Robert Bresson banned acting from his films and critics ranked him among the greatest
Robert Bresson refused to use performers in the usual sense. He cast amateurs, called them models, and shot take after take until nothing theatrical survived. Over fifty years he finished only 13 features, yet seven of them appeared in a 2012 Sight and Sound poll of the best films ever made.
Bresson was born on 25 September 1901 at Bromont-Lamothe in the Puy-de-Dome and studied at the Lycee Lakanal in Sceaux, near Paris. Very little is recorded about his childhood. He painted after leaving school, then worked as a photographer, and in 1934 made a short called Les affaires publiques. Three forces shaped the director he became: Catholic faith, a painter's eye, and more than a year as a German captive after his capture in 1940, having joined the French Army when war broke out.
That imprisonment fed directly into A Man Escaped (1956), one of three Bresson titles, alongside Pickpocket (1959) and Au hasard Balthazar (1966), that reached the top 100 in the 2012 critics' poll. No other director placed as many films on that list. Jean-Luc Godard went further, comparing Bresson's place in French cinema to Dostoevsky's in the Russian novel and Mozart's in German music.
His method was set out in Notes on the Cinematographer, a book of aphorisms published in 1975. Bresson drew a sharp line between ordinary cinema, which he saw as theatre recorded on film, and cinematography, a new language built from images and sound. Actors, he argued, push feeling outward from within, while his models move from outside to inside. Repeating scenes until any trace of performance vanished produced a flat, raw quality, and together with his sparing use of music it became a template for minimalist film.
Funding was always hard to find, which partly explains the small output, as did his painstaking habits and lack of commercial interest. Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, an extra on Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), found him more cut off from his crew than any director he had watched; his wife, a former assistant director, often relayed his orders. Oddly, the ascetic Bresson confessed to adoring the Bond film For Your Eyes Only. His final picture, L'Argent, came in 1983, and he died aged 98 on 18 December 1999 at Droue-sur-Drouette.
Source: Robert Bresson
