How to speak of Robert Bresson whose Interviews just reappeared? Forty years of cinema, 40 years of responding to journalists and critics to understand what was for him the essence of the seventh art that he preferred to call “cinematograph” not cinema. Forty years and 14 films torn from producers. And an Genesis never shot for lack of funding that we like to imagine as the greatest aborted film in the history of cinema.
After three films, already brilliant, where he was looking for himself, the adaptation of Diary of a country priest de Bernanos made his name. A death row inmate has escaped, drawn from his experience as a prisoner during the war, Pickpocket, The Trial of Joan of Arc, At random Balthazar, Mouchette enthroned in the pantheon of cinephilia, even if they are considered, wrongly, as austere.
What follows is less easy, yet with a Lancelot amazing, and two very contemporary films, the Devil probably, one of the greatest films on youth, and his testament, Money, whose topicality is every day more proven.
Emotion above all, at Bresson
How to talk about Bresson? Perhaps first by going to the heart: Bresson is emotion: “As soon as it is true, we touch. » However, how to create emotion in cinema? Bresson has an answer as clear as it is irrefutable: by making cinematography and nothing else. Not literature (even if he writes wonderfully), not painting (even if he is a painter), above all not filmed theatre.
You have to understand that cinema has its own means that you have to respect. And these means are relations of images and sounds. A shot in itself, however beautiful, only makes sense in relation to the image that precedes it and the one that follows it. Hence the importance of the looks that make this link, “the only important thing in the film”, does he explain about the Trial of Joan of Arc. And that of the assembly. Bresson is not only a formidable creator of shots, but during the editing, the film takes shape and meaning. The editing makes the film.
Tell the truth of a soul
Nevertheless, and this is perhaps what makes Bresson’s films disconcerting, this film is based on characters embodied by what he calls “models” not actors. The actor is for the theater and Bresson admires him because the theater is this art where the actors create with their body.
In the cinema, the body is absent, it is recorded by a camera, but this camera cannot show or feel the body as it exists in the theatre. It makes invisible things visible. The cinema records by a neutral tool bodies in movement and gives in return the soul. It is abstract and suggestive. That’s why Bresson’s models don’t play, they are. At the antipodes of Dreyer, whom Bresson does not like, and this is obviously severe, Bresson’s models speak with a voice, not white, he protests, but just. To tell the truth of a soul.
Bresson chose to be Mouchette a young girl who did not know how to play. He could shoot 50 takes, to arrive at the moment when, letting go of all control, the model reveals what is hidden, its soul. And for that, the word is not the essential: “The word must say everything that the image cannot say. » Speech or music, never decorative. Schubert’s andantino in Random balthazar is what the donkey cannot say but must suggest. Schubert is the donkey which is itself a Christ figure.
A “Jansenist” filmmaker
Faith is essential with Bresson. He defines himself expressly as a Christian filmmaker. This is why he refuses to have his films considered desperate. Even Mouchette’s suicide is not hopeless. The final scene is one of the most emblematic of Bresson’s cinema: the body rolling towards the river, then, as it continues off-screen towards its fatal destiny, the camera remains on the empty, deserted ground. And then the sound of the water and the shot of the clothes lying on the ground.
Never has the cinema given a more real death because it avoids the lie of the staging. And yet, it’s not hopeless, not only because Bresson believes in God, believes in the redemption of Mouchette, but because by not showing what other filmmakers would have fabricated, he opens up to mystery, therefore to only possibility of salvation.
“Jansenist” is how Bresson has been called and the economy of means is not for nothing. But a Jansenist who believes in predestination and chance, who believes in the virtue of the frame, so that improvisation can develop. A Jansenist so unpessimistic that he could have been a Jesuit and wanted to make a film about Ignatius of Loyola.
Because Bresson’s spirituality is both Christ-like (the donkey in Random balthazar, Joan of Arc) is marked by the emergence of grace, in the heart of darkness, like the redemption of the character of Pickpocket testifies to it. The last sentence of the film (“O Jeanne, to get to you, what a funny road I had to take”) is that of the life of grace in every human being. And that Bresson’s cinema could make people see and feel.
To read
Robert Bresson. Interviews compiled by Mylène Bresson, Flamemarion, €25.
The “Interviews”: a look back at 40 years of cinema by Robert Bresson