Though the singular French filmmaker Robert Bresson was once thought of as a kind of transcendentalist, and was even discussed as such alongside Carl Dreyer and Yasujirō Ozu in Paul Schrader’s famous book Transcendental Style in Film (1972), more recent criticism on Bresson has pushed back against this as the dominant hermeneutic approach. If transcendentalist aesthetics seek to go beyond that which can be discerned by the five senses, moving instead toward a heightened state of subjective interiority or spiritual ascendance, then Bresson’s highly physical approach to filmmaking seems to fall somewhat outside of this category. Later critics like Dana Polan and Jonathan Rosenbaum have instead usefully repositioned Bresson’s cinema as an intensely materialist experience.
In Bresson’s two hillbilly companion pieces of the late Sixties, Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967), both of which take place among rural, modern-day peasants in the French countryside, Bresson’s camera guides his central figures (and the viewer) through a series of intensely physical, earthy environments, dragging us through a desolate, muddy wasteland to arrive at — what, exactly? If the eponymous donkey of Balthazar is interpreted as a Christian symbol of sorts, then perhaps one could read that film’s ultimate meaning as one of salvation or transcendence (I personally do not), but how could anyone interpret the matter-of-fact, seemingly inevitable suicide of a child that ends Mouchette in these same terms of grace?
In Bresson’s gloomy universe, characters search for a version of freedom within worlds of disgusting and shattering darkness, but whether they find it at the end of the tunnel is another matter. To my eyes, these characters find no redemption at the end of their troubled existences — only a profound “emptying out” for them and the viewer alike. If this vision sounds somewhat hard to take, it certainly can be, though the experience of watching a Bresson film is unlike any other; he’s a filmmaker without precedent in the cinema and without any real equals, a complete standalone.
With A Man Escaped (1956), which screens at IU Cinema in 35mm on March 4, Bresson uses these highly physical spaces to arrive at one of the greatest of all films about living in confinement. Much ink has already been spilt over Bresson’s famously controlled direction of actors — whom he preferred to call “models” due to their restrained mode of purely physical performativity, drained of nearly all theatrical and emotional emphases — though equally fascinating are his close-ups of hands touching inanimate objects, imbuing the film with a tactile dimension that borders on the erotic. These shots recall Hitchcock’s contemporaneous The Wrong Man (1956), which perhaps explains why some critics have seen fit to discuss Bresson’s films in Catholic terms. One of the ways that Bresson defines the space of a prison cell, the basic unit of his protagonist’s imprisonment, is through his dense and concentrated use of offscreen sound. By making the viewer aware of sounds emanating from beyond the edges of the image, he emphasizes the presence of a teeming world alive beyond the four walls of a cell. In this way, his film becomes, like Balthazar and Mouchette, another quest for personal freedom of a different sort.
The film is based on a memoir by André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance who was held in captivity during the Occupation, and Bresson himself was imprisoned in an internment camp during the war. Though the filmmaker perhaps felt a personal attachment to the material, he refuses to make this known to us, instead choosing to drain the story of any overtly sentimental touches or emotional catharsis. Rather, the greatness of A Man Escapes resides in its observance of process and physical detail, the painstaking and highly secretive methods by which the hero, Fontaine, plans his various attempts to escape from the prison fortress. By observing these acts on a moment-by-moment basis, Bresson also enables the viewer to feel time passing in a different way, so that the viewer, too, becomes ingrained in the almost painfully slow rhythms of life in incarceration. In this regard, Bresson anticipates the alternative conceptions of time found in the cinemas of Chantal Akerman and Andy Warhol avant-la-lettre.
Last October, I was fortunate to attend a screening of Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar in 35mm at the University of Chicago’s Doc Films, the theater which hosted the North American premiere of Bresson’s masterpiece over four decades earlier. I can attest that few experiences in filmgoing can compare with seeing a monumental Bresson feature as it was meant to be seen and heard: the physicality of his work draws its force through the texture of celluloid, and inevitably loses some of its power in video reproductions. Bresson’s mature work mysteriously emerged unto the French cinema, seemingly devoid of any real influences (he famously claimed that he wasn’t a cinephile, and hardly ever watched movies), and his work has lost none of its singularity in the intervening decades. The opportunity to view a great Bresson under the proper conditions is one that doesn’t come around every day.
A Man Escaped screens at IU Cinema in 35mm on March 4 as part of its ongoing City Lights Film Series.
The Cinema also showed Balthazar in 35mm in 2018 as part of its Themester: Animal/Human series.
Jack Miller enjoys the films of Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur and John Ford. He graduated from Indiana University with a BA in English, and currently resides in Chicago. He also enjoys listening to country and disco music.