Books

World Books Interview: The Films of Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film by Tony Pipolo. Oxford University Press, 407 pages, $29.95

By Bill Marx

On the cover of Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film, director Martin Scorsese argues that “we are still coming to terms with the peculiar power and beauty” of Robert Bresson’s films, classifying the French filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.” Bresson’s artistic peculiarity has grown into an undeserved reputation for thorny austerity, a forbiddingly minimalistic sense of the ethereal reinforced by his use of non-professional actors, attraction to religious themes, and the suggestions of moral judgments in his work. Compounding the misunderstanding is that that a number of his films are still not available on DVD.

This compelling volume is the most comprehensive effort in English yet to celebrate and analyze the thirteen features Bresson (1901-1999) made over a forty year period, a lineup that includes such masterpieces as The Trial of Joan of Arc, The Devil Probably, and Au hasard Balthazar. Author Tony Pipolo is a Professor Emeritus of Film and Literature at the City University of New York and former co-editor of Millennium Film Journal. He is a practicing psychoanalyst as well, and brings a sophisticated respect for the life of the mind to what is obviously a labor of love. I sent Pipolo some questions via email about the history of his appreciation of Bresson’s art, the director’s relevance to cinema today, and his influences on international culture.

World Books: When did you first discover the films of Robert Bresson? And how have your responses changed over the years?

Pipolo: The first Bresson films I saw were Diary of a Country Priest and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, shown as a double feature at the Bleecker St. Cinema, a repertory theater in lower Manhattan, in either 1965 or 1966. I remember being intrigued, but I don’t think I sensed his uniqueness because these were early works that resembled other French films of the mid Forties/early Fifties that I had seen. My feelings about both films, especially Diary, have deepened considerably over the years.

It was not until 1970 when Au hasard Balthazar was commercially released in the U.S. and opened at Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Theater that I was struck by Bresson as a name and a phenomenon to be reckoned with. I was then and remain in awe of that film. As a student in the Graduate Cinema Studies program at New York University around the same time, I took a course in Bresson and Dreyer given by P. Adams Sitney. By then I had seen everything of Bresson’s up to 1969. From the 70s through the 90s, I also screened several of the films in my graduate and undergraduate classes and taught a graduate seminar devoted to his work. The more intimate I became with the work, the more my commitment and interest grew.

It first occurred to me to write a book about Bresson’s work in the late 80s for a series published by Cambridge. Although the series was discontinued before I finished, my ongoing training as a psychoanalyst also presented a temporary obstacle. Not because of time pressures, but because I found it difficult to reconcile my thinking about psychoanalysis with what I felt about the films and how they worked. This was a real challenge, but over the next fifteen years it seemed less and less of a problem to integrate psychoanalytic ideas sensibly and sensitively into comprehension of the films. This realization enabled me to move forward and complete the book.

Through all of this, my estimation of the films never faltered. Even those I had not felt strongly about initially–Trial of Joan of Arc, Four Nights of a Dreamer, and Devil Probably–grew in stature. The deeper and more complex my understanding of them, the more a psychoanalytic approach seemed appropriate.

World Books: For those new to the films of Bresson, which would be the best to begin with? And why?

Pipolo: The films that I think are immediately accessible and that I have gotten reinforcing feedback about from people who have asked this question are A Man Escaped, Diary of a Country Priest, and Mouchette. The first works so well as a suspenseful prison escape drama that one need know nothing of Bresson to enjoy it. I have not found this to be so with his subsequent film Pickpocket because here Bresson’s conception of the “model” is more overt and the film’s minimal “acting” style can be an obstacle.

I recommend Diary because it is a moving and eloquent study of a young priest that makes effective use of such familiar features as dramatic scenes, powerful acting, and psychological characterization.

Although filmed later, Mouchette seems to grip viewers immediately because of its heartbreaking story, although, in truth, many students found it too depressing.

World Books: Reviewers of Bresson inevitably comment on the austerity, not the passion, of his films, from Diary of a Country Priest to A Man Escaped and Pickpocket. In what ways do you want to complicate or amend that approach?

Pipolo: The passion of my book’s title refers, first of all, to the all-consuming investment of Bresson himself and his tireless efforts to hone the craft of filmmaking and distill its effects into an instrument of clarity, precision, and great beauty. His is as passionate a commitment as one can find in the history of the medium.

This passion can also be said to describe many protagonists–certainly the novice Anne Marie in Les Anges du peche, the priest in Diary of a Country Priest, the prisoner Fontaine in A Man Escaped, Michel in Pickpocket, and Joan in Trial of Joan of Arc. All of these are creatures possessed, fixated on a specific goal that determines every gesture and action they perform.

Bresson shows us their passion through the continued evidence on the screen of the singularity of their focus through his meticulous attention to shots, framing, and editing–in other words through cinematographic means rather than via an actor’s performance. This is the essential difference between Bresson and conventional filmmakers. Passions are converted into the visual and audio properties of the medium, into actions that define character and are propelled through space and time. This is the heart of his cinema and the reason he preferred “models” over actors, whose studied repertory of techniques he believed alien to the scrutinizing eye of the camera.

