• Born: Sep 25, 1901 in Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, France
• Died: Dec 18, 1999 in Paris, France
• Occupation: Writer, Director, Actor
• Active: '30s-'80s
• Major Genres: Drama
• Career Highlights: A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, The Diary of a Country Priest
• First Major Screen Credit: C'etait un Musicien (1933)

Biography

Often described as a "painter" of films, French director Robert Bresson was one of cinema's greatest anomalies. He directed only 13 films over the course of 40 years, but these films were in a category all their own, minimalist works that tended towards radical (and sometimes controversial) reinterpretations of such classical sources as Diderot, Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy. An expert manipulator of narrative incident, Bresson focused on seemingly incidental details of the stories he told and used amateur actors (whom he called 'models') lacking any trace of theatricality, creating searching meditations on the quality of transcendence, spirituality, and alienation. Of the artistic influences inherent in his work -- perhaps most apparent in his belief that the cinema is a fusion of music and painting, not the theatre and photography -- Bresson once said "Art is not a luxury, but a vital necessity."

The year of Bresson's birth has often been subject to debate; his biographer, Philippe Arnaud, has declared it to be 1901, while others claim that he was born in 1907. Whatever the case may be, Bresson was born on September 25, in the town of Bromont-Lamothe, located in France's mountainous Auvergne region. Originally trained as a painter, he abandoned painting in favor of the cinema in 1934. His first film, a short comedy called Les Affaires Publiques, went largely unseen. In 1939, Bresson joined the French army and spent a year as a POW in a German war camp. The experience had a profound effect on him and would later prove to be a particular influence in his making of Un Condamné à Mort C'Est Echappé (A Man Escaped).

After his release, Bresson returned to Paris, and during the height of the war he began preparing his first feature-length film, Les Anges du Péché (Angels of Sin). Released in 1943, it was one of his only films to use trained actors, stylized dialogue, and a specially composed soundtrack, features that Bresson would reject in his later work. The film, which revolved around a nun's love and self-sacrifice in the service of the rehabilitation of a fallen woman, showed early indication of the director's preference for a narrative composed of a series of short scenes, as well as a fascination with the details found in human skill and ritual.

Bresson sought literary inspiration for his second film, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Made two years after Les Anges, the film's plot was taken from a novel by Diderot, Jacques le fataliste, and featured dialogue written by Bresson and Jean Cocteau. A tale revolving around a woman's revenge on her seemingly uncaring lover, it was made with professional actors and the same composer and cameraman that Bresson used for his first film. Although it proved to be critically and financially unpopular (owing in part to its use of highly stylized costumes and formal dialogue), it contained the seeds of what would later become hallmarks of Bresson's work, namely the kind of spare, icy calm that pointed to an interior world of quiet alienation.

Bresson's international reputation was established with his third film, Le Journal d'un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) (1950). Based on the novel by Catholic writer Georges Beranos, it was a first-person account of the efforts of a young priest to bring salvation to an insular, loathsome French village. Bresson used a blend of voice-over and dialogue to describe the sort of alienated interior world he had alluded to in Les Dames. The film made evident his preoccupation with transcendence and spirituality (next to art, perhaps the greatest influence on Bresson's work was Catholicism) and was centered around the doomed priest's attainment of a state of grace. Praised by international critics and a considerable box office success, Le Journal won a number of prizes, including a Prix Louis Delluc and the 1951 Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival.

The film that many consider to be Bresson's masterpiece came six years later. Un Condamné à Mort C'est Echappé (A Man Escaped) was inspired by the experiences of a former prisoner of war, Commandant André Devigny, and was both an excruciatingly tense study of the details of confinement and a profound interior examination of a human being. Bresson used non-professional actors for the film and only the most minimal of dialogue to create a sort of anxious dream state; even though the title would indicate otherwise, it was never entirely clear whether or not the prisoner would actually escape. Bresson not only succeeded in manipulating his audience in this way, he also achieved complete control through the use of his actors, or "models." Manipulating their every move and word, the director, as one critic observed, effectively played all of the film's roles. His incredible handle on all aspects of his film did not go unrewarded: Un Condamné won a number of international honors, including the Cannes Festival's Best Direction prize.

