It’s hard to write about him because everybody already has, and because words seem so inert and abject when up against his moving pictures and sounds. How’s this? If you can only see one Robert Bresson film, see all of them. And you can: As part of a touring Bresson retrospective, the full baker’s dozen of his features will be available for a few weeks at Pacific Film Archive.
“Understated” is the most frequent of the grasping Netflix tags; also “cerebral” and “dark.” That gets close, in a manner apropos of a rental. But you don’t want to rent these. You need a safe space for clarity and urgent quietude (set against, say, church bells in the distance, or a train whistle, or a firing squad), which is what Bresson’s films provide and what they deserve. There are reasons people can be brought to tearful, quasi-religious fits just through whispers of scene-summarizing phrases, like, “Mouchette rolls down the grassy slope,” or, “The donkey lies down in the field of sheep.” Watch the movies in a dark room full of strangers and you’ll see.
Les Anges du Péché
A few necessary biographical details: French, Catholic, originally a painter, briefly a prisoner of war, eventually a titan of the artform, permanently an enigma. How to parse the “transcendental style” ascribed to him by the guy who went on to write Taxi Driver? Filmmakers use Bresson to wake themselves up. Any auteur you admire likely has had to reckon with him, or is “still coming to terms,” as Scorsese put it. “Lapidary” was Tarkovsky’s word, and indeed Bresson seemed to go beyond directing into engraving. In Godard’s estimation, “Bresson is to French cinema what Mozart is to German music and Dostoyevsky is to Russian literature.” That probably would seem true even if Mozart and Dostoyevsky didn’t figure so indelibly into Bresson’s films.
A Man Escaped
Visit or revisit them if only to tap into that burning purity of creative purpose. Discover how A Man Escaped obviates all your movie Stalags and Shawshanks and Alcatrazes. Recall how well Au Hasard Balthazar, the one with the donkey, works as a modern update of Apuleius’ “The Golden Ass,” or a pet-sitter selection test, or an antidote to our new on-screen saturation of animals digitally manipulated into grotesquely adorable monsters.
