Maybe Robert Bresson, Jansenist that he was, be the most unorthodox of all the filmmakers brought to these articles. Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo —one of the great scholars of Catholic orthodoxy, the history of ideas, literature in Spanish, the interpretation of aesthetics and other substantive knowledge— includes the Jansenists in his History of the heterodox Spaniards (1880-1882). Now that the volumes dedicated to the Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation have been completed, in the volume that deals with the 18th century, encyclopedism and the preponderance of French culture, the Jansenists — sworn enemies of the Jesuits —, meanwhile Frenchified, have their own entry. Certainly the faith of Jansenium —who was Bishop of Ypres (1636-1638)— is considered heretical by the Catholic Church.
Already in the first half of the 20th century there came a time, of which he tells us Fernando Pesso, in which “most young people had lost belief in God for the same reason that their elders had had it: without knowing why”. Increasingly pronounced in its mistrust of old beliefs, that era continues into our 21st century.
Thus, given the skepticism of the common peasantry regarding these questions —I am the first and one of the most unbelieving—, I know positively that drawing attention to a filmmaker by talking about his Jansenism is attracting very few viewers to his filmography.
“For some, Marie’s virtue is platonic; for others, no matter how heretic Bresson was for the Catholic Church, she is that Franciscan love for animals“
I will therefore praise a virtue of the great Robert Bresson that is fully in tune with the sensibility of our days: his animalism. If tomorrow, in some film library, a cycle were dedicated to him, by means of this procedure —“dialogue”, they call it—, by which the great Madrid art galleries confront one artist with another —in principle unrelated to each other—, so that the visitor discovers analogies and draw your own conclusions, I would put dialogue Random Baltazar (Robert Bresson, 1966) with Goodbye, Lamb! (1893), the most lyrical and moving of the tales of Leopold Wings, Clarion. Yes, sir, there is something in Rosa, the girl who bids Cordera farewell, in the Somonte meadow, when the train takes the cow to the slaughterhouse, that dialogue with Mary (Anne Wiazemski), the young woman from Bresson who is the only good thing that fate has in store for Baltasar —the ass that gives the film its title—, the only one who does not mistreat him.
For some, Marie’s virtue is platonic; for others, no matter how heretic Bresson was for the Catholic Church, it is that Franciscan love of animals. For the great Godard —whom Baltasar’s Chance touched him so closely that Anne Wiazemsky was his second wife—the film “sums up the world in an hour and a half”. And if by “world” we mean that journey that takes us from the innocence of children’s games, which Balthazar share with the children around them —such as Rosa and Pinín with la Cordera—, the pettiness and misery of adult life that make Balthazar in a beast of burden, the “world” is told with absolute mastery.
“He portrayed with such scrupulousness the gestures, attitudes and gestures of his nuns that he was able to express his spirituality without resorting in any way to the supernatural“
His first pictorial and photographic concerns now forgotten, Robert Bresson (Brémont-Lamothe, Auvergne, 1907 – Paris, 1999) became known as a filmmaker in the most difficult years for French cinematography throughout the 20th century: those of the German occupation of France. The filmmakers who do not opt for exile, which has brought masters like Rene Clair, jean renoir either Julien Duvivier, they have to renounce poetic realism as defeatist and the avant-garde as decadent. You can only shoot evasion tapes, which do not bother the Germans, or directly serve their interests.
Marcel l’Herbierformer avant-garde, opts for evasion in the fantastic night (1942); Marcel Carne —the greatest of the poetic— does the same and premieres visitors of the night (1942). Bresson, who has just passed eighteen months confined in a German prison campopens with a story told by a Swiss Dominican —Raymond Leopold Bruckberger— with whom he has shared his captivity, about the nuns who care for former inmates: the angels of sin (1943). The filmmaker so scrupulously portrayed the gestures, attitudes and mannerisms of his nuns that he was able to express his spirituality without in any way resorting to the supernatural.
