Joseph Cunneen,
Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film.
New York & London: Continuum, 2003.
ISBN: 0826416055 (pb) US$17.95
ISBN: 0826414710 (hb) US$29.95
224pp
(Review copy supplied by Continuum)

The professed aim of this book is to introduce to a wider public, particularly a wider American public, a French filmmaker who has been widely honoured but whose films have been seldom screened. An introductory and concluding chapter frame twelve short chapters devoted in chronological sequence to Bresson’s films – the source of their story, the director’s re-working of it, any notable technical innovations, any overall development in his work, and the comments made on each film by various critics.

In most respects, then, this is a routine auteurist study, but with two unusual aspects – first, there is little possibility of relating the films to their author’s biography, since Bresson is a very private person, and little is known of his life; and second, given that the films are so little known in America, Cunneen feels obliged to provide very full plot summaries. Indeed these plot summaries constitute in all 53 pages, or close to one third of the 163 pages of text; and since half of the remainder is a loose assemblage of remarks by other critics, Cunneen’s own voice and opinions do not by any means come through clearly.

Moreover, what he has to say is fairly predictable: Bresson’s films are difficult because elliptical, ambiguous and austere, avoiding most of the film-making strategies familiar to the target audience of the book, and notably the star system, expressive acting, psychologically motivated character, and causally linked narrative structures. The pursuit of these practices is seen as motivated by Bresson’s religious convictions, but Cunneen hastens to reassure his readers several times that there is no consistent theoretical or intellectual basis, let alone an ideological underpinning, for the practices. Ideas bad, feelings good. Yet somehow the procedures always turn out to be the only possible right way to have made the films. Sometimes Bresson is brilliantly faithful to his sources; sometimes he re-works them with brilliant originality; each turns out to be miraculously right, in context. As these remarks may indicate, the book’s auteurist traits can be rather wearing: the vocabulary used to describe Bresson and his films involves the terms subtlety, depth, emotional intensity, inspiration, insights and insightful, mystical, and I even noted one ineffable. Bresson “places his own signature on almost every detail”.

More interesting alternatives were available. Bresson might for instance have been treated not as sui generis, but rather as participating in a set of debates and practices that were current at the time, about the possible form that religious film-making might take. While Cunneen cites numerous books on Bresson himself he doesn’t mention, let alone cite, any of the books on religious film-making published by OCIC (1948), Ford (1953), Agel (1953), Ayfre (1954), Ludmann (1956) or Fescourt (1958), which constitute such a large proportion of the critical output of the time. Nor does he remind us of the critical writings of Éric Rohmer at Cahiers du cinéma during the 1950s, despite apparently having himself written a monograph on Rohmer. In fact to see Bresson in the light of Rohmer’s parallel, if slightly later, attempts to develop an appropriate form and style for religious film-making might have been immensely productive, given certain common thematic concerns – the fragmentation of bodies, the Arthurian legends, young people of today, chance and its relationship to grace and salvation.

This failure to place Bresson in context is exacerbated by a tendency to attribute to him revolutionary developments that were, in fact, quite common at the time – location shooting, the use of untrained actors, directors writing their own screenplay, etc. Instead he is seen in typical auteurist style as rejecting standard filmmaking practices of the previous generation to carve out radically new paths. No-one who has looked closely at the previous decade’s film-making in France could have seen it as a coherent system, let alone a coherent system on the Hollywood model.

This, then, is not a very well-informed book, and is unlikely to achieve its modest aim. And one final criticism: even if Bresson himself retrospectively disowned his first film as director – the 1934 comedy Les affaires publiques – it might have been nice to include it in the filmography. Of course it doesn’t fit Cunneen’s argument very well; however it is more closely related to Bresson’s other marginal film work in the 1930s as scriptwriter, adapter, dialoguist and assistant.

Colin Crisp,
Australia.
Created on: Friday, 30 April 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Apr-04