Austere Perfectionism: The Films of Robert Bresson (France, 1959-1967

Description

“It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears.”—Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography

The works of Robert Bresson— thirteen exquisite gems in a career that spans five decades—are as rare as they are revered. So it is with great pleasure that we present this complete retrospective of his films organized by James Quandt of TIFF Cinematheque on the occasion of the forthcoming publication Robert Bresson (Revised), edited by Quandt and distributed by Indiana University Press, an invaluable volume for anyone seeking to understand the beauty and perfectionism of Bresson’s singular body of work.

With his first feature—made after he had been a prisoner of war—Robert Bresson (1901–99) was recognized as an original and authentic voice in cinema. Over the years, this authenticity would rework itself in film after rigorous film, gaining him more than a few imitators, but never a true heir. Even now, the power of Bresson’s style—austere, yet deeply affecting; controlled, yet replete with compassion, almost unbearably so—remains one of cinema’s pure mysteries.



The Catholic Bresson evinces an unsparing eye toward French society—in the countryside, in the city, in convent or prison—and unsparing compassion for its victims. But while other directors are concerned with sentiment, Bresson’s concern is at once more real and more otherworldly: his subject is suffering and redemption. For his many admirers, his films attain the grace his characters seek.

Series coordinated at BAM/PFA by Susan Oxtoby. Thanks to the following individuals and institutions for their generous support of this retrospective: TIFF Cinematheque and James Quandt, Toronto, who undertook the organization of the North American touring series; Institut Français, Paris; Delphine Selles Alvarez at the French Cultural Services, New York; Denis Bisson and Nora Orallo, French Consulate San Francisco; La Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Mylène Bresson, Paris; Pierre Lhomme, Paris; Jake Perlin, The Film Desk, New York; Bruce Goldstein and Eric Di Bernardo, Rialto Pictures, New York; Sarah Finklea and Brian Belovarac, Janus Films, New York; and Alliance Française San Francisco.

Thursday / 1.19.12
7:00
Au hasard Balthazar
Robert Bresson (France, 1966)

Inspired in part by the donkey anecdote in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, Bresson cast Balthazar the donkey as the central character. Passed from one owner to the next, Balthazar is both witness to and victim of their stories, their suffering, their violence. His life and death are as mysterious, if not as meaningless, as any of theirs. The other main figure in the film is a young farm girl who befriends Balthazar and suffers some of his fate in the grip of her passion for a leather-jacketed motorcyclist. The film is at once extremely sensual and a work of unearthly sensitivity. Judy Bloch

Written by Bresson. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. With Anne Wiazemsky, François Lafarge, Walter Green, Philippe Asselin. (95 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Rialto Pictures)

Saturday / 1.21.12
6:30
Mouchette
Robert Bresson (France, 1967)

Mouchette is a visual study of a state of mind. Based on a book by Georges Bernanos (author also of Diary of a Country Priest) it has affinities with Balthazar in its depiction of the limits of quiet suffering and humiliation a living being can endure. In a French village painted in all its charmlessness, fourteen-year-old Mouchette has been denied a childhood by an alcoholic father and a dying mother. Despised and rejected, she observes the adult world from a position of extreme isolation. A final lesson in the callousness of adults informs Mouchette’s first, and last, act of open rebellion, a pure, elegiac enactment of Bresson’s redemptive pessimism. Judy Bloch

Written by Bresson, based on the novel Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. With Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Marie Cardinal, Paul Hébert. (80 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Rialto Pictures)

Saturday / 1.28.12
6:30
Pickpocket
Robert Bresson (France, 1959)

It is one of those consummate works of art which in one flash pales everything you have ever seen . . . an unmitigated masterpiece.—Paul Schrader

Bresson liked to use untrained actors whose natural impassivity he harnessed to his own ends. The epiphany is Pickpocket, which in a watershed year in French cinema, 1959, was merely the most contemporary film ever made. A young recluse, Michel, drawn inexorably to picking pockets, suffers not guilt, but a kind of performance anxiety based on his Nietzschean theories of the superior man. Shot in the streets, cafes, and subways of Paris, Pickpocket is a brilliant ballet of fingers, hands, glances, legs, watches, wallets, gazes from strangers indifferent or wary by turns. Everything is observable, isolated. Judy Bloch

Written by Bresson. Photographed by Léonce-Henry Burel. With Martin Lasalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie, Jean Pelegri. (75 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Janus Films/Criterion Pictures)