Pickpocket, which followed in 1959, was one of Bresson's films that was indebted to Dostoyevsky. Loosely inspired by Crime and Punishment, it told the story of a lonely, arrogant, expert pickpocket who feels that he is above the law and normal human emotions. The film employed the same documentary-like approach as Un Condamné, as well as an obvious delight in human skills. Like his previous work, Pickpocket provided another striking example of Bresson's preoccupation with isolation and transcendence and the ultimate attainment of a state of grace.

Following Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc) (1962), a study of Joan's inner struggle that blended historical accuracy and an extreme compression of narrative, Bresson made what many consider his most complex film Au Hasard, Balthazar (By Chance Balthazar) (1966). Deriving inspiration from Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, the film was an episodic study of the experiences of a donkey and his victimization during a series of human encounters, each representing one of the deadly sins of humanity. The poor donkey, who eventually is killed during one of these encounters, is used by Bresson to achieve his most complex and saintly portrait within a film, one that is wholly free of sentiment or false emotion. When it was released, Balthazar was hailed as a film of deep resonance and immediacy, and Bresson's next film, Mouchette, followed just a year later with unprecedented rapidity.

One of Bresson's most controversial films, Mouchette was banned in some areas as an indictment against teenage suicide. Certainly, the plight of the title character -- a socially isolated 14-year-old girl who is brutally raped and subsequently commits suicide -- is bleak, but as is typical in Bresson's films, Mouchette is more about tragic alienation and the ultimate attainment of inner peace. A particularly troubling film for Catholics, it seemed to affirm Bresson's growing pessimism -- something he denied -- although many critics thought that the film was more the director's affirmation of both the human spirit and the bleakness of the human condition.

Bresson's next film, Une Femme Douce (A Gentle Woman) (1969), was the first that he made in color. It was also one of his few to use a "model" who would later become an actor. The "model" was Dominique Sanda, a popular '60s fashion model, and it was upon her inner world that Bresson focused his story. The plot, which began with the suicide of its title character, revolved around the increasingly problematic relationship between a pawnbroker and his wife (Sanda). Both a study in the contrasts between its two protagonists and a spiritual examination of its central character, Une Femme Douce met with a fairly cool reception; some reviewers felt that Bresson's use of color softened the film's potential impact.

The director went back to Dostoyevsky for his next film, Quatre Nuits d'un Rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer) (1971). Inspired by the author's White Nights, the film could be deemed a fairly accessible love story, but it was informed by Bresson's attraction to what has been described as "the idea of love being stronger than the love story itself." Although some of the director's admirers expressed concern about his preoccupation with young love and the use of popular music in the film, it still earned a number of honors, including the British Film Institute's award for the "most original film" of the year.

Bresson's subsequent Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake) (1974), was a pet project for the director, who had spent 20 years planning how he would film the search for the Holy Grail. His most elaborate and expensive work, it combined fights and swordplay with long sequences of philosophical dialogue. Deeply pessimistic, it had none of the certainty of grace featured throughout Bresson's earlier works, and it was viewed as his darkest film -- literally and morally -- to date.

Bresson returned from the medieval forest to modern Paris for his next film, Le Diable, Probablement (The Devil, Probably) (1977). Centered on four disillusioned intellectuals who bear witness to a society that is materialistic, inhuman, and exploitative, it was Bresson's most overtly political work to date. He called it "a film about money, a source of great evil in the world." The movie is dominated by a protagonist who hates both life and death and declares that "My sickness is that I see things clearly." As Bresson's most unsympathetic protagonist, he was, in part, why the film was labeled as the director's most uncompromising and daring film to date. In rejecting modern society, the character rejects the audience, who are complicit in the evils of society. His eventual death at the hands of a drug addict whom he has bribed to kill him brings with it a nihilistic state of grace, free of the kind of redemption that had dominated much of Bresson's previous work.

