Robert Bresson

• 1. The Patron Saint Of Cinema

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  Jean-Luc Godard once wrote of one man, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." The man Godard meant was Robert Bresson, a French filmmaker born on the 25th of September 1901 and dead on the 18th of December 1999. Across fifty years of work, Bresson finished only thirteen feature-length films. Yet at the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, he placed seven films on the list, more than any other director. His admirers call him a "patron saint" of cinema. What does it mean to direct actors who are forbidden to act? Why would a man with a Catholic upbringing hide God from his own films? And how did a director who stopped going to the movies become the figure Alain Cavalier called the father of French cinema? The answers begin with a painter who refused to believe that film was only filmed theatre.

• 2. A Painter Captured

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  Bromont-Lamothe, in the Puy-de-Dôme, was where Bresson was born, the son of Marie-Élisabeth, born Clausels, and Léon Bresson. Little is known of his early life. He attended the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, in Hauts-de-Seine near Paris, and after graduating he turned to painting. Three forces shaped the films he would later make: Catholicism, art, and his time as a prisoner of war.

  A photographer first, Bresson made his earliest short film, Les affaires publiques, or Public Affairs, in 1934. At the start of World War II he enlisted in the French Army. The Germans captured him in 1940 and held him as a prisoner of war for more than a year. That captivity fed directly into A Man Escaped, released in 1956. Film historian Mark Cousins observed that where Bergman filmed life as a theatre and Fellini as a circus, "Bresson's microcosm was that of a prison," his characters "psychologically imprisoned."

  The small number of films was no accident. Bresson worked with painstaking care, kept clear of commercial aims, and often struggled to find funding for his projects. He lived in Paris, in the Île Saint-Louis. He made his final film, L'Argent, or Money, in 1983, and had been unwell for some time. He died at his home in Droue-sur-Drouette, southwest of Paris, at the age of 98.

• 3. Models, Not Actors

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  "Bresson opposed not just professional actors, but acting itself," wrote film scholar Tony Pipolo. Bresson preferred to call the people in his films 'models', and he drew them almost entirely from outside the profession. His early aim was to pull the language of cinema away from the theatre, which leans on the actor's performance to carry the work.

  In his 1975 collection of aphorisms, Notes on the Cinematographer, Bresson set the two apart in a few words. Human models, he wrote, move from the exterior to the interior. Actors move from the interior to the exterior. He borrowed a line Chateaubriand had used about 19th century poets and turned it on actors: "what they lack is not naturalness, but Nature." To believe one gesture is more natural than another he called "absurd," and said nothing rings more false in film than the "overstudied sentiments" of theatre.

  The method was punishing. Bresson made his models repeat take after take until every trace of performance was worn away, leaving an effect both subtle and raw. Writing in the journal CrossCurrents, Shmuel Ben-gad described the result: models who are "like people we meet in life, more or less opaque creatures who speak, move, and gesture." Acting, Ben-gad argued, puts a filter over the person and stops the camera from reaching a real human depth.

  Roger Ebert found a strange power in this restraint, writing that because Bresson's actors did not act out the emotions, "the audience could internalize them." Susan Sontag, in Against Interpretation, named Bresson "the master of the reflective mode," the artist who appeals to feeling through the route of the intelligence. The form of his films, she wrote, was built to discipline the emotions even as it aroused them, inducing a tranquility in the spectator that became the subject of the film itself.

• 4. Hiding God

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  "When I see a tree, I see that God exists," Bresson said in 1973. He wanted to catch the idea that we have a soul, and that the soul is in contact with God, and he called that the first thing he hoped to put in his films. He was a Catholic, though he parted ways with some Catholic theology. He was unsure of the resurrection of the body, and said he would "rather be a Jansenist than Jesuit" because he believed in predestination.

  The Second Vatican Council unsettled him. After its transition to the Mass of Paul VI, Bresson stopped attending church services. He said he still felt a sense of transcendence sitting in a cathedral, but that the changes to the Mass made it harder for him to feel the presence of God. In a 1976 interview with Paul Schrader, he spoke of what he saw as "the collapse of the Catholic religion" in France, and doubted the post-Vatican II Church could meet the challenge. The Devil Probably carried some of those criticisms. Bresson said its young protagonist "is looking for something on top of life, but he doesn't find it. He goes to Church to seek it, and he doesn't find it."

  Bresson believed a secular film with religious undercurrents would reach modern viewers better than an openly religious one. Susan Sontag noted that crime, the revenge of betrayed love, and solitary imprisonment yielded in his work the same themes as any religious vocation. He worried the new French generation was too materialistic for true belief, saying "every religion is poverty," and that "when Catholicism wants to be materialistic, God is not there." His aim was indirection: "I don't want to shoot something in which God would be too transparent." He preferred, he said, to make people feel that presence rather than show it. In a 1983 interview for TSR's Spécial Cinéma, he revealed he had wanted to make a film from the Book of Genesis, but thought it would be too costly and too slow to produce.

• 5. Father Of The New Wave

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  "In French cinema you have a father and a mother," wrote the director Alain Cavalier. "The father is Bresson and the mother is Renoir, with Bresson representing the strictness of the law and Renoir warmth and generosity." By offering his own answers to the question "what is cinema?" and by building his ascetic style, Bresson set himself against the established pre-war French cinema known as the Tradition de la Qualité, the "tradition of quality."

  The founders of the French New Wave took him as a precursor. He is often listed alongside Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin among the figures who shaped the movement. In developing auteur theory, François Truffaut named Bresson among the few directors to whom the term "auteur" truly applies, and one of the only ones who could approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes. Yet the fit was imperfect. Bresson was neither as experimental nor as political as the New Wave directors, and his Catholicism and Jansenism held little appeal for most of them.

  The admiration spread far beyond France. Andrei Tarkovsky named Bresson and Ingmar Bergman his two favourite filmmakers, saying, "I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman." In Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky called him "perhaps the only artist in cinema" to achieve a perfect fusion of finished work and concept. Martin Scorsese praised him as "one of the cinema's greatest artists" and an influence on Taxi Driver. Christopher Nolan drew on Pickpocket and A Man Escaped for Dunkirk, and Yorgos Lanthimos picked Pickpocket as "the most moving film I've ever seen."

• 6. An Aloof Figure

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  On the set of Four Nights of a Dreamer in 1971, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum worked as an extra and watched Bresson at close range. The director, Rosenbaum wrote, "seemed more isolated from his crew than any other filmmaker I've seen at work." His widow and onetime assistant director, Mylene van der Mersch, often passed along his instructions. Rosenbaum, who admired the work, still called Bresson "a mysterious, aloof figure."

  The charge of an "ivory tower existence" outside mainstream cinema followed him for years. Late in life Bresson said he had stopped watching other filmmakers' movies in theatres. There was one surprising exception. He praised the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, from 1981, saying, "It filled me with wonder... if I could have seen it twice in a row and again the next day, I would have."

  His sympathy ran toward society's victims, drawn without sentiment. Of one protagonist he said, "Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations." His most contemporary films, The Devil, Probably from 1977 and L'Argent from 1983, reach similarly unsettling conclusions, pointing toward the culpability of modern society in the dissolution of individuals. In the decennial Sight and Sound critics' poll, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne climbed to 31 by 2022, the same film Jacques Rivette called one of "the key French films for our generation."