by Susan Sontag
But sometimes we get the scene first, then the explanation, the description of what has just happened. For example, in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, there is a scene in which the priest calls anxiously on the Vicar of Torcy. We see the priest wheeling his bicycle up to the Vicar’s door, then the housekeeper answering (the Vicar is obviously not at home, but we don’t hear the housekeeper’s voice), then the door shutting, and the priest leaning against it. Then, we hear: “I was so disappointed, I had to lean against the door.” Another example: in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, we see Fontaine tearing up the cloth of his pillow, then twisting the cloth around wire which he has stripped off the bed frame. Then, the voice: “I twisted it strongly.”
The effect of this “superfluous” narration is to punctuate the scene with intervals. It puts a brake on the spectator’s direct imaginative participation in the action. Whether the order is from comment to scene or from scene to comment, the effect is the same: such doublings of the action both arrest and intensify the ordinary emotional sequence.
Notice, too, that in the first type of doubling—where we hear what’s going to happen before we see it—there is a deliberate flouting of one of the traditional modes of narrative involvement: suspense. Again, one thinks of Brecht. To eliminate suspense, at the beginning of a scene Brecht announces, by means of placards or a narrator, what is to happen. (Godard adopts this technique in Vivre Sa Vie.) Bresson does the same thing, by jumping the gun with narration. In many ways, the perfect story for Bresson is that of his last film, Procès de Jeanne d’Arc—in that the plot is wholly known, foreordained; the words of the actors are not invented but those of the actual trial record. Ideally, there is no suspense in a Bresson film. Thus, in the one film where suspense should normally play a large role, Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, the title deliberately—even awkwardly—gives the outcome away: we know Fontaine is going to make it.16 In this respect, of course, Bresson’s escape film differs from Jacques Becker’s last work, Le Trou (called, here, Nightwatch), though in other ways Becker’s excellent film owes a great deal to Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé. (It is to Becker’s credit that he was the only prominent person in the French film world who defended Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne when it came out.)
Thus, form in Bresson’s films is anti-dramatic, though strongly linear. Scenes are cut short, and set end to end without obvious emphasis. In Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, there must be thirty such short scenes. This method of constructing the story is most rigorously observed in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc. The film is composed of static, medium shots of people talking; the scenes are the inexorable sequence of Jeanne’s interrogations. The principle of eliding anecdotal material—in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, for instance, one knows little about why Fontaine is in prison in the first place—is here carried to its extreme. There are no interludes of any sort. An interrogation ends; the door slams behind Jeanne; the scene fades out. The key clatters in the lock; another interrogation; again the door clangs shut; fadeout. It is a very dead-pan construction, which puts a sharp brake on emotional involvement.
Bresson also came to reject the species of involvement created in films by the expressiveness of the acting. Again, one is reminded of Brecht by Bresson’s particular way of handling actors, in the exercise of which he has found it preferable to use non-professionals in major roles. Brecht wanted the actor to “report” a role rather than “be” it. He sought to divorce the actor from identifying with the role, as he wanted to divorce the spectator from identifying with the events that he saw being “reported” on the stage. “The actor,” Brecht insists, “must remain a demonstrator; he must present the person demonstrated as a stranger, he must not suppress the ‘he did that, he said that’ element in his performance.” Bresson, working with non-professional actors in his last four films (he used professionals in Les Anges du Peché and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne), also seems to be striving for the same effect of strangeness. His idea is for the actors not to act out their lines, but simply to say them with as little expression as possible. (To get this effect, Bresson rehearses his actors for several months before shooting begins.) Emotional climaxes are rendered very elliptically.
But the reason is really quite different in the two cases. The reason that Brecht rejected acting reflects his idea of the relation of dramatic art to critical intelligence. He thought that the emotional force of the acting would get in the way of the ideas represented in plays. (From what I saw of the work of the Berliner Ensemble six years ago, though, it didn’t seem to me that the somewhat low-keyed acting really diminished emotional involvement; it was the highly stylized staging which did that.) The reason that Bresson rejects acting reflects his notion of the purity of the art itself. “Acting is for the theater, which is a bastard art,” he has said. “The film can be a true art because in it the author takes fragments of reality and arranges them in such a way that their juxtaposition transforms them.” Cinema, for Bresson, is a total art, in which acting corrodes. In a film,
each shot is like a word, which means nothing by itself, or rather means so many things that in effect it is meaningless. But a word in a poem is transformed, its meaning made precise and unique, by its placing in relation to the words around it: in the same way a shot in a film is given its meaning by its context, and each shot modifies the meaning of the previous one until with the last shot a total, unparaphrasable meaning has been arrived at. Acting has nothing to do with that, it can only get in the way. Films can only be made by bypassing the will of those who appear in them; using not what they do, but what they are.
