Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics by Brian Price (review)

Brian Price's view of Robert Bresson is a strenuously polemical one, inscribing itself against the widespread view of the director as first and foremost an exponent of the transcendental and giving us instead the 'portrait [. . .] of an engaged, militant filmmaker' (p. 2). This reading is rooted, inter alia, in Badiou's Saint Paul, whose 'secular reading of Paul as a potential militant [. . .] attempts to recuperate grace in terms of the event' (p. 11) — the former of those last two terms is omnipresent in discussion of Bresson, and the latter is nowadays all but a locus classicus of non-teleological radical politics. The view that the director is 'concerned with the relation between labor and religion' (p. 14) is certainly a stimulating one, but sometimes patchily and tendentiously argued here. Price's attempt to anchor Bresson's work in the France of its time is praiseworthy—transcendence, after all, has to have something to transcend—and sometimes points towards intriguing new readings, as in his view that Lancelot du lac 'is a Marcellinian nightmare: the ancient institution under siege' (p. 135). Yet it also seems occasionally beset by délire d'interprétation, aswhen he reads Une femme douce as possibly allegorical of the May 1968 events on the grounds that the pawnbroker in that film, as in the Dostoevsky source text, exhibits similarities with De Gaulle, or in his suggestion that in Lancelot du lac the 'struggle for power between Pompidou and Chaban-Delmas is echoed in the struggle between Lancelot and Arthur' (p. 134). Such binary rivalries, after all, have been a classic feature of political struggles through the ages; the specific relevance of the Pompidou-Chaban-Delmas joust to Bresson's film appears to me to be no more than historically coincidental. The assertion apropos Le Diable, probablement that, unlike that film, 'political art tends towards the monological' (p. 150) is surely rebutted at least in part by the work of Nagisa Oshima or — a fortiori in this context — Jean-Luc Godard. Price's work is erudite and often perceptive, as in his treatment of the importance of hands not only in Pickpocket but also in L'Argent, but too often overargues its case. Perhaps Bresson's unique strength resides in the links his oeuvre suggests between the spiritual and transcendental on the one hand, the social and political on the other. Price's rebalancing reading, emphasizing the second of those sets of terms where the first has hitherto been canonical, is certainly intriguing, but for this reviewer at least overweights and overstates its argument.