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Home , Anatole Dauman, Angels of Sin, Au Hasard Balthazar, A Gentle Woman, A Man Escaped, Four Nights of a Dreamer

October 16, 2018 (XXXVII:8) : (1967, 78 min.) Online versions of The Goldenrod Handouts have color images & hot links: http://csac.buffalo.edu/goldenrodhandouts.html

DIRECTED BY Robert Bresson WRITTEN BY (novel), Robert Bresson (scenario & adaptation and dialogue) PRODUCED BY MUSIC Jean Wiener CINEMATOGRAPHY EDITING Raymond Lamy PRODUCTION DESIGN Pierre Guffroy SET DECORATION Pierre Guffroy COSTUME DESIGN Odette Le Barbenchon ART Jean Catala (props) SOUND Jacques Carrère (sound), Daniel Couteau (sound effects editor), Séverin Frankie (sound) COSTUME AND WARDROBE Odette Le Barbenchon MUSIC DEPARTMENT Jean Dréjac (conductor: score) deliberately flat, expressionless performances. This demanding , France 1967 and difficult, intensely personal style was a barrier to achieving Won: OCIC Award: Robert Bresson; Special Distinction, popular audience reception beyond a devoted critical following, Homage by the Jury’s Unanimous Decision: Robert Bresson as seen in his multiple nominations and wins at Cannes Film Festival throughout his career. Still, the Palm d’Or always eluded CAST him. Nadine Nortier...Mouchette Jean-Claude Guilbert...Arsène He wrote and directed Public Affairs (1934, Short); A Man Marie Cardinal...Mouchette's Mother Escaped (1956), for which he was nominated for the Palme d'Or Paul Hébert...Mouchette's Father (as Paul Hebert) and won Best Director at Cannes Film Festival; Pickpocket Jean Vimenet...Mathieu - gamekeeper (1959); (1962), for which he was Marie Susini...Mathieu's wife nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Jury Special Prize and Liliane Princet ...Schoolteacher the OCIC Award; (1966); Mouchette Suzanne Huguenin...Undertaker (1967), for which he was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won Marine Trichet...Luisa the OCIC Award and Special Distinction at Cannes Film Raymonde Chabrun...Grocery Shop-owner Festival; (1969), (1971), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L'Argent (1983), for ROBERT BRESSON (b. September 25, 1901 in Bromont- which he was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won Best Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, France—d. December 18, 1999 (age Director at Cannes Film Festival. Additionally, he directed 98) in , France) trained as a painter before moving into films Lancelot of the Lake (1974), for which he won but refused to as a screenwriter. After spending more than a year as a German accept the FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes Film Festival. He also POW during World War II, he wrote and directed his first feature wrote dialogue for C'était un musicien (1933), the adaptation of (1943). The next film he wrote and directed, Les Les jumeaux de Brighton (1936), and the shooting script for Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) would be the last time he Southern Carrier (1937). would work with professional actors. Starting with adapting and directing Diary of a Country Priest (1951), he developed a GEORGES BERNANOS (b. February 20, 1888 in Paris, singular, minimalist style that omitted all but the barest France—d. July 5, 1948 (age 60) in Paris, France) was a French essentials, his actors (or as he refers to them: "models") giving novelist whose Roman Catholic and monarchist leanings Bresson—MOUCHETTE—2 informed his criticism of bourgeois thought. Robert Bresson’s The Gray Days (1974), De jour en jour (1981), Happy Memories first film to use non-professional actors Diary of a Country Priest (1981), La vie promise (1983, TV Series), Les fous de Bassan (1951) was an adaptation of Bernanos’s 1936 novel of the same (1987), La nuit avec Hortense (1988), Des amis pour la vie name. His work continues to be adapted for film and television (1988, TV Movie), Avec un grand A (1986-1990, TV Series), audiences. Desjardins (1990, TV Movie), The Confessional (1995), L'oreille d'un sourd (1996), Sauve qui peut! (1997, TV Series), GHISLAIN CLOQUET (b. April 18, 1924 in Antwerp, Nuremberg (2000, TV Mini-Series), The Book of Eve (2002), The Antwerp, Belgium—d. November 2, 1981 (age 57) did Novena (2005), and Route 132 (2010). cinematography for 62 films, some of which are: Soldats d'eau douce (1950, Short), Saint-Tropez, devoir de vacances (1952, Documentary short), Lumière (1953, TV Short documentary), La belle journée (1954, Short), Statues d'épouvante (1955, Documentary short), Night and Fog (1956, Documentary short), Girl in His Pocket (1957), Les naufrageurs (1959), and Le Trou (1960); The American Beauty, A Man Named Rocca, and The Honors of War in 1961; The Fire Within (1963, director of photography) and Mickey One (1965, director of photography); Au Hasard Balthazar and The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short in 1966; The Young Girls of Rochefort, Mouchette, and Far from Vietnam (Documentary) in 1967; The Diary of an Innocent Boy, Un soir, un train, and Marry Me! Marry Me! In 1968; A Gentle Woman (1969); Appointment in Bray and Thumbs Up in 1971; Nathalie Granger (1972, director of photography: avec la participation de) and Belle (1973); Woman of the Ganges and Say It with Flowers in 1974; The Butcher, the Star and the Orphan and Love and Death in 1975; Monsieur Albert (1976), The Secret Life of Plants (1978, Documentary), Tess (1979), and Four Robert Bresson: from World Film Directors V. I. Ed John Friends (1981). Wildman.. The H. H. Wilson Company. NY 1987 Entry by Brian Baxter NADINE NORTIER (b. 1948) acted in one film, Mouchette The French director and scenarist, was born in the (1967). She also appears in Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary mountainous Auvergne region. [September 25, 1907] He spent short about the making of Mouchette, Bande-annonce de his formative years in the countryside until his family moved to 'Mouchette' (1967). Paris, when he was eight. Between thirteen and seventeen he studied classics and philosophy at the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, JEAN-CLAUDE GUILBERT acted in five films: Au Hasard intending later to become a painter. Although Bresson abandoned Balthazar (1966); Mouchette and Weekend in 1967; Pano Will painting around 1930 because it made him “too agitated,” he Not Be Shown (1969) and Paris-Saint-Lazare (1982, TV Mini- remains a “painter” to this day. Series). He rejects the term “director” and uses “cinematographer.” He believes that cinema is a fusion of music MARIE CARDINAL (b. March 9, 1929 in Algiers, France [now and painting, not the theatre and photography, and defines Algeria]—d. May 9, 2001 (age 72) in Valréas, Vaucluse, “cinematography” as “a new way of writing, therefore of feeling. France), a French novelist, received a degree in philosophy from His theories are precisely given in his book Notes on the the Sorbonne. From 1953 to 1960 she taught philosophy at Cinematographer. His films have resolutely followed these schools in Salonica, Lisbon, Vienna