lens. 88 While Pipolo admits that Bresson himself would likely deny such readings, his Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is a well-written and thought-provoking piece of psychoanalysis. Of all of Bresson’s films, Pickpocket is perhaps most conducive to psychological readings and the strongest evidence for Pipolo’s points. However, I would argue that Bresson’s well-documented stance against such psychological analysis is apparent to some degree even in Pickpocket, which de-emphasizes Dostoevsky’s main contribution to literature. I must qualify that the type of psychology that Bresson tends to reject refers only to the implications that the word has in a Western context. Bresson’s cinematic style certainly emphasizes character subjectivity, but this type of subjectivity focuses on direct experience as opposed to words, ideas, and concepts. In short, Bresson often suggests a character’s point of view, but he does so in a way that draws attention to sensory information (sights and sounds) as opposed to a character’s worldview.34 Bresson’s lack of emphasis on character psychology in the filmmaking process is well-documented, and the 52-minute documentary The Models of Pickpocket is particularly insightful in this regard. Made nearly 50 years after the release of Pickpocket, the filmmakers interview three of the film’s primary “models” or “interpreters”:35 Pierre Leymarie, Marika Green, and Martin LaSalle. Their reflections on the production of the film confirm the claims that Bresson made in his notes and interviews, and their comments are characteristically Zen-like. Unsurprisingly, the interviewees frequently address the issue of repetition. Pierre

Leymarie, the actor portraying Jacques, claimed, “Five or ten takes were common. Fifteen

34 For more on this point, see the section concerning Mouchette in Chapter One. If cinematic correlatives to Dostoevsky exist, Scorsese and Hitchcock are perhaps closer approximations. 35 Pierre claims that while Bresson would later use the term “models,” at the time of filming Pickpocket he referred to them as “interpreters.” This seems to contradict François Lettier’s claim that Bresson referred to his actors as “models” as early as A Man Escaped in 1956. Either Bresson varied the terms from film to film, or someone’s memory is faulty. 89 or 20 [sic] sometimes. I think we once went up to 36 takes…After a certain number of repetitions, it’s a bit like brainwashing. You don’t know anymore [sic] what you’re saying” (Models, 2005.).36 Martin LaSalle, the actor who plays the protagonist Michel, also speculates on the reason for the repetition: “That business of climbing the staircase 40 times—there must have been a reason. I think that maybe it was to weaken the ego of the ‘model’ or actor” (ibid.).”37

Bresson’s implementation of a rigid, repetitive, monotonous structure to achieve moments of truth finds an obvious parallel in the Zen way of life, represented by Shunryu

Suzuki’s description of the Buddha: “In order to find out how dough became perfect bread, he made it over and over again, until he became quite successful. That was his practice” (Suzuki, 1980, p. 56). The process of losing oneself in an activity leads to the cessation of thought that characterizes one’s true nature. Thus, Suzuki tells his students, “Do not think about anything…Then eventually you will resume your own true nature. That is to say, your own true nature resumes itself” (ibid., p. 49). As Leymarie suggests above, to act for Bresson is to stop thinking about what one is saying because he intends for this process to lead to the discovery of one’s true nature. Listening to the interviewees, one also gets a sense of Bresson’s desire to release his actors from goal-oriented thinking. While the lines are repeated over and over again, the result is not to consciously strive for the intended effect, but rather to exist moment after moment until one displays the unintended effect. Marika Green, who played Jeanne, claims that “he was searching for the moment when a human being lets go. He wanted to recapture that moment of letting go, I think. And the youngest ones, like us, could let go

36 Asked if he felt “depersonalized” through this process, Leymarie claims that he wasn’t bothered. However, after the release of the film, he admits to feeling initial disappointment on hearing a remark from one of his father’s friends: “It’s not that your son doesn’t act well. He doesn’t act at all” (“Models,” 2005). 37 Again, we think of Bresson’s note: “The actor learning his part presupposes a ‘self’ known in advance (which does not exist)” (Notes, 2016, p. 57). 90 without any problem. That psychological aspect wasn’t yet developed” (“Models,” 2005).38 The concept of letting go of everything, from worldly attachments to psychological content, is a central precept of Zen Buddhism. Indeed, this way of speaking about Zen is so widespread that it is verifiable by merely examining the titles of various books on the practice: Letting Go: The Story of Zen Master Tosui by Peter Haskel, Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Bad Habits by , and Let Go: Theory &

Practice of Detachment According to Zen by Hubert Benoit.39 By letting go of any conscious notions of identity, one is able to transcend the prison of ambition. Hisamatsu describes this paradoxically goalless journey in Bressonian fashion: “Therefore, when Linji tells us we should seek true insight, the true way of seeking is not to seek. The lack of any seeking is true seeking” (Hisamatsu, 2002, p. 76). This claim is a near paraphrase of Bresson’s note to himself to “Practice the precept: find without seeking” (Notes, 2016, p. 40). The model does not seek a feeling that he or she does not possess or attempt to translate the psychology of a character separate from his or her own identity. The simple, repetitive instructions from the director keep the model’s work free from conscious goals. It is also worth mentioning that an additional use of this approach to film acting is to place a stronger emphasis on gesture. As the following stills from the film reveal (Fig.

9), Bresson is more interested in how the face interacts with the movement of hands, feet, and bodies than he is with the face itself. The scenes of pickpocketing, which reveal what

38 “When you give up, when you no longer want something, or when you do not try to do anything special, then you do something” (Suzuki, 1980, p. 47). And again, “There is no starting point, nor goal, nothing to attain” (ibid., p. 54). 39 This idea was apparently so prevalent in Zen communities that it found its way into the music of Zen enthusiast Leonard Cohen, whose song The Smokey Life contains lines such as “There is nothing to investigate” and “It’s light enough to let it go” (Cohen, 2014). While Jewish in faith, Cohen was fascinated by Zen Buddhism and spent a period of his later life meditating on Mt. Baldy under the guidance of Kyozan Joshu Sasaki. 91

The purse The take

The wallet The pass

The wallet The pass

The watch The case

Figure 9: The intelligence of hands—criminal team in Pickpocket (1959) 92 Bresson calls “the intelligence of hands,” (Bresson, 2016, p. 63) is close to the Zen ideal of losing oneself in one’s activity. The type of intelligence that Bresson refers to here is not intelligence in the Western sense of the word, and it has nothing to do with words, abstractions, symbols, or conscious thoughts. It is instead an appreciation of the delicate genius of skillful physical behavior performed automatically. The following stills reveal the camera’s fascination with the act of theft.

This celebration of gesture, and the Zen-like concentration with which the act of pickpocketing is performed, has something in common with the meditation claims made by neuroscientist , who writes about the difference between a wandering mind and a concentrated mind:

Generally speaking, to pay attention outwardly reduces activity in the brain’s midline, while thinking about oneself increases it. These results appear mutually reinforcing and might explain the common experience we have ‘losing ourselves in our work.’40 Mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation (: metta) also decrease activity in the DMN [default mode network]—and the effect is most pronounced among experienced meditators (both while meditating and at rest) (Harris, 2014, p. 121). The process of losing oneself in a physical activity is directly linked to meditation, and Harris discusses the relationship between mindfulness meditation and human neurology.41 This scene in Pickpocket communicates this flow state in cinematic terms, due in no small part to the work of Bresson’s models, who achieve the automatism that Bresson cultivates.

