Robert Bresson: Cinema

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A Man Escaped: Robert Bresson, 1956

 

from a French television interview with Robert Bresson by Roger Stephane, 1966

... The scene was on paper. But there's a world of difference between writing it and filming it. To me, the most important part of a film is its rhythm. Everything is expressed by the rhythm. Without rhythm, there's nothing... everything you say happens, didn't happen during filming, but during editing. It's the editing that creates these things, that brings them forth. The camera simply records. It's precise, and fortunately, unbiased. The camera is extremely precise. The drama is created in the cutting room, when images are juxtaposed and sound is added, that's when "love blossoms".

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The difficulty is that all art is both abstract and suggestive at the same time. Art lies in suggestion. The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that's impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a state of anticipation. This goes back to what I said earlier about showing the cause after the effect. We must let the mystery remain. Life is mysterious, and we must see that on screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their causes, like in real life. We're unaware of the causes of most of the things that we witness. We see the effects and only later discover the cause.

Mouchette: Robert Bresson, 1966

Words should say everything an image can't. Before having characters speak, we should examine everything they could express, with their eyes, above all with body language, certain kinds of interaction, certain ways of behaving. Words should only be used when we need to delve deeper into the heart of things. In short, ideas must be expressed on film using appropriate images and sounds, and dialogue should only be used as a last resort. I don't like talking about technique. I don't feel that I have one. It's more an obsession I have with flattening out images. I have good reason to. I believe -- or rather, I'm certain -- that without transformation there is no art, and without transforming the image, there is no cinema. If the image remains isolated on screen, just as it was filmed, if it doesn't change when juxtaposed with other images, there is no transformation, and it isn't cinema. To achieve that -- images bearing the mark of the dramatic arts can't be transformed, because they're marked by that seal; like a table made of wood that's already been carved once, the table will be shaped by these carvings. You must use images free from all art, especially the dramatic arts, so they can be transformed through contact with other images and sound. The great difficulty in cinema -- I say "cinema" to distinguish it from "movies" -- by "movies" I mean conventional ones, which to me are just filmed plays; the director has the actors perform a play, and he films it -- to me, cinema is entirely different. It's an independent art, born of the juxtaposition of images with sound -- image with sound, and sound with sound. When you film actors performing a play, the camera reproduces the scene, it doesn't create it. In the theatre, we ask actors to perform a piece, actors from stage or film or both. We photograph them acting out this story. To me, it's not the same thing. Cinema is about images and sound; images that are transformed when juxtaposed with others. But the images must have a certain quality that might be called neutrality. They must have -- and it's difficult to avoid too much dramatic meaning -- their dramatic meaning should only come from the juxtaposition with other images. That's what's extremely difficult, to know how this image should be shot, and from what angle, to allow it to interact with other images.

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To the degree that theatre is an external and decorative art -- which is not at all an insult, in my mind -- to that same degree, the aim, the goal of cinema (I specifically say "cinema" and not "movies", referring to the art of the cinema, if it exists) is about interiorization, intimacy, isolation; in other words, the innermost depths.

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To me, cinema is the art of having each thing in its place. In this it resembles all the other arts. Like the anecdote of Johann Sebastian Bach playing for a student. The student gushes with admiration, but Bach says, "There's nothing to admire. You just have to hit the note at the right time, and the organ does the rest".

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...talking about technique again, or rather my obsession with mechanical behavior. I think most of our gestures, and even our words, are automatic. If your hand is on your knee, you didn't put it there. Montaigne has a wonderful chapter about this, about our hands that go where we don't tell them to go. Our hands are autonomous; they are not under our command. Our gestures, our limbs, are practically autonomous. That's cinema. What cinema is not is thinking out a gesture, thinking out words. We don't think of what we're going to say. the words come even as we think, and perhaps make us think. In this regard, theatre is unrealistic and unnatural. What I attempt with my films is to touch what's real. Perhaps I'm obsessed with reality.

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[The "models":]... they improvise, but not in the way you think. By that I mean, I like the mind to be completely uninvolved in what's happening. We keep repeating lines, fifty times if necessary, until the mind no longer intervenes in the dialogue or gestures. Once things become automatic, the actor is thrown into the action of the film, and completely unexpected things happen that are a hundred times more real than theatrical acting, where the actor has memorized his lines, thinking out his every word and gesture. There's no way it will seem real.

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What interests me is not what they show but what they conceal... [which can be shown] thanks to that miraculous machine called a camera. As matter of fact, what surprises me [about conventional "movies'] is that such an incredible device, capable of recording what our eyes can not, or more precisely what our mind does not, is only used to show tricks and falsehood. That's what surprises me.

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I ask [the performers] to learn their lines while ignoring their meaning, as if they didn't have a meaning, as if they were just syllables. The meaning comes upon them unaware.

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I always try categorically to eliminate what's not essential. I absolutely believe in cinema as serious art. Not as entertainment, but on the contrary as a kind of aid to mankind in delving deeper, and discovering ourselves.

A Man Escaped: Robert Bresson, 1956