and Montreal. Cardinal beliefs, and are dominated by his Catholicism. published her first novel, Écoutez la Mer (Listen to the Sea), in When Bresson decided to abandon painting he moved 1962. She acted in three films. In 1967, she had a role in Jean- towards cinema. During the following decade he was on the Luc Godard's film Deux Ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais D'elle and fringes of cinema and “saw everything.” Of this period nothing played Mouchette's mother in Robert Bresson's Mouchette. She of importance exists. His work was mainly as a “script later appeared in Les mots pour le dire (1983). consultant,” first on C’était un musicien (1933), directed by Frédéric Zelnick and Maurice Gleize, then on Claude Heymann’s PAUL HEBERT (b. May 28, 1924 in Thetford Mines, Québec, comedy Jumeaux de Brighton (1936) and Pierre Billon’s Canada—d. April 20, 2017 (age 92) in Quebec City, Quebec, Courrier Sud (1937), and fleetingly with René Clair. His only Canada) acted in 69 films and television series, some of which significant work was a short film, financed by the art historian are: 14, rue de Galais (1954, TV Series), Wolfe and Montcalm Roland Penrose, made in 1934. Called , (1957, Short), Pépé le cowboy (1958, TV Series), Dubois et fils this comedy has long been lost and little is known of it....Bresson (1961), Jeudi-théâtre (1962, TV Series), Ti-Jean caribou (1963, admits to liking the work of Charles Chaplin—especially The TV Series), The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1964), À chacun son la Circus and —and he was earlier linked with the (1965, TV Movie), La vie heureuse de Léopold Z (1965), surrealist movement in Paris. Mouchette (1967), D'Iberville (1967, TV Series), C'est pas la In 1939 Bresson joined the French army and was a faute à Jacques Cartier (1968), My Side of the Mountain (1969), prisoner of war between June 1940 and April 1941. His Bresson—MOUCHETTE—3 imprisonment profoundly affected him, even though he was not film image, its ability to make us believe what we see and feel confined like many of his protagonists (notably Fontaine, in A what the image suggests, Bresson deliberately subverts this Man Escaped). “I was set to work in a forest, for local peasants power by directing our attention to a world beyond that of his who—luckily—fed us. After a year or so I simulated a fever and narrative. What is left is not the illusion of “realism,” but what he with other prisoners who were sick I was released. I returned to calls the “crude real” of the cinematic image itself, which for Paris.” Bresson carries us “far away from the intelligence that In occupied France, at complicates everything”; that is the height of the war, Bresson why he calls the camera began preparing his first “divine.” feature, Les Anges du péché / Bresson prefers to work on The Angels of sin (1943), based location and if possible in the on an idea by a friend, the actual settings prescribed by the Reverence Raymond script. Brückberger, and inspired by a His third film, and the one novel. Bresson wanted to call that established his international the film “Bethanie”—the name reputation, came six years later of the convent where the action and can be seen now as a is centered. He wrote the transitional work. Based on the screenplay and then asked the famous novel by the Catholic playwright Jean Giraudoux to writer Georges Bernanos, Le supply the dialogue. Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, Although Bresson regards his debut film and the two 1951), this is a first-person account by a young priest (Claude works that followed as incomplete and spoiled by the intrusion of Laydu) who is given a rural parish in the village of Ambricourt, conventional music and actors, rather than the “models” (in the in northern France. The young man—innocent, awkward and sense of artists’ models) he subsequently used, Les Anges du unworldly—is treated with scorn and ridicule. He is drawn into a péché remains one of the most astonishing first features in world drama that is unfolding at the local chateau and takes upon cinema. It not only displays complete mastery of the medium, but himself the almost impossible task of reconciling the countess to puts into practice many of the theories Bresson later refined and her God. He succeeds, but the cost to him—as it was to Anne- distilled. He says: “I knew at this stage what I wanted, but had to Marie—is his life. The young priest, existing on a diet of bread accept the actresses. I warned them immediately to stop what and too much cheap wine, grows more and more ill and weak, they were doing in front of the camera, or they—or I—would and is finally diagnosed as having caner of the stomach. He dies leave. Luckily they were in nun’s habits so they could not at the home of friends, and his last words are “What dies it gesticulate.” matter? All is grace.” The image on the screen fades into one of a Les Anges du péché proved a great commercial success dark gray cross. In a contemporary review, Gavin Lambert and won the Grand Prix du Cinéma Française. It tells a basically commented on the “inner exaltation” of the film, and in a famous melodramatic story set in a convent devoted to the rehabilitation essay André Bazin, describing it as a masterpiece, adds that it of young women....In ’s words, Bresson’s impresses “because of its power to stir the emotions, rather than vision “is almost mature in his first feature.” It already shows his the intelligence,” which is exactly Bresson’s avowed aim in all preference for a narrative composed of many short scenes, as his films. well as his fascination with human skills and processes, The film was praised by critics and awarded numerous observing in detail the nuns’ work and rituals. On the other hand, international prizes, including the Prix Louis Dellue and the 1951 we also see his characteristic user of ellipsis, as when Thérèse, Grand Prize at the . It also achieved buying a gun, is simply shown receiving it over the counter. considerable success at the box office. In it, Bresson moved Bresson resolutely proclaims himself a painter, not a towards the use of nonprofessional actors and, although writer, the task he finds most difficult of all. For his second film, Grünenwald once again supplied the score, the soundtrack is Les Dames du Bois do Boulogne, he sought more literary infinitely more complex than in the earlier films and may be seen inspiration, a novel by Diderot, Jacques le fataliste. Actually he at the beginning of Bresson’s use of sound and image as used only one chapter and for the second and last time he sought complementary elements. Thus we see the priest writing in his help with the dialogue—from his friend Jacques Cocteau, who journal and hear him reading his words in voice-over, then we nonetheless stuck closely to the original. It was Cocteau who see the remembered scene, with the voice-over commentary later said of Bresson, “He is one apart from this terrible world.” continuing until finally the dialogue takes over. Bresson later Bresson’s films