Bresson’s approach to directing his models creates performances that are remarkably physical, and the intuitive reactions of the human body are given primacy over the

40 At this point, Harris includes a footnote citing “The Default Mode Network and Self-Referential Processes in Depression” (2009) by Y.I. Sheline et al. 41 While Harris is not a Zen Buddhist, and has written critically of various world religions, he has written eloquently on the importance of Zen, (of ), and mindfulness not only for physical and psychological health, but also for gaining important realizations about the nature of consciousness. The terms “mindfulness,” Dzogchen, and Zen are not truly interchangeable (for reasons that are too detailed to explore for our purposes here), but it is not controversial to observe that Zen Buddhism has had an enormous influence on the mindfulness movement in the West. 93 emotional interiority suggested (or imposed on the viewer) by the facial expressions of traditional acting. In other words, the emphasis on gesture in relation to the models mirrors the work being accomplished in the scene cinematographically—the viewer loses oneself to the film experience in the same way that the pickpocket loses himself to his work.

MOUCHETTE (1967)

Some of the most valuable sources for examining the theory of actor-as-model in practice are two short documentaries available on the Criterion DVD of Mouchette. The 31-minute documentary Au Hasard Bresson is predominantly composed of behind-the- scenes footage of Bresson directing his models in a way that confirms his claims. The 7- minute Cinéma: Travelling also contains on-set production footage, in addition to two brief but essential interviews with Nadine Nortier and Jean-Claude Gilbert, the actors playing Mouchette and Arsène, respectively.

The interview with Nortier lends credence to Marika Green’s claim that youthful actors lack the self-consciousness of professionals. When the 18-year-old Nortier is asked if it is difficult for her to play a 14-year-old, she looks off camera for a moment and then gives a blunt “No.” The interviewer is persistent: “You don’t have to work at it?” Nortier returns, “No” (Cinéma, n.d.). These responses are precisely what Bresson is after. While behind-the-scenes footage shows Nortier, like all of Bresson’s models, receiving constant and repetitive correction, she accepts it quickly and continues to follow the basic instructions that she is given. Her work is both disciplined and effortless, a Zen-infused paradox. Gilbert is equally simple, and his lack of pretension makes for a humorous exchange. When asked to speak to his experience as an actor, he claims that “It’s mindless

94 work,” and falls silent as if the answer is entirely satisfactory. He is pushed on the point: “Why?” With a soft head shake, he responds, “I take no initiative. I don’t have to use my brain at all, assuming I have one.” He explains that his actual profession is masonry. When asked if he would consider working with another director, he shrugs: “Sure, if the pay is the same” (Cinéma, n.d.). The insistence that the work of acting is “mindless” obviously implies that one ceases to think about it. As Hisamatsu tells us, “Thinking that one must sit, and actually sitting, are two different things” (Hisamatsu, 2002, p. 11). Released in 1967, the film that “starred” Nortier and Gilbert coincided with the explosion of acting talent in the films of the New Hollywood. The era of method acting that introduced audiences to Dustin Hoffman, Faye Dunaway, Al Pacino, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Ellen Burstyn, Robert De Niro, and Meryl Streep was beginning. While Bresson’s native France arguably didn’t experience the same radical shift in performing style, movie star culture was very much alive, with Anna Karina, Alain Delon, Catherine

Deneuve, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Jeanne Moreau working for many of the important French directors of the time. Against such a backdrop, Bresson’s casting of a mason (one of the rare actors to appear in a second Bresson film, after Au Hasard Balthazar) and an 18-year-old with no previous acting experience evokes the simplicity of Zen. Cinéma: Travelling also provides a close look at Bresson’s direction of actors, providing invaluable behind-the-scenes footage of the shooting of Mouchette’s singing scene. Attempting to soothe the town alcoholic, who has just had an epileptic fit in front of her, Mouchette sings a song that she learned in school. Bresson’s precise directions refer not to psychological motivation or the projection of feeling, but rather focus solely on the logistics of Nortier’s movement and delivery. “Try singing it faster,”42 he suggests, and

42 This piece of footage is characteristically Bresson in all details except for one: for a moment, Bresson can be heard softly singing along with Nortier, offering an example of the rhythm and tone to emulate. This contrasts with Leterrier’s experience of working on A Man Escaped. While it is possible that Bresson’s 95 after several seconds, he steps in: “That’s not right.” Then, “Don’t drop that” in reference to a musical note. Nortier sings for a bit longer and receives a characteristically simple response: “Good” (Cinéma, n.d.). This summary is about as engaging as the production footage itself—there is a banality to what unfolds that is only transformed once the film arrives in the editing room. More evidence is available in Au Hasard Bresson, in which we see behind-the- scenes footage of Bresson directing a take that most likely appears in the finished film. We can infer this because we hear Bresson call “Very good, print that one” after the completion of the shot (although given his penchant for retakes, it is of course possible that he chose an alternative, near-identical take in post-production). There are no conversations about character development, arc, or motive, and not even the simplest instruction for how to play the scene emotionally. Instead, Bresson concerns himself with the problem of the set- up of a shot and Nadine Nortier’s walking and gate-opening abilities (Fig. 10). Bresson first addresses his crew: “Is she moving left or right? Slant the fence this way so it isn’t so flat…that’s good. Don’t slant it too much. The sun will cast shadows.” And then to Nordier: “Keep your arms stiff. Slow down. Look at the house. Slide through slowly. Very slowly. Good. Cut” (Au Hasard Bresson, 1967). At a glance, this fastidiousness concerning the minor details seems to suggest a filmmaker who lacks the ability to prioritize. But Bresson doesn’t lack priorities: rather, his priorities are the inverse of most filmmakers. The manner by which Mouchette opens the gate is more important than Nordier’s understanding of her character or our ability to appreciate her performance. In other words, it is not that Bresson is concerned with everything, even down to the finest detail, but rather that he is concerned with the finest detail at the expense of everything else. subtle coaching in this singing scene was the result of the stage of production, and that in post Nortier would go through a process similar to Leterrier, it is also possible that Bresson adapted in this respect to the needs of individual projects. 96

Bresson directs Nortier

Bresson supervises the walk

Shot in the finished film

Figure 10: Direction of models—Mouchette (1967) 97 In the discussion of Au Hasard Balthazar in Chapter One, we saw how Bresson’s cinematography and editing choices de-emphasized narrative. Like meditation, Mouchette is concerned with our ability to directly experience things going on in the present, not to project into the past or future in order to conceptualize a framework for the events that occur. We can identify a similar intention here with the direction of Nortier. The concern with the way in which Nortier opens the gate, and the lack of concern with our understanding of Mouchette’s motivation, encapsulates Zen philosophy. Mouchette’s “true self” is not to be found by any kind of thought, be it on the part of the actress or the audience. Instead, her true self arises out of the repetition of simple actions, a repetition that leads to automatism. Sheng Yen’s interpretation of a Hongzhi’s writings on Silent Illumination suggest a self that appears through the losing of self. Sheng Yen claims,

Although the earth is holding up the steep, lofty mountain, it has no self- conscious notion of doing so. For its part, the stone has no idea that it contains a flawless jade. Both are totally free of self-reference. So both analogies affirm the silence in Silent Illumination—no thoughts and no attachment (Yen, 2008, p. 77). Zen suggests that no-self is the route to true-self, mirroring the process by which Bresson strips his characters of identity to reveal an inner truth that he believes cannot be captured in words. It is widespread knowledge that Western culture tends to be individualistic, while Eastern culture places the emphasis on the community. Zen Buddhism eradicates the boundaries between “I” and “you,” “us” and “them.” Eastern philosophy sees identity as an illusion and the quest for individualism as an exercise in futility. Bresson’s actors embody this idea. In the same way that Buddhism emphasizes the unity of humanity, all people as reflections of one true self, so too are Bresson’s models united by the filmmaker’s unique approach to directing actors, which de-individualizes them. Bresson’s special approach is not a desire to chase individualism. Rather, it is distinctive merely in contrast 98 to the individualism of other filmmakers. In the same way that a Zen monk looks individualistic on the street corner of New York City, Bresson’s lack of ostentation stands out in an ostentatious culture. The radical nature of Bresson’s cinema lacks radicalism; the genius director employs no genius. Bresson’s entry into the esteemed canon of Western art cinema is a simple country boy’s journey to the city, a donkey’s walk through the world of humanity.

