
I think the reason Bresson’s films resist singular interpretations is that they are composed of multiple, overlapping perspectives. His films contain elements of humanism, nihilism, absurdism, existentialism, transcendentalism, and numerous other strains of philosophical thought. For Bresson, life seemed to have been full of both faith and doubt, good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, love and hate, and so on. These ideas intersect in his work.
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The critical discourse surrounding Robert Bresson has been some of the most contentious in film history, due, in large part, to a crucial impasse among scholars. Bresson criticism has traditionally been divided into two rival camps; the “transcendentalists” and the “materialists,” referring, in the broadest sense, to the spiritual and secular interpretations of his work. The origins of this debate can be traced back to the 1960s and the rise of the auteur theory, but even today, these viewpoints are generally regarded as mutually exclusive. In response to the overwhelming dominance of the transcendental approach, a critical offshoot was formed to discuss Bresson in a completely nonreligious context, and as time has gone by, these two groups have only become more antagonistic.
The language of Christianity is deeply embedded in the scholarship surrounding Bresson’s filmography. He is often described as the “patron saint” of cinema or “the most Christian of all directors.” The words “transcendental,” “spiritual,” “Jansenist,” “Christian,” and “metaphysical” are applied interchangeably to his films. But the relationship between Bresson’s cinema and his religious orientation is more complex than its pervasiveness might suggest. For instance, it is often assumed that Bresson was, in fact, Christian. He made films about Christian people (Angels of Sin, Diary of a Country Priest), and he collaborated on the script for Angels of Sin with Raymond Léopold Bruckberger, a French Dominican priest. He also planned to shoot a film adaptation of the Book of Genesis, which, unfortunately, was never made. However, we do not actually know much about Bresson’s religious beliefs. Many critics have referred to him as a “self-described Christian atheist,” but curiously enough, there is no proof he ever said this. No one has ever been able to locate a source for this bizarrely ubiquitous misquote. Furthermore, scholars routinely call him a Jansenist, even though he seemed to be somewhat ambivalent about the label.
The most famous advocate of the transcendental approach is filmmaker Paul Schrader, whose book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson and Dreyer offers a detailed analysis of Bresson’s aesthetics through a Christian lens. Schrader is usually credited with fostering this interpretation, but in fact, most of his observations came from a chapter in Susan Sontag’s book Against Interpretation entitled “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson.” In this essay, she hypothesized that Bresson’s aesthetics made him “transcendental,” as opposed to the overtly Christian subject matter in Diary of a Country Priest (1951) or the themes of salvation and redemption in A Man Escaped (1956). She noted the technique of “doubling,” the elimination of suspense and the use of non-actors, all of which were discussed by Schrader in his book. She even introduced the Bresson/Ozu comparison, which is arguably the starting point for Schrader’s entire argument. These writings, for decades, have served as the foundational texts for modern Bresson criticism.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, on the other hand, is at the forefront of the materialist approach. He feels that Schrader affords Bresson the inaccessibility of an icon and misinterprets his work, reading metaphysical subtext into a body of work that, in his opinion, evokes more sensuality than spirituality, and his final judgment seems to be that Bresson’s films have been forced to conform to an abstract theoretical framework that has been formed independently after-the-fact, and which has begun to overshadow the films themselves. The transcendental approach has become such a ubiquitous “fact” that it is now treated as a foregone conclusion, one that is unlikely to be questioned, even at its most basic level, by those writing about Bresson. Rosenbaum acknowledges the spiritual themes in Bresson’s work but cautions against too much reliance on them, and most of his praise goes to Bresson’s editing and use of sound. This, in essence, is the substance of the argument.
In other attempts to deconstruct the transcendental reading, critics have often cited Bresson’s later work. Although the transcendental approach refers specifically to films in the “prison cycle” (Diary of a Country Priest, A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, and The Trial of Joan of Arc), there is a notable change in Bresson’s work, beginning with Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), that would seem to contradict the widely held view of him as a spiritual artist. In the prison cycle, the protagonists end in a state of deliverance from their guilt and suffering. In the later films, there is no salvation. These films are testaments to human cruelty, focusing on Godless people inflicting suffering on the innocent, ending in tragedy, and some critics feel they can even be described as “atheist,” which has led many to wonder how the man responsible for such works could also be responsible for the so-called transcendental films. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was the turning point, when the insistent pessimism that characterized Bresson’s late period first entered his work. Although it is unclear what brought this on, by 1966, Bresson seemed to have become convinced that materialism had taken over contemporary society and that God had become remote. In the earlier films, the protagonists (the priest, Joan of Arc) reasserted their faith in their final moments, but in the later films, the saintly figures (Balthazar, Mouchette) died silently, at the hands of brutal sadists. Suicide also became a recurrent theme.
But making a film about a Godless society isn’t the same as saying there is no God. In fact, one could argue that by emphasizing a spiritual void you actually draw attention to the spiritual (although there is room for interpretation in this claim). But it would seem a mistake to read Bresson’s late-period films as explicit endorsements of atheism.
