About a third of the way through this collection of brief, lapidary propositions and thoughts on the making of films, we see, in shouty capitals: “THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE.” There are a couple more occasions when Bresson resorts to such typography, but this is the most striking in that it uses a loud voice, so to speak, to evoke silence. It is also correct, you realise: after all, before soundtracks you had either a continuous musical accompaniment, or the clattering of the projector itself.
If there were any director you might expect to write what is, in effect, a philosophical notebook on the art and science of film-making, it would be Bresson. He studied philosophy as a young man, as well as painting, an ideal pairing for the contemplative, ascetic cinema of Diary of a Country Priest, Pickpocket and A Man Escaped – all from the 1950s, when the bulk of these notes were written. He started off as a scriptwriter, so he knows the value of words. Notice the way he insists on calling it “cinematograph” rather than cinema. Not a fancy Gallicism: more a reminder to us that cinema is a kind of writing – cf “photograph”, writing with light. There is a lot of silence in his films, and yet this very stillness draws in the viewer. As Bresson puts it: “Draw the attention of the audience (as we say that a chimney draws).” (French: tirer.)
This translation, by Jonathan Griffin, first appeared in 1977, two years after the book’s French publication, and 22 years before Bresson’s death, aged 98. It features an introduction by JMG Le Clézio, who went on to win the Nobel prize for literature in 2008. I can admire Le Clézio’s fiction, but his introduction really is all fancy Gallicism. “To Bresson, art is the only possible escape from the bitterness of impotence. But it is also much more. It gives way to the only visible part of the being, the merging part.” The what?
Bresson does not express himself like that because film-making isn’t just an art, it’s a science and involves a number of practical skills. There must be nothing extraneous or redundant: everything in the frame has to be there for a reason, and he knows this. You can tell very quickly that the practical experience of making a film, the literal nuts and bolts of it, is never far from his mind. “Get to know my resources, make sure of them,” ends the first note in the book. “The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows,” runs the second. These two statements should be tattooed on the hands of every aspirant film-maker, and not just aspirant ones, come to think of it. He is also good on directing actors, or “models” as he called them (he preferred to cast unknowns, and indeed non-professionals). He was no fan of “acting”: “The terrible habit of theatre,” runs one note in its entirety.
But why should we be interested in the notes of an obscure director from another country? Well, Bresson was one of the great directors, and even at a time when most of the best directors in the world were French, he was still remarkable. What he had to say is worth listening to. He was a film-maker who, in David Thomson’s deft words, “photographs reserved faces to evoke all the wildest emotions of the spirit”. And how many of us like to imagine ourselves as directors from time to time? This is also a collection that reaches beyond its subject matter. It actually is philosophy. “Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I regard them.” That doesn’t just apply to film directors.
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