AU HASARD BALTHAZAR (1966)

The walk of the donkey is a particularly important point of intersection between Zen philosophy and Bressonian modeling. Balthazar is perhaps the most Bressonian and the most Zen model of the director’s entire filmography. If Zen philosophy is concerned with experience over intellect, sensory detail over conceptual thought, and autonomous activity as opposed to consciously driven behavior, then an animal protagonist is perhaps the perfect representation of Zen on film. Zen philosophy emphasizes (in part) our animal nature,43 and the aspects of human behavior that it critiques most harshly are the characteristics that we have adopted through the accumulation of language and culture, characteristics that distance us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

To understand Zen is to understand passivity.44 Watts states that “the mind cannot act without giving up the impossible attempt to control itself beyond a certain point”

43 This is a useful comparison, but it is true only in a limited sense. Unlike animals, Zen is also concerned with cultivating the skill to transcend emotional responses: anger, sadness, excitement, etc. This skill is lacking in the rest of the animal kingdom. However, Zen also emphasizes spontaneity and the eternal now, and humans are the only animals that currently struggle under the constant burden of abstract thought. A Zen master delighting in the sound of the birds singing in a forest is inhabiting a natural state of being that is reflected in the behavior of many animals. 44 Again, a Zen master would probably push back that to “understand” Zen is to not understand it. Regardless, in order to make this point clear, I am forced to rely on words to convey the general idea. If one 99 (Watts, 1999, p.139). A Zen master knows that he or she is not the author of actions. Rather, these actions flow spontaneously through a body that reacts to the world around it. There is no attempt to act upon the world because there is no separation between “I” and the world; the I is a part of the world, the world is a part of I, and one’s behavior is born out of this automatism. One sees the world as a constant happening, and one’s reaction to the world is also a happening. By casting a donkey in the lead role, Bresson does away with the need for repetition to achieve this effect. Balthazar embodies the happening, and the donkey is as passive a film protagonist as any in the history of the medium. In a review of

Au Hasard Balthazar, critic identifies this passivity: “Balthazar makes no attempt to communicate its emotions to us, and it comunicates [sic] its physical feelings only in universal terms: Covered with snow, it is cold. Its tail set afire, it is frightened. Eating its dinner, it is content. Overworked, it is exhausted” (Ebert, 2004, n.p). The simplicity that Ebert observes not only makes the donkey “the perfect Bresson character”

(ibid.), but also a powerful embodiment of Zen on film (Fig. 11). Balthazar views the behavior of humans, beautiful and ugly, heroic and obscene, with a matter-of-factness that suggests a monk’s acceptance. To fall back on a trite proverb, the cinematographic perspective of the donkey captures his attitude towards the world: it is what it is. This passivity is apparent even in the more superficially complex scenes, particularly one in which Balthazar is trained to perform in the circus. When Balthazar stamps his feet to indicate a number, thus solving problems of arithmetic for the entertainment of an audience, he is not illustrating his intellectual prowess. Balthazar’s stamping is a direct and immediate response, and his training is a simple reaction to the context in which he has been placed. Determined to capture this authenticity, Bresson cast

were to appoint a Zen master as an advisor for a thesis concerning Zen Buddhism, he or she would most likely perform the professorly duty of burning the manuscript. 100

A donkey’s perspective

Counting with hooves at the circus: production halted for two months

Zen in death: a passive protagonist

Figure 11: The ideal model—Au Hasard Balthasar (1966)

101 an untrained donkey for the first section of the film, then halted the filming process for several months so that the donkey could be trained. Ever conscious of the need for the model to “be” and not to “act,” Bresson extends this approach even to the performance (or lack thereof) of an animal. The animal is the only model completely free of the knowledge that he is going to be in a movie projected for an audience. Shunryu Suzuki claims, “When I was at Eiheiji monastery in Japan, everyone was just doing what he should do. That is all…And when we were practicing, we did not feel anything special. We did not even feel that we were leading a monastic life” (Suzuki, 1980, p. 78). To paraphrase Suzuki in a

Bressonian context, the donkey just does what he should do without feeling special, and he does not feel that he is leading Balthazar’s life. This approach lends a spiritual purity to Balthazar, but this purity is not the result of a moral code. The goodness of his existence is arrived at through the paradoxical transcendence of moral concepts. A superficial examination of Zen suggests the importance of striving to do good: a Zen monk will live simply, love others, avoid various vices, and perform his or her duties with humility. And yet, this goodness is not arrived at by conscious thought. In Zen, there is no thinking of good or evil, no effort to abide by a moral code. Zen Buddhists believe that goodness stems not from conscious effort, but by transforming one’s perception of the world in such a way that one contributes to the good unconsciously, as if it were the only way to be.45 Hisamatsu speaks of the Sixth Founding Teacher’s advice to Huiming: “‘Think not of good, think not of evil. At that very moment, let me see your original face’” (Hisamatsu, 2002, p. 59). Balthazar is perhaps the only film hero to show this original face, living his life unaware of the good/evil dichotomy. He is a character completely devoid of evil, and his goodness is a way of being, not of doing.

45 In an interview for Pickpocket, Bresson responds to the question of whether his film has any “moral meaning” by claiming, “If there is one, I made no effort to put it there” (Bresson on Bresson, 2016, p. 64). 102 For Bresson, one directs not to teach the model, but to help him or her unlearn the habits acquired as a result of conscious effort. Thus, the repetition serves not to educate the individual, but to purge the actor of thought. Donald Richie claimed that Bresson has his models “do the same thing over and over again until they have dropped what little vestige of self they ever had” (“Donald,” n.d.). To drop the self is quintessential Zen. But concerning Balthazar, this work is almost completely accomplished at the level of casting

(the circus example mentioned above being an exception to this rule, requiring directorial effort). Almost everything that Bresson is after, the character in his very “suchness,” to use the Watts phrase, is available to the director at the moment he calls action. Thus, the animal model requires almost no direction. It must merely behave physically in the scene according to the needs of the film. Having dispensed with the need to strip this model of self, the only task left to Bresson is the cinematographic task of finding an aural-visual correlative to the donkey’s simple way of being. In most Bresson films, the actors must adjust their style to fit the subtlety of his cinematographic vision. But in making Balthazar, Bresson is working with a donkey, an animal that is more naturalistic than his cinematography. Therefore, Bresson must push himself ever further than before to capture the simplicity of a donkey in the language of film: sounds and images.

