Born September 25, Bromont-Lamothe,
Puy-de-Dôme, Auvergne, France
Key
Production Country: France
Key Genres:
Drama, Psychological Drama, Period Film
Key
Collaborators: Pierre Charbonnier
(Production Designer), Raymond Lamy (Editor), Leonce-Henri Burel
(Cinematographer), Ghislain Cloquet (Cinematographer), Pasqualino De
Santis (Cinematographer), Jean-Jacques Grunenwald (Composer), Mag Bodard
(Producer), Agnes Delahaie (Producer), J-C Guilbert
(Leading Character Player), Philippe Agostini (Cinematographer)
Highly
Recommended:
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Diary
of a Country Priest (1950), A
Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959),
Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette
(1966), L'Argent (1983)
Recommended:
Les Anges du peche (1943), Trial
of Joan of Arc (1962), Une Femme douce (1969), Four Nights of a Dreamer (1972), Lancelot du Lac
(1974)
1,000
Greatest Films: Les
Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Diary of a Country Priest (1950), A
Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966),
Mouchette (1966), Lancelot du Lac (1974), L'Argent
(1983)
"For the
most part, Bresson employs only amateur actors. He avoids
histrionics and seldom permits his "models" (as he
calls them, drawing a metaphor from painting) to give a
traditional performance. The emotional tensions of the films
derive from the elaborate interchange of glances, subtle camera
movements, off-screen sounds, carefully placed bits of baroque
and classical music, and rhythmical editing." - P.
Adams Sitney (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"He is
an example of pure cinema in the sense that he photographs
reserved faces to evoke all the wildest emotions of the spirit.
To see his films is to marvel that other directors have had the
ingenuity to evolve such elaborate styles and yet restrict them
to superficial messages...He is a great director, even if no
other great director seems less intrigued by cinema itself." -
David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
"Bresson
occupies a unique place in French cinema. He cannot be
classified with either the old guard or the New Wave but is
highly respected by both for pursuing his own individual style,
unperturbed by the cinema around him. "He expresses himself
cinematographically as a poet would with his pen," Jean
Cocteau said of him. "His cinema is closer to painting
than to photography," says Truffaut.
Others see in him a philosopher with a camera, an uncompromising
Jansenist rigorously preoccupied with ideas of predestination
and spiritual grace." - (The
MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)
“Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky
is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music." -
Jean-Luc Godard
"My movie
is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the
living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film
but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen,
come to life again like flowers in water." -
Robert Bresson
"The most
ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires
brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must
shine." - Robert
Bresson
