The Art of Showing Nothing

...Where a single image, the painting, is all there is, overtones, implications, sugges-tiveness will become all-important...

...Repeatedly, we catch Jacques daubing away at his paltry pop canvases, or confiding his fairy-tale fantasies of a princesse lointaine to his tape recorder and then lying on his cot as he listens to them being played back —all of which serves only to make him more wishy-washy, ineffectual and boring...

...Since Jacques carries on throughout like a brain-damaged somnabulist, his amazed incomprehension—presumably meant to express Bresson's dismay at such tenets—merges with, and gets lost in, his general vagueness...

...Perhaps Jean is such a hirsute, thin-rimmed-spectacled, pinched-looking nonentity to make Marthe belong more truly to the camera and its autocratic wielder, the director...

...For Jacques and Marthe to watch a passing bateau-mouche—colorfully illuminated and hauntingly photographed by Pierre Lhomme—from the bridge, is no emotional equal of taking the girl out in a rowboat...

...Bresson is after an ellipsis, a lacuna, something that the viewer's imagination must creatively fill in...

...This is an effective transposition of what was once a lover's heartbeat insistently thumping out the beloved's name...

...in the latter, the intricate, desperate stratagems of a condemned man planning and carrying out a difficult escape...

...He carries the contraption close to his heart in an inside pocket, and turns it on in unlikely places such as a bus, to the consternation of other passengers...

...Four Nights of a Dreamer concerns Jacques, a young painter, who stops a girl, Marthe, from jumping off the Pont Neuf into the Seine...

...As in Une Femme douce, and, less obviously, Pickpocket, the filmmaker goes back to Dostoevsky for his scenario...

...In a highly thought-provoking interview with Charles Thomas Samuels (in his just published Encountering Directors) Bresson curiously remarks, "I can't bear to see people kissing on the screen...

...The contrast worked compellingly...

...This inadvertently makes it appear as if Bresson found the friend's opinions acceptable...

...What Bresson wants to do, as he has frequently said, is make his amateurs perform mechanically, without thinking about their parts, without acting...

...Marthe would not send the silently loving, masochistically suffering Jacques to deliver a letter to Jean's friends...

...The one device with which Bresson successfully bridges the gap between Dostoevsky's day and ours is the tape recorder Jacques uses to record his own voice repeating the one word "Marthe...

...If the plot of Four Nights seems ridiculous in present-day terms, the time sense or, if you prefer, the editing of Bresson has become no less infelicitous...

...And it is quite obvious that the Brazilian saudades-singer (or whatever he is) and his bongo band are put on that pleasure ship merely by tricky montage...

...To quote Bresson to Samuels again: "I don't create ellipsis...

...God knows, other men have made movies, and good ones, with amateur actors, but they did not compel them to walk, talk and breathe along chalk lines...

...Pauline Kael once remarked that Bresson's later films have been "dumb," in the sense of stupid...

...T he method works in films like Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped for a very good reason...

...the effect is no longer that of something transcendent being quietly documented, even if (understandably) not explained, but of something just ordinarily painful, quaint or neurotic being belabored to the point where it dazzles us through sheer idiosyncrasy and style...

...More than increasingly minimal-ized acting, the problem may be the progressively preposterous plots...

...On first seeing, the scene appears justified by the heady erotic aroma it exudes...

...In his later films, the subject matter has become more mundane and his technique more demonstrative...

...As Marthe's narrative is acted out, we meet Jean, her seemingly faithless lover...

...it is there from the beginning...

...Other equivalents fail...

...In the still almost feudal Russia of the 19th-century Tsars and on a bridge across the Neva, things were done and expressed differently from what is voiced and enacted on or under a contemporary Parisian bridge...

...One day I said, 'Cinema is the art of showing nothing.' I want to express things with a minimum of means, showing nothing that is not absolutely essential...

...but when the camera takes the place of the mirror, it is for the director that the girl seems to put on her sexual dance...

...A girl does not have to sneak out of her house at night for a tryst...

...In that way something basic and natural is supposed to emerge quite unconsciously...