“For our filmmaker, this translates into a mise-en-scène totally devoid of artifice. Artifices including professional interpretation“
Already with the liberation, it arrives The Ladies of the Forest of Bologna (1945). starring the Spanish Mary Casares, our compatriot will be the only professional actress who will collaborate with Robert Bresson. Both Anne Wiazemsky and Dominic Sanda —protagonist of the sweet woman (1969)—were his discoveries that later developed a filmography. But when he hired them they were two unknown to the general public. For Breson, jansenism was basically austerity, as they are, in fact, this and the rest of the Puritanisms for all mortals. But for our filmmaker this translates into a staging completely devoid of artifice. Artifices including professional interpretation.
“We must abandon the prejudice against simplicity”, the director will declare that, together with Carl Theodor Dreyer, will make the most austere and elevated cinema in all history. It is by no means gratuitous to compare The trial of Jeanne d’Arc (1962) by Bresson with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) by Dreyer. And, like his Danish colleague in vampire (1932), Bresson is also a master in the use of the space that remains outside the cameraman’s field in allusion to what is shown on the screen. Abounding in his eagerness to strip his speech of all artifice, he manages to make a pure cinema, without an iota of theatrical contamination, without any interpretation. Their actors they move through the field encompassed by their planes like automatons.
“Except the army of shadowsfew films about the French resistance reach the mastery of A death row inmate has escaped“
Over time, the bad conscience created in France during the German occupation gave rise to a whole genre of French cinema: that of resistance. An obsession of the neighboring screen as it will be in ours the Civil War and everything that concerns it, from the Second Republic to the Franco regime. The most notable difference between the two monomanias is that the French resistance will also give rise to a whole subgenre of cinema inspired by World War II. Now, except for the army of shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970) Few films about the French resistance reach the mastery of A death row inmate has escaped. Received by critics with an enthusiasm until then only displayed to greet the cinema of the mystics Scandinavian directors—Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Victor Sjöström—Bresson won the Best Director award at the 1957 Cannes Film Festival.
Their literature —“Cinema is not a photographed spectacle, but a writing”, he maintained— is already stripped of all artifice in The ladies of the forest of Bologna. Based on a fragment of Jacques the Fatalist, of Diderot, in his sequences Bresson offers us one of the most impressive portraits of the feelings that have been on the screen through the spiteful Hélène (María Casares), who takes revenge on Jean (paul bernard), when he leaves her. To this end, he will surreptitiously maneuver until he marries Agnès (elina labourdette), an entertaining one of which she ignores her past, although it constitutes an offense for Jean as a husband.
“Bresson comes to do exactly the opposite in Journal d’un cure de campagne. It was thus in search of the most intimate of the novel to show it without the slightest concession to cinema as a spectacle.“
“What difference does it make? Everything is already grace!” says the priest of Ambricourt (Claude Laydu), the protagonist of Journal d’un cure de campagne (1951), before delivering the soul. It is Bresson himself who has achieved grace, which in his case could be defined as the perfect harmony between the asceticism of the subject to be portrayed and the austerity of the style in portraying it, or, if the reader prefers, the perfect balance between form and substance. But there is something else. Being the film the adaptation of Diary of a rural priest (1936), the famous novel by Georges Bernanos, amply translated in Spain, in which the battle against the sin of a young religious is sublimated, and Bresson being a writer who uses his camera as a way of pen, Journal d’un cure de campagne becomes a singular film adaptation.
At that time, the canons dictate that, when putting a novel on the screen —versions that always tend to obey editorial successes—, the filmmaker goes to look for that image that is worth a thousand words, to show everything that can not be said . For example: Le diable au corps, film version, on the other hand, commendable, directed by Claude Autant-Lara in 1947 on the homonymous novel by Raymond Radiguet. Well, Bresson comes to do exactly the opposite in Journal d’un cure de campagne. It was thus in search of the most intimate of the novel to show it to its viewers without the slightest concession to cinema as a spectacle..
Although its scant commercial success forced him to shoot from time to time, when he premiered Pickpocket (1959), about a pickpocket who ends up finding grace like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov at the last moment, in that final redemption so Bresson, not only revalidates his grace, it also becomes a classic of European cinema. “Bresson is to French cinema what Mozart is to German music”, estimates Godard. Among his subsequent production, all of it outstanding, it is necessary to draw attention to Mouchette (1977) and The money (1983), his last tape.