are unique. Most of them deal with the remarked in his notes, “An ice-cold commentary can warm, by religious themes of predestination and redemption, but in terms contrast, tepid dialogues in a film. Phenomenon analogous to that of tightly constructed dramatic narratives. However, Bresson of hot and cold in a painting.” Another characteristic use of scorns the easy pleasures and illusions of the storyteller’s art, and sound occurs during a climactic conversion scene, whose drama is quite likely to leave out what others would regard as a is counterpointed by the mundane sound of the gardener raking dramatic high point. We may simply be told that the event has the path outside. taken place, or shown only a part of it, while being treated to all Several years elapsed before the emergence of the first the associated activities that mere storytellers take for granted— uncompromised and definitive Bresson masterpiece, a work that people coming in and out, opening and closing doors, going up remains among his most highly regarded and best-known films. and down stairs. Recognizing the great persuasive power of the Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (, 1956) was Bresson—MOUCHETTE—4 inspired by an article in Figaro Littéraire. It was written by a Like its predecessor, Pickpocket has a convincingly former prisoner of war, Commandant André Devigny, and “documentary” feel to it and a delight in human skills (here those describes his astonishing escape from Montluc Prison in Lyons of a criminal), using locations and—importantly—a professional while awaiting execution by the Germans. Bresson wrote the pickpocket to help achieve this verisimilitude and the moments screenplay, the sparse dialogue, and the commentary that of suspense that are so much part of the film. Inevitably there is a counterpoints and illuminates the action. He eschewed a spiritual dimension to Bresson’s study of an isolated antisocial conventional score and used—sparingly—excerpts from man almost willing himself to be caught. Amedée Ayfre suggests Mozart’s Mass in C Minor that Michel is freedom without (K427). With this film grace, unconsciously seeking it. We Bresson achieved the witness a kind of miracle, as in the complete control he sought case of Fontaine and Jost’s escape or by the use of “models”— Thérèse’s redemption. In Schrader’s nonprofessionals with no words, this is “the transference dramatic training who are of…[Michel’s] passion from taught to speak their lines pickpocketing to Jeanne”; in prison and move their bodies he is “faced with an explicitly without conscious spiritual act within a cold interpretation or motivation, environment….it is a ‘miracle’ precisely as Bresson which must be accepted or rejected,” instructs them—in effect, as As usual, Bresson used one critic wrote, Bresson nonprofessional “models” and plays all the parts. The hostility this often provokes in the hapless collaborated only with trusted associates (his most frequent models creates a tension of its own, without destroying the collaborators have been Pierre Charbonnier as art director, director’s conception of a shot. Raymond Lamy as editor, and until 1961, Léonce-Henry Burel as Bresson prefaces the film with two sentences. The cameraman). Bresson believes that in cinematography “an image first—an alternative title—is Christ’s admonition to Nicodemus: must be transformed by contact with other images,” that there is “The wind bloweth where it listeth,” Then comes the comment: “no art without transformation.” He therefore favors a relatively “This is a true story. I have told it with no embellishments.” It is inexpressive or “neutral” image, of maximum versatility in true that by shooting at the actual prison, by painstaking combination with other images. Hence his preference for the reconstruction of the methods and instruments of Devigny’s medium shot, with the camera straight on its subject to produce a escape, Bresson brings an absorbing versimilitude to the surface “flattened image.” The music, used sparsely for its “spiritual” of a story whose outcome we already know. This surface, said qualities, comes from the work of the seventeenth-century Amedée Ayfre, stems from “the precise choice of details, objects composer Jean-Baptiste Lully. and accessories, through gestures charged with an extreme solid Characteristically, the film is short (under 75 minutes), reality”—what Eric Rohmer called “the miracle of objects.” reflecting Bresson’s compression of narrative and his desire to Bresson himself said: “I was hoping to make a film about objects make one image “suffice where a novelist would take ten pages.” that would at the same time have a soul. That is to say, to reach As Godard noted, he was now “the master of the ellipsis,” which the latter through the former.”... he uses for a variety of purposes—for economy, to avoid the Bresson gives us an almost documentary portrait of a titillation of violence, often to unsettle the viewer by denying his prison, its relationships, its routine: the clanging pails, the narrative expectations. For some critics, however, Bresson had clinking keys. From these bare bones, he builds one of the most gone too far in this direction; Robert Vas even accused him of profound interior examinations of a human being ever shown. self-parody. This work, which brought Bresson the award as best director at Unmoved, Bresson carried compression even further in Cannes and several other honors, established him internationally Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962), the and confirmed his stature as, in Jean-Luc Godard’s words, “to effect of which, as Derek Prouse simply but effectively noted, French cinema what Mozart is to German music and Dostoevsky was “like being hit over the head by a sledgehammer.” In little is to Russian literature.” No higher accolade could be given to over sixty minutes Bresson shows us the imprisonment, trial, and Bresson, who regards Dostoevsky as “the greatest novelist,” to the execution of Joan, splendidly “modeled” by Florence whom he is indebted in no fewer than three of his thirteen films. Carrrez.” This debt is expressed in Bresson’s next work, Pickpocket Importantly the film is not an historical “reconstruction” (1959), which derives from Crime and Punishment. Michel, a (Bresson deplores such films), but he uses the costumes (for the lonely and arrogant young man, is an expert pickpocket who English), documents, and artifacts of the period to convey the feels himself above the law and normal human emotions. sense of “another time.” We see Joan on the rack but Bresson Eventually, thanks to the relentless pursuit of a detective, he is characteristically spares (or denies) us any explicit scenes of caught and sent to prison—something “predestined.” In the final torture. The use of models, the startling compression, the lack of moments of the film he is redeemed by the love of Jeanne, whose ornamentation and the continued striking of exactly the “right help he has previously refused. (’s American note,” give the film a timeless