Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics

Notes

Introduction 1. Henry Chapier, “Giscard oui, Bresson non!” Le Quotidien de Paris, 9 June 1977. 2. Henri Quiqueré, “Bresson bâillonné,” Le Matin de Paris, 9 June 1977. 3. Wolinksy, L’Humanité, 17 June 1977. Unless otherwise noted, translations throughout the book are my own. 4. Unsigned article, “Le Diable probablement: avec la benediction de d’Ornano,” Sud Ouest, 16 June 1977. 5. Twentieth Century French Photography, ed. Jean-Claude Lemagny (London: Trefoil Publications, 1988). 6. Ayfre’s article, “L’univers de Robert Bresson,” originally appeared in Téléciné 70–71 (November–December 1957). Elizabeth Kingsley-Rowe’s translation“The Universe of Robert Bresson,” which I cite here and throughout the book, appears in Robert Bresson, ed. James Quandt (Toronto: Cinematheque Ontario, 1998), 54. 7. Mirella Jona Affron, “Bresson and Pascal: Rhetorical Affinities,” in Robert Bresson, 170. 8. See, for instance, Tony Pipolo,“Rules of the Game: On Bresson’s Les Anges du péché,” in Robert Bresson, 193–209. 9. Ayfre, “Universe of Robert Bresson,” 52. 10. Ibid., 53. 11. Annette Michelson, “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 26. 12. André Bazin,“The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1:9. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Ibid., 14. 15. André Bazin, “Le Journal d’un curé de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” in Robert Bresson, 33. 16. Emmanuel Mounier, “Situation du personalisme,” Esprit 1 (January 1946): 7. 209 Notes 210 Notes to Chapter 1 17. Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–24. 18. André Bazin, “On the politique des auteurs,” in Cahiers du cinéma, the 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave, ed. Jim Hiller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 257. 19. Lo Duca,“Un acte de foi,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 1 (1951): 45–47; Anne Walter, “L’angoisse de la certitude,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 104 (1960): 47–48; Paul Vecchiali, “Les fausses apparences,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 143 (1963): 35–39. 20. Eric Rohmer, “Les miracles des objets,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 65 (1956): 44. 21. Julien Green, “En travaillant avec Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 50 (1955): 18–23. 22. Roland Monod, “En travaillant avec Robert Bresson,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 64 (1956): 16–20; François Leterrier, “Robert Bresson L’insaissable,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 66 (1956): 34–36. 23. Leterrier, “Robert Bresson L’insaissable,” 34. 24. See especially Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003). 25. Alasdair MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 112. 26. Ibid., 104. 27. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 30. 28. Ibid., 76–77. 29. Ibid., 77. The emphasis is Badiou’s. 30. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001), 116. 31. Ibid., 77. 32. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 13. 1. Crime as a Form of Liberation 1. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Film Style: Ozu, Dreyer, Bresson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 93. 2. Ayfre, “Universe of Robert Bresson,” 51. 3. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 123. 4. Jacques Doniol Valcroze and Jean Luc-Godard, “Entretien avec Robert Bresson ,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 4 (1960): 3. 5. Twentieth Century French Photography, ed. Jean-Claude Lemagny (London: Trefoil Publications, 1988). This image was brought to my attention—and rather unsel fishly, I might add—by Colin Burnett. 6. Denise Tual, Le Temps dévoré (Paris: Fayard, 1980), 204–5. 7. Keith Reader, Robert Bresson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 8. 8. Alice Yeager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 34. Notes to Chapter 2 211 9. Ibid., 134. 10. For an important complication of this period along similar lines, see Christopher Faulkner, “René Clair, Marcel Pagnol, and the Social Dimension of Speech,” Screen 35, no. 2 (1994): 157–70. 11. Robert Bresson,Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (Kobenvahn : Green Integer, 1997), 61. 12. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University...