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XXXVII:8) Robert Bresson: MOUCHETTE (1967, 78 Min.

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XXXVII:8) Robert Bresson: MOUCHETTE (1967, 78 Min. October 16, 2018 (XXXVII:8) Robert Bresson: MOUCHETTE (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 Georges Bernanos (novel), Robert Bresson (scenario & adaptation and dialogue) PRODUCED BY Anatole Dauman MUSIC Jean Wiener CINEMATOGRAPHY Ghislain Cloquet 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 Cannes Film Festival, 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); The Trial of Joan of Arc (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; Au Hasard Balthazar (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; A Gentle Woman (1969), Four Nights of a Dreamer (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 Paris, 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 Angels of Sin (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 Les Affaires publiques, (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 City Lights—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.
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