strength. Again the images are Gigolo is not only indebted to the same source and to the work of “flattened,” a 50mm lens providing a constant physical the director he most admires, but the final minutes of his film are perspective with few traveling shots. (Bresson has used a 50mm a direct “copy” of and homage to Bresson’s film.) lens since his second film.) This rigorousness seemed to demand a change. Bresson had gone as far in the direction of pure Bresson—MOUCHETTE—5 cinematography as he could. The linear quality of the prison them to a nearby field where she waves to a passing tractor films could be likened to the path of an arrow. For his next work, driver. He ignores her and in a spontaneous response she wraps a one of several Franco-Swedish coproductions undertaken on the white dress around her like a shroud and rolls down an initiative of the Swedish Film Institute, he moved to an embankment toward a stream. She stops at the edge, rolls down altogether more complex form. again, and falls unresisting into the stream. The accompaniment The result was described by Tom Milne as “perhaps his to this act of despair and loneliness is Monteverdi’s greatest film to date, certainly his most complex.” Bresson had “Magnificat.” The effect is another sledgehammer blow, as one been thinking about the film for years, deriving the initial sits transfixed by the devastation of a life and the implied belief inspiration from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. that Mouchette has at last achieved Au hasard, Balthazar (Balthazar, 1966) peace. is, says Bresson, “made up many lines The paradox presented here that intersect one another.” The has troubled many viewers, especially picaresque and episodic story links two Catholics. Bresson denies that he is a souls—the girl Marie and the donkey pessimist, yet the more obvious Balthazar. Balthazar passes through a optimism of, say, the escape of series of encounters, each one Fontaine and Jost has been lost by the representing one of the deadly sins of time of these films of rural life. humanity. The donkey, naturally, cannot Bresson continues to affirm the choose his fate. That is determined by the dignity of the human spirit while will of others, and he suffers at the hands seeming to admit that earthly forces— of those who ware avaricious, proud, increasingly immediate and powerful lustful, and so on. Marie is a human in his films—can erode that spirit. being, yet her victimization is as appalling as that of the little More and more his work acknowledges the bleakness of the creature she adopts at the beginning of the film. At the human condition, and he uses that knowledge and awareness as conclusion she has been raped and beaten up by a gang of the jumping-off point for his “miracles.” blousons noirs and their leader—Gérard_ uses Balthazar to carry Bresson’s next film is noteworthy as his first in color— smuggled goods across the Franco-Swiss border. something of which he has always been wary. Une Femme Balthazar is shot by customs men and dies amidst a flock of Douce (A Gentle Creature, 1966) was his first direct (albeit sheep on the hillside where he was born, a victim but also a updated) adaptation of Dostoevski....Quatre Nuits d’un rêveur symbol of Christian faith. Despite the use of a nonhuman (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), was adapted from a more protagonist, Bresson achieves his most complex and saintly famous Dostoevsky story, White Nights, already filmed by Ivan portrait within a film without sentimentality or a false note. By Pyriev in Russia and by Visconti in Italy. Bresson moves the choosing a commentary on the deadly sins, set over an extended novella’s setting to Paris....Bresson was attracted to what Carlos period in a varied social milieu, he moves from the rarified Clarens describes as “the idea of love being stronger than the atmosphere of his two previous works. His examination of such love story itself….” The result is an altogether more secular work basic sins as gluttony—through the character of the drunken than any which had preceded it....Even Bresson’s admirers Arnold—allows us to relate unequivocally to the work, while worried about his preoccupation with young love and his use of never losing sight of the spiritual significance of the film. It has “popular” music in the film, although no one could be other than great immediacy and resonance. However, his next film proved ravished by the breathtaking scene of the bateau-mouche floating even more accessible. down the Seine (filmed near his Paris home) and the gentle, Mouchette (1966) followed with unprecedented rapidity, somber use of color throughout. By some standards a “minor” thanks to money from French television—the first time that film, it was yet of a stature to receive the British Film Institute ORTF had collaborated with cinema. Based, like Diary of a award as “the most original film” of its year. Country Priest on a novel by Georges Bernanos, and exhibiting In 1974 Bresson returned to grander things and—after an uncharacteristic degree of naturalness, it tells of a fourteen- twenty years planning—achieved his dream of filming “The year-old schoolgirl, isolated from her schoolmates and from her Grail” or, as it came to be called Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot). family. Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is spirited, stubborn, and This was his most elaborate and costly work and, although he resilient, and yet is finally unable to resist the pressures of the could not film it in separate English and French versions as he grinding poverty—material and spiritual—of her pathetic had hoped, it was otherwise made without compromise. existence. Her father and brother are drunkards, her desperately The film opens in a dark forest with a close-up of two ill mother is on her deathbed. swords wielded in combat. There are glimpses of other scattered Brief instances show Mouchette’s strength, and in a conflicts and of groups of riderless horses galloping through. scene on the Dodg’em cars at a fairground (something unlike any Titles describe how the Knights of the Round Table had failed in other sequence in Bresson’s work) she experiences a sense of their quest for the Holy Grail. Lancelot and the other survivors exhilaration and excitement that is cut short by her father’s heavy return, and he begs Queen Guinevere to release him from their hand. In a darker sequence she is raped by a drunken poacher adulterous bond so he may be reconciled with God. Mordred whom she has tried to help and only half-resists, almost lurks, fomenting dissension. There is a tournament and the welcoming the attack as an acknowledgement of her existence. victorious Lancelot is wounded and goes into hiding. He abducts After her mother’s death, Mouchette finds herself even Guinevere, who is under suspicion, but in the end restores her to more isolated. She rejects the false charity of a shopkeeper but King Arthur. Mordred stirs up rebellion and Lancelot fights on accepts clothes given her by an