Based on a story by Tolstoy, L'Argent (1983) was another examination of a world riddled by corruption. Like Le Diable before it, the film centered around the evils of money and its disastrous effects on an essentially innocent young man. Inarguably one of Bresson's bleakest works, it nevertheless came to the conclusion -- through brutal societal retribution and deliverance from membership in society -- that "All is Grace." It was Bresson's last film, and he described it as the one with which he was most satisfied. It was the final installment in the career of a man who can be truthfully described as one of cinema's genuine auteurs. On December 18, 1999, Robert Bresson died, leaving behind over a half-century's worth of contributions to both his country's culture and that of the world. ~ Rebecca Flint, All Movie Guide

L'Argent Buy this Movie	Le Diable Probablement Buy this Movie	Lancelot of the Lake Buy this Movie	A Gentle Woman Buy this Movie
Mouchette Buy this Movie	Pickpocket Buy this Movie	A Man Escaped Buy this Movie	The Diary of a Country Priest Buy this Movie

Show More Movies Show Fewer Movies

French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was, as fellow director Jean-Luc Godard phrased it in an estimation quoted by the "New York Times", "to French cinema what Mozart is to German music and Dostoyevsky is to Russian literature." Bresson was a classic figure of French film and of filmmaking in general, one who boiled the art down to its essentials and favored stark, serious films on basic spiritual themes. He worked mostly with nonprofessional actors, avoided the use of background music, and never toyed with the emotions of an audience. The generation of French directors that followed Bresson differed sharply from him in terms of style and mood, but the integrity of Bresson's vision and his insistence on creative control over his work provided powerful examples for younger filmmakers.

Bresson was notorious for refusing to discuss his personal life, or even to talk much about his own work. As one New York Times contributor related, the filmmaker once asked an interviewer whether the man had seen his latest film, and when the interviewer answered that he had, Bresson responded, "Then you know as much as I do. What do we have to talk about?" Even Bresson's date of birth is in dispute, but most sources agree that he was born September 25, 1901, in the small town Bromont-Lamothe, in the Auvergne region of central France. Many of his films display a sensitive appreciation for landscape imagery, a quality that can be attributed to this childhood home. Bresson grew up in a military family, however, and he lived in both city and country when he was young.

As a teenager, Bresson studied classics and philosophy at the Lakanal School in Sceaux, France. Later in life, he would tell younger filmmakers that they should focus on music, painting, and poetry rather than studying film. For much of his life, Bresson was a classical pianist of well-above-average ability, and he also took photographs that were later exhibited in an English museum. His greatest dream as a young man was to become a painter. That ambition brought Bresson to Paris, where he married his first wife, Leidia Van der Zee, in 1926.

Switched to Film from Painting

As Bresson wrote in an article quoted by author Jane Sloan, he soon discovered that painting made him "too nervous." He became interested in film around 1930 and immersed himself in the art, becoming a special admirer of American comedian Charlie Chaplin. In the 1930s Bresson worked as a screenwriter for other directors and filmed a short comedy of his own called Affaires publiques (Public Affairs) in 1934. His budding career was cut short, however, by the outbreak of World War II, and in1939 Bresson joined the French army. He was captured by German forces in June of 1940 and spent ten months as a prisoner of war. He was sent to a labor camp, where he worked in a forest. Finally, when a group of Bresson's fellow prisoners became ill, he faked an illness of his own and was released by the Germans, who by this time were in full control in France.

After his return to Paris, Bresson's film career began in earnest. His 1943 film Les anges du péché (The Angels of the Streets) was set among a group of Dominican nuns, one of whom goes to extreme lengths to try to save the soul of a hardened female criminal. Les anges du péché featured a screenplay by French playwright Jean Giraudoux. Although the film did not quite have the pure simplicity of Bresson's later masterpieces - it used trained actors, for example, rather than the nonprofessionals Bresson, in the manner of a painter, liked to call models - it became a commercial success and established Bresson as a major talent.

Bresson's second film, a 1945 melodrama titled Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois du Boulogne), showed more evidence of Bresson's originality. Audiences were put off by the way the director's camera focused on everyday, seemingly insignificant details, but filmmaker Jacques Becker, as quoted in World Film Directors, hailed Bresson's style, noting that the film's focus on characters "who come and go, look, sit, rise, go up and down stairs, take the elevator, and exchange laconic words in a strange language" served as a new and original breakthrough.