MODELS AND MEDITATION

Ultimately, the process of rejecting any conscious display of acting functions to heighten the state of meditation that Bresson cultivates in the viewer. The audience is not invited to analyze or interpret character’s motivations, but to take the model as he or she exists in a natural state of life, stripped of social, cultural, narrative, or psychological explanations. In the same way that a meditator decontextualizes an object to see it as it 103 plainly is, so too does Bresson decontextualize his characters to reveal a pure state of existence. The unassuming nature of the performances corresponds to the subdued nature of the cinematography and soundtrack. In the work of Bresson’s models, we witness a type of minimalism that leads to a Zen-like transformation of our perception, a shift from acting to being.

104 Conclusion: From Tarkovsky to Tarr, Antonioni to Akerman—Topics for Further Research

As I have tried to illustrate, I believe that the filmmaking process of Robert Bresson finds a strong but understudied correlative in the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. However, the claims that I have made about Zen and filmmaking, particularly the link between meditation and cinematography, editing, and sound, are of course not limited to the films of Bresson. Though there is much potential for further study, I have found surprisingly little existing research in this area. Currently, discussions of depictions of Zen in film are far more common than uses of Zen as a framework for analyzing a film’s formal elements. But the link between cinema and Zen meditation, or for that matter cinema and mindfulness, extends beyond Bresson. Paul Schrader’s introduction to the new edition of Transcendental Style in Film is particularly useful for our purposes here. Though his argument is perhaps oversimplified,

Schrader’s work notes some of the directors who were influenced by Bresson and is thus a useful springboard for further Zen-film studies. Published in 2018, this new essay discusses the descendants of transcendental style and explores the origins of “slow cinema,” which Schrader attributes in large part to the influence of Bresson. He claims, “‘Slow cinema’ is a fairly recent term used to designate a branch of art cinema which features minimal narrative, little action or camera movement and long running times” (Schrader, 2018, p. 10). He goes on to describe many other characteristics of slow cinema, such as heightened sound effects, visual flatness, static frames, repeated compositions, minimal coverage, and non-acting. To some extent, Schrader may be guilty of overreaching, and I find it somewhat problematic to see Bresson as emblematic of a sort of proto-slow cinema. While Bresson shares with slow cinema a meditative quality, his films do not otherwise seem to meet any definition of slow. Schrader is correct to claim that “a long take need not be of Olympian 105 length to serve its purpose. It just needs to be longer than expected” (Schrader, 2018, p.11), and it is true that Bresson manipulates time by occasionally holding a shot longer than necessary. However, I would argue that far more frequently, Bresson manipulates time by cutting off shots prematurely, and that his famous elliptical editing is technically the opposite of the type of slow cinema favored by Tarkovsky, Kiarostami, Tarr, et al. Ultimately, Schrader’s list of the qualities of slow cinema seems unconvincing. The characteristics mentioned above (visual flatness, non-acting, static frames, etc.) are perhaps qualities that one could attribute to certain strands of meditative cinema, but to use them to employ a unique definition of “slow” that has little to do with temporality is grounds for skepticism. However, despite the flaws of Schrader’s approach in linking Bresson to slow cinema, certain filmmakers that he discusses do utilize sound and image in ways that correspond to Zen meditation, and his work is a useful starting point for further research in this area. This chapter explores some of the films and filmmakers that employ techniques that are, to varying degrees, conducive to a Zen lens.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY

Like Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky occupies the writer/director/theorist sphere discussed in the introduction, and his degree of control over his projects make him a useful starting point and organizing force for the study of films such as Mirror (1975), Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983), and The Sacrifice (1986). Bresson was held in the highest regard by Tarkovsky, who claimed that “Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand” (Tarkovsky, 2008, p. 94). The emphasis on immediate experience in the films of Tarkovsky warrants further investigation for the purposes of our study.

106 Tarkovsky also shares with his French hero a suspicion of symbolism and a desire to depict film objects in a way that emphasizes their uniqueness. By contrast, symbolism reduces film objects to the generic—thematic associations as opposed to pieces of specific experience. Furthermore, Tarkovsky is far more interested in the effect of sights and sounds on the viewer than he is with the exploration of concepts or themes, and he rejects intellectualism in his films in a way that suggests Eastern influence. He claims, “Art addresses everybody, in the hope of making an impression, above all of being felt…of winning people not by incontrovertible rational argument but through the spiritual energy with which the artist has charged the work” (Tarkovsky, 2008, p. 38). Indeed, Tarkovsky is conscious of this influence, and unlike Bresson, we have evidence of his exposure to Eastern ideas and his fascination (at least for a period of time) with Zen Buddhism. In A World in a Drop of Water: Eastern Influences in the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, Seán Martin notes Tarkovsky’s trip to Japan while filming scenes of Solaris in 1971 and his continued fascination with the culture. Martin even suggests a parallel between Zen meditation and the act of watching Tarkovsky’s films, paving the way for further research in the field. While Tarkovsky is less perfect of a Zen model than Bresson (for reasons hinted at in Chapter Two and explored further below), there are associations here that shouldn’t be ignored.

Stalker (1979), arguably Tarkovsky’s greatest achievement, opens with a quiet, glacially paced scene that illustrates the manner by which Tarkovsky sidesteps interpretation in favor of immersion. After a credit sequence (a sepia-toned shot of men drinking in a bar), Tarkovsky cuts to another sepia shot that is initially hard to visualize. What at first looks like a piece of abstract imagery, a fantastical pattern from a dream, reveals itself to be the camera’s slow movement toward a set of double doors, cracked slightly for the camera to enter through. A man and a woman lie asleep in bed. A high angle 107 shot, looking directly down at a bedside stand, tracks from right to left as the sound of an approaching train is heard in the distance. The camera tracks across a woman, who is possibly asleep, and past a sleeping child before arriving at a man, who is wide awake. Halting momentarily, it reverses its track back across the child, again revealing the woman, who has now unmistakably opened her eyes. It is possible that the characters were awakened by the sound of the train or of the French national anthem La Marseillaise

(diegetic or non-diegetic?), the latter seeming to increase and decrease in volume with the movement of the train.46

What is immediately apparent to the viewer is the juxtaposition between silence and sound—like in the films of Bresson, the soft sounds of the train draw attention to the silence that preceded it. Also immediately apparent is the visual splendor of the cinematography, which prioritizes pictorial beauty over realism. Who has double doors in front of a bedroom? Perhaps somebody very rich, but why then would the room’s interior be so cheaply furnished? And why is seemingly diegetic classical music accompanying the crescendo of the approaching train? The questions subside very quickly as we realize how aggressively and how consciously the film disregards logic. The assault on rationalism, the minimalism regarding narrative details, and the hypnotic pull of the images and sounds suggest a language closer to dreams and music than to literature or theater. Unlike Bresson, there is no mistaking this world for realism. And yet the directness with which we experience it, the hyper-attention to the sounds of the train and the seamless glide of the camera across a bed, remove the burden placed on the audience by most opening scenes in narrative cinema—the pressure to figure out who