old woman. Mouchette carries the King’s side. Arthur and all his knights, encumbered by their Bresson—MOUCHETTE—6 obsolete armor and idealism, fall before Mordred’s disciplined photographed like its predecessor by , was bowmen—a great junk heap of chivalry. Lancelot died last, based on a newspaper story. It centers on four disaffected young whispering the name of Guinevere. intellectuals—two men and two women—completely Some critics saw a moral triumph in Lancelot’s disillusioned with the world created by their elders. The quartet renunciation of Guinevere; others, like Jane Sloan, thought pad through Paris, witnesses to a world that is insanely Guinevere “the only one who is grounded, willing to take life for materialistic, inhuman, and exploitative of its natural resources. what it is,” and Lancelot a prideful dreamer, foolish to deny her This is a work far more overtly political than anything that love. Most agreed that the film was deeply fatalistic and preceded it; Bresson called it “a film about money, a source of pessimistic, with none of the great evil in the world whether for certainty of grace that inspired unnecessary armaments or the the earlier films, and “darker senseless pollution of the than any Bresson film to date, environment.” These evils are both morally and literally” shown in brilliantly orchestrated (Tom Milne). newsreel and other footage of There are numerous despoilation and waste. deliberate anachronisms The film’s title is a reply to a because Bresson maintains question asked by one of the that “you must put the past characters” “Who is responsible into the present if you want to for this mockery of mankind?” If be believable.” For Jane the possibility of grace seemed Sloan, Lancelot de Lac “is a remote in Lancelot du Lac, it is film about the end of things and the illusory heights of almost inconceivable here. Jan Dawson called this “Bresson’s idealism....The reliance on individual series of repeated images most daring and uncompromising film to date,” partly because as set-pieces also presents the clearest instance of the “Charles appears to us, if not to his girlfriends, as the most approximation of musical form in Bresson’s work. The riderless antipathetic of Bresson’s protagonists to date. horses galloping through the dark woods are a particularly L’Argent (Money, 1982; first drafted in 1977) is loosely haunting melody in this respect, but there are many other based on Tolstoy’s story “The False Note.” Jean Sémolué points instances: the opening and closing of visors that punctuate a out the “brutality” of this title—the first time Bresson had used conversation between the knights; Gawain’s repeated utterance an object for this purpose—and the film shows a bleak, appalled of ‘Lancelot’ during the tournament; and the several series of rigor of content and means, proving an uncomfortable experience multicolored horse trappings. The elegance and coldness of this for many of those at the Cannes premiere and later. aesthetic search for the ‘purely abstract’ has its parallel in the Bresson himself describes L’Argent as the film “with search for the Grail, the impossible search for the spiritual in the which I am most satisfied—or at least it is the one where I found living world.” the most surprises when it was complete—things I had not “Think about the surface of the work,” Bresson says expected.” For him, the making of a film comprises “three births (with Leonardo da Vinci). “Above all think about the surface.” and two deaths”; the birth of an idea is followed by its “death” in Various critics have fastened on various different aspects of the the agony of writing; it comes alive again in the period of surface in Lancelot. found his “manner of preparation and improvisation, only to die again during the actual infusing naturalistic detail with formal significance...particularly filming; and then there is rebirth in a new form during the masterful in the marvelous use he makes of armour....It functions editing, where the “surprises” come. At Cannes in 1983 it shared as an additional layer of non-expressiveness, increasing the “Grand Prize for Creation” with ’s neutrality and uniformity in separate images and cloaking . identities in many crucial scenes....The concentration on hands For the time being, Bresson has abandoned his long- and feet that is a constant in Bresson’s work becomes all the cherished plan to base a film, “Genesis,” on the first chapters of more affecting here when it is set against the shiny metal in other the Old Testament, finding the logistical problems insuperable. shots. Or consider the overall effect of contrast achieved between In 1987, almost eighty, he was planning a “lighter film” derived the suits of armour and the image of Guinevere standing in her from a modern novel about two girls who leave their dreary jobs bath, which makes flesh seem at once more rarified and and head for Monte Carlo and then Italy, gambling and stealing vulnerable, more soft and graceful, more palpable and precious. as they go, and knowing their inevitable destiny is prison. The The on- and off-screen rattle of the armour throughout the is also finishing a major book to supplement and amplify reinforces this impression.” his Notes on the Cinematographer. Bresson’s use of animals in this film (as elsewhere) was In his long career, Bresson has made just thirteen also much discussed. Tom Milne wrote that “the mysterious, feature films and earned the right to two clichés. He is a genius poetic precision of the film springs from...images invested with of the cinema, and he remains unique. Since his 1943 debut, he Bresson’s belief that animals are more sensitive, more perceptive has steadily refined and perfected a form of expression that perhaps, than humans”—images like those of “the birds flying places him apart from and above the world of commercial movie- graceful and free above the knights, the horses toiling through making. He has preferred to remain inactive rather than the mud and dying with their riders.” compromise and has chosen never to work in the theatre or on From the haunted medieval forests of Lancelot du Lac, television (a medium he dislikes). He is the cinema’s true Bresson returned to modern Paris for a story arguably even in that his films are completely and immediately recognizable darker, Le Diable, probablement (The Devil, Probably, 1977), and he has controlled every aspect of their creation. He has built Bresson—MOUCHETTE—7 a pyramidic, densely interwoven body of work with great purity professional actors, minimized dialogue, and eschewed the angst- and austerity of expression, in which, as Jonathan Rosenbaum ridden psychology typical of and Bernardo has written, “nothing is permitted to detract from the overall Bertolucci. His films display neither the self-conscious malaise narrative complex, and everything present is used.” Bresson has of Antonioni nor the Brechtian/Marxist reflexivity of Godard. often been called the Jansen of the cinema, because of his moral And in his mission to purge the cinema of visual