Robert Bresson (review)

This study of Robert Bresson is one of the twenty or so titles that now constitute the 'French Film Directors' series, edited by Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram since 1998. The series's self-evidently auteurist approach, whose methodological basis some may wish to question, could hardly be easier to justify than in the case of Bresson, as Keith Reader himself remarks in his introduction. For Bresson's work is one of the classic sites for exponents of the theory that cinema is an art-form created essentially by exceptional individuals, whose personal films display a formal and thematic rigour evolving towards an aesthetic absolute. Thus Reader can unashamedly adopt such an auteurist method in his examination of Bresson's fourteen films, starting with the little-known Affaires publiques (1934) and following the filmmaker's long career to his final masterpiece, L'Argent (1983), considered as the distillation of everything that the artist had achieved in the intervening fifty years. The main characteristics of Bresson's unique manner, according to Reader, are his minimalist paring down of cinema to its basic material components; his rejection of French classic cinema's psychologically motivated dramatic narratives; and, most famously, his almost exclusive employment of non-professional 'models' rather than trained actors, whose theatricality the filmmaker openly despised. To these three prime formal traits Reader adds two major thematic concerns that he believes can be traced throughout Bresson's entire corpus. One is the filmmaker's ambivalent and increasingly pessimistic relationship to certain strands of Catholic theology, especially Jansenism and the works of Pascal. The other is what Reader posits as an indirect dialogue between Bresson's films and the writings of Jacques Lacan. Without anywhere suggesting that Bresson is a Lacanian, or indeed that the filmmaker had any detectable interest in psychoanalysis, Reader attempts to demonstrate in his discussion that some Lacanian models and concepts can provide original interpretive insights into Bresson's films. This is the five-point agenda, then, that Reader sets out for his chronological survey of Bresson's career. In each chapter he presents very briefly the production background and public reception of the film or films in question. Then he gives a linear account of each film's narrative, interlaced with his personal readings of the work's main points of interest, as well as with references to some of Bresson's best-known critics and academic exegetes. There are also frequent allusions to Lacan, as already mentioned, alongside Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, and Simone Weil. Despite these high-theory references, Reader's style is relaxed and informal, if at times slightly digressive; but overall the rigidly chronological structure and the clearly auteurist agenda succeed in keeping the discussion on track and the analysis in focus. In conclusion, then, this book will serve its main purpose as an introduction to Bresson's work for teachers and students alike.