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This year coincides with the 20th anniversary of the death of the world-renowned French film master Robert Bresson, and the recently concluded "Tribute to the Master" section of the 22nd Shanghai International Film Festival has screened 10 films directed by him in different periods, such as "Death Row Prisoner Escape", "Pickpocket", "Diary of a Village Priest", "Samurai Ranshino", etc., which basically include all his film creations. From his 1943 feature film debut, Sin Angel, to his 1983 posthumous work Money, Bresson's 40-year career as a director has produced only 13 films (Genesis, which he began planning in the 1960s, never made). The directors practiced their hands on short films before they released feature films, and he only had one 1934 Public Affairs. As for the book, there is only a thin but concise booklet, published in 1975 in "Notes on Film Writing".
The work is low-prolific, and Bresson's behavior is also very low-key. He had no relationship with the New Wave or the Left Bank, or even away from the film industry. He did not contact his peers, did not communicate with reporters, and for many years used a telephone line to keep in touch with the outside world. In the documentary "The Road to Bresson," two of his admirers made several phone calls before he agreed to meet for an interview. But because of his unique film style, he gained wide respect from his peers. Godard said: "Bresson is to French cinema as Mozart is to Austrian music, Dostoevsky is to Russian literature. ”
Robert Bresson
At the beginning of "The Road to Bresson", Tarkovsky, who won the Best Director Award at Cannes that year with Bresson for "Nostalgia" in 1983 (this documentary recorded the precious moment when the two masters shared the stage to receive the award), commented on him: "Bresson used his works to elevate the film career to a level comparable to the old form and old genre. At the same time, Tarkovsky used Bresson's 1962 "The Judgment of Joan of Arc" as an example to describe Bresson's influence on him." This film shows that the film is not only an audiovisual display, but also highlights the nature and life fragments that we pay attention to or ignore. Bresson is one of the few artists who has successfully gained depth on the path of pursuing simplicity. A person's work has complete independence in front of the audience and critics, laying the foundation for my understanding of the director's attitude towards his audience. ”
Bresson's attitude toward the audience was seen at his rare press conference for Money in Cannes in 1983. Faced with reporters' questions about the plot and his handling methods, he simply replied, "I don't know." He thinks his film is enough to explain everything, and there is no need to answer questions outside the film.
"Money"
The problem is that Bresson's films, as Louis Mahler, who rose to fame on The Elevator to the Gallows, commented: "They're so simple, yet so hard to see." ”
Bresson uses his invention of the theory of "film writing", "a kind of writing composed of moving pictures and sounds", with simple and accurate pictures and sound information, to fight against the ancient habits and rules of drama and can not extricate themselves, which he called "the use of dramatic techniques (actors, scene scheduling, etc.) and cameras for reproduction", subverting the audience's inherent cognition of film. He makes films with the mentality of "not secretly expecting anything unexpected" and leaves no room for the audience to expect.
"Gentle Woman"
Often at the beginning of the film, Bresson informs the audience of the ending of the story. "Gentle Woman" opens with different levels of information such as the perspective of a maid, the scarf that the heroine falls from the sky, the sound of many brakes, passers-by watching a female corpse, and the sound of police cars, bringing out the heroine's suicide by jumping off the building. The first scene of "Probably the Devil" is a newspaper story about a young man committing suicide in a cemetery, followed by another newspaper's denial of the news, and the young man died by his killing. "Death Row Escape" in the English title "A Man Escaped" uses the past tense to reveal the fate of the French lieutenant.
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Whether it is a flashback about the process of the evolution of the outcome, or a narrative plot, Bresson refuses to use all means that may incite the audience's emotions, or even omits the key parts in a jumping way, abandoning the path of the audience's spiritual resonance with his characters.
"Death Row Escape" does not have the usual gripping scenes of prison break films, only the cool steps and patience of the lieutenant to implement the prison escape plan, the core scene of killing the sentry, Bresson chooses to hide. Through the long camera and the lieutenant's inner monologue, the audience knows the tension before he kills and the success of killing, but can't see how he kills - the opening scene of the lieutenant trying to escape and is arrested on the way to the prison, Bresson does not use the picture to directly show, but uses the shot of him escaping from the prisoners in the same car and returning to them, as well as the sound of gunshots and footsteps. At the time of escape, the lyrical resurgence of the finale of "The Shawshank Redemption" is also underserved.