46In Zona, a refreshingly personal, non-academic interpretation of Stalker, Geoff Dyer playfully mocks the lack of logic in the moments directly following this scene. The entire book is full of such irony, indicating that serious fans of the film fully accept and celebrate the film’s lapses in narrative and psychological clarity. 108 people are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it. In Stalker, one realizes fairly quickly that an inability to easily answer these questions is not antithetical to an appreciation for the film. Attempts at rational analysis remain incomplete, but the film effectively connects with the viewer on an emotional level. However, the Tarkovsky-Zen link breaks down at the point of minimalism/modesty. Like Tarkovsky, Zen prioritizes immediate experience and the “is- ness” of things, but as we have seen, to look at the lives of Zen practitioners is to see a life of extreme simplicity, a sort of extraordinary ordinariness. Bresson shares with Zen a delight for sensory experience and the natural world that is cultivated by the mundane; while meditative, Tarkovsky’s films lack this banality. Tarkovsky may admire the “simplicity” of Bresson,47 but his films are staggering pictorial achievements, breathtakingly conceived and sumptuously scored. The “minimalism” of Tarkovsky is a minimalism merely of narrative, and while the trance-inducing effect of the opening scene of Stalker is meditative, the style itself contains an ostentation more indicative of Tarkovsky’s Eastern Orthodox background than any aesthetic or philosophical schools of the Far East. Consider the elaborate nature of a Russian cathedral and the influence of Byzantine art on Russian religious culture. The architecture, with its awe-inspiring pockets of space, and the paintings, gorgeously rendered, contrast sharply with the simple daily life of the monks as described in Chapter Two. In Zen monasteries, monks dutifully perform simple activities in plain environments, to say nothing of the impressive amount of time spent sitting on simple mats.

47 In the 1984 documentary The Road to Bresson, Tarkovsky claims, “Bresson appeals to me precisely because, among the many artists who strive for simplicity and depth, he is alone among the very few who’ve managed to achieve it in his work. This is the most important part. Of course, we all strive for simplicity, any artist who is more or less serious strives for simplicity, and yet not many of us succeed in achieving this simplicity. But Bresson is one of the few who have [sic] succeeded” (Road, 1984).

109 If Bresson’s films capture the essence of the Zen koan, then Tarkovsky’s convey the spirit of the book of Revelation or the poetry of William Blake: visionary, apocalyptic, hallucinatory, and most importantly, otherworldly. Tarkovsky is fiercely dualistic: the distinction between flesh and spirit, material and ethereal, earth and heaven, is pronounced. The spiritual is certainly manifested within the material, and yet its purpose is ultimately to hint at another world, a peace to come. In Stalker, when the title character falls to the ground and experiences a spiritual vision, it is immediately clear to the audience that we are witnessing a shift—an identifiable movement from the world of the flesh to the world of the soul. The landscape begins to ripple as if the viewer has taken psychedelics, and as the camera pans across strange objects submerged beneath polluted water, a passage from Revelation 6:12-17 is whispered over the soundtrack. Tarkovsky sees traces of the divine in every tree and bird, and while he refuses to reduce them to symbols, he sees them as indicative of a spiritual realm that exists beyond the world that we currently inhabit. In contrast, Bresson’s style does not hint at another world so much as emphasize the spirituality of the present world, obtainable in the moment. From the Bressonian point of view, a hallucinatory vision, with staggering visual effects and a thunderous score, would be construed as false, an indulgent distraction from the beauty that exists in the ordinary. The opening shots of Au Hasard Balthazar in Chapter

One, in which the donkey is found, brought home, and baptized over the course of a few simple shots, could not be more different than the scene in Stalker. Again, this difference between Tarkovsky and Bresson is not apparent at the level of narrative content, character, or theme (in which case they are both strong proponents of Western Christianity), but at the level of film form—the physical world that Bresson creates is more in keeping with Zen than Tarkovsky.

110 Nevertheless, as far as Eastern studies are concerned, Tarkovsky’s fascination with the subjectivity of cinematic time and his emphasis on sensory immediacy are two Zen babies that can be extracted from the metaphysical bathwater. While the extravagance of Tarkovsky’s style clashes with Zen, Tarkovsky progressed the link between cinema and meditation in a manner that is otherwise highly conducive to Zen experience. To cite one of many examples, the climactic scene of The Sacrifice, in which the protagonist sets fire to his house, is filmed in a slow, methodical manner that completely absorbs the viewer in his process of preparation (the fact that the simple sound effects give way to an Eastern- influenced score, and that Alexander wears a robe with a yin-yang symbol on the back, are also worth noting). Serving as a sort of poster boy of arthouse cinema in the 1970s, one could also argue that Tarkovsky was an even more influential filmmaker than Bresson (being the more accessible of the two radical stylists), and that his popularization of the slow cinema movement paved the way for a filmmaker whose meditative qualities align more specifically with Zen philosophy: Béla Tarr.

BÉLA TARR

Before briefly investigating how this unique descendant of Bresson and Tarkovsky cultivates a similar type of viewer meditation, it is important to address a particularly confusing case of authorship. Béla Tarr seems to function as a sort of brand name for a film crew, putting us in a difficult position in assessing a unique body of films. In the 2014 documentary Tarr Béla: I Used to be a Filmmaker, Tarr suggests a middle path for examining his role. With something akin to familial pride, he claims, “My films are what they are because people who work on them really invest themselves, like spiritual partners” (Lepoutre, 2014). By the same token, he highlights his role as a sort of governor of the film

111 set: “It is quite a feudal system, because someone has to decide how to position the camera, and democracy does not belong in the world of art” (ibid). The films are a product of a European arthouse historical and production context that emphasizes a stylistic unity across films, and Tarr (or his marketers) seem to want to push auteurism as a vehicle for connecting films such as Damnation (1987), Sátántangó (1995), (2007), and The Turin Horse (2011).48 But the name is perhaps more a company than a person. Thus, while it is not egregious to speak of Sátántangó by Béla Tarr, the function is perhaps more similar to Toy Story (1995) by Pixar than Mouchette by Bresson. This leaves us in a troubling position. Referring to the films of Béla Tarr is an accurate way to represent the contributions of a filmmaking team, and yet the name potentially misleads. For clarity’s sake, I will continue to refer to these works as “The Films of Béla Tarr” and to personify the authorial voice, but I must first acknowledge that we currently lack another name to more accurately describe a Hungarian film crew with a distinctive film style. With Sátántangó and The Turin Horse, Tarr radicalizes Tarkovsky’s experimentation in the field of slow cinema. With an 8-minute opening shot of cows meandering in a pasture, Sátántangó proceeds at a glacial pace for more than seven hours. Like the act of Zen meditation, the process of losing oneself in the film, of “letting go,” is at first difficult to achieve. But once it clicks for the viewer, he or she loses all sense of time, experiencing a continual present unfolding on screen in a state of total calm and acceptance. It is difficult to conceive of a more Zen-like assertion than that offered by Sean

48 Even more confusing is the official crediting of the director in these two films. Starting with (2000), the films begin to credit Tarr’s wife Ágnes Hranitzky as co-director, and yet if Tarr’s claim is to be believed, there is less of a difference between the solo directorial credit on Sátántangó and the dual credit for The Turin Horse than one might initially suspect. To further complicate matters, the official trailer for The Turin Horse sensationally announces, “the final film by BÉLA TARR” (The Cinema Guild, 2012), disregarding Hranitzky entirely.

