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Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983
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Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943-1983
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Overview
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.”
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781681377803 |
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Publisher: | New York Review Books |
Publication date: | 09/26/2023 |
Pages: | 304 |
Product dimensions: | 6.03(w) x 8.96(h) x 0.64(d) |
About the Author
Anna Moschovakis is a translator and editor and the author of several books, including, most recently, the poetry collection They and We Will Get into Trouble For This and the novels Eleanor: Or, the Rejection of the Possibility of Love and Participation.
Mylène Bresson is Robert Bresson’s widow and the manager of his estate.
Pascal Mérigeau is a journalist and film critic who has published numerous books, among them biographies of Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Maurice Pialat, and Jean Renoir.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
Part 1 Public Affairs, 1934
Prelude 3
Part 2 Angels of Sin, 1943
It Takes an Auteur 9
Jean Giraudoux 13
Part 3 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, 1945
Scandals and Shocks 19
Inferiority Leads the Way 23
Jean Cocteau 25
The Festival du Film Maudit 27
Part 4 Diary of a Country Priest, 1951
Between These Two Worlds 31
It's the Impossibility That Attracts Me 33
To See and To Hear 37
As I Would Write a Poem 41
Part 5 A Man Escaped, 1956
The Wind Blows Where It Wants To 47
A New Means of Expression 55
Part 6 Pickpocket, 1959
A Film Made of Hands, Objects, and Glances 59
A Film's Rhythm Should Be Like the Beating of a Heart 63
To Capture Only What Is Real 69
To Get to the Mystery 73
Poetry and Truth Are Sisters 81
Part 7 The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962
This Familiarity with the Palpably Supernatural 87
I Know of Nothing More Atrocious or More Poignant 93
It's What the Film Wanted 95
Emotion Should Be Our Only Guide 101
Joan of Arc Was Beautiful, Elegant, Approachable, Modern 107
To Make Her Real, To Bring Her Close 115
If You Want the Current to Flow, You Have to Strip the Wires 119
Part 8 Adaptation
Aspects of Dramatic Creation 125
Part 9 Au Hasard Balthazar, 1966
A Donkey in All Its Purity, Its Tranquility, Its Serenity, Its Sanctity 133
The Freest Film I've Made, the One to Which I've Given the Most of Myself 139
To Create Life Without Copying It 159
The Beaten Path 173
Part 10 Mouchette, 1967
More in the Manner of Portraitists 185
Something Else I Like in Bernanos: His Supernatural Is Constructed from the Real 189
Looks That Kill 193
Part 11 The Sound Track
The Ear Is Far More Creative Than the Eye 199
Part 12 A Gentle Woman, 1969
The Confrontation Between Death and Life 205
I Am Here, tire Other Is Elsewhere, and the Silence Is Terrible 209
Part 13 Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1972
Art Is Not a Luxury, But a Vital Need 217
Between Blue and Brown 221
I Look for Surprises 227
Part 14 Lancelot of the Lake, 1974
To Bring the Past into the Present 233
It Was Lancelot's Very Particular Inner Adventure That I Found Striking 237
Torn Between Fidelity and Felony 239
The Sound of Iron 243
The Grail 247
Part 15 Notes on the Cinematograph, 1975
You Strip Your Art Naked 253
Part 16 The Devil, Probably, 1977
The Adversary 263
The Gaps Are Where the Poetry Slips In 267
Part 17 L'Argent, 1983
O Money, Visible God! 273
The Cinema Is Immense, We Haven't Done a Thing 279
Image Credits 285