Robert Bresson

Biography: life and films

Robert Bresson was born in 1901 at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, in France. The son of a French officer, he began a career as a painter before making his first film, a short, in 1934: Affaires publiques.

Bresson made his first full length film, Les Anges du péché , in 1943 during the Nazi occupation of his country. Although this film earned him considerable prestige his following film, Les dames du Bois de Boulogne, based on a classic story by Diderot, was ill received by the public and was a commercial failure.

After a 5 year haitus, Bresson returned to film making with the 1950 film Journal d'un curé de campagne, a film that established Bresson as one of the greatest living film directors. This gave Bresson the template for his subsequent films, a unique and powerful form of cinema which no other director has attempted to emulate.

In 1956, Bresson directed his most famous, and arguably his best, film, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé. This began a trend where Bresson would focus on intimate details of a story, often the response to an event, rather than on the events themselves. This is a stunningly effective style of story telling which Bresson would refine to perfection for his final film, L'Argent .

Bresson's cinema is often marked by the interaction between the inner world of the mind and the external reality of a brutal physical world. This is most apparent in Journal d'un curé de campagne, where the young curé's solitary thoughts are relayed to us when he writes his diary, whilst he struggles against a debilitating illness and social rejection from his parishioners. It is, however, a theme which Bresson returns to again and again.

Other enduring themes in Bresson's films are an individual's entrapment by a pre-ordained destiny - the best example of this being his shocking final film L'Argent - and the unyielding capacity of the human spirit to endure unjust physical hardship (Le procès de Jeanne d'Arc and Au hasard Balthazar). Whilst these can be interpreted as hinting towards a religious agenda, Bresson's cinema is not overtly religious. Rather, the religious elements in his films point to a much deeper, more profound analysis of the human psyche.

Another distinctive feature of Bresson's films is the use of non-professional actors. Bresson preferred to train his own actors (which he termed 'models') rather than use experienced actors, because this enabled him to create a greater sense of reality and intimacy in his films. Being able to mould his own actors for particular roles gives Bresson an extraordinary power to achieve on screen precisely what he set out to portray. It is probably this more than anything which makes his films so distinctive and compelling.

Over a 40 year career, Bresson made just 13 full length films. Whilst not a popular director in the traditional sense of the word (none of his films was a box office success) his films are highly regarded and he has been awarded many prizes, including the Special Prize at the 1962 Cannes film festival for Le Procès de Jeanne d´Arc and the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1983 for L'Argent . He has been awarded many honours, including the Légion d´honneur and the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres.

Bresson died in France in 1999. Although his passing was not as widely reported in the media as it should have been, the director is regarded by many as one of the great film directors of the Twentieth Century.

Filmography

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