I found this screen grab of cinema’s “patron saint” on Tumblr and have been a bit perplexed by it. It evidently comes from this French TV interview from 1960. As I noted in the previous post, I’ve now seen almost all of Bob’s filmography, and that’s why I find this statement so baffling… because frankly, if there’s one thing I’ve very rarely done with Bresson’s films, it’s feel anything from them. His approach to acting which involved kind of leeching all the “performance” out of his performers, of which Roger Ebert wrote in his obit of him:
Bresson was one of a handful of directors whose very frames identified their author. Like Fellini, Hitchcock and Ozu, he had such a distinctive way of seeing that his films resembled no others. What you noticed was the extreme restraint of his actors (he preferred to call them “models”), and the way the action centered on what his characters saw, rather than what they did. “The thing that matters,” he said, “is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.”
His actors had no difficulty conveying that state, because Bresson never discussed characters, plot or motivation with them, only instructing them minutely on how to move and what to say. He shunned displays of emotions in his work, rehearsing and shooting a scene over and over, until the actors seemed to be going through the motions without thought. Oddly, this style created films of great passion: Because the actors didn’t act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them.
But I rarely if ever felt an emotion TO internalise from Bresson’s films. I never felt passion from them, except perhaps for Diary of a Country Priest. The proposition that his methods created some kind of greater realism just doesn’t hold for me, and I think his films tend instead to a kind of gross artifice. Not as grotesquely so as Greenaway’s, but certainly not naturalistic. The “acting” may be drained from Bresson’s films, but so is almost everything else. I know I’m in the minority here, but that’s how it is for me.
Diary is the only one of his films I ever particularly liked, and I haven’t seen it since 1995, at which age this was the sort of film I would have liked at that time and that age, when this kind of art cinema with some sort of heavy spiritual theme seemed particularly Important (with a capital I) to me. Over the years I gradually saw most of the rest of the Bresson filmography, none of which impressed me in the way that film did, and I don’t think I left any of them with more than a somewhat distant sense of mild appreciation and respect for the effort at best. At worst I actively disliked the films. If I ever catch up with those three I haven’t seen, I don’t suppose my overall opinion of Bresson will improve much.
But, as I said, I haven’t rewatched Diary in 30+ years, nor indeed have I rewatched any of them that I can remember, with the somewhat odd exception of Lancelot du Lac, which I remember seeing on SBS and then again some years later on a DVD I got from the library, and per the note I wrote about it on my old film blog back in 2009—the last time I can recall watching him at all—I apparently hated it less than I did first time round, and that by the time I was 50 I might even like Bresson. And, well, I’m past that landmark now, so maybe it’s time I found out. Maybe I just need to rewatch Bresson’s other films with these markedly older eyes and allgedly more mature perspective. Maybe I’ll watch something I’d rather watch first, though.
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