112 Burns, who claims, “Sátántangó bends your perception of time and turns monotony into an epiphany,” (Burns, 2019, n.p.). Sátántangó is a groundbreaking piece of cinematic guided meditation, employing a runtime just slightly shorter than the average American workday to quiet the mind and lull the audience away from the distraction of chronology. Around the time of the film’s release, New York Times critic Janet Maslin claimed that an unnamed Hungarian critic referred to the film as a “meditation through ugliness” (Maslin,

1994, n.p). The description captures the despairing nature of the film’s narrative, but the act of watching it also cultivates a type of hypnotic beauty. Like a meditative retreat in a cave, viewing the film is an escape from past and future, reflection and anticipation: one experiences the images and sounds directly, without filtering them through the mental noise generated by Western interpretation. In terms of pacing, The Turin Horse is even more radical, though it runs the less- radical length of two-and-a-half hours. With little dialogue and little narrative, Tarr’s camera concerns itself with a fictionalized, hypothetical interpretation of the days following the historic act that affected Friedrich Nietzsche so deeply: the beating of a horse in Turin by an angry owner. Tarr’s highly sympathetic portrayal of the man, the daughter, and the horse, who toil away on their farm at a level near starvation (the man and his daughter eat a potato each a day) is Bressonian in its redundancy—the film is split into five separate days of chores on the farm, and on the sixth day, the characters are consumed by darkness. Tarr depicts the repetitive actions—the daughter dressing the old man, the eating of the potato, the painful trek through dust and wind to retrieve water from the well—over and over again. The camera films the same chores from fresh angles as we progress from day to day, and the sixth day of the film frees us from the chores, but takes us into apocalyptic blackness.

113 The allegorical nature of the film—its relentless pessimism and its thematic flirtation with nihilism—are less important for our purposes than the cinematographic and aural effects employed. Regardless of the film’s thematic philosophy, Tarr’s use of film form strikes me as more Zen than nihilist. Unlike the European art cinema of pessimism referenced in Chapters One and Two—the gaudy, meaningless artificiality of The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, the gritty, docudrama despair of Accattone, or the nihilist parody of Tarkovsky on display in Antichrist, Tarr’s camera finds something in the nothing.49 The camera imbues the film objects with spiritual significance, a value born not out of their function as signposts to another world, but rather for the spirituality that they exhibit in their natural state. Though punishing in terms of content, the film achieves a spiritual quality born out of the state of meditation that it cultivates in the viewer. If Tarr is bleaker than Tarkovsky or even Bresson, his careful use of sights and sounds nevertheless contribute to a world of hypnotic beauty, a world worth inhabiting. The characters suffer immensely before their inevitable demise, and yet death seems to be their worst option. Tarr’s cinematographic choices communicate a value that is arguably lacking in the work of von Trier: the sense that life, despite its suffering, is worth living. Tarr is closer to Tarkovsky than Bresson in his employment of the long take, and he is also an eloquent visual stylist. There is a pictorial beauty within the individual shots in Sátántangó and The Turin Horse that is lacking in Bresson, but overall, Tarr is far less grandiose than Tarkovsky in terms of technique. If it’s not quite modest, it’s getting there, and the brooding scores and the exquisitely framed shots examine everyday objects in

49 In using the word parody, I don’t mean to convey that von Trier intends to critique Tarkovsky, a film hero who looms so large in his mind that he dedicated the film to him. Rather, von Trier seems to try to use a Tarkovsky-inspired form to inverse effect, and his seemingly spiritual style is not an attempt to emphasize hope in the world, but despair. Tarkovsky’s disdain for symbols contributed to a very literal spirituality, while the apparent spirituality of von Trier’s film functions more metaphorically to communicate darkness. In other words, Tarkovksy is optimistic and immediate, while von Trier is pessimistic and allegorical. 114 simple environments. While Tarkovsky’s burning barns, levitating bodies, and hallucinatory underwater imagery were employed to operatic effect, Tarr’s approach is subtler, if not as strict as Bresson’s in its fidelity to the mundane. Research into Tarr’s work with actors could also be rewarding. On the set of The Turin Horse, Tarr comments on Mihály Kormos’s performance: “Misi, here also, you overact…Here too, it’s overacted. Fucking overacted” (Lepoutre, 2014). The meditative quality of Tarr’s films is aided by the restrained work of his actors and actresses, and while there seems to be no evidence of Bresson’s unique approach to directing his models, Tarr’s minimalist approach to performance is worth closer inspection. After the filming of this scene, Kormos jokes to fellow actor János Derzsi about Tarr’s impending retirement: “Bela is gonna paint portraits and you will be his model.” Tarr playfully responds, “Portraits? My ass” (ibid).

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

In the BFI article What Antonioni’s movies mean in the era of mindfulness and #MeToo, Stephen Dalton suggests a link between meditation and the films of Antonioni that is worth exploring briefly. Given Antonioni’s rock-star status in European art circles and his exalted position in the pantheon of slow cinema, it is necessary to address his films, although I find them slightly less conducive to Zen experience than the other filmmakers discussed thus far. As I briefly mentioned in Chapter Two, the supposed “minimalism” of

Antonioni contains a staggering pictorial beauty that is the antithesis of Bresson’s Zen modesty. But in this respect Antonioni is similar to Tarkovsky, whose films still place the viewer in a state of meditation that suggests Eastern influence. Dalton seems to have a similar experience with the films of Antonioni, claiming, “Once you adjust to their languid

115 rhythms, Antonioni’s films still have a bewitching intensity about them, like a kind of cinematic mindfulness session, or a bracing dip in a cool mountain stream” (Dalton, 2019, n.p.). But while films such as L’Avventura (1960), Red Desert (1964), and The Passenger (1975) bear some characteristics of meditative cinema, I believe that on closer inspection, they reveal a somewhat different, or at least more complex, approach to filmmaking. Antonioni’s most famous works are studies in ennui; rich, lonely people attempting and failing to connect with each other. The choices of cinematography, editing, and sound convey a spatial and aural emptiness that reflects the emptiness of the characters’ lives.

The approach is more intellectual than sensory, more distancing than immersive.50 With Bresson, Tarkovsky, or even Tarr, potentially boring material is transformed by the filmmaker into spiritual material.51 With Antonioni, boredom is utilized to reflect his contemporary culture. By forging a style that mirrors the alienation of his characters, Antonioni prioritizes thematic and philosophical readings, even as his films contain some aspects of meditative cinema. While this technique is artistically justifiable, any attempt to adopt a Zen framework in assessing Antonioni must offer a caveat. In his “Great Movies” review of L’Aventurra, Ebert describes Antonioni’s thematic concerns: “His characters were parasites whose money allowed them to clear away the distractions of work, responsibility, goals and purposes, and exposed the utter emptiness within” (Ebert, 1997, n.p.). To speak of an “emptiness within” may sound Zen, but in Antonioni’s hands, this emptiness doesn’t cultivate peace of mind. The questions that he consistently raises about

50 While one may also speak of “distance” or “detachment” in Zen, it is important to clarify what one is “detaching” from. In Zen, one detaches from concepts and ideas, and this detachment from abstract thought leads to an ability to better experience the immediate world directly. In Antonioni, one is detached from the immediate world and brought instead into the realm of thought. Antonioni and Zen both invite detachment, but they detach in opposite directions. 51 Tarr might push back on this point, but the effect seems to be present in the films regardless. In addition, it is worth noting that whether Tarr affirms or denies a claim seems to be more indicative of his mood on a given day than his concrete beliefs concerning the matter of discussion. 116 consumerism, modernism, and sexuality are foregrounded, limiting the utility of a Zen approach. This is not to say that the films do not have moments of overwhelming visual and aural impact, or that Antonioni’s films are completely devoid of a Zen framework. Anyone who has experienced the hypnotic sequence of Monica Vitti’s night walk in the closing moments of Red Desert, or the breathtaking long take that ends The Passenger, has encountered the meditative quality that Antonioni can tap into. Nor is this to say that the other filmmakers discussed do not play with metaphors or ideas to a certain extent

