What remains is a fierce critique leveled against money: the “father-master,” the heart of every exchange in free-market society, and the origin of the degradation of being first into having and finally into appearing. Currency is capable of creating and erasing every existing bond; it is the universal agent of separation, a symbol enjoying an autonomous life – a God by election.
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Godard once remarked that if one had to imagine the personification of French cinema, one could only think of Robert Bresson – just as it is natural to associate Mozart with German music and Dostoevsky with Russian literature. That – if nothing else – grand gesture of humility from the French master is anything but a hollow compliment; rather, it is a sociocultural observation of significant depth. Indeed, the painter-turned-director, through the philosophical radicalism of his work, is the ancestor of the revolution that would hit French cinema with the Nouvelle Vague.
Bresson worked on his first films in 1943, in the midst of the most tragic and intense period of the Second World War and under the Vichy regime, advancing ideas strikingly similar to those of the critic André Bazin, the famed founder of Cahiers du Cinéma. For both – and subsequently for the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers – cinema had to emphasize its distance from other arts to establish its own legitimacy. Above all, it was not to be a force that shapes or models reality; rather, it had to appear perfectly adherent to it.
To be precise, this is where the distinction between film and cinematography comes into play, according to Bresson: the former is a mere filmed representation, while the latter is an autonomous language where audio and image develop in a dialectical relationship through editing. Cinema must rediscover itself as minimalist; it must not induce emotion but allow the spectator to discover it within themselves. Actors must be cold, glacial, ready to repeat the same scenes over and over until they are completely purged of their emotional component. Music is absent or reduced to a marginal role: it cannot, under any circumstances, artificially simulate an emotional response.
Robert Bresson in a 1983 interview
This conception of cinema – with all the developments that stem from it, leading to an entirely new way of understanding the manipulation of filmic material – finds its ultimate application in the director’s final work: L’Argent (1983). Presented at the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 and winner of the Prix de la mise en scène (tied with Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia), the work is inspired by a Tolstoy novella titled The Forged Coupon. Bresson updated the era and setting and removed the parable of redemption from the final act. What remains is a fierce critique leveled against money: the “father-master,” the heart of every exchange in free-market society, and the origin of the degradation of being first into having and finally into appearing. Currency is capable of creating and erasing every existing bond; it is the universal agent of separation, a symbol enjoying an autonomous life – a God by election.
Everything begins with the whim of an upper-class boy and a forged 500 franc note. This note is first spent in a shop, eventually ending up in the hands of a poor worker who, in trying to spend it, finds himself caught in a process that strips him first of his job, then his moral integrity and his family, leading him to prison and the extreme acts that follow.
The two bourgeois youths attempting to use the counterfeit note
The film’s approach is not strictly Marxist, as one might initially imagine. The aura of religiosity, of almost spiritual contemplation, and the detachment from the realism typical of social protest make the film curiously mystical – certainly not materialist in its framework. A religious exegesis of L’Argent yields fascinating results. There is something incredibly poetic in the elevation of money to the ultimate object of sacredness. The forged banknote is the false god (currency in general as an exchange agent elevated to an idol) that derails human life, degrading it to absolute bestiality.
It is sacredness, yes – but a virulent sacredness: contagious, viscous, soaking into body and spirit and every scrap of clothing like a scent one cannot wash away. Life becomes secondary to exchange: the more we, as a collective, make the superfluous necessary, the more we make the necessary superfluous. If the economy enjoys more importance than man and life itself, does that not mean that everyone’s life is worth less than the lowest-quality commodity? Nothingness, essentially, or something close to it.
After being released from prison, Yvon, the protagonist, kills two hotel keepers (ultimately a crime less grave than the exchange of counterfeit money) and finds refuge with a widow living in her country house with her father and son. The woman knows of his murder – she feels it in her gut – yet she is not intimidated by Yvon in any way. In a particularly moving scene, she explains that if she were God, she would forgive everyone.
Yvon finding comfort in the old woman’s house
Perhaps this isn’t so absurd. The woman represents both a benevolent deity and a relic of past eras (perhaps ones that never existed), her purity still untouched by that evil which accumulates like a cancerous mass and spreads wherever man settles. She is the god-made-human (or, in this case, woman): no omnipotence, no eternity, no religious dogma – only love and forgiveness.
The murderous frenzy that leads Yvon to turn on the family is, from this perspective, the violence of commodity fetishism instilling itself in the consciousness of us all – residents of prosperous nations, victims and executioners alike under the logic of consumerism. Those values – love and genuine compassion – cannot find space in the new societies of control.
Yvon stealing money after one of his heinous crimes. This scene further reflects Bresson’s antihumanist, pessimistic critique of a commodity-centric society.
“God is dead,” cried the madman in Nietzsche’s parable; I would add that humankind worships a new golden calf: money. Poverty becomes the new “original sin” that is impossible to shake off. Thus, while for the wealthy teenagers who circulate the forged money it is all just a game, the poor, like Yvon, suffer the tragic consequences. Because, fundamentally, it is not fraud being punished but poverty – the new ontological evil.
As in Kafka’s The Trial, there is no remedy or end to this guilt; it resolves only in violence. Social violence against the individual, the violence of wealth against poverty, the violence of markets against humanity. For, in the end, the mechanisms of seeking profit at any cost are governed by nothing but blind violence. Violence is the only god we truly worship.
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All images are screenshots from YouTube trailers and clips.
