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Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983

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Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983

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Overview

Robert Bresson, the director of such cinematic master-pieces as Pickpocket, A Man Escaped Mouchette, and L’Argent, was one of the most influential directors in the history of French film, as well as one of the most stubbornly individual: He insisted on the use of nonprofessional actors; he shunned the “advances” of Cinerama and Cinema-Scope (and the work of most of his predecessors and peers); and he minced no words about the damaging influence of capitalism and the studio system on the still-developing—in his view—art of film. Bresson on Bresson collects the most significant interviews that Bresson gave (carefully editing them before they were released) over the course of his forty-year career to reveal both the internal consistency and the consistently exploratory character of his body of work. Successive chapters are dedicated to each of his fourteen films, as well as to the question of literary adaptation, the nature of the sound track, and to Bresson’s one book, the great aphoristic treatise Notes on the Cinematograph. Throughout, his close and careful consideration of his own films and of the art of film is punctuated by such telling mantras as “Sound...invented silence in cinema,” “It’s the film that...gives life to the characters—not the characters that give life to the film,” and (echoing the Bible) “Every idle word shall be counted.” Bresson’s integrity and originality earned him the admiration of younger directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas. And though Bresson’s movies are marked everywhere by an air of intense deliberation, these interviews show that they were no less inspired by a near-religious belief in the value of intuition, not only that of the creator but that of the audience, which he claims to deeply respect: “It’s always ready to feel before it understands. And that’s how it should be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681370453
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	11/15/2016
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	26 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert Bresson (1901–1999) was born in Bromont-Lamothe, France. He attended the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, and moved to Paris after graduation, hoping to become a painter. He directed a short comedy, Affaires publiques, in 1934, but his work was curtailed by the outbreak of World War II. He enlisted in the French army in 1939 and was captured in 1940, spending a year in a labor camp as a prisoner of war. After his release he returned to Paris and directed Angels of Sin (1943), his first full length film, under the German occupation. Les dames du Bois de Boulogne followed in 1945, and in 1951 Diary of a Country Priest was met with widespread acclaim. His next film, A Man Escaped (1956), which follows the memoirs of André Devigny, a French Resistance leader incarcerated during World War II, became a hit. He made eleven more films over the next three decades, including Mouchette, Au hasard Balthazar, Pickpocket, Lancelot of the Lake, and L’Argent. Throughout his career Bresson eschewed the use of theatrical techniques and employed nonprofessional actors whom he referred to as models. Raised in the Catholic faith, he worked on and off throughout his career on an adaptation of the book of Genesis, which never saw fruition. He died in Droue-sur Drouette at the age of ninety-eight.

New York Review Books also publishes Bresson’s celebrated Notes on the Cinematograph.

Anna Moschovakis is a translator and editor, and the author of several books of poetry, including Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (2011). She lives in Brooklyn and Delaware County, New York.

Mylène Bresson is Robert Bresson's widow and the manager of his estate.

Pascal Mérigeau is a journalist and film critic who has published numerous books, among them biographies of Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Maurice Pialat, and a forthcoming biography of Jean Renoir. Mérigeau lives in France.

Preface ix

Part 1 Public Affairs, 1934

Prelude 3

Part 2 Angels of Sin, 1943

It Takes an Auteur 9

Jean Giraudoux 13

Part 3 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, 1945

Scandals and Shocks 19

Inferiority Leads the Way 23

Jean Cocteau 25

The Festival du Film Maudit 27

Part 4 Diary of a Country Priest, 1951

Between These Two Worlds 31

It's the Impossibility That Attracts Me 33

To See and To Hear 37

As I Would Write a Poem 41

Part 5 A Man Escaped, 1956

The Wind Blows Where It Wants To 47

A New Means of Expression 55

Part 6 Pickpocket, 1959

A Film Made of Hands, Objects, and Glances 59

A Film's Rhythm Should Be Like the Beating of a Heart 63

To Capture Only What Is Real 69

To Get to the Mystery 73

Poetry and Truth Are Sisters 81

Part 7 The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962

This Familiarity with the Palpably Supernatural 87

I Know of Nothing More Atrocious or More Poignant 93

It's What the Film Wanted 95

Emotion Should Be Our Only Guide 101

Joan of Arc Was Beautiful, Elegant, Approachable, Modern 107

To Make Her Real, To Bring Her Close 115

If You Want the Current to Flow, You Have to Strip the Wires 119

Part 8 Adaptation

Aspects of Dramatic Creation 125

Part 9 Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966

A Donkey in All Its Purity, Its Tranquility, Its Serenity, Its Sanctity 133

The Freest Film I've Made, the One to Which I've Given the Most of Myself 139

To Create Life Without Copying It 159

The Beaten Path 173

Part 10 Mouchette, 1967

Editorial Reviews

This collection of interviews reveals the great French filmmaker's own interview technique to bear more than a passing resemblance to Roger Federer's drop shot…[Bresson] thinks, then gently deconstructs the implicit assumptions about cinema contained [in the question], and rolls the ball back to the interviewer's feet with a smile…He interviewed much as he made films: by saying very little, with great eloquence.