(particularly Tarr, and to some Akerman, discussed next). But Antonioni’s intellectual tendencies are summed up well by Robert Koehler, who appreciates the film for reasons that are far removed from Zen studies:

The greatness of L’avventura is multivalent, situated in many realms at once: cinematic, aural, existential, literary, architectural, sexual, philosophical – all of them of equal importance. The open film, beyond its fluidity, is amoral in the best sense, or at least unconcerned with a hierarchy of values. Almost all films of any kind privilege certain artistic values above others, and the great ones do it for several (Koehler, 2019, n.p.). It is precisely this lack of prioritization, this rejection of the hierarchy of aesthetic values, that separates Antonioni from Bresson, Tarkovsky, and Tarr. The other filmmakers subordinate all other goals to the “cinematic” and the “aural” (to accept Koehler’s problematic distinction between the two terms), which cultivates a meditative experience. Antonioni’s method and his intention are more complex, even cluttered—to give existential, literary, and philosophical concerns equal weight as those pertaining directly to cinema is to embrace a type of intellectualism that seems blatantly Western. From a Zen perspective, the danger here is that such an approach may increase, rather than reduce, the chatter of the mind. The films of the cryptic Italian filmmaker are as enigmatic as their reputation, but they are also arguably less mystical, less driven by spiritual concerns, than 117 the other films discussed. Antonioni is indeed in the mystery-making business, but he constructs the type of mystery that the viewer tries to solve, even if no answers are available. The frustration of the riddles offered by a minimalist narrative reflects the cultural aimlessness of the 1960s and 1970s, and this type of abstraction clashes with the Zen/Bressonian goal of using direct sensory experience to transform viewer perception. Nevertheless, elements of these films line up well with Zen meditation, and Antonioni’s name should certainly be considered for further research in this area.

CHANTAL AKERMAN

Aside from the work of Bresson, perhaps the filmmaker most conducive to a Zen framework is the Belgian Chantal Akerman. To varying degrees, films such as Hotel Monterey (1972), Je tu il elle (1974), and Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) use a minimalist approach to emphasize sensory experience over intellectual thought. Akerman’s long takes create a meditative effect similar to those found in the films of Tarkovsky and Tarr, and yet her employment of the technique is less flamboyant. Akerman tends to avoid awe-inspiring tracking shots, allowing a static camera to focus on simple objects. When her camera moves, it is to less ostentatious effect. While her cinematographic choices (full shots as opposed to visual synecdoche) and her editing patterns (long takes as opposed to short takes) could not be more different than Bresson, the effect she creates is similar: an absorbing and transformative cinematic experience grounded in simplicity. Je tu il elle is a study in alienation, and one could argue that the distancing minimalism of the middle section occasionally surrenders to the more intellectual realm of Godard/Antonioni. However, the film’s opening and closing acts are much closer to

118 Bresson in their emphasis on pure experience and the suppression of intellectual interference. The film opens with an extended sequence of the unnamed protagonist, played by Akerman, confined to a single room. She writes in a journal, eats sugar with a spoon, moves furniture, and undresses. This section, running for more than half an hour in a single location with a highly unusual voiceover track, seems to recall A Man Escaped, and can be viewed as a more radical extension of the director-as-prisoner-of-war aesthetic. The final act consists of Akerman’s visit to the house of a former girlfriend, and the love scene, lasting more than 10 minutes, cultivates eroticism through minimalist technique. If

Schrader identifies a “Transcendental Style,” one could claim that Akerman uses similar tools to master an “Erotic Style.” Akerman’s first feature-length fiction film, though not entirely cohesive, lays the foundation for her next film, which is most significant for Zen studies. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking feminist examination of a lonely middle-aged woman, takes us through three monotonous days in her life. An in-depth examination of the film in relation to Zen philosophy is beyond the scope of this analysis, but a brief discussion of the film and its relation to Akerman’s other work should indicate the potential for further research concerning a Zen-film connection. Stylistically minimalist in a manner much closer to

Bresson than Tarkovsky or even Tarr, the film is composed of simple, long takes of a woman performing mundane activities. The film contains no non-diegetic music, and the only instances of diegetic music over the course of its almost 3.5-hour runtime are two scenes in which the son turns on the house radio. As in The Turin Horse (which was possibly influenced by Akerman’s much earlier film), the passage of days creates a circular structure that emphasizes the redundancy of the household chores. Jeanne, a single mother whose husband died six years prior to the 119 depicted events, spends early mornings and late evenings with her son. Most of her day is spent alone, or briefly interacting with people around the town as she runs errands. Minor slips in her routine reveal a surface calm that is about to crack, and the minimalist approach builds to a gut-wrenching climax (a climax of content, not of form: the film remains stylistically minimalist to its final shot). This extremely simple narrative is stretched over an extended runtime as Akerman focuses with Zen intensity on the minute details of

Jeanne’s chores. Akerman is particularly interested in the transformation of an environment by the presence or absence of human bodies. The film returns again and again to familiar locations: the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, and the apartment hallway. While the locations are repeated, the mood that they communicate changes in accordance with shifts in cinematographic context. Quite frequently, Akerman holds her camera on a room after a character (usually Jeanne) has exited it, allowing human absence to comment on, and change our experience of, a space that was designed to be inhabited. The juxtaposition of a space in two different contexts (presence, absence) draws attention to multiple ways of experiencing a single environment. As Jeanne leaves rooms, she also frequently turns out the light to save electricity, but Akerman doesn’t plunge the room into total darkness. Rather, she leaves enough light for the viewer to continue to examine the room. The effect is remarkably similar to the experience of meditation, a fresh way of perceiving familiar, daily life. Almost everybody has had the experience of turning off a light before leaving a room. Like Jeanne, our minds are elsewhere, concerned with where we are going next. Akerman allows us to study an environment that we touch constantly but rarely see clearly; by lingering in a room with the lights out, she allows us to interpret a known space in a new way.

120 Akerman’s silent documentary Hotel Monterey (1972) was perhaps an influence on the experiments with location seen in Jeanne Dieleman. This hour-long, non-narrative film uses long takes to explore the environment of a cheap hotel. With Bresson, we saw how useful sound could be for creating a Zen experience. Here, we see how the absence of all film sound can serve a similar purpose. While the majority of the shots lack the presence of bodies, people do occasionally enter and exit the frame, going about their business at the hotel. At times, the people are clearly speaking, and yet Akerman’s silent approach denies us their words, stripping away conventional context and forcing us to see the space that these people inhabit free from the clutter of their words. This mundane environment slowly becomes a hypnotic cinematic event. The brief summary of the film offered by Criterion perfectly sums up the Zen experience: “Under Chantal Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap Manhattan hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional occupants framed like Edward Hopper tableaux” (Hotel, 1972). “Unexpected beauty” is quintessential Zen, and the fact that this transformation of perception is the result of a filmmaker’s “watchful eye” speaks to the ability of the film camera to train the mind to see the world differently. If one were to further explore Zen as a theoretical framework for the cinematic experience, these films would be a valuable avenue of study.

