Think about the surface, primarily the surface.
Leonardo Da Vinci
Having given up painting on doctor's orders (it supposedly made him too agitated) Bresson made his first short film at the age of thirty-three. During almost the hundred years of his life he managed just 13 full-length feature films, but despite that he stands unfalteringly on the Parnassus of cinematography. Andrei Tarkovsky has called him the only shining and unattainable apex, Jim Jarmusch has admitted his influence, the laconic and metaphorical style of his films is reflected in the Kaurismäki films and together with Jean Cocteau he was the main influence on the French ‘new wave’ film directors.
Bresson was alienated from his immediate cultural environment, the big ideologies of the 20th century and the general social initiative. In his concern about spirituality and redemption, if one looks carefully, one can see a critique of the contemporary French society, but as a morbid hermetic primarily occupied with theological issues he was mainly perceived as a cultural reactionary.
When talking about the specific style of Bresson's films, the concept ‘laconic’ should be reserved just for his films or devise a new, thus far unused concept. Driven by the desire to find the ‘supernatural’ from the ordinary and everyday, he cast out all formal exaggerations until he reached something he called ‘surface aesthetics’. Scrupulously and with an almost documentary precision he observed the trivial, tiny sounds, static views, conventionality in a picture, expressionless faces. However unlike ‘cinéma-vérité’ that tries to find the ‘truth’ of the event, he only searched for the superficial truth. Bresson documented the surface of reality, he peeled the events of any excess meaningfulness, he saw each single scene through its smallest possibilities. He defined reality through the characteristics lacking rather than the existing ones, as a plausibility, a potential.
Bresson's commonplaceness does not stem from the need to reverberate something we call ‘real life’, but from the desire to avoid constructed dramatic events that are being passed as truth in cinemas everywhere. According to him such emotional constructs like a plot, acting, camera work, editing, and music are veils that prevent us from seeing the real reality. Bresson despises everything that a cinemagoer loves, his films are ‘cold’ and ‘boring’. Susan Sontag writes about Bresson: «He promises to avert physical beauty and the simple pleasures of falseness for a new pleasure that is a lot longer lasting, more invigorating and sincere».
Bresson calls the plot a lame trick that creates a superficial relationship between the viewer and the event: when a viewer gets to follow the course of events (a hero is in danger), he or she is later (the hero is saved) able to feel satisfied. The viewer perceives as if he/she is somehow involved with the functioning of life and that life is under his/her control. The viewer can degenerate into deceptive complacency. Bresson: «Dramatic stories ought to be thrown out. They have nothing to do with cinema. It seems to me that when someone tries to achieve anything with drama in cinema it is as if trying to saw wood with a hammer.»
The veil that Bresson condemns most ferociously is acting (the problems of cinema acting should be well familiar to the Estonian cinema audience). An actor reduces his or her own inexplicable versatility and complexity to something relatively simple and demonstratable characteristics. Too simplified and thus an incorrect image of man is what Bresson rages against. He despises psychology and tries to avoid it, since the world explained by it is too humanised.
The primary requirement that Bresson insisted on from his non-professional non-actors, or ‘models’ as he called them, was inexpressiveness, not only did he disapprove of expressiveness, he forbid it completely. He demanded the lead in the film “Un Condamné à Mort S'est Echappé”, Ronald Mono, what was characteristic to his method: «Forget about tone of voice and meaning. Do not think about what you say; speak the words automatically». In order to achieve similar automatism in movements, he had the actors repeat the same movements dozens of times until they lost all sense of meaningfulness.
Bresson also regarded camera work as a veil before the truth, his camera was mostly positioned at an actor's chest-height, he mainly used simple centre-plan and from the fifth film on only one 50mm lens. The camera angles and frame compositions pass on moral judgements, interpret and simplify the character, therefore Bresson tried to approximate all images to each other and flatten each one separately, as Bresson puts it: «attack the image with an iron». The simplicity and asceticism of Bresson's picture can be compared to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu's camera was placed statically at the level of eyes of a person sitting in zazen meditation position. When all the movement is conveyed at the same inexpressive manner, the viewer no longer looks for cues for movement from the picture and the viewer's emotional sympathising is yet again obstructed. Bresson does not look for judgementalism in editing either, he looks for commonplaceness and he mostly avoids music altogether.
Now for the reader a justified question may emerge as to the necessity of such cinematic language - what is it that makes Bresson's films watchable if he methodically levels all the known measures of cinematography? Viewers, who are accustomed to cinema orientated at emotions and identifying with characters, but nevertheless manage to overcome their boredom and stay put will surely get an answer. Bresson's method that is described by scriptwriter and director Paul Schrader as Disparity and Susan Sontag as Doubling is very interesting. For example, Bresson loves to follow his characters with a voice-over that describes the same thing that can be seen. Instead of receiving additional information from the voice-over, we receive the same information from several sources. The effect is strange and it is not the only one in Bresson's arsenal. The general commonplaceness of his style and such bizarre appearing means create a weird intensity in his films that continues to grow with the passing of time. On the one hand it is realism in extreme detail and on the other hand, doubt in the realism arising from the Disparity effect that everything is not quite as it should. As the effect continues Bresson strives to create a feeling in the viewer of ‘something completely different’ other than simple commonplaceness. Of course the mysterious other state is the omnipresent God, to whose redeeming grace Bresson steers us with his films.
For those, however, to whom metaphysics is disturbingly vague and who have no desire to automatically adopt Bressonic intellectual teachings, can be recommended to watch his films through a psychoanalytical or simply formalistic prism, anyway it is not a waste of time.
Films to watch in case of interest:
“Journal d'un curé de campagne” (1951)
“Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut” (1956)
“Pickpocket” (1959)
“Procès de Jeanne d'Arc” (1962)
“Au hasard Balthazar” (1966)
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Veiko Õunpuu
nov 26 '09
1 contribution
Veiko Õunpuu is a writer, artist and film director. Sometime lecturer, this ex-carpet salesman (who never made a sale) has directed 1 short and 2 feature length films which have excited critics and left audiences enthralled, appalled and puzzled. He is now directing a play.
published • November 26th '09
dec 1 '09 19:51
Andres LÕo
Isn't it weird how the supposedly dead art of painting still somehow stems or erm... threatens art of film... How it haunts in films. Tarkovsky had a "rookie complex" towards painting and refused to film "live paintings" etc. It would've been interesting to read about Veiko's feelings about the painting and film relationship.