8:10
Diary of a Country Priest
Robert Bresson (France, 1950)

(Le journal d’un curé de campagne). Georges Bernanos’s novel concerns a young country priest who, in his simplicity and purity, suffers the scorn of his parishioners. Bresson faithfully adapted the novel to the screen, using Bernanos’s original dialogue and diary entries. Episode by episode, in his loneliness and then in illness, like stages of the cross, the priest progresses through pain to grace. Claude Laydu, a Swiss stage actor, fasted for periods in order to achieve the authenticity of his role, which is one of exterior passivity and interior strength. He effects Bresson’s most intimate excursion into the soul. Judy Bloch

Written by Bresson, from the novel by Georges Bernanos. Photographed by Léonce-Henry Burel. With Claude Laydu, Nicole Maurey, Jean Riveyre, André Guibert. (114 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Rialto Pictures)

Friday / 2.3.12
7:00
The Devil Probably
Robert Bresson (France, 1977) New 35mm Print!

(Le diable probablement). This has been called Bresson’s most cynical film. It certainly offers his most fashionably cynical protagonist, Charles, a young Parisian whose suicidal despair is vaguely linked to, but not entirely explained by, all the ecological, political, and social disasters of the modern world circa 1977. This character makes an interestingly unsympathetic addition to Bresson’s gallery of self-sacrifices—his behavior toward his multiple lovers is far from saintly, and his aristocratic beauty can’t mitigate an infuriating, passive arrogance. But Charles’s life, which ends in the middle of an unexpressed thought, takes on in retrospect the odd, compromised dignity of a thwarted spiritual search. Juliet Clark

Written by Bresson. Photographed by Pasqualino de Santis. With Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maublanc, Laetitia Carcano. (93 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, From The Film Desk and Olive Films)

Sunday / 2.5.12
4:00
Les anges du péché
Robert Bresson (France, 1943) New 35mm Print!

(Angels of Sin). Bresson’s visual elegance and uncompromising narrative style are already in evidence in his first feature film, lending calm to its passionate religious ambiguities. The script, written by France’s distinguished playwright and novelist Jean Giraudoux, follows a sophisticated young woman, Anne-Marie, into the closed world of a convent devoted to the rehabilitation of delinquent girls. The patiently evoked details of convent life present ritual, discipline, and sometimes ruthlessness as the norm. And if the camera’s eye is rarely idle, Bresson said, “The knots which are tied and untied inside the characters give the film its movement, its real movement.”

Written by Jean Giraudoux, R. P. Raymond, Leopold Bruckberger, Bresson. Photographed by Philippe Agostini. With Renée Faure, Jany Holt, Louise Sylvie. (96 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Institut Français)

Preceded by: Les Affaires Publiques (Robert Bresson, France, 1934). Robert Bresson’s legendary first film, long believed lost, proves to be cinema’s most intriguingly unlikely directorial debut: “A burlesque comedy; a circus with a plot; a piece of filmic doggerel; a cartoon with live actors—and like a cartoon, activated exclusively by energy” (Gilbert Adair).

Written by Bresson. Photographed by Nicolas Toporkoff. With Dalio, Beby, Andrée Servilanges, Gilles Margaritis. (1934, 25 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From La Cinémathèque Française)

Total running time: 121 mins

Friday / 2.10.12
7:00
The Trial of Joan of Arc
Robert Bresson (France, 1962)

(Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc). Bresson’s film follows Joan of Arc’s prolonged interrogation through to her death. The dialogue consists entirely of the trial transcript, reduced to its essentials; the visuals are austere, consisting mainly of medium shots of Joan and her judges, intercut with extreme close-ups of objects, hands, feet. Out of this icy surface Bresson creates an experience full of the mystery and the drama of this woman’s existence. Bresson: “She convinces us of a world at the farthest reach of our faculties. She enters this supernatural world but closes the door behind her.”

Written by Bresson. Photographed by Léonce-Henry Burel. With Florence Carrez, Jean-Claude Fourneau, Roger Honorat, Marc Jacquier. (65 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W, 35mm, From Institut Français, permission Janus Films/Criterion Collection)

8:25
Les dames du Bois de Boulogne
Robert Bresson (France, 1945)

One of Robert Bresson’s most incandescent works.—Senses of Cinema

(The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne). Bresson’s most accessible work (on the surface) updates an episode in an eighteenth-century

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