The dimensions of that breakthrough became clear with Bresson's third postwar film, 1951's Le journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest). Based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, this stark tale of a self-sacrificing young priest who ministers to his flock even as he himself is dying concludes with an image of a gray cross on the screen. The film set the tone of quiet seriousness that would recur in most of Bresson's mature works. It was also defined by the director's fervent Catholicism. While not all of Bresson's works have religious themes, they often dealt with questions of faith or morality. The contrast between timeless themes and modern, stripped-down cinematic language accounts for some of the power of Bresson's work.

Filmed POW Story

Rather than rush to follow up on Le journal d'un curé de campagne, which was quickly acclaimed as a masterpiece, Bresson worked slowly. He insisted on complete creative control over his films, which in the hard financial times of post-World War II Europe were difficult to finance, and his careful, painterly approach to filmmaking did not lend itself to rush jobs. Consequently, in a career that lasted over 40 years, he made only 13 feature films. His next film, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (A Man Escaped), did not appear until 1956. This true account of the inner life of a World War II prisoner of war as he plots his escape from the Germans likely had roots in Bresson's own World War II experiences, although the filmmaker never revealed such insights into his own creative processes. The film was Bresson's first to dispense with the use of a conventional musical score; instead the director used small snatches of a solemn classical work, Mozart's Mass in C Minor.

For his next film, Pickpocket, which reportedly inspired parts of the Hollywood film American Gigolo, Bresson turned to a writer whose spiritual and existential concerns matched his own: Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Pickpocket, loosely based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, again touches on a theme of redemption in its story of a criminal tracked down and finally imprisoned. Once again, Bresson turned to classical music, this time that of Baroque composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, for his score. His next film would contain no music at all except for a drum roll at its climactic moment.

Even when he was not working in a religious setting, Bresson was noted for his strengths in depicting the rituals of everyday life. Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, for example, focused at length on the rhythms of prison life. When he did return to religious themes in his 1962 film Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc), Bresson succeeded in putting a wholly new face on a story that French viewers and many other audiences knew well. The torture and burning at the stake of the fifteenth-century heretic and military leader Joan of Arc were shown mostly through indirect details, such as a dog agitated by the smell of burning human flesh. Much of the film is based on the actual transcripts of Joan's trial. Whereas other directors treated Joan's story in epic terms, Bresson's film lasted only a little over an hour and dwelt on the feelings of the saint herself. Intimate and poignant, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc is considered one of Bresson's very greatest films.

By the mid-1960s, Bresson was no longer at the cutting edge of cinematic art; he had been overtaken by the young directors of the so-called French New Wave, such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Directors of the New Wave cultivated a breezy, unconventional style, marked by experimental influences, that was diametrically opposed to Bresson's severe classicism. Yet despite this shift, and despite the fact that the filmmaker's overt religiosity was becoming rarer in a rapidly secularizing France, Bresson served as an inspiration to the New Wave generation. In part, this was a result of his uncompromising artistic integrity, and partly it was due to the purely cinematic quality of his work: although Bresson often based his films on literary works, the films that resulted would be difficult to translate into any other medium.

Planned Biblical Epic

In any event, during the 1960s and 1970s Bresson was generally heralded as one of France's greatest filmmakers, a fact that made financing for his new projects somewhat easier to come by. With backing from Italian film mogul Dino de Laurentiis he began work on a giant film based on the biblical Book of Genesis, but abandoned the project. Although he would return to it later, it remained unfinished at his death in 1999. His next two completed films, Au hasard, Balthazar and Mouchette, followed one another in 1966 with unusual rapidity for Bresson. Mouchette tells a grim story of a troubled girl's suicide after she is sexually abused. The film was banned in France for a time and drew criticism from Catholics upset by its frank depiction of an act they considered sinful.