"Probably the Devil" tells how the male protagonist moves step by step to destruction, without any emotional color, like a very objective documentary report. Shooting at his partner who promised to kill him, the picture of him being shot and falling to the ground is skipped, and the audience only sees the partner firing two shots forward and downward, hearing two gunshots, and watching the partner put the gun in his dead hand.
"Probably the Devil"
Sounds in a situation similar to the one described above are the main source of sound in Bresson's films. His films lack the infectious soundtrack of the magnification lens, and the music will only sound when instruments, records, etc. appear in the picture. Regarding the relationship between picture and sound, he wrote in the "Notes on Film Writing": "The communication between picture and picture, sound and sound, picture and sound will give life to the characters and events in your film, and unify your work through a clever phenomenon." But "the picture and the sound should not support each other, but should work in turn with each other in a relay way." ”
Bresson's use of actors is also very different. Perhaps because he was a painter in his early years, he believed that the director should have the vision of a painter while observing and creating, and the model, because of its "irreversible soul and body", is undoubtedly the source of "the painter's excitement and inspiration". So he called actors models to counter the star system that distracted audiences. His shots are mostly medium and close-up, reflecting the habitual vision of the human eye, but because the models are almost all expressionless (except for a few scenes in "Sin Angels", "The Women of the Blaugé Forest", and "Muchette"), even their speeches and monologues are extremely stiff (the result of Bresson's repeated lines dozens of times), cutting off the possibility of the audience wanting to be close to them, forcing the audience to pay attention to their actions - he loves to shoot the movement of the model's fingers and footsteps, because he also feels that the action is greater than all.
In order to avoid situations where the audience no longer believes in the models, and "the models will look at themselves in the first film like a mirror, hoping that the audience will see them the way they want", he only uses each model once.
Pickpocket
Incredibly, the model thus acquires the ability to keep the body in place at all times like a precision instrument, and let the audience follow their movements, unexpectedly discovering another kind of reality hidden beneath the surface of reality. Michelle in Bresson's 1959 film "Pickpocket" discovered and confirmed his love for Jenny in the loosening of the soil of life again and again. And Jenny, who "watches" Michelle's behavior instead of the audience, accepts this love and places hopes on Bresson for the audience to find another side of life (American director Paul Schrader's "American Dancer" almost "copied" this ending as it was).
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Comparing Bresson's different treatments with other masters on the same subject matter can better understand his "film writing".
The inspiration for "Pickpocket" is generally believed to come from Samuel Fuller's 1953 South Street Adventure, the godfather of American B-movies. Both films are about thieves being saved by kind women, but "Pickpockets," which focuses on crime and the process of salvation, is much purer than "South Street Adventures," which is involved in state secrets. Fuller's tense and suspenseful atmosphere makes the audience's heart beat faster, but Bresson allows Michelle to use his inner monologue, slow steps, and Mune's face to create many still effects and blank moments.
The film's repetitive accounting of information, such as Michelle's reading out in the form of narration while writing a diary, is also Bresson's usual method. The "Diary of a Village Priest", which also uses a diary to advance the plot, the priest will also read it while writing. This is not in contrast to Bresson's view that "picture and sound" cannot support each other, and the collision component contained in it still reflects his breaking with the traditional film language.
Diary of a Village Priest
The filming of Joan of Arc's Judgment stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the 1928 silent film Joan of Arc's 1928 silent film, directed by Danish film maestro Carl Theodore Dreier. Known as one of the world's top ten films, Joan of Arc's trial is a complete collection of materials preserved in the Paris Public Library to restore the process of the British religious institutions using the scepter in their hands to force a faithful girl to die, with a close-up shot of Joan of Arc's tears filling the film, bringing out the anger of Joan of Arc, who was less than 20 years old, who was strongly questioned about her firm beliefs, as well as her fear and death.
Although the film, like Dreier's "Words", makes the audience feel the power of miracles, Bresson's close-up shot of Dreyer's up, let Joan of Arc look at the sky and tears, which is particularly false. He remade the film using two kinds of scenes, medium and close- and short-range, neither "drama" nor "masquerade ball". Although Joan of Arc in The Judgment of Joan of Arc also has tears, most of the time she fights against the injustice of judgment with a calm face.