excess, he rigor and his concern with predestination; but his films often avoided the elaborate mise-en-scène and extended camera seem to embody a passionate struggle between that bleak creed movements so beloved of , Kenji Mizoguchi, and a Pascalian gamble on the possibility of redemption. Max Ophuls, and …. Too singular to lead a “school” of filmmakers, Bresson Bresson’s concern with ethical behavior and how to has nevertheless influenced many directors and has been conduct a moral life was consistent with the climate in the intensely admired by , , Paul aftermath of the Second World War, when traditional value Schrader, François Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard, among systems were challenged by philosophies such as Sartrean others. He remains resolutely attracted to the idea of youth, “its existentialism…. suppleness and potential,” and has become increasingly hardened in his dislike of the commercial cinema, maintaining that he has The Question of God not seen a film through to the end for twenty-five years. Yet The question of Bresson’s personal convictions about God and nothing could be further from the truth than the suggestion of a the Catholic faith in which he was raised is difficult to answer, hermetic, cynical, or bitter man. Late in 1986, in a conversation since without a biography, one can only conjecture from the with this writer he said simply: “I love life.” work and from remarks he made in interviews over the years. The more immediate question concerns the relationship of Bresson’s art to belief in God, and more specifically, to the tenets of Catholic doctrine. Many critics and admirers of Bresson would prefer that such questions just go away. But as the words design, destiny, inevitable course, and prescribed plan—all of which have been used by critics of every stripe, suggest, Bresson’s cinema has always evoked the question of God. … Consider the moral severity of the films mentioned earlier. Although such a stance has been attributed to his Catholicism, there is no hard evidence that Bresson practiced the faith in his adult life. Nevertheless it would be difficult to deny that both Catholicism and faith left their marks on his thinking and his art, along with a perhaps heretical belief in predestination, as the implacable nature of his narratives strongly supports. Even his late works suggest an inability or unwillingness to relinquish the idea of design inflected by the Christian theory of history. This is something Bresson shared with George Bernanos, Feodor Dostoevsky, and Leo Tolstoy, from Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Tony Pipolo. whose works inspired more than half of his films. Like them he Oxford University Press, NY, 2010. was preoccupied with questions of good and evil. The existence Perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker of God, the relationship between body and soul, and that between after , Robert Bresson sustained a reputation as an personal and social morality. For him, as for Bernanos and uncompromising artist throughout his career. In 1957 the director Dostoevsky, the world is fallen and evil is intrinsic to the human remarked, “There is only one [French] condition, as present in the provinces as it is in the cities, in the filmmaker who has not sold out, and that’s Bresson.” At the time old as well as the young, the rich as well as the poor, the Bresson had made only four films, but the claim proved powerful as well as the weak. It was this obstinate posture that prophetic. Few filmmakers have clung so tenaciously to the same infuriated Leftist critics in such journals as Positif who declared thematic concerns, exerted such obsessive control over every Bresson out of touch with social and political reality…. aspect of their work, and adhered to as harsh a vision of the Bresson’s films, thematically and formally, have always world. Like Carl-Theodor Dreyer, another idiosyncratic been about apparent absences, silences, and the invisible. The filmmaker sometimes drawn to religious subjects and whose only “evidence” of God’s existence in Diary is the intense look career also spanned nearly a half century, Bresson’s rigorous on the face of as he stares into a powerfully standards limited his production. In forty years he made only charged off screen space….Bresson’s work therefore bears the thirteen films. … sign of one raised Catholic as well as the doubts of a deeply Bresson occupied a singular position in international engaged modern thinker. Pivoting on the line between the two, cinema. His pursuit of a “pure” film aesthetic not only placed his cinema reflects an authentic mind-set of mid-twentieth- him outside the mainstream, but led him to renounce even those century thought. Wondering how committed he was to a religious pleasures afforded by the art cinema of his contemporaries. No point of view seems an inescapable aspect of watching his films. star personalities grace his work as they do those of Roberto … Rossellini (Ingrid Bergman), (Monica From Diary on, in fact, we might say that Bresson did Vitti), or (). Determined to not simply discover the means by which he would impose his set free the cinema of any residue of the theater, Bresson rejected vision on the world; he became a God-like author of that vision, Bresson—MOUCHETTE—8 whose compulsive control over every facet of each film—a the elegance, obstinacy, and capaciousness of Bresson’s double- stance by definition antithetical to the egoistic personalities of mindedness. A rape edges into tenderness, suicide emerges as at actors—effectively re-created the world in the image and manner once holy and appalling, and scene upon scene invokes, in which he believed it was created. simultaneously, spiritual despair and an afterlife. Mouchette (1967) was Bresson’s final black-and-white film before he switched over to color for Une femme douce, in 1969. And there are vestiges throughout of the mournful, formally exacting work he created during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as intuitions of the tonal complexity and even fiercer pessimism that infused his late style. Mouchette herself is at least as solitary as Michel in Pickpocket (1959), and her village proves as claustrophobic as Fontaine’s prison cell in A Man Escaped (1956). Like Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Mouchette tracks hereditary alcoholism in the “malicious” French countryside, and Bresson adapted both movies from novels by Georges Bernanos, a gifted exponent of what he designated “Catholic realism” and also the author of the libretto for the Francis Poulenc opera Dialogues des Carmelites. Shooting on Mouchette started soon after Bresson finished Au hasard Balthazar (1966), and Mouchette seems a combination of the suffering Marie and the donkey, Balthazar, much as the from Robert Bresson A Spiritual Style in Film. Joseph hunting (rabbits) and poaching (partridges) episodes once again Cuneen. Continuum NY 2003 analogue human and animal misfortunes. Andrey Tarkovsky, the great Russian director who made