How to Improve Your Movie Literacy With Robert Bresson

By Shawn Swanky

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was a French movie director. Over 25 years, he compiled some reflections about movies as an art form and applied these in his work. Bresson may be best known for two tragedies, "Au Hasard Balthazar" and "Mouchette," and for a black comedy commenting on modern society, "The Devil Probably." In 1975, he published his reflections as "Notes on Cinematography." This remains essential reading today because many of the movie-making issues explored there are fundamental and not just about the state of the art during his time.

Apart from clarifying key terms, this introduction aids students in four ways:

1) It selects from among the "Notes" to introduce only the most important themes.
2) It re-arranges the presentation topically, following the stages of movie production.
3) It contains observations, reflections, suggestions or criticisms of Bresson.
4) It concludes with a consideration of the movie storylines and issues tackled by Bresson in his style.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312737693

Book preview

How to Improve Your Movie Literacy With Robert Bresson

How to Improve Your Movie Literacy With Robert Bresson

By Shawn Swanky

Copyright © 2014 by Dragon Heart Enterprises.

Cover art by Shawn Swanky.

For additional copies please contact [e-mail] or visit the online store at www.shawnswanky.com.

All rights of reproduction, storage, transmission or copying are reserved. This includes the right to create screenplays, documentaries, television programs or movies based in any way on the research contained herein.

For more information please email [e-mail].

ISBN 978-1-312-73769-3

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Preface

Everyone interested in improving their movie literacy will find Robert Bresson's Notes stimulating. This includes students of movie-making, fans seeking to enhance their enjoyment and those studying movies for cultural insights. This ShawnSwanky.com introduction will expose all these to Bresson's theories, themes and movies with the greatest efficiency.

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was a French movie director. Over 25 years, he compiled some reflections about movies as an art form and applied these in his work. In 1975, he published these reflections as Notes on Cinematography.[1] This remains essential reading today because many of the movie-making issues explored there are fundamental and not just about the state of the art during his time.

Bresson's title often deters students. Who expects such a title to speak more of actors than it does of the camera? Yet, for Bresson, cinematography describes everything about the process of making movies. From finding suitable material to editing. Then, to describe an inferior form of movie, Bresson uses the term cinema. For clarity, this introduction replaces cinematography with the less elegant but more descriptive phrase creating a movie performance. And it replaces cinema with the descriptive term photographed theatre.

Apart from clarifying key terms, this introduction aids students in four ways. First, it selects from among the Notes to introduce only the most important themes. Many of the Notes' almost 450 selections repeat ideas. Some are enigmatic. Some are in the nature of comments made in passing.

Second, it re-arranges the presentation topically, following the stages of movie production. The original has little apparent order. Nor can the genesis of particular notes be traced to issues faced in the movie work Bresson then had at hand. Invariably every serious student soon begins cross-referencing Notes. Indeed, that is how this introduction began: to meet a student's need for an efficient introduction to the range of Bresson's ideas and for some order.

Since Bresson's Notes frequently appear as aphorisms a word about this literary form may be appropriate. Aphorisms are statements filled with irony, paradox, sarcasm and the like to highlight seemingly strange congruencies or startling truths. Rather than representing some final statement, however, the author intends these more as pry bars to open the recipient's mind. Aware of new possibilities, we can reflect on the observation's implications but also imagine its limitations. We are not meant to take them as dogma.

Third, in addition to selecting and reordering the Notes, this introduction contains observations, reflections, suggestions or criticisms of Bresson. Labelled as Commentary, they should not be confused with the Notes or taken as something Bresson might have ratified. Good students approach a master's work with the hope of learning tried and true pathways. Good masters inevitably open one's mind to still other pathways and encourage students to find their own way. When we might take issue with Bresson, then, it is in good faith. He would not have published his Notes, if he did not hope that we would become better creators or more informed fans.

That said, Bresson began his career as a painter in a context where and when painters would establish schools based on different notions about painting's aesthetics or social function. For that matter, his Notes frequently reference reflections made by painters. Bresson may have imagined his Notes as opening the door in a similar way for a school of moviemaking. As, say, Picasso was a founder of cubism. It would be work, then, that should be evaluated against its own criteria rather than against some outside standard. However that may be, while many directors since have found his Notes and his product instructive, important parts of Bresson's style have been less widely emulated.

Fourth, any general theory would be of little interest unless it applied equally well across a wide range of comedic or tragic storylines. Moreover, whatever theory someone may have advanced, his or her work would be uninteresting unless it also touched a range of worthwhile themes. And so we conclude with a consideration of the movie storylines and issues tackled by Bresson in his style.

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[1] Although I have made some retranslations for the benefit of www.shawnswanky.com students, my introduction generally follows Jonathan Griffin's translation, Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography. (New York: Urizen Books, 1975.)

On the Nature of Movie Performances

Creating movies is writing with moving images and sounds.

There are two types of movies: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera to reproduce. And those that use the camera to create, employing all the resources integral to a movie performance.

The truth of a movie performance cannot be the truth of theater. Or the truth of the novel. Or the truth of painting. What the movie creator captures with his or her resources cannot be what a theater production, the novelist, or that painters capture with theirs.

A movie cannot be a stage show. A stage show requires the presence of flesh-and-blood. But it can be, as photographed theater, the photographic reproduction of a stage show. This is comparable to the photographic reproduction of a painting or of a sculpture. But a photographic reproduction of Donatello's