Robert Breson

Robert Bresson (Bromont-Lamothe, September 25, 1901 – Paris, December 18, 1999) was a rigorous, coherent and profound author like few others, of enormous expressive austerity, deep spirituality and great humanity, who possessed the virtue of not resembling nobody and being difficult to imitate. Painter and author of a short film ( Les affaires publiques , 1943), he worked as an assistant to the teacher René Clair .

The artistic-creative personality of Robert Bresson would be confirmed film after film, widely spaced due to its low budget and little commerciality, in addition to its careful preparation, with a display of lyricism and thematic meticulousness that is rare. In his simple and emotional work –full of gazes and objects– a transcendence was evident that could almost be touched. Since his debut in 1943 with Los ángeles del pecado , the theme of redemption has been the leitmotif of his cinema, as can be seen in Diary of a rural priest (1951), A condemned man has escaped (1956), Pickpocket ( 1959), The trial of Joan of Arc (1962) or Mouchette (1967).

A Christian with a Jansenist tendency, he believed that grace redeems only exceptional beings from their faults at the moment of death, be it sought or accepted as liberation. His cinematographic work, therefore, was out of fashion, also due to his long-suffering pilgrimage in search of the absolute and supernatural grace, which sometimes irritated the public, especially the detractors that this film had earned. singular creator.

In Bresson’s films, the beautiful is replaced by the just: “Painting has taught me that beautiful images should not be made, but necessary images.” Hence, it destroys the established rules, and the rhythm of the editing, the direction of the actors, the music and the tone of the dialogues are less destined to express a particular idea than to ensure, together with the other elements of the staging , the poetic plot of the work. While his film writing is simplified, as in Lancelot du Lac(1974), makes more and more use of editing, reassessing its importance within modern cinema. “Only at the moment in which the images and sounds come into contact, in which everything is placed in its place, the film is born. And it is the film that, at birth, gives life to the characters and not the characters that give life to the film”, the French master would affirm.

He distinguished himself as a lonely artist and not at all prolific, since he only made 13 feature films. He exposed his aesthetic-philosophical principles in “Notes sur le cinématographe” (1975), where he defined two types of films: “Those that use theatrical means (actors, staging, etc.) and use cameras to reproduce, and those that use the means of cinematography and use cameras to create”. For this reason, he usually used non-professional actors, chosen among his friends or on the same street for their physiognomy, in order to reflect without artifice the inner life of the characters they embody.

Obviously, Robert Bresson’s aesthetic –influenced by the master Carl Theodor Dreyer– seemed to be based on an asceticism, although sometimes it was somewhat amoral, as happened in Une femme douce (1968) or Le diable, probably (1977). Also in his work there was a clear tendency to abstraction and to universalize the themes he touches on, based on novels by Bernanos, Dostoiewski and Tolstoy, among other authors. He has been off the set since 1983, when he made Money .