In 1969, the aging Bresson made his first color film. Une femme douce (A Gentle Creature) was based on a story by Dostoyevsky and featured future French star Dominique Sanda - then a 17-year-old unknown - in its lead role of a struggling young woman who marries a pawnbroker but finds herself bitterly unhappy. Bresson did not back down in the face of criticism, for this film, like Mouchette, ends with a suicide. Bresson followed that film up with another Dostoyevsky adaptation, Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer) in 1971, one of the director's rare love stories.

Although his biblical epic had fallen through, in 1974 Bresson succeeded in realizing another massive project he had contemplated. Lancelot du lac (Lancelot) is a medieval epic based on the legends of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Characteristically for Bresson, subject matter that would have been treated as swashbuckling adventure by another director instead served as a vehicle for the study of self-sacrifice in the face of imminent death. Reluctant though he generally was to discuss his work and methods, Bresson revealed some of his behind-the-camera techniques involving this and other films in the book Notes sur la cinématographie (Notes on Cinematography), published in 1975.

Old age did not dull Bresson's talents in the least. His last two films, 1977's Le diable, probablement (The Devil, Probably) and 1981's L'argent (Money) serve as dark, moralistic indictments of modern life. The former, set in modern-day Paris, surveys the rampant waste and materialism of modern society, while L'argent, based on a Leo Tolstoy short story titled "The False Note," depicts a chain of linked crimes that lead inevitably, because of the power money holds over the characters' lives, from a counterfeit bill to multiple murder. Although the downbeat subject matter disturbed audiences, Bresson said, as quoted in the London Guardian, that of all his films, L'argent was the one that had given him the "most pleasure."

Bresson contemplated resuming his Genesis project and also sketched out plans for several other films, but eventually ill health overtook him. His first marriage had ended in divorce, but his second wife, Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch, whom he married in the early 1990s, cared for him and tended his legacy. For much of the later part of his life, Bresson lived in an apartment on the top floor of a historic 17th-century building in Paris - a fitting roost, perhaps, for a man who had towered over the world of French cinema and seemed to touch the country's most profound artistic traditions in his work. He died in Droue-sur-Drouette, near Paris, on December 18, 1999, after a lingering illness.

Books

Cunneen, Joseph, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film, Continuum, 2003.

Reader, Keith, Robert Bresson, Manchester University Press, 2000.

Sloan, Jane, Robert Bresson: A Guide to References and Resources, G. K. Hall, 1983.

Periodicals

Cahiers du Cinema, February 1967.

Film Quarterly, Spring 1960; Fall 1977.

Guardian (London, England), December 22, 1999.

New York Times, December 22, 1999.

Times (London, England), December 22, 1999.

Yale French Studies, Volume 60, 1980.

For more information on Robert Bresson, visit Britannica.com.

Bresson, Robert (b. 1901). The greatest of French Catholic film-makers began his career with Les Anges du péché (1943), though his distinctive cinematic style does not appear fully until the Bernanos adaptation, Journal d'un curé de campagne (1951). This is characterized by elliptical narration, the eschewal of anything that might resemble psychologial ‘explanation’, and above all the refusal of ‘actors’ in favour of ‘models’ whose apparent emotional neutrality acts like a window onto the soul. These ideas are aphoristically set out in Notes sur le cinématographe (1975), and reach perhaps their highest development in Pickpocket (1959), a homage to Dostoevsky, and Au hasard Balthazar (1966).

— KAR

(rôbĕr' brĕsôN') , 1901–99, French film director and scriptwriter, b. Bromont-Lamottie, France. Bresson's films tend to be austere, unadorned, and concerned more with intellectual and spriritual values than plot or character. He evinced a unique aesthetic and spiritual approach to cinema in the 13 films he made during the course of 40 years. Bresson attempted to avoid the theatrical, preferring to use nonprofessional actors in scripts with a minimum of dialogue and creating images of nearly abstract simplicity. His films include Les Dames du Bois de Bologne (1944), The Diary of a Country Priest (1950), A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1965), Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1966), Lancelot of the Lake (1974), and Money (1983).

Bibliography

See The Films of Robert Bresson (ed. by I. Cameron, 1970).

Quotes:

"When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration."

"One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life."

"Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing."

"Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body."

"An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it."

"In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene."

See more famous quotes by Robert Bresson

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)