Yet Mouchette registers a departure from early Bresson Andrey Rublyov, Stalker, and The Sacrifice, rightly insisted that as much as a summing up. Philosophically, or theologically, Bresson doesn’t have a genre: suicide no longer arises as inevitably redemptive, as purely (in He is a genre in himself....Bresson is perhaps the only novelist Dennis Cooper’s tense phrase) “a tragic segue into the man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of comforting delusion of heaven.” Mouchette foretastes the the finished work with a project formulated desperate convulsions of Bresson’s last films, The Devil, beforehand....His guiding principle was the elimination Probably (1977) and L’argent (1983). There are also prickly of what is known as ‘expressiveness,’ in the sense that cinematic variations and reversals. A distinguishing gesture of A he wanted to do away with the frontier between the Man Escaped, Pickpocket, and especially Diary of a Country image and actual life, to make life itself graphic and Priest involved the repetition, sometimes the tripling, of an expressive....The principle has something in common event—we see a close-up of a handwritten notebook page; then with Zen art where, in our perception, precise listen as a voice-over speaks the words; finally, someone observation of life passes paradoxically into sublime performs the actions we have just heard and read. artistic imagery. For Mouchette, Bresson folded this stylistic signature inside out, But perhaps Bresson’s instinctive rebellion against the and instead of reiteration advanced a sort of stutter step, often various forms of excess found in most commercial signaled by a disruption of image and sound. movies is adequately summarized in his wonderful bit A brief prologue introduces this oblique sound-image of self-advice: “Not to use two violins when one is design and lodges a story line in the form of a question. The enough.” scene, the film in miniature, enacts a riddle of presence and absence. A woman we later recognize as Mouchette’s dying Bresson’s “spiritual style in film” is no guarantee of mother abruptly sits before us, crying, talking. “What will edifying endings, but his austere, clear-eyed cinematography become of them without me?” she asks. “I can feel it in my fosters a deep understanding of the grandeur and pain of our breast. It’s like a stone inside.” The woman rises, but Bresson’s common humanity…. camera, instead of following her, stays fixed on the spot she has just departed, inside—we now discern—a church. Against the Robert Polio: “Mouchette: Girl, Interrupted” (Criterion vacant frame we hear the loud click-clack of her shoes as she Notes) walks away, and then Claudio Monteverdi’s Magnificat. The rest “Between thought and expression”—as Lou Reed wrote of the film tracks a reply to her tearful inquiry, perhaps her in the Velvet Underground song “Some Kinda Love”—“lies a prayer, about the fate of her family, particularly her daughter lifetime.” Mouchette, and maybe all Robert Bresson’s Mouchette. But on subsequent viewings, after we understand inexhaustible, majestic films, transpire in that puzzling space who the woman is and her situation, cruxes still abound. The “between,” that incalculable “lifetime.” How, for instance, does a “stone” indicates her fatal physical illness, yet isn’t the word also director as visually acute as Bresson and so insistent on “the emblematic of the adamantine misery that numbs her family, the resources of cinematography and the use of the camera to create” entire town? Does the empty frame betoken, as the Magnificat also imply the urgency of the unseen, the ineffable, the hints, her ascent into heaven? Or do empty frames anticipate otherworldly? How does a filmmaker so attentive to greater, possibly eternal, emptiness, as the disappearing footsteps metaphysical demands honor the press of our physical existence, suggest? She can’t go on with the world, the prologue further whether everyday or tragic? The marvel of Mouchette inheres in proposes, yet the world can go on without her. Bresson—MOUCHETTE—9

Mouchette arranges a disquieting mix of naturalism and From the drinking to the violence, the strangled birds to disorientation. The vistas of the film look matter-of-factly the wounded rabbits, Mouchette inscribes a fever dream. Long impoverished, brutal, and desolate, but Bresson recurrently shuns shots that overwhelm the human actors with landscape play transitions, radiates noises—voices, trucks, a baby—independent against close-ups that block perspective. Inside and out, there is of visual sources, and insinuates reactions prior to causes. “The always a “cyclone,” as Arsène and Mouchette naively tag the ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outer,” storm that agitates their world. Mouchette apprehends her future Bresson remarks in Notes on a Cinematographer. “The eye (in in the hunted creatures, but also in Louisa’s drudgery, her general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive.” Like her mother’s sickness, and Arsène’s shame. Her parents, the teacher mother, and as if in prediction of her suicide, Mouchette tends to who yanks her by the neck over to the piano as though she were exit the frame before Bresson cuts to the next shot, though from one of Arsène’s partridges, the old women who demean and the outset she comes across as earthy rather than ethereal, her mortify her, Mathieu—the figures of ostensible authority are body hugging the ground, as when she crouches along a roadside suspect, tainted, their morality indistinguishable from neurosis, to toss mud at her classmates, stomps her feet in a puddle, grinds terror, and self-delusion. dirt into a fancy carpet, or rolls downhill into a pond. In her Mouchette twice tries to tell her mother what happened oversize clogs, Mouchette always seems off-kilter, as Bresson’s to her with Arsène during her night in the woods, but each time strategy of low shots—legs, hands, skirts, shoes—disorders her she stops, interrupted by a crying baby and by her mother’s childhood. Even her time line is unsteady—the music during the passing. Because of her suicide, Mouchette’s life is another bumper-car interlude at the local fair secures a 1960s setting, but interrupted story—and Bresson doesn’t show us an image of her inside her destitute house it might as well still be World War II. body entering the water, recording instead the sounds of her The coordinates of Mouchette are drinking and male splash. The Magnificat returns as the camera lingers over the power. Mouchette’s father and brother haul contraband liquor space that she, like her mother at the start of the film, has now and grimly toast in celebration of their delivery. Alcohol is vacated, an empty frame. Once again, we might view this as consumed before and after Sunday worship. The poacher, Mouchette’s release, as a gift, but if her death is akin to grace, Arsène, drains his canteen of gin when he rapes her, and his Bresson never lets us forget that her suicide is also desperate, bloody fight with Mathieu, the