"Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film", Tony Pipolo

Robert Bresson was a French filmmaker, known for his ascetic and austere style, where the protagonists seek redemption in a world inhabited by despair and indifference. His minimalist approach, with characters absent from a background, use of non-professional actors (or "models" as he called them), fixed camera, absence of non-diegetic soundtrack (except in unexpected moments such as religious masses who enclose his films) and the depuration of action without visual embellishments, made him one of the most influential filmmakers in film history. Of his short work (13 feature films and a short film), his most remembered films are Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951), Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (A Man Escaped, 1956) and Pickpocket (1959).

Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film, written by psychoanalyst and former film teacher Tony Pipolo, is the first study of Bresson’s career, using his films, their literary sources and psycho-biographical aspects, while also giving a detailed attention to mise en scène, sound and découpage choices to each of Bresson’s films.

Excerpts:
"(...) some elements and objects in the films, though belonging to the world of the fiction, nevertheless assume metaphoric or symbolic value. The woods in Mouchette are a primal image of the harshness of provincial life, where animals are trapped and killed and Mouchette loses her virginity. Balthazar is a real animal, but also the repository of virtues of which the film’s characters are bereft. But in those films with a documentary-like aspect—A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Joan of Arc—the metonymic dominates, linked to the increased economy and precision Bresson pursued in the late 1950s and early 1960s."

"One remembers a Bresson film not for a performance but for the accumulated effect of the world created. This is beyond a theory of acting. He holds the cinema accountable to the same rigorous principle as he does the actor, cleansing it of rehearsed artifices and drawing from its 'soul' whatever truth it is capable of revealing. No less than the body, face, and personality of the actor, the body, image, and personality of each film must serve this end. Bresson’s answer, then, to the question How does one create a character in a film? is from the outside in, from the accumulation of actions and gestures that reveal the self."

"Pars pro toto, the rhetorical device of having a part stand for a whole (or vice versa), is rarely just a stylistic strategy in Bresson, as the previous analysis of Pickpocket argued. In Lancelot [du Lac] it seems to encode the overall moral and psychological crisis at the heart of the narrative, namely, the disintegrating social world it depicts and the personal breakdowns it generates. For example, in an early sequence, Arthur, Lancelot, and Gawain walk around the Round Table, which we see, through the framing and editing, only in sections, as the king laments the loss of so many knights and wonders if God has punished the fellowship for having provoked him. It seems insufficient to observe that each piece of the table stands for the whole and leave it at that. In context the synecdoche stresses fragmentation and loss, a broken, irreparable unity, and the dissolution of the virtue that it symbolized."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

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