In sum: there are spiritual resources beyond effort, which appear only when effort is stilled. One imagines that Bresson never treats his actors to an “interpretation” of their roles: Claude Laydu, who plays the priest in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, has said that while he was making the film he was never told to try to represent sanctity, though that is what it appears, when viewing the film, that he does. In the end, everything depends on the actor, who either has this luminous presence or doesn’t. Laydu has it. So does François Leterrier, who is Fontaine in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé. But Martin Lassalle as Michel in Pickpocket conveys something wooden, at times evasive. With Florence Carrez in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, Bresson has experimented with the limit of the unexpressive. There is no acting at all; she simply reads the lines. It could have worked. But it doesn’t—because she is the least luminous of all the presences Bresson has “used” in his later films. The thinness of Bresson’s last film is, partly, a failure of communicated intensity on the part of the actress who plays Jeanne, upon whom the film depends.
5
All of Bresson’s films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty. The imagery of the religious vocation and of crime are used jointly. Both lead to “the cell.”
The plots all have to do with incarceration and its sequel. Les Anges du Peché takes place mostly inside a convent. Thérèse, an ex-convict who (unknown to the police) has just murdered the lover who betrayed her, is delivered into the hands of the Bethany nuns. One young novice, who tries to create a special relationship with Thérèse and, learning her secret, to get her to surrender herself voluntarily to the police, is expelled from the convent for insubordination. One morning, she is found dying in the convent garden. Thérèse is finally moved, and the last shot is of her extending her hands to the policeman’s manacles.… In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, the metaphor of confinement is repeated several times. Hélène and Jean have been confined in their love; he urges her to return to the world now that she is “free.” But she doesn’t, and instead devotes herself to setting a trap for him—a trap which requires that she find two pawns (Agnès and her mother), whom she virtually confines in an apartment while they await her orders. Like Les Anges du Peché, this is the story of the redemption of a lost girl. In Les Anges du Peché, Thérèse is liberated by accepting imprisonment; in Les Dames du Bois
de Boulogne, Agnès is imprisoned, and then, arbitrarily, as by a miracle, is forgiven, set free.… In Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, the emphasis has shifted. The bad girl, Chantal, is kept in the background. The drama of confinement is in the priest’s confinement in himself, his despair, his weakness, his mortal body. (“I was a prisoner of the Holy Agony.”) He is liberated by accepting his senseless and agonizing death from stomach cancer.… In Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, which is set in a German-run prison in occupied France, confinement is most literally represented. So is liberation: the hero triumphs over himself (his despair, the temptation of inertia) and escapes. The obstacles are embodied both in material things and in the incalculability of the human beings in the vicinity of the solitary hero. But Fontaine risks trusting the two strangers in the courtyard at the beginning of his imprisonment, and his trust is not betrayed. And because he risks trusting the youthful collaborationist who is thrown into his cell with him on the eve of his escape (the alternative is to kill the boy), he is able to get out.… In Pickpocket, the hero is a young recluse who lives in a closet of a room, a petty criminal who, in Dostoevskian fashion, appears to crave punishment. Only at the end, when he has been caught and is in jail, talking through the bars with the girl who has loved him, is he depicted as being, possibly, able to love.… In Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, again the entire film is set in prison. As in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, Jeanne’s liberation comes through a hideous death; but Jeanne’s martyrdom is much less affecting than the priest’s, because she is so depersonalized (unlike Falconetti’s Jeanne in Dreyer’s great film) that she does not seem to mind dying.
The nature of drama being conflict, the real drama of Bresson’s stories is interior conflict: the fight against oneself. And all the static and formal qualities of his films work to that end. Bresson has said, of his choice of the highly stylized and artificial plot of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, that it allowed him to “eliminate anything which might distract from the interior drama.” Still, in that film and the one before it, interior drama is represented in an exterior form, however fastidious and stripped down. Les Anges du Peché and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne depict conflicts of wills among the various characters as much or more than they concern a conflict within the self.
It is only in the films following Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne that Bresson’s drama has been really interiorized. The theme of Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne is the young priest’s conflict with himself: only secondarily is this acted out in his relation with the Vicar of Torcy, with Chantal, and with the Countess, Chantal’s mother. This is even clearer in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé—where the principal character is literally isolated in a cell, struggling against despair. Solitude and interior conflict pair off in another way in Pickpocket, where the solitary hero refuses despair only at the price of refusing love, and gives himself over to masturbatory acts of theft. But in the last film, where we know the drama should be taking place, there is scarcely any evidence of it. Conflict has been virtually suppressed; it must be inferred. Bresson’s Jeanne is an automaton of grace. But, however interior the drama, there must be drama. This is what Procès de Jeanne d’Arc withholds.
Notice, though, that the “interior drama” which Bresson seeks to depict does not mean psychology. In realistic terms, the motives of Bresson’s characters are often hidden, sometimes downright incredible. In Pickpocket, for instance, when Michel sums up his two years in London with “I lost all my money on gambling and women,” one simply does not believe it. Nor is it any more convincing that during this time the good Jacques, Michel’s friend, has made Jeanne pregnant and then deserted her and their child.
