![]() It was Jean-Luc Godard, no friend of the Church, who described "Au Hasard Balthazar" as containing "the world in an hour and a half." Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, of "The Son," "L'Enfant" and the forthcoming "Kid With a Bike," are the most obvious Bresson acolytes in contemporary cinema, and perhaps the most sympathetic to his faith. Bresson's influence, which has never been wide, is largely found among semi-experimental filmmakers who tend toward atheistic or agnostic worldviews, from the French New Wave to Jim Jarmusch and Michael Haneke. (We can have the debate about Martin Scorsese some other time, but he'd be happy to concede the point.) Yet it's not clear how much comfort the faithful have ever found in his work, which is rooted in the severe strain of French Catholicism known as Jansenism, and in the demanding, uncompromising Jesus Christ of the Sermon on the Mount. The mysteries of films like "Au Hasard Balthazar" and "Pickpocket" and "Mouchette" (probably his three most highly regarded works) lie entirely in how you interpret them and what you take away from them, in how and whether the spiritual or transcendental lessons Bresson tries to impart work on you.īresson is almost certainly the most important Christian, and specifically Roman Catholic, filmmaker in cinema history. It takes a while to relax into what critic Kent Jones has called Bresson's "perfect rhythmic clarity," a "profound sense of harmony between images and sounds" that appears artless but is in fact exquisitely controlled. In those cases and others, the austerity and simplicity of the film can be disorienting on its own terms you cast about for some familiar emotional or psychological foothold and don't find one. ![]() "Pickpocket," from 1959, is an even more compact tale about a petty criminal who begins to imagine a different way of life, and half-intentionally allows himself to be captured and imprisoned. ![]() "Au Hasard Balthazar," which I take to be his masterpiece (it's a pretty conventional opinion), is exactly what it seems to be, a fable about the parallel lives of two suffering innocents, an abused donkey and an abused girl. There are no 12-minute shots of people driving cars his movies are brief and tell simple stories that aren't difficult to follow in the slightest. Viewers accustomed to the pace and style of Hollywood movies can sometimes find themselves alienated by the seemingly obscure or symbolic mode of European-style art-house cinema - What am I missing? Why don't I get this? - but Bresson presents almost the opposite problem. He frequently depicts action or motion by means of synecdoche, showing feet walking, hands turning doorknobs and so on. Faces are often expressionless and eyes downcast. (Bresson was apparently displeased when Anne Wiazemsky, the teenage star of his 1966 "Au Hasard Balthazar," went on to become a professional actress.) His scenes are direct, clear and concise, with little visible emotion or inflection. Most famously, he has no interest in conventional drama or characterization, compelling his nonprofessional actors - or "models," as he called them - to do repeated takes, in an effort to strip all "performance" from their line readings. (For more details, see below.)īresson moves the camera rarely and only when necessary, uses only the crudest special effects and minimal musical motifs (or none at all, in later films), and never relies on editing tricks to heighten the drama, which never amounts to much by the standards of post-D.W. This winter and spring, North American viewers get an exceedingly rare opportunity to see Bresson's films projected on the big screen, in a near-complete retrospective that opens this week in New York and will move on to many other cities. Bresson's best-known pictures simply don't. ![]() Watching the films of Robert Bresson, the ascetic French director who made only 13 features in a 40-year career, reminds us that most of the movies we watch, from Steven Spielberg to the Coen brothers to Pedro Almodóvar, share an essentially similar set of narrative principles. Watching any movie always involves getting used to a particular director's narrative rhythms - that is, how he or she is telling the story, as well as what kind of story it is. ![]()
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