culture
TIFF Welcomes Would-Be Initiates to the Cult of Bresson
The latest Lightbox retrospective revisits the rigorous, much-revered filmmaking of Robert Bresson.
Bresson's bracing style can pose a barrier to entry for newcomers.
The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Thursday, February 9 to Friday, March 30, selected dates
As we suggested in our preview of last night’s Lightbox screening of A Man Escaped, few legendary filmmakers are as daunting to the uninitiated as Robert Bresson. Among seasoned cinephiles, he’s considered one of the medium’s most esteemed masters, but audiences habituated to Hollywood conventions (and even to the general conventions of contemporary “art house” fare) often struggle when first confronted with the rigours and rhythms of Bresson’s meticulous, truly singular style.
Thankfully, there has rarely been a better opportunity to become acquainted with Bresson than via “The Poetry of Precision,” the first complete retrospective of his feature filmography to be presented in North America in more than a decade. The touring series was curated by senior Cinematheque programmer and renowned Bresson buff James Quandt, and debuted to a rave reception at New York’s Film Forum last month. The series’ Lightbox engagement (February 9–March 30) seeks to provide context to newcomers through introductory lectures from U of T professors Bart Testa and Brian Price, while longtime Bresson devotees will marvel at the series’ several newly struck prints. The event also coincides with the release of an expanded volume of Quandt’s definitive English-language compendium Robert Bresson (Revised)—ideal for those wishing to bone up between screenings.
Indeed, Bresson’s films are best viewed with the benefit of a little prep work. The director made a total of 13 features during his 40-year career, all but two of which were radically non-commercial. He retired with 1983′s L’Argent, by which time he was 82 years old, and died in 1999 at the age of 98. His Catholic upbringing is often identified as the source of his spiritual themes and his austere, ascetic technique, but the essential c-word in the Bressonian glossary is surely “cinematography.” The term held a unique meaning for Bresson, who used it to label his mode of filmmaking, which he viewed as distinct from “cinema.”
Where, for Bresson, “cinema” means employing the camera merely to reproduce the elements of theatre (such as acting and direction), he viewed “cinematography” as a method of creation uniquely suited to celluloid. The central tenet of his practice was the use of non-professionals (“models,” in his terminology) in place of established actors. Bresson eschewed the expressiveness of conventional performers, demanded that line readings be delivered devoid of emotion, and coached his casts, over repeated takes, to pare away any demonstrations of dramatic artifice.
Claude Laydu, the first of Bresson's tormented non-professional leads, as the country priest.
After the release of his relatively orthodox (and highly acclaimed) first features in the early 1940s, Bresson’s cinematographic style began to take shape with 1951′s Diary of a Country Priest (
). Here, the director introduces his spare compositional style, and precise, evocative sound design, while Claude Laydu features as the first of his anguished, alienated young models. Adapted from the Georges Bernanos novel about a naive curate struggling against both the hostility of his parishioners and his own failing health, the film is Bresson’s most overtly Catholic work. Religious stylistic signifiers would endure in his films through the remainder of his career, but the theme from Country Priest that would feature most prominently in his later work wasn’t holy purity of spirit, but the pessimism expressed in the suffering the priest endures at the hands of his scornful flock.
With Pickpocket (1959, 
), Bresson again draws on the diary entries of a troubled protagonist, crafting a portrait of isolation that Paul Schrader cites as a major influence on his own script for Taxi Driver. Based loosely on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Pickpocket is the story of Michel (Martin LaSalle), who prowls the platforms of the Paris Metro nimbly relieving passersby of watches and wallets. Bresson’s camera scrupulously observes this sleight of hand, but, true to form, the film’s opening captions explicitly disclaim the seductive trappings of a conventional crime thriller. Michel, despite his dubious assertions of moral superiority, is plainly a victim of self-destructive compulsion; his petty thievery is an attempt to fill a spiritual and interpersonal void. Inevitably, it’s an attempt that is doomed to failure, but Pickpocket‘s finale retains the transcendental tenor of Bresson’s preceding films, and demonstrates that Michel remains capable of redemption.
Anne Wiazemsky, as Marie, enjoys a short-lived moment of tenderness with Balthazar.
The theme of transcendence becomes less conspicuous with Bresson’s twin masterworks of the mid-’60s, Au Hasard Balthazar (
), and Mouchette (), both of which mark the emergence of his preoccupation with spiritual corruption. The films, which tell the stories, respectively, of a donkey and a schoolgirl, both feature central characters whose innocence is debased by tyranny and neglect. Au Hasard Balthazar unfolds as a vastly superior antecedent to Steven Spielberg’s War Horse, with its eponymous beast of burden exploited by a succession of human owners. In addition to his literal loads, Balthazar bears the sins of his various masters with a noble, Christlike constitution. His tribulations are paralleled by Marie (Anne Wiazemsky), who is the only compassionate soul among his keepers. Made to endure repeated indignities, she prefigures the young pariah that Bresson introduces in Mouchette. (Like Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette is based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, but Bresson, on this occasion, offers no hints of grace to ameliorate the suffering of his wretched protagonist.) Thematically, if not in their rich imagery, Balthazar and Mouchette are among Bresson’s more severe films, but are nonetheless very highly recommended.
If there’s a uniquely challenging work among Bresson’s filmography, it’s perhaps 1974′s Lancelot du Lac (
), which makes Brian Price’s introductory lecture before the February 20 screening all the more valuable. Adopting a resolutely revisionist, consummately “cinematographic” approach to Arthurian legend, Bresson here subverts all expectations of chivalry and visceral spectacle. The result is a jarring mixture of a lushly realized medieval setting and performances rendered in absolute, robotic deadpan. (Graham Chapman’s turn in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was famously fuelled by gin. One wonders whether Bresson might have slipped his knights some heavy-duty sedatives.) Bresson immediately forestalls notions of knightly heroism with a stiltedly barbaric opening montage, and, in a celebrated central scene, abstracts a jousting tournament to a hypnotic audio-visual loop of horns, fluttering flags, and clattering hooves. The illicit liaisons between Lancelot and Guinevere, meanwhile, are wholly de-romanticized. They register as selfish acts of betrayal.
The affectless disaffection of Antoine Monnier in The Devil Probably, Bresson's third colour film.
An air of disillusionment also hangs heavily over the mordantly nihilistic The Devil, Probably (1977,
), Bresson’s penultimate film. Inflecting the director’s customary restraint with a stylized, New Wave tinge, it follows Charles (Antoine Monnier), a young intellectual who resigns himself to suicide after concluding that he can neither change nor adapt to a world in irreversible physical and moral decline. Unlike Laydu’s priest, Pickpocket‘s Michel, or Nadine Nortier as Mouchette, Charles is the hub of an active social circle, but exhibits the same affectless alienation as many of the protagonists that precede him. His is a malaise that takes no solace in companionship, and he is similarly unmoved by both organized religion and his cohorts’ political activism. When his friends convince him to undergo psychoanalysis, a darkly comic exchange with a therapist succeeds only in tipping Charles off to the ideal way to off himself. At 77, Bresson remained as unsentimental as ever, and tapped into youthful unrest to decry the venality of contemporary society. It’s a lament he would repeat in his final film, L’Argent (“Money“), to even more blistering effect.
Images courtesy of TIFF. For tickets and a complete programme schedule, visit Tiff.net
