Audient Auteurs: Robert Bresson

This is the third in my 2018 monthly series devoted to watching two films a month by revered directors whose work is not known to me.

If you’re a cinephile and also a reasonably intelligent person, it can be hard to admit that you just don’t “get” something. But I think I may indeed not “get” Robert Bresson. In this month’s Audient Auteurs, I hope to unpack why and explore what to do about that.

I have a bit more of a history with the French filmmaker than some of the other subjects I’ve chosen for this series, even though, like those others, I had yet to see any of his films. The reason is that they’d done a marathon of Bresson films a couple years back on Filmspotting, and though I was only “listening loosely” during those segments – a habit I’ve developed when listening to a discussion of a film I haven’t seen – the fact remains that I did expose myself to a discussion of about six of his films, including both films I watched in April. So I kind of knew what to expect: artsy miserabilism.  

And I guess I don’t think all that much of artsy miserabilism, perhaps especially artsy miserabilism from France. (Is there any other kind? Ha ha.) Although Bresson is often thought of more as a precursor to the French New Wave, he’s really contemporaneous with it, and both of the films I watched came out long after the movement was underway. Those films have put me a bit in mind of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, whose 1959 release came seven years before either of these films. The 400 Blows is a film for which I have a massive amount of respect, and no love. I suppose not having seen it since I was a late teenager could have something to do with that, but given my general feeling toward artsy miserabilism, I wouldn’t think my 2018 perspective would be all that different.

French cinema has a distinct identity on the whole, and Bresson is considered central to it. Godard once wrote of him, “Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." That’s high praise, but also prepares a viewer for a particular type of experience while watching Bresson’s films. While ennui and a tragic ending are almost a given, Bresson’s films in general do not seem to be the cinematic equivalent of a beret. In fact, both I watched are set in the country, or at least in a pastoral setting.

Initially a photographer and having been a prisoner of war, Bresson made his first short in 1934, and in fact made only 13 features in a 50-year career. He was also a Catholic, a spiritual association that makes it into many of his films. He was known for using something called the “actor-model technique,” which required repeated takes from actors until their tendency to over-emote was scrubbed out of their performances. This flatter affect was designed to allow audiences to internalize the intended emotions rather than having the actors or director feed them on a platter. You can definitely see this in both films I watched.

And those were …

1. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)

 

This film wasn’t on my radar prior to the Filmspotting marathon, but it clearly should have been. The film must be considered Bresson’s masterpiece, because only a short while after that marathon, Au Hasard Balthazar ranked an impossibly lofty 16^th on the 2012 Sight & Sound critics poll of the greatest films of all time. In fact, I initially didn’t even have any idea how the film’s title was spelled, as Filmspotting co-host Josh Larsen seemed to say it as “O Hazar Bath Hazar.” Which is not that far off from its actual pronunciation, perhaps maybe with an Arabic flavor to it. But if you don’t know what words he’s saying, you kind think of the title as having the same second and fourth words, even if they only sound similar. (Most of Bresson's other titles get full translations into English, with the exception of my second film for reasons you will see, but I almost never hear anyone referring to this one by its English title, which is just Balthazar.)

If I'm beating around the bush with a lengthy introduction of this film, it's because I watched it three weeks ago. A lot has happened in those three weeks (including an international trip and a crisis I've had to deal with), so my talking points are already rusty to non-existent.

To give you a bit of the plot, it essentially follows the life of the titular donkey through various owners over the course of some 20 years or longer. The girl in the poster above loves him, but unfortunately, the twists and turns his life takes means that her ownership and influence over him is only fleeting. Far more often he's owned by someone who is whipping him and lighting his tail on fire for sport.

As a film that's not made by Disney cannot really be "about" a donkey, this is of course more a look at the humans who handle Balthazar and their capacity for kindness and cruelty. There are relationship dynamics between them, and the girl (named Marie, and played by Anne Wiazemsky) is loved and humiliated in equal measure by various men, the same men who victimize Balthazar. There's a clear and poignant parallel drawn between woman and animal, and let's just say nothing really goes well for either of them.