...Bresson has been all too successful in this pursuit of nonhistrionic acting: He has effectively choked the life out of most performances...

...In his earlier films, Bresson tended to convey how, in a troubled world, someone achieves a state of grace...

...Now it is all very well to choreograph a scene, but this can be done by less enslaving means...

...What a difference real acting could make here...

...Feelings," Bresson told Samuels, "don't change from century to century," thereby ostensibly justifying his modern-dress versions of period stories...

...At one point Jacques is visited in his studio-apartment by a fellow painter whom he does not recognize but who proceeds to lecture him about the glories of the minimal art he (the visitor) practices...

...as Jacques, speaks in a stifled monotone, lopes and slouches, is given to vacant stares, and generally suggests a rather timid reve-nant...

...He also explains that his nonactors often go about with downcast eyes because they are following the chalk marks on the floor...

...Guillaume des Forets (I don't believe that name...

...The art of showing nothing has become the art of saying nothing...

...he applied a strictly simple, often static and extremely elliptic technique to complex, involuted and violent subjects...

...The aim may derive in part from Bresson's having been a painter...

...As if the last filming of this tale, by Luchino Visconti, had not been stilted enough, Bresson had to go the Italian one worse by making his short film an interminable parade of pretentious trivia...

...A great deal of what has been called Bresson's Christian mystique or saintliness must, I think, be given a less honorific name: quirkiness...

...a man does not go off?even to the antipodes, even to Yale —for a year to be unheard from until he returns one year to the day of his departure to the same nocturnal meeting place...

...with his seignorial disdain of explanation, turning them into sources of misunderstanding or, at least, confusion...

...Wherever you apply your sudden, narrow, fleeting focus, you catch a moment of intense psychic or physical struggle...

...The whole pretty interlude emerges as an arbitrary decoration, rather like the already mentioned nude scene before the mirror—very different from the nude scene in Balthazar where the ravished heroine cowers against the wall, a shot having both narrative and symbolic significance...

...Absolute string-pulling is what Bresson the puppeteer is after...

...Again, a prolonged parody of a cheap, pretentious policier in the manner of Jean-Pierre Melville is dragged in out of left field, and may strike some as a tribute rather than the jibe it surely, though distractingly, is...

...She tells him she was supposed to rendezvous with the man she loves, a student who had been her mother's lodger and, after getting Marthe to sleep with him, had gone off to Yale on a one-year scholarship...

...But on film, where movement and continuity are of the essence, Bresson's short, rigorously self-contained takes, providing no development, run the risk of becoming self-defeating...

...Although essential feelings remain unchanged, however, their expression does in fact undergo significant modifications...

...there are little things like telephones or pneumatiques or going there yourself...

...To no surprise of ours, he looks like a ghoul and acts zonked to the gills...

...In both films, much was going on: In the former, it was emotional and spiritual conflict...

...to this I would add that they are dumb in the sense of uncommunicative, inexpressive...

...on second viewing, however, I found no special artistry, only the loveliness of the girl's body and the fact that, for once, she is allowed to unfurl her long, dark, sensuous hair...

...Thus the big nude scene in the film is not the one in which the unclothed, upright bodies of Marthe and Jean cling together almost mo-tionlessly, but the one where the naked girl preens and cavorts before her pier glass...

...It reveals, ostensibly, her sudden awareness of her sexuality...

...But no, everything must be subdued: speech as if by rote, movements as if produced by strings...

...In Four Nights of a Dreamer, you keep getting snapshots of lulls, dawdling, gaps between significant activity...

...With all due allowance for hyperbole, there is something absurd about that "art of showing nothing...

...Marthe and Jacques spend three more nights on and around the bridge, telling each other their life stories...

...Another bothersome habit of Bresson's is dragging in private concerns irrelevant to his plot and...

...He promised that if he still wanted to and could marry her, he would meet her on the bridge where they had said good-bye on the exact anniversary of their parting...

...Isabelle Weingarten, who plays Marthe, acts stiff and somewhat dazed, but at least she is not a zombie...

...In the end, we could not care less which dreary male the dull heroine goes off with, and feel that our time, like Bresson's talent, has been wasted...