Bresson and Greenaway

When creators are also theorists, and are given to manifestos and such, the by-products of their theories, the actual created works, are often far more interesting than the theories themselves. The works may be intended as illustrations of the theories, but if the works are any good, I think the theories merely serve them as combustible fuel -- necessary to get going and to keep going, but used up in the going.

Robert Bresson and Peter Greenaway are two of the most stridently theoretical and prone to announcement-making of all film directors. Both have championed and sought to create bodies of cinema that spurn the theatrical and literary tendencies that they believe poison most conventional film-making. Neither has ever been shy about expressing the opinion that the overwhelming majority of films have no artistic qualities whatsoever. They are exclusionary, purist, and disdainful of commercial and audience concerns. Greenaway, admittedly, has a little more of the showman about him -- a vein of humor in his early work, a strong epater le bourgeois reliance on sex and violence in his later. Bresson had the orneriness to leave all surface appeal out of his work, jettisoning (for the most part), professional actors, pretty images, musical accompaniment, and other props of the movies.

I like many films by both directors, but unlike a Jean Renoir or a Robert Altman who opens a path for others, the oeuvres of these hermetics are basically interesting dead ends. There is nothing wrong with that, although there are fervent Bressonians (Greenaway has by now alienated most of his admirers) who hold that Bresson is the ne plus ultra of cinema. I don't honestly think that most of them would truly wish for or appreciate a film culture that was wholly or largely Bressonian (not that such a thing is imaginable in the real world), and apparently no one else does either -- Bresson has had no virtually no imitators or disciples of note and impact. That is what I mean by a "dead end."

I recently watched Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, his film about the life and death of a saintly donkey, and was moved and impressed by it without necessarily wanting to bow down before the Bresson altar. Balthazar is a fine, distinctive, valuable film, of which there are many in the world, and it is always good to have one more. That should be enough. I have no inclination to use Bresson's (occasional) greatness as an example to chide other film-makers; in my view, there is no warrant for that.

I also read Bresson's Notes on Cinematography (he draws a distinction between his "cinematography" and the general run of "cinema"). This is composed of brief observations and absolutist statements, with the occasional gem almost lost amid the general hot air. The well-known French bent toward abstraction is in full swing. Bresson's emphasis on the "painterly" eye and the "necessary" rather than the beautiful image links him even more firmly with Greenaway (who is an accomplished art historian and curator).

I do like it when Bresson says that he aims for his non-professional actors ("models," he calls them) to be "involuntarily expressive" rather than "willfully inexpressive." That should be quoted to some of Bresson's detractors, who think that by drilling his performers through re-takes until they were drained, he was attempting to achieve a robotic effect. Not at all; whether he was right or wrong, he felt that only by getting them completely beyond any desire to express could he liberate the meanings of the characters and the lines they speak.

I also find Bresson's attitude toward the technology of film-making to be stimulating:

What no human eye is capable of catching,...your camera catches without knowing what it is, and pins it down with a machine's...indifference.

Compare this to a similar rumination of Douglas Sirk in Sirk on Sirk:

...the camera sees with its own eye. It sees things the human eye does not detect. And ultimately you learn to trust your camera.

Amusingly, what Sirk was talking about was the camera detecting Rock Hudson's star quality -- a far cry from Bresson's precoccupations! Sirk understood that "a film has to make back its money," while Bresson had a not a shread of commercial or crowd-pleasing instinct in his body. He grasped instead for the purity he admired above all: "From the beings and things of nature, washed clean of all art and especially of the art of drama, you will make an art." I think that longing for purity is a trap (well described as such by Annie Dillard in Living By Fiction); film, like fiction also, is a notably impure art. But no one can deny that Bresson stuck to his vision.

POSTSCRIPT: My correspondent Robert Kennedy sent a most interesting comment in which he took some issue with my notion that Bresson did not "open a path" for other directors; on the contrary, Robert shows that many directors both slightly like and completely unlike Bresson have been inspired and stimulated by the example of his technique. That is unquestionably opening a path, so I stand corrected! Robert agrees with me that no one has adopted the entire Bresson program, or is recognizably a disciple in the way that one can clearly identify roots of Alan Rudolph's or Paul Thomas Anderson's work in Altman.

Robert also discusses the basis of Bresson's perfectionism in his Catholic religious beliefs, with which I am admittedly out of sympathy. Robert notes that for Bresson, "creating cinematic acts of perfection was as sacred an act in his eyes as prayer, where renouncing the superficialities of the material world, which is what he did in his films, was how one communicated with God." That is very well put, and clearly many individual artists pursue some notion of "purity" which lends distinction to their art, no matter whether Annie Dillard and I feel there are pitfalls in this approach.

The greater pitfall, though, lies in the relative assessment of the worth of artists who pursue purity and those who do not. In my view "purer" is not artistically better, more virtuous, or superior in any other sense. So I do have a beef with some admirers of Bresson (and Dreyer, and even my beloved Ozu) who brandish those directors' purported purity of purpose and execution as a stick to beat other artists with. I like the very impure Sirk as much as the ascetic Bresson.