I was hoping to have more of the actual plot to latch onto, to refresh my memory, but the Wikipedia plot summary speaks in generalities that constitute only four sentences in total. That's not really the point of Au Hasard Balthazar anyway. The incredible eye Bresson has for image making and for setting a scene is the dominant takeaway of this movie, and that makes it a real art film in the best possible sense. Just as Bresson scrubbed the exaggerated emotion from his actors, you might imagine that he pre-scrubbed anything high concept from this film at the writing stage. His films are slices of life in which both the beauty and the pain are in the mundane. Though I suppose there is something you could describe as "high concept" about following a donkey for 90 minutes, and the use of coincidence breaks some of this film's reliance on the mundane, the plot is the least important element in a film that examines the way people hurt each other without providing any easy answers, or even any explanations why they do what they do. Consistent with his personal beliefs, Bresson turns Balthazar into a bit of a Christ figure, which is all well and good.

Overall I found this movie sufficiently profound to be clearly in the "pro" camp, but maybe concluded that it's not, like, among the top 20 movies ever made.

2. Mouchette (1967)

In a career that spanned 50 years, I managed to watch two movies that were made in consecutive years. If I'd had my druthers I would have made my second Bresson (or first, if we're going chronologically) either Diary of a Country Priest or Pickpocket, but my choices were made for me by Kanopy, as these were the only two Bresson films available. Don't think I'm complaining. I was overjoyed to have these movies available at all, since I don't pay a dime for Kanopy yet have already used it in the past month to watch both of the movies for this series and to rewatch my favorite movie of 2017 (A Ghost Story).

It's clear that the themes that preoccupied Bresson in Balthazar are still with him only a year later, as Mouchette has a similar pastoral setting and a title character who is abused, both physically and emotionally, by the men in her life. Although I watched this only a few days ago, I'm actually relying a bit on the (longer) Wikipedia plot synopsis for this one as well. I'm finding a strange phenomenon with Bresson where the very minimalism of his films makes me wonder if I wasn't paying attention for a moment and missed some key element of the story.

Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) is an odd duck teenage girl who lives with a dying mother, alcoholic father and baby brother, and is treated as an outcast at her school (though interestingly, she seems to initiate as many run-ins with the school's "bullies" as they do, sometimes hiding and throwing clumps of dirt at them unprovoked). She follows the movements of animal poachers near her house and becomes involved in an incident where she appears to witness one of them strangling another to death. She then develops a weird sexual relationship -- possibly consensual, possibly not -- with the one who appears to have committed the murder.

This film might be even harder on Mouchette than the other is on Balthazar. At one point her teacher humiliates her for singing off key by forcing her ear down into the piano keyboard. Her family members are verbally abusive to her/dismissive of her in various ways, and even townspeople with whom she has not previously interacted in the film call her a slut and degrade her in other ways, apparently without provocation. This is the type of miserabilism I'm talking about, and that I generally do not like. Why is the world so cruel to Mouchette? Because that's what the world is like.

There's one central scene at a carnival where Mouchette appears to have the chance to have kind of a normal relationship with someone, a boy her age who appears to like her. They are on the bumper cars together, bumping in that way that seems sort of startling and aggressive in the moment but is really just part and parcel to that activity. They both have big grins on their faces, though the sound of the cars bumping into each other are like gunshots on the soundtrack, in what I thought was a very compelling choice. The fact that this episode is isolated, and she doesn't interact with the boy again (that I recall), tells you something about Bresson's perspective on the chances someone like Mouchette has in this world.

The overall thrust of Mouchette feels episodic and quite random, but individual scenes were quite compelling to me, such as the one described above. I also noticed some really interesting choices by Bresson about how to set up the camera in a way that defies our usual expectations, but conveys the same visual information in perhaps a more immediate way. As one example, and the details of what was actually going on were fuzzy, there's a scene where some bootleggers appear to be transporting some kind of alcohol under a sheet on the back of a truck. As they are unloading it, an authority figure comes within range, and they quickly cover the alcohol with the sheet. As they wait for the threat to pass, the camera is not on their waiting faces, looking nervously in the direction of the threat. Rather, it shows only their hands on the top of the sheet covering the alcohol, as we may be left to imagine the expression on their faces. I can't explain why I found this so profound, but it's one of a number of examples of Bresson's mastery of camera setups and their psychological impact on us.

My two Bresson viewings leave me a bit unresolved about the man. I described myself as "not getting" him and still believe that's true in some essential sense, but even in the course of writing this I've identified very distinct and memorable moments in his work that struck me in a way that felt fresh and original. As with any great artist, I'd like to continue making my way through his work and reckoning with it.

I'm a bit undecided on my subject for May, though Kanopy does leave me some options. I'll need to start digging deeper soon, possibly considering different candidates who were not on my initial list ... or (ahem) alternate methods for sourcing the movies I can't find.