Books on Cinema

Edited by James Quandt (senior programmer at Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque),  Robert Bresson gathers academic essays, interviews and opinions from worldwide filmmakers (such as Scorsese or Michael Haneke) about one of the most acclaimed and influential film directors in history. The adaptation of  Journal d'un curé de campagne  discussed by André Bazin, the spirituality of his body of work seen by Susan Sontag, the impressive use of sound in Mouchette  (1967) studied by Lindley Hanlon, an interview conducted by Godard that reveals much of Bresson’s aesthetic intentions, among many other relevant texts, all this makes this book the most important on the French filmmaker. Excerpts: "Bresson's aesthetic is, therefore, based essentially on the linguistic system called asyndeton, which consists of eliminating the links between terms or groups of terms that are closely related. More precisely, understatement, ellipsis, and metonymy are the figu...

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...

Paul Schrader is a director, screenwriter and film critic. Raised in a Calvinist family who deprived him of the cinema in his youth, Schrader was only able to see the first film at age 17 ("Other college kids had to vandalize government buildings. go to movies. ", as he would say later). This led to the construction of his late cinephilia in a more intellectual than emotional way. Hence, in the films written by him, the spectator feels uncomfortable with the imperfection and lack of attachment to his protagonists, existentially disturbed and self-destructive, but redeemed in the last scene that justifies the long process of violence to which they had been subjected. Although he is most remembered for his collaboration with Martin Scorsese in 4 films - Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999) - the ones he directed are equally astonishing [ Hardcore (1978) and Affliction (1997)], with a strong and inn...

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) represents, as Andrew Sarris has put it, "the principle of repression in cinematic art" [1]. The filmic universe of the director of such classics as 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) is inhabited by Dostoievskian characters that, either saints or sinners, present their faces in an expressionless way, sacrificing themselves, in a last redemptive gesture, for an apathic world. Such tales bring the inward catholicism of the french filmmaker, whose austere style, with a precise notion of timing, silence and composition, restrains musical score and abnegates theatrical performances for a filmic experience more transcendent. Notes sur le cinématographe  ( Notes on the Cinematographer aka Notes on Cinematography ), published in 1975, is the book Bresson wrote regarding his vision of the cinema, translating it in a series of aphor...