Robert Bresson by Joseph Cunneen

...There is no gore in the massacre...

...Ruthlessly, he ordered multiple takes to so exhaust the "models" that all attempts to "act" would be undermined and something spontaneous would appear...

...People turn away from the camera, assume prayerful or meditative poses, pass one another as though on a private procession...

...In truth, Bresson, like all great creators, perfected a style which empowered him to assemble his own imaginative world, a world that had room for faithful priests, unbreakable Resistance workers, obsessed criminals, and even abused donkeys, but had absolutely no place for a Lancelot or a Guinevere, whose essence has to be enacted in graceful pavannes of courtly love...

...In Bresson, physical process doesn't really symbolize spiritual process...

...No heart-to-heart dialogue explains the marital problem...

...No heartwarming music underscores the priest's self-sacrifice...

...Though he believes in God, we never see him pray with the clergymen who befriend him...

...Most daringly and, for some, most ir-ritatingly, he stopped using professional actors after his third movie...

...We leap at the opportunity as if it were salvation...

...he even minimizes images of the physical brutality practiced against her...

...Then Cunneen recounts the plot so that the reader can note odd narrative twists and elliptical hops...

...Richard Alleva has reviewed films for Commonweal since 1991...

...The latest full-length study, Keith Reader's Robert Bresson (2000), is British and has no American publisher...

...Bresson keeps reminding us that the universe is an unreadable tome...

...Bresson wrote screenplays focused on very few characters and never permitted those casual, semiimprovisatory moments that are often the most freely breathing things in a movie (Brando trying on Eva Marie Sainf s glove in On the Waterfront, Jeanne More-au breaking into song in Jules and Jim...

...When it doesn't, as in Lancelot du Lac, you may feel you are watching the worst zombie movie ever made...

...The unknown is what I wish to capture...

...Yet unlike Vittorio De Sica, who poured his own theatricality into his amateur vessels, Bresson forbade his cast members, whom he termed "models" rather than actors, to do anything more than say their lines in a nearly inflectionless manner...

...For when this method, a kind of artificially induced documentary, works in The Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, L'Argent it is as if you were reading the human face as a map of the soul...

...In short, this is an excellent primer for those who have seen enough Bresson to have their appetites whetted, but also may have been put off by his strangeness...

...Though ninety-seven items are listed, at least forty-five remain untranslated from the French, and almost all the English-language writings are out of print...

...Commonweal since 1991...

...We can assume that the country priest prays, but perhaps the most memorable images from Diary are those pain-laden walks in which every ache in his joints and every gasp of air into his consumptive lungs is a prayer...

...The camera catches it...

...it becomes spiritual progress...

...His thievery is negative prayer spiritual concentration brought to bear on crime and his self-willed arrest is an escape from damnation...

...neither they nor I really know it before it happens...

...Unlike, say, Donald Richie's classic studies of Kurosawa and Ozu big, sidewind-ing volumes that caress felicities, worry away at flaws, and fling biographic, technical, and cultural grace notes at the reader Cunneen's work marches through his subject's career in an orderly fashion...

...What he actually achieved were a swift, cool, tense, often elliptical style and characters whose massive sullen-ness can be pierced by joy...

...A bride joyfully jumps up and down on her bridal bed but soon her husband impassively remarks on the soundtrack that he threw cold water on her exhilaration...

...Yes, they look down at their feet as they walk but they keep moving...

...Conversely, when the hero of Pickpocket practices his illicit art in the amazing Gare de Lyon sequence (as riveting as the duel of the pool players in The Hustler), we feel the delirium of his soul's damnation...

...Perhaps not only the unknown but the unseen...

...Bresson, he writes, "may well have been an intellectual but his movies are concerned with feelings, not ideas...he went to great extremes to avoid the easy exploitation of superficial, readily available emotions...in The Trial of Joan of Arc...

...For Bresson is strange immediately and enduringly and irredudbly strange...

...Even if his characters aren't predestined, Bresson wanted his editing to seem so...

