THE SKIN OF CINEMA: ROBERT BRESSON

“Robert Bresson makes films for the blind.” In reading his notebooks, one thing hits you – the similarity of his daily maxims to the “rehabilitative” notekeeping of one who has lost a particular faculty (sight, hearing) and must restructure his life in order to maintain his standard of living, relying on the amplified contributions of other senses to supply the lost data. “The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows,” he writes in 1950. The first entry in what was later published as “Notes of a Cinematographer” reads: “Rid myself of the accumulated errors and untruths. Get to know my resources, make sure of them.” This dictum shows a simple determination consistent with the single-minded discipline of those who have no choice but to reconfigure themselves and their way of apprehending the world; the urgency and self-discipline in these short, pithy statements is remarkable, as if the desire to make a shift from the failing arts to the 'living' arts is of paramount importance.

What drives this apparent schism? Obviously Bresson is trying to estrange himself from certain notions, “vices”, and sharpen his ability to move in a different fashion. The schism, for Bresson, manifests itself in multiple ways: between theater and cinema, between acting and “modeling”, image and sound, interior and surface. By pointing out these dichotomies, he seeks to make clear that the industry of “illusion” so inseparable from that of film is in fact a crutch which may have sustained the transition from theatre to cinema, but is no longer needed.

            Bresson’s cinema was an explicit reaction against a number of "failing" movements and schools: the stylized spectacle of Hollywood films and their imitators, the Brechtian formulations of those seeking a more potent form of cinema to oppose the limpid Hollywood fare, and the realists who achieved a documentary feel through contrivance. By contrast, Bresson created a kind of “superrealism” with his actors and photography, placing the action according to our expectations. If you watch a Bresson film with your eyes closed, and open them in the middle of any scene, chances are the aural information coupled with conventional ideas about mise-en-scene has created a picture in your head almost identical with that on the screen. This is a remarkable feat; it’s not that his images have a barely supplementary status, but that they appear to respond directly to the carefully-considered intuitions of an audience. Understandably, given that cinema is an audio-visual medium, much of the criticism directed at Bresson centers on his apparent renunciation of the image. In a 1983 interview coinciding with the release of L’Argent, he speaks of “the lie that is photography.” He denounces the importance of the “cardinal sin” of cinema: that a film must not expose its actors as such, and replaces it with another maxim: “There is no lie of sound that compares to one of vision.” In other words, the aural characteristics of an event are less illusory and more revelatory than the visual cues that are often used explicitly to structure the response of others. Of course, the limitations of sound recording tarnish these expectations, but the fact remains that it’s far easier to elicit a desirable response by manipulating our primary source of conscious information – vision – than appealing to our sense of hearing with (only diegetic) sound. Another reason for the primacy of sound in his films is that, as he says, the ear is “inventive” in a way the eye is not: “When you hear the whistle of the train it gives you the idea of the whole station.” Everything captured by the camera is indeed “captured”, stuffed, but the cinematic ephemera we imagine escapes this death. He believes (like Pasolini) in the power of what isn’t shown.

First encounters with Bresson are usually a little hairy; there aren’t many other things we’ve encountered that force us to differentiate between “bad acting” and “no acting”. To say that a performer isn’t acting is to say that he is simply playing himself – which of course is patently untrue, but we understand it to mean that the character is so similar to the actor himself that there is virtually no work involved in developing a different persona for the role. It is, we say, a “natural” performance. But Bresson turns this notion on its head (in a way that seems willfully contrarian, and undoubtedly awkward, to a viewer unaccustomed to his techniques): he coaches synthetic performances from actors instructed not to play characters. This amounts to reading lines – not bodying them forth, as Actors do, but simply intoning them; wearing their street clothes (except in period films like Lancelot du Lac and The Trial of Joan of Arc), shuffling on wooden floors, hitting their marks, turning, and delivering. It’s his way of dropping the scaffolding to expose the mechanics, but instead of leaving it bare (which would result in some sort of inverted ‘meta-documentary’ which collapses in on itself and becomes one-dimensional), he constructs a new synthetic universe around these human pistons and wheelbarrows, and the actors do double duty as both the disinterested colorists of their universe and the paperweights that keep it from blowing away.

