Review
------
"The collection Bresson on Bresson: Interviews
1943-1983 and Bresson's own Notes on the Cinematograph are
primers for the gradual understanding of Robert Bresson, to
paraphrase Gertrude Stein...Notes on the Cinematograph is the
ultimate refinement of Bresson's thought, a loosely grouped
succession of aphorisms and Zen koans." --J. Hoberman, The New
York Times
"If there were any director you might expect to write what is, in
effect, a philosophical on the art and science of
film-making, it would be Bresson...This is...a collection that
reaches beyond its subject matter. It actually is philosophy."
--Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
"Half-philosophy, half-poetry, Notes on the Cinema-to-graph reads
in places like The Art of War for filmmakers." --John Semley, The
A.V. Club
"The power of Bresson's films lies in the fact that his purity
and fastidiousness are at the same time an idea about life, about
what Cocteau called 'inner style, ' about the most serious way of
being human." --Susan Sontag
"Short, aphoristic fragments that guide Bresson's film making.
Scribbed down as 'notes to self, ' reading them in whole is
astonishing & inspiring, a totality of a brilliant filmmaker."
--Mike Kitchell, HTMLGiant
Notes on the Cinematograph...feels like the rare beast: a
manifesto of filmmaking one doesn't see much of nowadays. In it,
Bresson's artistic philosophy is laid bare.
--Zak Salih, The Los Angeles Review of Books
An original and singular figure, Breton sought a truer form of
narrative film...a welcome creative tool, both for people
interested in making art and for those who just enjoy talking or
thinking about it.
--Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, A.V. Club
Bresson's films are many things. They are among the most
maddeningly beautiful in all of cinema; each is like a wedge
violently driven into the world. Bresson's cinema is a monument
to an idea of art that knows no compromise.
--Michael Blum, The Brooklyn Rail
About the Author
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Robert Bresson (1901-1999) was born in
Bromont-Lamothe, France. He attended the Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux,
and moved to Paris after graduation, hoping to become a painter.
He directed a short comedy, Affaires publiques, in 1934, but his
work was curtailed by the outbreak of World War II. He enlisted
in the French army in 1939 and was captured in 1940, spending a
year in a labor camp as a prisoner of war. After his release he
returned to Paris and directed Angels of Sin (1943), his first
full-length film, under the German occupation. Les dames du Bois
de Boulogne followed in 1945, and in 1951 Diary of a Country
Priest was met with widespread accl. His next film, A Man
Escaped (1956), which follows the memoirs of André Devigny, a
French Resistance leader incarcerated during World War II, became
a hit. He made eleven more films over the next three decades,
including Mouchette (adapted from the Georges Bernanos novel of
the same name, published as an NYRB Classic); Au Hasard
Balthazar; Pickpocket; Lancelot of the Lake; and L'Argent.
Throughout his career Bresson eschewed the use of theatrical
techniques and employed nonprofessional actors whom he referred
to as models. Raised in the Catholic faith, he worked on and off
throughout his career on an adaptation of the book of Genesis,
which never saw fruition. He died in Droue-sur-Drouette at the
age of ninety-eight.
Robert Bresson's interviews, edited by Mylène Bresson, are
collected in Bresson on Bresson, published by New York Review
Books.
Jonathan Griffin (1906-1990) served as the director of BBC
European Intelligence during World War II. Among the authors he
has translated are Jean Giono, Fernando Pessoa, and Nikos
Kazantzakis. A collection of Griffin's poetry, In Earthlight, was
published in 1995.
J.M.G. Le Clézio was born in Nice in 1940. He has written more
than forty books, including works of fiction and memoir as well
as collections of essays and books for children. In 2008 he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.