In this sense, his films ask us to re-evaluate the nature of passion, directing us to its inner sources and the way it builds and shapes a character’s outward behavior. If we only recognize passion via dramatic rendering by good actors, our range of comprehension is limited indeed. What hidden passions lie in the heart of an autistic child?

For me, Bresson’s art is more genuinely passionate because its passion is not amorphous and indiscriminate but slowly and incrementally induced in the viewer without being filtered through the actor. “Identifying” with actors, allegedly the traditional route by which we become emotionally involved, is in fact, more artificial, imposed from the outside, mediating between the viewer and whatever underlying force and passion is in the work as a whole. This is not something most viewers accept, but then the whole idea behind Bresson’s cinema is to renounce facile immersion and, as Susan Sontag once said, to discipline our emotions.

Bresson’s films belong to that tradition in art, which holds that underplaying emotion and expressivity ultimately leads to a building up of inner feelings that result in greater emotional release. This said, it is also true that the austerity many refer to is less of a problem than it once was. Many European narrative filmmakers of the last two decades have acknowledged Bresson’s influence in their minimalist approach to acting, dialogue, and tight editing structures.

World Books: You write that the “question of God’s existence and everything that ensues from it bears directly and pervasively on Bresson’s thematic preoccupations, on his overall philosophy of life and behavior, on the stylistic rigor of his films, and even on his use of models rather than professional actors.” How do you reconcile that mode of appreciation with your background as a psychoanalyst?

Pipolo: A good part of the book is devoted to addressing this question and coming to terms with its seemingly paradoxical thrust through a detailed discussion of each film. One important strand of the book’s argument is that the entire body of Bresson’s work can be seen as a psychological profile of him. Psychoanalytic investigation, in that sense, is about seeing the work and its preoccupations as direct and indirect manifestations of the psychology, beliefs, and doubts of the artist. What makes this legitimate is Bresson’s obsessive need to control every aspect of his work, something he himself acknowledges and to which every film testifies.

The key word in the quote is “question.” From first film to last, Bresson’s work is consumed by this question, which only seems to be rhetorical in the first few films while growing in importance with the later ones. I think there is more ambiguity, more ambivalence in the films from Balthazar to L’Argent, but questions of God’s existence, of the Christian ethic, and the possibility of redemption are never abandoned. The very shift in the tone and thrust of the work that this suggests, therefore, speaks to a personal conflict in the artist who created it, and it is that conflict–moving, variable, and eloquent–which can be illumined by psychological investigation.

World Books: How does Bresson’s controversial opposition to professional actors, to acting itself, contribute to his value in a celebrity-driven culture?

Pipolo: Since Bresson’s work, by definition, ignores the appeal of stars and was never made for mass consumption, it is unlikely to be valued by a celebrity driven culture. The very idea seems fanciful. He never sought such a thing and the proof of how intact his art is and how removed his films are from such a concept is testimony to the uniqueness and integrity of his approach to the medium.

The very disparity between his work and a celebrity-driven culture is instructive. Namely, that just as his entire approach to film was to “chasten” it as an art form, to rid it of its excesses and its flamboyant and theatrical tendencies, one might say that seeing and studying his films in such a culture as ours is a sobering, chastening experience that can function as a corrective to the idle, fleeting, and superficial aspects of celebrity, drawing our attention to what really matters and what is most important in the human journey.

Of course there are other serious but more audience-friendly filmmakers of the present day who also refuse to kowtow to celebrity culture. I don’t see this as a bad thing. We should not expect everyone to embrace Bresson anymore than we should expect everyone to be moved by the music of Schoenberg or the cantos of Ezra Pound.

Another, perhaps minor point can be made here. Many films once thought immortal because of memorable performances by stars suffer terribly when seen decades later, the style of its acting being so out of sync with contemporary views of what constitutes the “real” and the credible. Professional acting and star quality in this sense are often victims of time. Of course, there are wonderful exceptions. I believe that Bresson’s renouncing of actors and acting in the conventional sense escapes this judgment. The dated quality we cannot ignore in many movies of the 30s and 40s does not seem to affect the way we perceive the behavior of the “models”–Bresson’s preferred term–in his films. In fact, consistent with his principles, we tend to look more closely at the film as a whole rather than at the actor.

World Books: You claim that Bresson is a highly moral artist. But my personal favorite among his films, Au hasard Balthazar, doesn’t offer a moral message, besides the patient resilience of a donkey mistreated by the “moral infirmity” of a succession of masters. What kind of positive ethical value does Bresson offer us given that you argue in your book that he has doubts about his faith?

Pipolo: I would go further and argue that none of Bresson’s films offers a moral “message” in any overt sense. The morality is implicit in his pre-occupation with the same issues–e.g., good and evil, the existence of God, the relationship between free will and design–that absorbed his literary mentors Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Georges Bernanos. That several protagonists–in Les Anges du peche, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and Pickpocket–have to cleanse themselves of pride in order to be redeemed or redeem others is a profoundly moral idea.