Psychological implausibility is scarcely a virtue; and the narrative passages I have just cited are flaws in Pickpocket. But what is central to Bresson and, I think, not to be caviled at, is his evident belief that psychological analysis is superficial. (Reason: it assigns to action a paraphrasable meaning that true art transcends.) He does not intend his characters to be implausible, I’m sure; but he does, I think, intend them to be opaque. Bresson is interested in the forms of spiritual action—in the physics, as it were, rather than in the psychology of souls. Why persons behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood. (Psychology, precisely, does claim to understand.) Above all, persuasion is inexplicable, unpredictable. That the priest does reach the proud and unyielding Countess (in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne), that Jeanne doesn’t persuade Michel (in Pickpocket) are just facts—or mysteries, if you like.
Such a physics of the soul was the subject of Simone Weil’s most remarkable book, Gravity and Grace. And the following sentences of Simone Weil’s—
All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.
Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
supply the three basic theorems of Bresson’s “anthropology.” Some souls are heavy, others light; some are liberated or capable of being liberated, others not. All one can do is be patient, and as empty as possible. In such a regimen there is no place for the imagination, much less for ideas and opinions. The ideal is neutrality, transparence. This is what is meant when the Vicar of Torcy tells the young priest in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, “A priest has no opinions.”
Except in an ultimate unrepresentable sense, a priest has no attachments either. In the quest for spiritual lightness (“grace”), attachments are a spiritual encumbrance. Thus, the priest, in the climactic scene of Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, forces the Countess to relinquish her passionate mourning for her dead son. True contact between persons is possible, of course; but it comes not through will but unasked for, through grace. Hence in Bresson’s films human solidarity is represented only at a distance—as it is between the priest and the Vicar of Torcy in Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, or between Fontaine and the other prisoners in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé. The actual coming together of two people in a relation of love can be stated, ushered in, as it were, before our eyes: Jean crying out “Stay! I love you!” to the nearly dead Agnès in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne; Fontaine putting his arm around Jost in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé; Michel in Pickpocket saying to Jeanne through prison bars, “How long it has taken me to come to you.” But we do not see love lived. The moment in which it is declared terminates the film.
In Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, the elderly man in the adjoining cell asks the hero, querulously, “Why do you fight?” Fontaine answers, “To fight. To fight against myself.” The true fight against oneself is against one’s heaviness, one’s gravity. And the instrument of this fight is the idea of work, a project, a task. In Les Anges du Peché, it is Anne-Marie’s project of “saving” Thérèse. In Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, it is the revenge plot of Hélène. These tasks are cast in traditional form—constantly referring back to the intention of the character who performs them, rather than decomposed into separately engrossing acts of behavior. In Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne (which is transitional in this respect) the most affecting images are not those of the priest in his role, struggling for the souls of his parishioners, but of the priest in his homely moments: riding his bicycle, removing his vestments, eating bread, walking. In Bresson’s next two films, work has dissolved into the idea of the-infinite-taking-of-pains. The project has become totally concrete, incarnate, and at the same time more impersonal. In Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, the most powerful scenes are those which show the hero absorbed in his labors: Fontaine scraping at his door with the spoon, Fontaine sweeping the wood shavings which have fallen on the floor into a tiny pile with a single straw pulled from his broom. (“One month of patient work—my door opened.”) In Pickpocket, the emotional center of the
film is where Michel is wordlessly, disinterestedly, taken in hand by a professional pickpocket and initiated into the real art of what he has only practiced desultorily: difficult gestures are demonstrated, the necessity of repetition and routine is made clear. Large sections of Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé and Pickpocket are wordless; they are about the beauties of personality effaced by a project. The face is very quiet, while other parts of the body, represented as humble servants of projects, become expressive, transfigured. One remembers Thérèse kissing the white feet of the dead Anne-Marie at the end of Les Anges du Peché, the bare feet of the monks filing down the stone corridor in the opening sequence of Procès de Jeanne d’Arc. One remembers Fontaine’s large graceful hands at their endless labors in Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé, the ballet of agile thieving hands in Pickpocket.
Through the “project”—exactly contrary to “imagination”—one overcomes the gravity that weighs down the spirit. Even Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, whose story seems most un-Bressonian, rests on this contrast between a project and gravity (or, immobility). Hélène has a project—revenging herself on Jean. But she is immobile, too—from suffering and vengefulness. Only in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, the most Bressonian of stories, is this contrast (to the detriment of the film) not exploited. Jeanne has no project. Or if she may be said to have a project, her martyrdom, we only know about it; we are not privy to its development and consummation. She appears to be passive. If only because Jeanne is not portrayed for us in her solitude, alone in her cell, Bresson’s last film seems, next to the others, so undialectical.