ZEN AND FILM STUDIES

Up to this point, the sections in this chapter have offered a sample of European art filmmakers and the varying degrees of utility that an Eastern lens could bring to their films. Bresson was selected as the focal point for this thesis because his work most consistently and precisely correlates to Zen practice. But further research with these other filmmakers 121 could provide valuable insight into the relationship between film viewing and Zen meditation, and there is much to discover in relating Eastern ideas to certain Western films. In summation, Akerman perhaps takes us closest to Bresson and Zen in achieving a transformation of viewer perception based on the coupling of two important characteristics: an emphasis on sensory information and a commitment to stylistic minimalism. With Tarkovsky and Tarr, the immediacy of sensory experience is prioritized, but the filmmakers are less subtle than Bresson and Akerman in their approach (particularly Tarkovsky). With Antonioni, the films contain individual scenes that are highly meditative and worth examining with a Zen lens, but in the films as a whole, there is neither stylistic minimalism (the emphasis on pictorialism is too strong) nor a strong commitment to steering the audience away from abstract thought. To varying degrees, these filmmakers are useful subjects for further investigation in relation to Zen-film studies.

SUSAN SONTAG AND AGAINST INTERPRETATION

In closing, I would like to shift focus to a Western writer briefly mentioned in the introduction who offers a sort of interpretative bridge for Eastern-Western film studies. Sontag’s 1964 essay Against Interpretation posits a theory concerning aesthetic study that in some ways parallels the Zen framework that I have suggested in relation to Bresson. Sontag echoes the sentiments of Bresson and Tarkovsky in her advocation of a movement away from symbolism and intellectual analysis. She claims that “all Western consciousness of and reflection upon art have remained within the confines staked out by the Greek theory of art as mimesis or representation” (Sontag, 1966, p. 4), and she finds it problematic that currently, “The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation” (Sontag, 1966, p. 5). Her primary concern is the Western discrepancy between artistic creation and

122 interpretation, the code-cracking style of the latter hindering the immediate effect that the artist strives so hard to communicate. Sontag suggests that the interpretative methods employed by intellectuals create a barrier between the art and our experience of it. Rather than enriching the artistic process, these methods hinder it, reducing the work to easily digestible ideas and conventions. She argues, “To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’…The world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have” (Sontag,

1966, p. 7). Such a claim recalls Watts’ critique of the Western mind’s obsession with the linguistic categorization of objects. In the same way that Watts saw these labels as reductive, so too does Sontag find severe limitations in our process of analyzing narrative, character, and theme. As mentioned briefly in the introduction, Sontag’s “Spiritual style in the films of

Robert Bresson,” a piece in the 1966 collection of essays entitled “Against Interpretation,” seems to counteract some of her claims. While she refrains from “interpreting” Bresson in the sense of seeing his work as representational, she argues that Bresson tries to stimulate the intellect before emotion. But in the title essay, Sontag argues against herself, claiming

Transparence is the highest, most liberating value in art…Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are. This is the greatness of, for example, the films of Bresson and Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (Sontag, 1966, p. 13).

Consistently throughout the piece, Sontag stresses the importance of the immediacy of sensory experience, which is precisely Bresson’s aim. More than 50 years later, the type of analysis that Sontag questions still pervades critical discourse. It is becoming increasingly difficult to come to art directly, free from the intellectual baggage that our aesthetic culture encourages us to cling to. I would add to 123 Sontag’s claims that this baggage creates an unhelpful and even ironic hierarchy: the more information one possesses on an artistic topic, the greater cultural capital he or she possesses, and yet much of the information accumulated detracts from our ability to tap into a profound aesthetic experience.

THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE ART FILM

The films of Robert Bresson are challenging in their aesthetic rigor and their demands on the attention span of the 21st century viewer, and yet they are refreshingly egalitarian in their rejection of this cultural capital. To “get” A Man Escaped is not to possess a knowledge of the centuries-old body of philosophical literature concerning the relationship between flesh and spirit. It is not even contingent on one’s possession of the critical capacity to interpret the film as a metaphor for spiritual liberation. Rather, to experience the protagonist’s simple dedication to the process of escape is to experience the film with the immediacy that Bresson intended, a way of viewing the film that is not only equal to, but perhaps even superior to, the methods encouraged by much of Western film criticism. A Man Escaped is thus open to all; anyone with the patience and discipline to wrestle with Bressonian minimalism can find the experience rewarding. Tarkovsky, Tarr, Akerman, and to some extent even Antonioni are likewise potentially democratic in terms of audience. The films may not be liked by everybody—some viewers will undoubtedly find the works more boring than others—but if we examine the films with a Zen perspective, we find that the degree to which a film works or doesn’t work for an individual should have little to do with the various educational backgrounds of the audience members. An Eastern approach suggests that education and attention span are not directly proportional. Approaching the art film from this perspective could widen public exposure

124 to these works, weakening the ivory tower barriers that currently separate the champions of A Man Escaped and the champions of The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Both films are prison escape dramas concerned with spiritual liberation, and yet the reputation of the former has accumulated so much academic baggage that its accessibility is now perhaps more limited than Bresson intended. This is not to say that art films are ever likely to enjoy blockbuster status; at the end of a workday, there is something to be said for the enjoyment offered by a few hours of formula. But most viewers have their own personal art films—films that are special to them in a way that transcends their role in contributing to two hours of entertainment. The reach of the films discussed in this thesis could very well be extended by encouraging a Zen method of cinematic experience, an emphasis on the viewer’s patience as opposed to a viewer’s intellectual abilities or education.

CONCLUSION

The significance of further research in this area hinges on its potential to transform, or at least nuance, our general approach to film theory. Exploration in this area challenges scholars to ask important questions: What context is really necessary when watching a movie? What type of thinking should the viewer be engaged in (or disengaged from) to truly process a great film? A crossover between Zen and cinema studies may allow us to approach film more intuitively, more emotionally, and more honestly. This approach could help to bridge the ever-widening gap between academia and popular culture, possibly making academic analysis of films more accessible and more relevant to a wider audience. While I believe that this fresh area of research is valuable, academic progress may not be easy. The western mind likes certainty on these matters, and to conduct a study in

125 which logical analysis occupies a lower rung of importance than the cinematographic method of organizing and arranging sensory detail to stimulate emotions might seem counterintuitive. Suzuki provides a humorous anecdote52 regarding a master and his pupil that is pertinent here: “Said Doko [the student] despairingly, ‘I cannot follow your reasoning.’ ‘Neither do I understand myself,’ concluded the Zen master” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 57). This anecdote finds its mirror image at the 1983 Cannes press conference for Bresson’s last film, L’Argent. Responding to the film, a member of the audience inquires, “I don’t understand exactly why the character’s wife left him.” Bresson gives a gentle shrug and provides the most Zen of all possible responses: “I don’t understand either.” (“L’ARGENT,” 1983). Until we learn to become more comfortable with this uncertainty, the body of interpretive work pertaining to European art cinema will remain frustratingly provincial.

52 Before telling this story from “one of the earliest Zen writings,” Suzuki includes the following information in a footnote: “This is taken from a work by Daiju Yekai (Tai-chu Huihai), disciple of Baso (Ma-tsu, died 738)” (Suzuki, 1991, p. 57). 126 References

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