THE FILMS OF ROBERT BRESSON : The Mozart of French cinema

Commonweal, Feb 9, 2001 by Joseph Cunneen

The December 1999 death of Robert Bresson at the age of ninety-two represents the virtual end of the post-World War II era of internationally known film directors. Although Bresson never found the broad audience that made Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini household names, his reputation among movie professionals--Jean-Luc Godard called him "the Mozart of French cinema"--guarantees that his work will continue to be studied, especially by aspiring directors. And Bresson's axiom that "the supernatural is only the real brought close up" suggests an additional reason to arrange retrospectives of his films and look at them more closely.

The relationship between movies and religion can be a treacherous one, often exploited by well-intentioned pastors looking to illustrate their sermons or teachers of religious studies, hoping to increase class enrollment. Bresson's work doesn't lend itself to such purposes. He is as little interested in conveying pious messages as in replicating surface realism; he wants the viewer to discover the interior meaning of the images he has arranged. He is known in the United States as the director of Diary of a Country Priest (1950). An examination of Bresson's stylistic decisions shows how he transformed Georges Bernanos's classic but apparently unfilmable novel into a credible and deeply affecting movie.

Despite the critical success of his first two films, The Angels of Sin (1943) and The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1944), Bresson decided to break with the conventions of French film production in preparing Diary for the screen. He chose unknown actors, with little or no experience. Instead of using artificial sets, he shot the movie in a village in the Pas-de-Calais, and he avoided all spectacle and melodrama. Claude Laydu became so identified with the role as the young cure d'Ambricourt that he virtually disappeared from movies afterward. Disciplined by Bresson almost to the point of playing an automaton, Laydu said he did not realize that he had been portraying a saint until he saw the completed film.

Bresson is faithful to the Bernanos text--all the dialogue in the movie is taken from the novel--but the director's style is quite different. While Bernanos is often lyrical, highly visual, and dramatic, the film opens simply, showing the school notebook in which the cure is making an entry. We hear his voice as he rereads it: "I don't think I am doing wrong in jotting down, day by day, with absolute frankness, the very simple trivial secrets of a very ordinary kind of life." Throughout the film, the cure's voice either echoes the text as he makes his diary entries, or prolongs it in subsequent images. While it would seem redundant to repeat what the images already reveal, such doubling assures an intensification; there is a constant going and coming between the external and the internal world.

Sometimes the voice pronouncing the words of the journal covers over those being spoken by the cure, who is heard again only when the journal's voice has become silent. This occurs in the film's key scene, when the cure challenges the local countess on her long-stored sense of personal bitterness. "Have you heard me?" she demands. He says no, and we haven't either, because for a moment the voice of the journal is the only one that is audible. On such occasions, leaving ordinary duration for a domain beyond time, we enter the realm of inner consciousness.

The supreme instance of this technique is an exchange between the young cure and his mentor, the cure de Torcy, when the older man insists that we all have to find the place in the gospel where we personally encounter Jesus. Suddenly Torcy exclaims: "What on earth's the matter? What are you blubbering about?" There is a close-up of the young priest's face as Torcy's words are covered by the voice of the journal: "I hadn't realized that I was weeping." A tear rolls down the young cure's cheek as the voice continues: "The truth is that my place for all time has been the Garden of Olives." After a medium shot of the two priests, Torcy continues: "What's up now? You're not even listening to me; are you dreaming?" Again the interior voice: "Suddenly our Lord had granted me the grace of letting me know, through the words of my old teacher...that I was the prisoner of his sacred Passion." Bresson makes these words more poignant by avoiding any dramatic emphasis; we hear the barking of a dog, and the camera's gradual withdrawal returns us to the world of appearances.

Diary of a Country Priest is a prime example of Bresson's rigor; he eliminated almost a third of the finished film in a final cut for the exhibitors' copy. There is an absence of psychology, which French films had prided themselves on, and practically no character development; each scene is complete in itself, as if controlled by some law of necessity. Bresson's love of abstraction is accompanied by a sure instinct for the telling concrete detail. When the cure falls in the mud, Seraphita, his precocious catechism student, gives him a cloth to wipe his face; during the conversation with the countess, we hear the raking of paths in the park; and visuals of doors and grills underline the relationship between people and things. Bresson makes it easy for agnostics to explain the actions of the cure as the result of heredity and morbidity, and the pious may feel cheated by the director's refusal to edify. His very restraint, however, forces viewers to give Diary their closest attention. Film critic and theorist Andre Bazin's praise is well earned: "Probably for the first time, the cinema gives us a film in which the only genuine incidents, the only perceptible movements, are those of the life of the spirit. It also offers us a new dramatic form that is specifically religious--or better still, specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace."