The Invention of Robert Bresson by Burnett Colin;

Author:Burnett, Colin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

A New Auteur, A New Language

If we examine it in light of the postwar cultural market, the story of Journal d’un curé de campagne’s adaptation becomes one of reciprocal attention. Bernanos provided the filmmaker with a novel as well as a set of broadly drawn principles for adapting it. Members of the literary and cinephilic press provided Bresson with intellectual and perceptual raw materials to work with—interests in fidelity as formal equivalency and in purity and austerity in the guise of first-person storytelling. Bresson reciprocated with a film that not only provided a stimulating test of his audience’s literacy and its tools for appreciating an adapter’s subtle editorial decisions, but a new challenge to the categories cinephiles had created. It took some discussion in the critical press to work out whether an adapter could also be an auteur, and in this way, Bresson seems to have caught cinephiles off guard with a work that manifests two highly personal styles.

In this, Bresson was both ahead of his times and very much tuned into them. In their own ways, Gérin and Béguin found Bresson’s first drafts of the script too unconventional and too risky—too bereft of narrative intrigue and too literary in its dialogue. In a visionary way, Bresson borrowed both strategies from Bernanos. His film actively invited a cultivated audience to compare it to the novel line by line and to appreciate his experiment in the sonic first person. But if Bresson wanted to display an art of elliptical creativity with respect to Bernanos’s dialogue (omitting lines and words that were either too expressive or too overt), it was because he wanted to make a “mold” all his own. He envisioned a film composed of fragments from the Bernanos original that, once reorganized, resulted in a series of subtle relations through which expression and emotion emerged indirectly. He found his own answer to the temptation of purity that characterized literary and cinematic endeavors in the period.

In a cultural market context, auteurs do not act on their own. In Bresson’s case, the cinephilic press played an important role as well, firming up expectations through a relatively refined language: a temptation of purity; a storytelling based on the sonic first person; the related concerns for ellipses and rhythm; faithful adaptation as formal equivalency; dialectical fidelity or multiplication; and the series of problems and solutions related to these “literary” interests in cinema. From our perspective, this language functions as a remnant of a social relation—an exchange of “mental goods” around the notion of intermediality—without which Bresson’s successful forays into adaptation and entrance into the canon of auteurs would have been unthinkable.

Two of these aspects of the midcentury sensibility—taste for a pared-down cinema and for cinematic rhythm—deserve further attention. The next two chapters show how Bresson developed a style that furnished cinephiles with perceptual and intellectual challenges along these two axes and a rhetoric that framed his cinema as an antidote to spectacular entertainment and an investigation of the medium’s rhythmic nature. In midcentury France, auteurs were made on such things.

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