Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (review)

This is by some way the longest and most detailed English-language monograph on Bresson's work, by an emeritus professor of film and literature who is also a practising psychoanalyst. That duality informs and is figured in Pipolo's discussions of Bresson's thirteen feature films (the early silent short Affaires publiques rates only a cursory mention), which combine 'traditional' filmic analysis with periodic allusions to — not solely Freudian — psychoanalysis. The approach is largely thematic, whether the author is focusing on recurrent motifs such as Bresson's undoubted, and (though Pipolo does not say this) almost certainly prurient, fascination with virginity, or developing new tropes such as 'sacred indirection, a phrase denoting that a religious aspect is being cited or alluded to but in an elusive, implicit manner' (p. 217) — an elegant way of approaching the 'problem of faith' often encountered in dealing with the director's work. Pipolo offers sensitive and formally detailed analyses of the films, in the Bordwell-Thompson tradition, luminous on, for instance, the importance of the 'countershot that never materializes' (p. 85) in Journal d'un cure´ de campagne, or the deployment of sound and off-screen space, notably in Un condamne´ à mort s'est e´chappe´. Careful attention is also given to the literary pre-texts of many of the films; I was especially intrigued by the Bloomian evocation of 'Bresson's literary theft' (p. 127) from Crime and Punishment in Pickpocket, and the consideration of sources and intertexts for Le Procès de Jeanne d'Arc is of great scholarly value. The psychoanalytical dimension of Pipolo's work appears less sure-footed, hovering as it does between a Freudian, even Lacanian, problematic evidenced in the assertion that in Lancelot du lac 'lack is the ruling sentiment' (p. 283), and a periodic lapsing into American therapy-speak combined with a hypostatization of the films' characters, as when Michel in Pickpocket is described as having 'submitted, like many narcissistically unstable young people, to a group psychology that flatters his false self and immature ego' (p. 139). Pipolo's labour of love becomes clearest in his redemption of Quatre nuits d'un rêveur — for many, Bresson's weakest film — through its comedic potential, but it is curious that Notes sur le cine´matographe, a deeply significant if elliptical text, receives little sustained attention, for it seems to me as much a part of his auteuristic output as the films. The book is well produced and adequately illustrated; if the stills are on the small side, that matters less in the DVD era than it once did. Its appeal is well exemplified by the inclusion of endorsements by Dudley Andrew and Martin Scorsese — the 'impact factor' at its best?