The Judgment of Joan of Arc
Bresson's Four Nights of the Dreamer, released in 1971, is based on Dostoevsky's short story White Nights. The novel was also adapted into a film of the same name by the great Italian director Lucino Visconti in 1957. The novel tells the story of a girl who is disappointed in love and a fantasist who is frustrated by life meet unexpectedly on a bridge in St. Petersburg, and the next three nights the two see each other and quickly fall in love, but after the old lover appears, the girl chooses to separate from the fantasist. Visconti's films transplant the story to winter Venice and add a romantic atmosphere. Bresson placed it on the banks of the Seine in the spring and changed his status as a fantasist to a painter. Although the painter has feelings for the girl he meets, he also mixes the ingredient of looking at the girl as a model. Bresson, behind the painter, uses the model as a carrier to look at the world.
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Bresson's other film from the Russian novel is Money, which was born out of Leo Tolstoy's short story "False Coupons". "Counterfeit Coupons" begins with a middle school student exchanging smuggled coupons for pocket money, leading to a story that involves the lives and deaths of many people, or even affects Russia. But Tolstoy's focus is on religious redemption, which accounts for two-thirds of the story. The collapse effect triggered by the fluttering of the butterfly's wings is ultimately defeated by conscience. Bresson exchanged coupons for 500 yuan of counterfeit french banknotes, depicting how the market circulation of counterfeit money led a young repairman to ruin. At the end of the film, there is also a light of redemption, which is small and weak compared to Tolstoy's novel, but it is related to Bresson's early works.
The loss of innocence and the march towards destruction have always been the main theme of Bresson's films. In early works, however, destruction occurs passively, accompanied by redemption. The devout nuns in "Angels of Sin" who behave out of character but believe in piety, after being expelled from the monastery, still firmly follow the holy light of God, and finally touch the evil soul when they are dying. In "The Women of the Forest of Braunje", the woman who has been a dust girl in order to live, her identity on the wedding night is exposed, resulting in an aggravation of her illness, but before she dies, she receives sympathy and forgiveness from her husband who is truly in love with her. The priest in the Diary of a Village Priest keeps his head clear by eating only wine and soaking dry bread and writing a diary, and his sermons, although almost no one cares, still insist on preaching the gospel, and finally let the countess, who resented God because of the death of her son, die peacefully. And his friend told him that the last thing he did before he died was to hold a rosary in his hand and slowly and clearly say to the cross in his heart, "What is the relationship, everything is compassionate", and the face that has always been sad and frowned finally stretched out.
The Women of the Forest of Braunje
1966's "Bassat the Donkey" is the division of destruction in Bresson's films from passive to active, and death is no longer attached to redemption. "Bassat the Donkey" is abused, trafficked, and shot by a donkey who has received "holy baptism", bringing out Bresson's pessimistic lament that "God is absent from the world". A year later, "Mushette" was released, and the flower girl who had been tormented by life rolled into the river with the shroud. Modeled after the Samurai Ranshino, a Japanese samurai film, death runs through from beginning to end, and the Holy Grail is never seen. "Probably a Demon", which is linked to the French student movement, exudes a rotten atmosphere from the opening scene.
Perhaps the reason Bresson re-brings God back to the table in Money is that he recalls what he once said in an interview with reporters: "Pessimism with clear overtones." This rather puzzling phrase refers to Bresson, who must stay in this era, with "clarity" beyond "pessimism" and look at a world where there are many terrible dangers.
Interestingly, Bresson has been walking with the times with a young mindset. Like Eric Houmai, he was always photographing young people. And his desire for youth is also manifested in the rumors of age tampering. Born in a small French town in 1901, he is said to have insisted on declaring that he was born in 1907.
"My film was first born in my mind and then died on the script; it was revived through the living and real objects I used, and then it was killed on film; but once it was placed in some order, it was screened on the screen, and it jumped out like a flower in the water." Bresson, in His Notes on Film Writing, talks about his films' "two deaths and three births." Today, every screening of Bresson's films is a new birth, because the flowers they produce are always lonely and special.
Text | Mei Sheng