In interviews, Bresson said that the array of character types in Balthazar was modeled on the seven deadly sins–pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth. Given how he endows Balthazar with the opposing virtues and associates him with Christian iconography and symbolism, the film does seem to be a moral parable about the corrupt way of the world and the cruelty and indifference with which it treats one who embodies patience, fortitude, and virtue.

To my mind, it was never Bresson’s purpose to proselytize. The darkness of his work derives largely from his lack of faith in human nature, not a lack of belief in the existence of a greater scale of values. That he may have ceased practice as a Catholic does not preclude the fact that this view of life was molded by Catholic doctrine and is not incompatible with that of such thinkers as Aquinas and Augustine.

Despite greater ambiguity in the later films, the battle between despair and possible redemption still exists. The widow in his last film, L’Argent, is the epitome of one who lives a Christian existence rather than simply preaching it–the very philosophy espoused by the older Tolstoy. Bresson expands on the relationship between her and the murderer Yvon beyond what it is in the Tolstoy source story. In doing so, he suggests at the end that the woman’s good works haunt and affect Yvon and prompt him to surrender. The doubts that preoccupied Bresson compete with even deeper convictions. In answer to a question about his view of the world, he quoted the writer Bernanos, to wit, “There is not a kingdom of death and a kingdom of life. There is the kingdom of God and we are in it.”

World Books: Are there some countries that are more receptive to Bresson than others? For example, how is he appreciated in the Middle East?

Pipolo: Bresson’s films have more affinity with cultures based in the Judeo/Christian tradition. I have no hard knowledge of how they fare in the Middle East although a student once observed that although the films are saturated in Christian imagery and doctrine, their adherence to moral culpability and a strict standard of ethical behavior would not be incompatible with non-Christian cultures.

World Books: What cultures outside of France do his films draw on?

Pipolo: If I understand this question, it’s about the sources and/or subjects of the films other than French. Bresson has a strong affinity with Russian literature. Although he transferred the settings of two Dostoevsky novellas from 19th century St. Petersburg to Paris of the late 60s/early 70s, his characters still manifest the eccentric, mercurial nature of Dostoevsky’s. And though he did not credit Crime and Punishment or The Idiot as sources of Pickpocket and Au hasard Balthazar respectively, the moral atmosphere of those novels is something that deeply affected Bresson’s world. His last film L’Argent is adapted from Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon.” But just as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy were at their best bringing Russian character and society to life, Bresson’s films, whether set in Paris or the provinces, are unmistakably French in spirit and tone.

World Books: You do not talk a lot about the political context of Bresson’s films. What do his films say about the times in which they were made?

Pipolo: Most of Bresson’s contemporaries in the film world thought of him as a being apart. The director Erich Rohmer said he was beyond categories. He infuriated the Left because his films seemed more concerned with universal conflicts and values irrespective of specific social or political contexts. The seeming exceptions to this are A Man Escaped and The Trial of Joan of Arc, but there as well Bresson’s overriding concern is with the journey of a soul through fire to personal triumph and with the way protagonists of undaunted courage and faith can inspire and give hope to others.

One could say that the very essence of a Bressonian journey requires a leap over political and social specificity to the ground on which the individual battles to preserve the integrity of his or her soul. This does not mean that one could not construe a political or social context but my feeling is that it would be strained and possibly beside the point. When Godard, himself a politically-engaged filmmaker for most of his career, referred to Au hasard Balthazar as “the World,” he captured the essence of this topic. Balthazar is no more defined and limited by its image of disaffected youth of the 1960s than the struggle of Anne Marie to convert Therese in Les Anges du peche is restricted to the confines of a convent.

In this sense, Bresson’s work of the 40s and 50s is worth examining in the context of existentialism, probably the strongest post-war philosophy to engage intellectuals, which also sought to restore a system of values in the wake of the devastations of the Second World War.

World Books: In what ways has Bresson influenced filmmakers that followed him? What do his films have to offer contemporary directors at a time when his minimalist approach is so out of fashion?

Pipolo: First, I disagree with the premise here. As the work of a long line of European filmmakers from the mid-70s to the present attests, Bresson’s minimalism has had a profound influence. In some form or other, the films of Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Laurent Cantet, the Dardenne Brothers, Claire Denis, Bruno Dumont, Jean-Luc Godard, Eugene Green, Michael Haneke, Benoit Jacquot, Aki Kaurismaki, Gaspar Noe, Erich Rohmer, and Andre Techine have all reflected the presence of Bresson in their adoption of a sparer use or elimination of expository dialogue, low-key acting styles, elliptical editing, and careful attention to sound. This late 20th century European style has become so familiar that it may be difficult to discern Bresson’s impact.

For the rest, I would say that the clarity, economy, and brilliant cinematography of Bresson’s films remain an achievement and a corrective to the mindset that holds that overkill, thrills, and special effects are what define the cinema. I strongly believe that viewers in the not too distant future will find Avatar boring, silly and overwrought while Bresson’s work, for those who seek it out, will retain its place as the product of a singular, idiosyncratic artist of moral conviction and passionate commitment to the art form he called “cinematography.”