These revelations about Bresson’s method are not forthcoming, and look a lot to most viewers like “bad acting” and “bad directing”. The first Robert Bresson film I ever saw was Le Diable Probablement, which I referred to unkindly as “Balzac puppet show” for its clear and unacknowledged resemblance to The Magic Skin and the wooden machinations of its actors. It took a couple more viewings of the movie, and an introduction to Lancelot du Lac, plus a few long conversations to change my mind. Also, his favorite writers being Dostoevsky and Bernanos – as are mine – tipped me off that this was something to investigate. And after hearing what Bresson has to say about his own films, I’m convinced that anyone who dislikes him has yet to read an interview with him. His clarity of purpose comes through remarkably, and there’s no false humility anywhere – he speaks so simply and candidly, and affably, that he sounds almost like Jean Renoir in print.

That which is the foundation, the fundament, of cinema, is the complete cinematic universe of Bresson. He reveals that the foundation is also the surface – refusing to allow his actors to illuminate their actions with even the most paltry psychological development – this, of course, is a statement that is difficult to defend, since the reasons for the behavior of most of his films’ characters are meant to be obvious, but when they are “given” apart from the action, they are either merely hypothesized, contradictory, or obtuse. Through this device, and others like it, Bresson drives home the point that language is the least trustworthy source of information. Both verbal and non-verbal signs are accused: the body language that means supplication and implies submission when one is pleading for mercy is artificial, he says; the expression of grief at a funeral is social. While we know that at least some of this is untrue, it remains true in the context of cinema, where a character does not have to grieve; he could laugh instead. Bresson does not oppose the display of emotion per se; he rejects it because it is most often used as a part of an elaborate sequence of great and minute events designed to manipulate the emotions of the audience provided only that there is nothing “artificial” about it. Films achieve emotional resonance with their viewers if and only if they succeed in seamlessly maintaining the illusion that the action on screen is really happening in some possible world. In these terms, it’s easy to see what Bresson finds so offensive, even incredibly sick/symptomatic about the way we think about cinema. The offense, he thinks, is masking the illusion. Bresson’s films reveal the mechanics of the diorama – his great imperative is to show us that we don’t have to be fooled to be moved. Lancelot’s hollow “Guinevere…” from beneath of a pile of corpses is Bresson’s “Stella!!” No one thinks that Lancelot is not desperate; just because he isn’t screaming doesn’t mean he’s not in pain. And the wooden “confessions” of Le Diable Probablement’s Charles in a boring psychiatrist’s office seem to hide so much from the director himself and the viewers that it makes us almost furious, and makes him pathetic and hopeless and doomed: a voluptuary and ascetic who makes no sense to anyone else that way. Michel’s gaze deflects our inquiry in Pickpocket; we can only guess at the futility and frailty he feels in his own machinations, and the reasons we come up with for his behavior – including his interaction with his mother – are more sorrowful than we should imagine them.