Notably, this debate tends to circumvent Bresson’s own views of his films. Although notoriously reclusive, Bresson gave a handful of interviews in his life, and the opinions expressed here have not been fully integrated into this discussion. To my knowledge, the only time Bresson was ever directly asked about the transcendental approach was in Paul Schrader’s 1976 interview, Robert Bresson, Possibly. This interview does not resolve the transcendental vs. materialist debate as conclusively as one might hope. In fact, the entire interview could be said to be an exercise in miscommunication. Schrader prefaces the interview with something that Bresson wrote to him about Transcendental Style in Film on its publication: “I have always been very surprised not to recognize myself in the image formed by those who are really interested in me.” Schrader goes on to say, “Bresson cannot (or will not) understand why I respect him, and I cannot (or will not) accept his interpretation of his films.” Apparently, Bresson found the interview so uninteresting that he asked for it not to be published. This would seem as firm a standstill as any critic and filmmaker could reach, and it suggests an extremely hostile confrontation.
However, reading the interview, I do not find that these reflections exactly match the content of the discussion. It is clear that Bresson does not align himself completely with Schrader’s theory, but neither does he reject it outright.
The interview proceeds like this: Schrader presents his formalist analysis of Bresson’s films as spiritual works, and Bresson questions, minimizes, or recontextualizes these assumptions at every turn. For instance, Schrader brings up the concept of “doubling,” which refers to the execution of a particular action on screen twice (or more). The priest in Diary of a Country Priest often writes in a journal. We see his narration on screen and we hear it in voiceover, and Schrader argues that this is a deliberate measure to retard the emotions, but Bresson responds that he is not conscious of having done it, and he doesn’t find any significance in it. The interview contains several comparable exchanges with more or less the same results. Schrader is not entirely to blame for this (Bresson is an impatient interviewee), but he is myopic in his interpretation. In the aftermath, he seems to have concluded that his reading is fundamentally at odds with Bresson’s and essentially chooses to ignore it, but while Bresson seems to feel that Schrader ascribes too much importance to certain filmic techniques, he offers qualifications for his rebuttals a number of times.
Here are some quotes from the interview, all by Bresson, that I find pertinent:
“Without pronouncing the word ‘God,’ the more I see the presence of God.”
“There is a presence of something which I call God, but I don’t want to show it too much. I prefer to make people feel it.”
“There is something different than earth where we live which you can’t imagine, but you can imagine that you could imagine.”
“I try to understand people’s sentiments aside from religion.”
These quotes point in another direction. It would seem that Bresson views transcendence as something mysterious and intuitive that cannot be typified by a theory such as Schrader’s. He expressed similar feelings in other interviews, notably this quote from his 1973 conversation with Ronald Hayman: “There is the feeling that God is everywhere, and the more I live, the more I see that in nature, in the country. When I see a tree, I see that God exists. I try to catch and to convey the idea that we have a soul and that the soul is in contact with God. That’s the first thing I want to get in my films.”
Bresson was a filmmaker who directed on instinct, preferring not to dissect his aesthetic choices, and this may have something to do with why he viewed Schrader’s theory with hostility. It’s also worth noting that Schrader’s interview took place after Bresson’s perceived ideological shift, which can, perhaps, explain self-corrections like, “I am very religious – was very religious.”
It is unsurprising that Schrader (raised Calvinist) would be drawn to a transcendental reading, just as it is unsurprising that Rosenbaum (atheist) would be drawn to a materialist one. Film historian Donald Richie says, “Bresson is a director that appeals to each person so individually that everybody has his/her own personal vision of what it is that the director has done.” Critics tend to remake Bresson in their own image, highlighting and omitting different parts of his films to support their individual theory of his work. The real question is, how could two completely opposite (seemingly contradictory) readings of the same films exist? For as long as Bresson’s films have been around, there have been those who have seen them as spiritual works and those who have seen this reading as a hoax. These two narratives both work with the same basic set of facts, and the dichotomy is so entrenched that some have even asserted that Bresson’s films express the non-resolution of these ideas, or essentially, that they mean nothing at all. However, I believe the answer is simpler than that.
I think the reason Bresson’s films resist singular interpretations is that they are composed of multiple, overlapping perspectives. His films contain elements of humanism, nihilism, absurdism, existentialism, transcendentalism, and numerous other strains of philosophical thought. For Bresson, life seemed to have been full of both faith and doubt, good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, love and hate, and so on. These ideas intersect in his work. Rosenbaum is correct that the term “transcendence” has often been misapplied, or applied lazily, but Bresson still (whether consciously or unconsciously) made certain films in a meditative style, which does not negate Rosenbaum’s interpretation any more than Bresson’s comments negate Schrader’s interpretation. These films, together, form an intersection of opposites, and this may, in fact, be why they resonate with so many people.
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All images are screenshots from the films discussed.