...Reading it, you'd think that Bresson was a masterpiece-producing machine rather than a fallible artist...

...he does not try to coerce tears from a sympathetic audience...

...Each begins by setting forth the theme, pertinent facts of production, and critical reception...

...Bresson's camerawork and editing evince grace, but his real heroes, whom he brought to mopey life, are all trudgers, moving to their fates with mulish undeflectability...

...Ingmar Bergman, Carl Dreyer, Orson Welles, and Yasujiro Ozu are all strange, too, but if you stick with them, each eventually becomes your friend...

...Each chapter is capped by cinematic analysis in which the author alternates his own lucid comments with the often gassier lucubrations of French critics (or perhaps French critics always sound gassy in translation...

...Joseph Cunneen's gratify-ingly plain book may make you want to rent every available Bresson video or DVD: The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne, Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, A Gentle Woman, Mouchette, The Devil Probably, Lancelot du Lac, and last and, I think, greatest of them all L'Argent (Money), the most amazing artistic product of old age since Verdi composed Falstajf...

...in the next scene, without explanation, he kills her and her entire family for a paltry sum of money, then, also without explanation, turns himself in to the police...

...My only complaint about Cunneen's book is that it never complains...

...Before speaking, eyes methodically drop in nervous, helpless abjectness...

...Fontaine, the French Underground agent soon to be the "man escaped," knows that to give up and passively await his execution would be to consign himself to despair...

...These are scenes from films written and directed by the late Robert Bresson...

...Instead he concentrates on the intelligence and audacity of the testimony Joan actually gave during her trial...

...Cunneen is helpful about the strangeness and the integrity behind it...

...Bresson's identification of physical motion with spiritual motion led him to try to perfect himself as a metteur en ordre who achieves the nearest thing to inevitability that a succession of shots can attain...

...then he grudgingly lets us glimpse half a sentence in the middle of the book...

...Turn to the bibliography of Joseph Cunneen's Robert Bresson and you see right away the gap this book fills...

...Perhaps only Michelangelo An-tonioni, among great filmmakers, repels coziness as ruthlessly as Bresson...

...Was there ever a body of cinematic work that needed helpful commentary more than the elliptical, lugubrious, humorless, yet finally deeply moving films by this French moviemaker...

...His escape plan is his prayer...

...He repels coziness but doesn't necessarily repel the viewer who is prepared to dispense with coziness...

...No pedestrian alternation of long shots (to take in lovely scenery) with glamorous closeups of the star...

...He pared down his dialogue with proper ruthlessness but sometimes used offscreen narration to contradict what is happening before the viewer's eyes...

...Cunneen meets this lack soberly, in the manner of an efficient tour guide who knows his route inch by inch but has never pretended to be a raconteur...

...The painter and film critic Manny Farber captured this quality well: "[Bresson] likes a face to be as free from reflection as an animal's: his sensitive-faced outsiders do what they do without the face making any comment on the action...

...A sad-faced murderer taking refuge with a saintly woman spends a silent moment of communion with her by helping to hang her laundry...

...In an interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (in Encountering Directors), Bresson explained: "I want the essence of my films to be not the words my people say or even the gestures they perform, but what these words and gestures provoke in them...

...a lamp knocked over does synecdochical duty for ax-shattered skulls...

...We are benighted not to know his work better...

...Bracketed between an interesting introduction and an even better summation are thirteen chapters dealing with the filmmaker's thirteen movies...

...Richard Alleva A consumptive priest drags himself down a country road and the autumn-stripped trees seem to murmur their kinship with the dying man...

...From the very beginning he used music sparingly, finally eliminating it altogether...

...To succeed at a task is the means of saving one's soul...

...If that approach strikes you as test-ingly ascetic, you don't know the half of it...

...Repeated viewings enrich one's understanding but don't resolve all doubts and discomforts...

...What I tell them to do or say must bring to light something they had not realized they contained...

...No waste...