You get the sense after watching a Bresson film – like an Antonioni – that it almost wholly consisted of ellipses, passages which would’ve been elided in most other films. Lines of dialogue evade the memory; we remember footfalls, the sound of money rustling in peoples’ pockets. Bresson’s imperative is opposite that of most directors: instead of trying to make the intermediary, quotidian events that fall between the “exciting” ones sensational or interesting in themselves, he instead works to make extraordinary events seem mundane.  In Four Nights of a Dreamer, Marthe takes her shoes off before a pre-empted suicide attempt on the Pont Neuf. When she is convinced to climb down from the bridge’s railing by Jacques, she is moody and saturnine, but polite, as if she was simply coming home from a bad day at the cosmetics shop. She dispenses the story of her sensed betrayal with only a flickering shadow of pathos, most of it contributed by our apprehension of the radical disconnect between her surging emotion and flat narration. In Pickpocket, it almost seems as if Michel’s betrayal of his own dread and discomfort concerning his professional alliances, and personal relationships is accidental – he has the eyes of a quarry, wide and restless, so common to a certain vertical class of men (or women): the petty thieves and hoods played by Elisha Cook, Jr., Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, the guileless Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc… and maybe Sal Mineo. But still, the gaze keeps us at bay – it’s so stark that we feel as if we’re trespassing. Subduing emotion is a common hack tool for eliciting an audience response that fills in what’s missing, usually to a greater degree than the director himself could have managed. It’s the old trick of the excluded middle – most often abused or mismanaged so that the scene it supposedly enhances by proxy just becomes more maudlin for the transparency of the technique. But there’s no suppression in Bresson. Guinevere’s lack of affect while fighting to keep the object of her passion is no suppression; it’s not calculated to make us wild with the disparity between the emotion and the act. (Of course, the tactic of suppression is not purely manipulative – it’s been used to stunning effect in, for example, the interrupted lovers’ parting in Brief Encounter that becomes businesslike, or the inward, sublimated passion of Richard Barthelmess’s “Chinaman” in Broken Blossoms.) No one gnashes their teeth over the inert passion of Bresson’s lovers; that reaction only evolves when we can imagine the blood pumping furiously underneath the calm pallor, but Bresson’s living statues escape this consideration. This habit brings up a question, though – if Bresson has no use for what’s ‘beneath the surface’, then why does he drive the feelings of his characters deeper within their skulls? I think the answer is this: He rejects the emotional constructs that actors create for themselves in order to play a scene “convincingly”, the proverbial ‘castles of cards’ that are demolished as soon as the scene is over. By instructing his actors “not to think”, he seeks to eradicate this sort of faux-empathetic acting in his films. He can’t dispense with these constructions entirely, as they’re employed in everyday life in diminished form as the parallel constructs, or perhaps supportive penumbras, of statements in a non-verbal language that allows for complicated transactions, and only amplified by the presence of a camera – a “shadow-language” given from outside, entirely a posteriori. If these constructs must exist, he desires to illuminate them instead of hiding them. This decision is, I think, a part of the approach that’s responsible for our feeling that his characters are somehow estranged from their motives – but, at the same time, we feel as if their psychological and physical circuits are compounded onto one level.

            “The body thinks.” Like Antonin Artaud, Bresson believes that “the mental in the physical” is what matters. They share the pretheoretic notion that the mental and the physical must be – not that it is – one and the same, for a utility and solidity of being that is the ultimate possibility of humanity.  The personal and transpersonal compacted – the Mind in flesh. About this dichotomy, he says: "It is the inside that commands. I know that it may seem paradoxical in an art that is all about the outside…” But the schism between these two, perhaps not in his theory but in his work, disappears. Rather than controlling the body, the mind moves towards its desires by becoming physical. Bresson often sounds contradictory when he speaks about the differences between ‘surface’ and ‘interior’, but that’s because he’s forcing a dialectical approach onto a concept that’s basic and unified, and unable to be parsed.

            Everything in a Bresson film affirms the embodiment of his characters: every footstep is tallied, every twitch of the shoulders makes noise, the lining of a loose suit jacket rustles, armor clanks incessantly…they have mass, above all else. This concentration, I think, explains the peculiar sensation one gets that his characters are light, hollow, yet firmly anchored. They seem to think with their hands – he’s fixated on hands; they become, in his films, the organs of expression, given explicitly a consciousness of their own. To apply the thought of Artaud once again, the characters that populate Bresson’s films move forward on the strength of “…intellectual cries, cries born of the subtlety of the marrow.” He isn’t using “intellectual” as synonymous with “rational”; rather, he means the exact opposite – impassioned. Desires move the blood, nerves are the pathways of thought: Bresson, as he creates, creates the skin of cinema.

             
“There must be little elements of life, of reality, captured separately, little by little with the extraordinary machine which is the camera. Then when you put them together in a certain way, a sudden life comes out of it—cinematic life, which is not at all like everyday life.” This is the foundation of Bresson’s approach: images in themselves are worth little, but in conjunction with one another, and arranged in a compelling way, they build a world. Accordingly, he observes that “a film is created in editing.” Dropping away the inside to reveal the outside in a systematic denuding of the inverted constructions of the dramatic arts, and fixing it firmly to the feet of his actors, Bresson creates a kind of cinema that’s deceptive in its simplicity. But the apparent flatness of his films is only the scrupulous equality of all the elements within them.

-Theresa Smith

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