He contributed notably to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of minimalist film.
Bresson originally pursued a career as a painter but turned to film in the early 1930s. In 1933, he gained his first experience as a script consultant.
During WWII, Bresson was a prisoner of war from June 1940 to April 1941--an experience which profoundly marked his subsequent work in the cinema.
After ‘Diary of a Country Priest’, Bresson created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film
This included often, crucial details of which were only given in the soundtrack, with the actors (he called them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances.
Bresson also made increasingly sparing use of music; he believed that sounds were more expressive than images.
He utilized selective and heightened soundtracks built from natural noises, which interact with his visuals to enhance and transform them.
Combined with his idiosyncratic approach to montage, this unique aural world imbues his films with an exceptional sense of rhythm.
Bresson stripped away all excess, rendering his narratives with a brisk economy. Actions are jumped over in sharp ellipses that obscure causality, while close-ups reduce wholes to parts.
These subtle instances thereby force the viewer to piece things together for themselves. From this, Bresson wished to avoid ‘filmed theatre’ and embrace cinema’s unique potential.
To this end, Bresson also eschewed character psychology and insisted that his nonprofessional actors – his ‘models’ – eliminate interpretation from their performances. He claimed, people do not analyze what they say, unlike actors.
By micromanaging the movements of his models and forcing them through endless repetition (often as many as fifty takes), he hoped to circumnavigate thought and reveal something closer to ‘truth’.
In a sense, what Bresson was interested to show was ‘the soul’.
His work is infused with a serious spirituality, ideas of sin, grace and predestination, inflected by Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen.
And yet, more often than not, Bresson avoided directly religious subjects and focused instead on criminals, rebels, the downtrodden and the abused.
For Bresson, God appears most strongly when not mentioned by name, and the transcendent is revealed through the natural: by looking at the surface of life close up, we can see the mystery that lies beyond it.
Jean-Luc Godard once said of the filmmaker, "Robert Bresson is French cinema as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music."
Though Bresson is first and foremost a "filmmaker's filmmaker," his features, so disorienting in their strange, singular beauty, have also inspired poets, musicians, choreographers, and painters.
Encountering Bresson on the big screen for the first time elicits a kind of vertigo, as eyes and ears dulled to inattention by conventional cinema are suddenly forced to a new or heightened awareness, an effect that registers somewhere between bracing and life-changing.
Within the world of Bresson, the interstice becomes the essential in a visual style that often elides the obvious and concentrates on the moments and spaces before, between, or after.
They charged images of gestures and glances, of isolated objects and vacated places, of parts of the body (hands and feet especially) and the oft-remarked doors he frequently fixes on — which, in his cinema, are never merely doors, but portals for the soul.
The result of Bresson's obdurate vision and style is a cinema of paradox, in which the denial of emotion creates emotionally overwhelming works.
These include minimalism, of which becomes plenitude; the withholding of information, of which makes for narrative density.
These also include fragmentation, of which evokes a sense of the world's wholeness; and attention, of which to what Bresson called "the surface of the work" that produced inexhaustible depth.
Physical imprisonment became a metaphor or vehicle for spiritual release; a chaste aesthetic generates potent sensuality; interiority is manifested in a "language of things".
He applied this intense materialism that transformed objects and gestures into signifiers of the transcendent; documentary naturalism became abstract formalism.
Among his credits, Bresson is best known for directing ‘Diary of a Country Priest’ (1951), ‘A Man Escaped’ (1956), ‘Pickpocket’ (1959), ‘Au Hasard Balthazar’ (1966), and L’Argent’ (1983).
Bresson is among the most highly regarded filmmakers of all time. He has the most number (seven) of films in the Top 250 list of greatest films ever made published by Sight and Sound in 2012.
Bresson is forever established for using a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which meant that his films never achieved great popularity.
It was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but Bresson has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema.
Bresson had been active from 1933–1983.
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