The paradoxes of Bresson

THE FOLLOWING are excerpts from articles written by Jean-Pierre Pagliano, Director, Alliance Francaise de Hyderabad and Indo- French Cultural Centre on Robert Bresson, legendary French film- maker.

The articles were published as part of a booklet brought out in connection with Bresson's retrospective organised by the Embassy of France in India:

`Do you know the game of Happy Families? ``In the Renoir family, I want the father.'' And you are offered the famous impressionist painter. The most famous of the painter's sons, Jean, the film maker and writer, peopled world cinema with a number of his spiritual sons.

Jean Renoir, a Bengali by adoption since the making of The River and a source of inspiration to the great Satyajit Ray, is the one French film maker who can be looked upon as a guru.

Film buffs delight in tracing family trees, creating lines and traditions. No great skill is required to place Jacques Becker and then Truffaut as descendants of Renoir.

Or to put Jacques Demy down as an offspring of Carne and Prevert who might have undergone some training in Hollywood. And so on and so forth.

However, the game soon becomes rather complicated, in fact quite impossible to play, should you be so unfortunate as to ask who are father and son in the Bresson family. It may not be wrong to say that Robert Bresson has no family at all. He does not even belong to the clan of cinema itself, fleeing it as if it were the plague. ``I, a film maker? Horror of horrors! No, my art is Cinematography.'' After the death of Jean Cocteau, in fact, Bresson is the only one to invoke Cinematography.

In 1957, Cocteau had noted, ``Bresson stands apart in this terrible trade.'' Cocteau, perhaps, is the only one who could be looked upon as a ``relative'' of Robert Bresson's; Bresson, in fact, had happily sought Cocteau's collaboration as a writer on ``Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne''.

Bresson stands apart

There are not too many film-makers whose signatures we can immediately recognise. A single shot or two is sufficient to identify a Cocteau, a Bresson, a Godard... But how many others are there? (Yet another game for film buffs!)

It is not only the fact that the director of ``Pickpocket'' and ``Mouchette'' has a singular style, a specific manner of filming gestures and looks, of imposing a monotonous diction devoid of dramatic intent upon his cast.

That style - which his adversaries are apt to look upon as a mere collection of mannerisms - is the expression of a system, of a veritable poetics, whose essential features are dealt with elsewhere in this publication.

The best known of Bresson's biases is his total refusal, after three films, to use professional actors. Or all actors, as a matter of fact.

The actor, he wrote in ``Notes on Cinematography'' is an illusionist, a conjurer who ``draws from himself what does not really exist therein.''

Subsequently, he would seek to mould only complete amateurs, shorn of any experience of theatre or cinema, and whom he would in fact refer to as models. (Bresson willingly selected them amongst writers, intellectuals and painters.)

As professionals resisted him with their acting, thrawted him with the fortified ramparts of their metier, only the non-actor would allow Bresson to create, that is to say combine his personal truth with that of his models in a long, deeply meditated adventurous quest.

A controversial genius

Bresson's prestige is inseparable from the legend surrounding him. Was he born in 1901 or in 1907? It is also said - erroneously - that he was an assistant to Rene Clair, whereas all he had done was collaborate on the screenplay of Air Pur, a film which was interrupted by the war in 1939 and remained incomplete.

His detractors are fierce - they accuse him of technical incompetence, of obsessive-compulsive hesitation, of making maniacal demands.

Pernickety, perverse, indecisive during shooting? In his ``Notes'', Bresson offers us his response, or at least his personal explanation: ``The anguish of not allowing anything to escape of all that I may merely glimpse, all that I may not yet see and may only see later.''

Drawing upon the succour provided by Debussy (``I spent a week deciding to go with one chord rather than with another.''), he added that ``defining the end with precision makes groping one's way there inevitable.''

This, obviously, glosses over the fact that proceeding by trial and error is a method allowed to writers and composers, who usually work individually and independently, whereas cinema is a collective - and extremely costly - art.

A mediocre technician who just draws upon the excellence of members of his crew?

Proof to the contrary comes from one of his former cinematographers: Bresson insists that only a 50mm lens may be used to shoot his films; if, without his knowledge, a 42mm lens is used, he immediately realizes it, although the difference between the two lenses is infinitesimal.

(To be continued.)

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