The Nightingale

Brian Price's Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics is a thorough reevaluation of one of France's most lauded filmmakers. In Price's summation, the aim of the book is to "argue that Bresson's work has from the beginning been engaged with questions of revolutionary practice and radical politics" (2-3). This argument runs counter to over fifty years of scholarship that has treated Bresson as a religious filmmaker. For Price, this tradition has become stifling in that it allows for no innovation, repeating the same view of Bresson over and over. Price is concerned less with proving this interpretation wrong than in showing what can be gained from dispensing with its dogma. As the book's epigraph, taken from Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer, puts it: "Is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?" There is, then, an iconoclasm in Price's approach to Bresson that meshes well with the subject of radical politics. Considering the rarity of this sort of interpretive gambit in film studies today, which remains mired in an infatuation with empiricism, the gesture itself is to be lauded.¹ Fortunately, this gesture also yields an original account of Bresson's oeuvre that is rich with ideas on revolt and the politics of cinema.

In a short introduction, Price provides a summation of the canonical reading of Bresson as "a religious filmmaker preoccupied with questions of grace and predestination, election and salvation, and the enactment of the theological problem" (3). This reading of Bresson was constructed largely in the pages of Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s and '60s under the influence of André Bazin and his ontology of the photographic image as a veritable acheiropoietic icon. For Bazin and his followers, Bresson's severe style and eschewal of character psychology was a strategy for allowing the passage of grace into the image. Price argues that the canonization of Bazin in film studies, and the continued interest in his ontology—precipitated in the last few decades by anxiety over the obsolescence of the photographic image—has in turn helped harden the religious interpretation of Bresson into a fundamentalism that "demands that we understand a text in just one way" (10). Rejecting this limitation as inimical to the project of interpretation, Price takes leave of the religious view of Bresson and does not look back; at the close of the introduction he writes that "a more conciliatory understanding of Christian thematics and the religious reading of Bresson's work will only ever lead us back to the same Bresson we have been seeing for over seventy years" (13).

The remainder of the book proceeds more or less chronologically through Bresson's long career, from Les Anges du péché (1943) to L'Argent (1983). Throughout, Price reveals Bresson's "sensitivity to a relation between film form and the world" by weaving together close analyses of the films with a detailed account of the shifting political landscape of postwar France (187). For this task Price draws on a wide variety of theoretical frameworks and interlocutors. While this herme neutic diversity fits with Price's critique of fundamentalisms, it somewhat encumbers the unity of the project. This difficulty is most apparent in the second and third chapters, which cover the period from Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962) to Mouchette (1967). Following a superb opening chapter on the surrealist celebration of the criminal in A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959), the historical backdrop all but disappears as Price assumes a more philosophical idiom and wrestles with a Derridean critique of the violence of language and interpretation. Unsurprisingly, it is in the second chapter, on three of Bresson's most explicitly religious films, where Price's thesis is most under strain, occasioning some dense pages on logocentrism and negative theology that at times have an ethereality somewhat incongruous with the aim of situating Bresson in the grit of the social world. The following chapter develops similar arguments with greater force...