The New York Times Book Review - Tom Shone

06/20/2016
What strikes one about this illuminating collection of interviews with revered French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901–1999), edited by his widow, Mylène, is the unwavering consistency of the philosophy. Thoughts appear time and again, always just a bit more refined—just like his films. In several interviews, Bresson explains the unaffected performances he elicited by saying he tells his actors, “When you’re talking, talk to yourself.” Not that there is much dialogue in his famously spare work; in 1960 he states, “What I’m trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express what other films express with words instead with silence.” He repeatedly compares directing to painting, his first métier, observing that the relationship between colors makes meaning in paintings; likewise, the juxtaposition of images makes meaning in filmmaking. One would be hard pressed to find more than a few interviews where he doesn’t speak against the cinema of the time—which he refers to as “filmed theater.” Cinephiles will delight in reading this book and following Bresson’s thinking as it develops further and makes each interview more compelling than the last. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films."
—Martin Scorsese

"The collection Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 and Bresson's own Notes on the Cinematograph are primers for the gradual understanding of Robert Bresson, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein...The interviews in Bresson on Bresson are grouped chronologically and organized by film. Reading it, one can see Bresson refining his answers to the similar questions that inevitably arose with each new production, even as he refined his filmmaking style." —J. Hoberman, The New York Times

"Bresson was the only director who knew how to captivate and surprise me. I consider him a unique phenomenon in the world of film." —Andrei Tarkovsky

"Bresson’s characters, his movies, and Bresson himself all become icons. . . . Bresson has transcended himself: he is blazed in mosaics in some moss-grown temple." —Paul Schrader

"The power of Bresson's...films lies in the fact that his purity and fastidiousness are not just an assertion about the resources of the cinema, as much of modern painting is mainly a comment in paint about painting. They are at the same time an idea about life, about what Cocteau called 'inner style,' about the most serious way of being human." —Susan Sontag

"Cinephiles will delight in reading this book and following Bresson’s thinking as it develops further and makes each interview more compelling than the last.” —Publishers Weekly

"To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it's to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago." —J. Hoberman, The Village Voice

"Robert Bresson's 13 features over 40 years constitute arguably the most original and brilliant body of work over a long career from a film director in the history of cinema. He is the most idiosyncratic and uncompromising of all major filmmakers." —Alan Pavelin, Senses of Cinema

From the Publisher

2016-11-20
Reflections of a cinematic grandmaster.Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was one of the few directors of France's cinematic old guard to be taken up by the iconoclastic French New Wave filmmakers, as the upstarts admired his exacting and poetic aesthetic and his commitment to the idea of pure cinema. In these short interviews, Bresson, who was given to such gnomic proclamations as, "sound cinema invented silence," proves to be a deeply analytical thinker who nonetheless puts a premium on intuition and instinct. In landmark films including Pickpocket (1959) and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), the director famously eschewed theatrical notions of "acting," casting nonprofessionals in the interest of capturing authentic behavior. Measured, austere, and elegant in their simplicity, Bresson's films produce profound emotional effects. The extent to which the filmmaker was conscious of every aspect of his craft in achieving those effects, as well as his enduring, passionate dedication to better understanding and expanding his tools, is on illuminating display in these conversations. Most compelling is an extended exchange with New Wave enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard, whose interrogation of Bresson reveals a penetrating and nuanced appreciation of the older man's films and provides a poignant reminder of the heady, collaborative, intellectual community that was the film culture of the mid-1960s. Bresson's monklike devotion to his idea of "pure" cinema wavers not a bit over the course of the four decades represented here, but it is his optimism and faith in his medium that inspire the greatest admiration. The book ends with this statement from Bresson, made in 1983, with 40 years of revelatory cinema behind him: "The cinema is immense. We haven't done a thing." That's not an admonition; it's an invitation.A terrific encapsulation of the philosophies and techniques behind the cinematic masterpieces of Robert Bresson, from the man himself.

Kirkus Reviews

Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983

Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983

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