gamekeeper, dissolves into pathetic, a dead end. amiable imbibing. Her mother asks for gin on her deathbed, then warns Mouchette, “Make sure you never get taken in by lazy workmen or drunks.” In his novel, Bernanos links the rape to her other travails as the child of a dipsomaniac: “It was like one of those endless nightmares of uniform horror which, as a real alcoholic’s daughter, she often had to endure throughout a whole night and whose full memory only really came back much later, at supper time, when she had carried it with her all day like an invisible animal attached to her body.” Sexual aggression and masculine bluster infect the countryside like a congenital defect. Early on, some boys expose themselves to Mouchette, and later call her “rat face.” Her father shoves her twice, first into church, and then as she flirts with a young man at the fair. Mathieu trails Arsène not so much for his illegal traps and snares as for their rivalry over Louisa, a dour bartender. There is a mechanical core to this antic, destructive motion—Mouchette’s father keeps on driving after he has collapsed onto his bed, improvising a steering wheel from his : “Robert Bresson Was Master of cap. The women of the town, too, absorb this lurid poison. “Little Understatement” slut,” a shopkeeper snaps at Mouchette, observing the telltale Robert Bresson, the lonely giant of the French cinema, scratches on her chest. is dead. For Mouchette, love, sex, empathy, service, humiliation, The director, whose austere masterpieces evoked praise and force are all bound up together. Although a child, she but little imitation, died Saturday in Paris at 98, after a long functions as caretaker for her family, yet she is an unseasoned, illness that inspired retrospectives and tributes at the Film Center lackadaisical steward, spilling coffee and milk, and sloppily of the Art Institute of Chicago and in Toronto, London, swaddling her baby brother. Her response to her mother’s death Edinburgh and Tokyo. In Chicago, all of the screenings sold out, is to fall asleep. Bernanos renders Mouchette’s encounter with even though Bresson's films often were ignored by audiences on Arsène as a continuation of the cruelty she suffers at home: “In first release. her child’s mind, the memory of that violence was somehow Bresson was one of a handful of directors whose very mixed with that of many others, and her reason could scarcely frames identified their author. Like Fellini, Hitchcock and Ozu, distinguish it from her father’s savage beatings.” But Bresson’s he had such a distinctive way of seeing that his films resembled bleaker vision here always sees double. He deftly affirms Arsène no others. What you noticed was the extreme restraint of his as an alternative to her domestic violations, as well as their latest actors (he preferred to call them "models"), and the way the installment. Arsène manifestly wishes to protect Mouchette, even action centered on what his characters saw, rather than what they as he attacks her. She identifies with Arsène’s troubles and his did. "The thing that matters," he said, "is not what they show me revolt, hugging him finally while he struggles on top of her. Bresson—MOUCHETTE—10 but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not the suffering of a mule. "Diary of a Country Priest" (1950) was suspect is in them." about a young priest whose true spirituality baffles those who His actors had no difficulty conveying that state, seek the comfort of superficial religion. It was cited as an because Bresson never discussed characters, plot or motivation influence by the Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, another director with them, only instructing them minutely on how to move and whose films resembled prayer. His final film, "L'Argent" (1983), what to say. He shunned displays of emotions in his work, tells the story of a young man who unwittingly passes a rehearsing and shooting a scene over and over, until the actors counterfeit note, setting into motion a strange chain of moral seemed to be going through the motions without thought. Oddly, circumstances. this style created films of great passion: Because the actors didn't Newcomers to his work were often baffled. Those who act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them. looked more closely became fascinated. I taught a class on his Bresson's best known film was probably "The Trial of work a few years ago, and watched the students begin with doubt Joan of Arc" (1963), in which Joan was seen entirely as a and end in admiration. Through his discipline there beat a spiritual creature; not for him the gaudy excess of the battle passion that made flashier, showier directors seem shabby. scenes in the recent French extravaganza "The Messenger: The "To see his films is to marvel that other directors have Story Of Joan Of Arc." He advised against music in movies, had the ingenuity to evolve such elaborate styles and yet restrict avoided all special effects, and when he did show a medieval them to superficial messages," write the critic David Thomson. battle scene, as in "Lancelot of the Lake" (1974), it was typical Quite so; the second entry in Bresson's Notes on the that he shot his characters from the neck down, dressed in armor, Cinematographer reads: "The facility of using my resources well focusing on physical agony rather than their personalities. diminishes when their number grows." In "Pickpocket" (1959), he studied on the exact physical methods What did he think of movies that assault us with blasts of his hero, leaving us to guess at his motivations, which were of sound and special effects? His notes are like psalms, with such not theft so much as a cry of loneliness from a man cut off from entries as: "If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost the world. In "A Man Escaped" (1956), he shows a jailbreak nothing to the ear. One cannot be at the same time all eye and all based not on cunning or trickery but on infinite patience and the ear." minute observation of the habits of others. In "Mouchette" Producers were not daring enough, and audiences not (1966), one of his most touching films, a young girl is cruelly curious enough, to easily support the kind of art to which he treated by her village, and kills herself; the death is a moment of devoted his career. His movies were few and far between - 13 in freedom and ecstasy. "Au Hasard Balthazar" (1966) was about 40 years. For lovers of film, they are like the stations of the cross.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2018 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS SERIES 37 OCT 23 MIKE HODGES, GET CARTER, 1971 OCT 30 , THE ELEPHANT MAN, 1980 NOV 6 KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI, THREE COLORS: BLUE, 1993 NOV 13 ALAN MAK AND WAI-KEUNG LAU, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, 2002 NOV 20 , THE DEPARTED, 2006 NOV 27 TOM MCCARTHY, SPOTLIGHT, 2015 DEC 4 , THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING, 1975

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