Robert Bresson

Now in paperback, a collection of interviews with a French cinematic titan--covering subjects such as adaptation, the effects of capitalism on art, and the importance of intuition--selected from a period of four decades. Robert Bresson, the director of such cinematic masterpieces 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 CinemaScope (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 soundtrack, 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."

Min film fødes først i mit hoved, dør pa° papiret, genoplives af de levende personer og de virkelige objekter, som jeg bruger, og som dør pa° filmstrimlen, men som, arrangeret i en særlig orden og projiceret pa° lærredet, vækkes til live igen som blomster i vand. * Model. Hans permanens: altid den samme ma°de at være anderledes pa°. * Grav dybt i din sansning. Se hvad der er pa° indersiden. Analyser den ikke med ord. Oversæt den til søsterbilleder, til ækvivalente lyde. Desto klarere den er, desto tydeligere viser din stil sig. (Stil: alt hvad der ikke er teknik.)

The French film director Robert Bresson was one of the great artists of the twentieth century and among the most radical, original, and radiant stylists of any time. He worked with nonprofessional actors--models, as he called them--and deployed a starkly limited but hypnotic array of sounds and images to produce such classic works as A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Diary of a Country Priest, and Lancelot of the Lake. From the beginning to the end of his career, Bresson dedicated himself to making movies in which nothing is superfluous and everything is always at stake. Notes on the Cinematograph distills the essence of Bresson's theory and practice as a filmmaker and artist. He discusses the fundamental differences between theater and film; parses the deep grammar of silence, music, and noise; and affirms the mysterious power of the image to unlock the human soul. This book, indispensable for admirers of this great director and for -students of the cinema, will also prove an inspiration, much like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, for anyone who responds to the claims of the imagination at its most searching and rigorous.