Robert Bresson films at the BFI

Ahead of a Robert Bresson season at the BFI, Wally Hammond asks whether the legendarily austere films of the great French director still exert an influence on the present generation of filmmakers

Who would you say is the film director who exerts most influence today? George Lucas, whose ‘Star Wars’ space operas kicked off – for better or worse – not only the modern movie franchise phenomena but inaugurated our ‘shock and awe’ era of pulversing industrial FX, computer technology, and visual overkill? How about one of the half-dozen or so ’70s movie mavericks – from Spielberg to Scorsese – who helped shake up and renew the moribund Hollywood, mostly from within. You could even make a case for John Hughes, say, who since ‘The Breakfast Club’ has shown how the judicious exploitation of juvenalia never hurt a film’s box-office prospects or, at a pinch, Chris Columbus, whose reading of the demographaphic runes revolutionised family entertainment. No? Not convinced? Okay, what would you say if I suggested… Robert Bresson?

Who? Robert Bresson. Born, probably, in 1901 in the Auvergne and, between 1943 and 1983, the maker of 13 films – 11 of which show in this month’s BFI Southbank retrospective (‘Une Femme Douce’ (1969) and ‘Four Nights of a Dreamer’ (1971) were sadly unavailable for rights reasons). This austere Jansenist Catholic’s style was unique: a search for the essential which, movie by movie, stripped itself of unwanted clutter, camera movements, cutaways, extraneous music, even professional acting. His films – including his prison escape movie ‘A Man Escaped’, his thief’s journal ‘Pickpocket’, his masterpiece on exclusion ‘Mouchette’ or his final anti-materialist ‘melodrama’ ‘L’Argent’ – arguably constitute the most integral and purely cinematic body of work of all the top ten all-time greats.

Ah! The greats. They’ve had a wave of publicity recently, following the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. One debate raging among the flurry of op-ed pieces in newspaper arts pages and the whirr of movie-buff web- and blog-sites was that over Chicago Reader writer Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Bergman obit, ‘Scenes from an Overrated Career’ where the influential critic was deemed to make disparaging remarks on the great Swede in favour of two other God-fearing canonical figures, the great Danish director Carl Dreyer and – our dear subject – Dreyer’s possible heir, Bresson. Whatever the justice of his particular view, Rosenbaum did posit an interesting test: ‘The best indication of an artist's continuing vitality is simply what of his work remains visible and is still talked about.’

Christ, I’d say Rosenbaum’s on a sticky wicket with the idea of visibility. Bergman, Antonioni or Bresson: they’re all equally unknown to – or at least unseen by – the man on the Clapham bendy-bus. Despite the impact of DVD, arthouse cinema is still a preserve of the cinephile few. And even the few can be fickle: from time to time, be it noted, revered figures can be disinterred from their tombstones in the mausoleum that is the film canon and shuffled out to the pauper’s plot. Bresson’s own votes slumped in the latest, 2002, Sight and Sound poll of filmmakers’ top films.

Thankfully, polls aren’t everything and, as history allows, influence isn’t the same thing as reputation. Influence can be, and is, insidious. You could say pronouncements of Bresson’s demise in 1999 have indeed proved premature. He lives. Whereas nobody, consciously or unconsciously, can or wants to make, films like Bergman or Antonioni these days, any number of filmmakers – as the directors from Nuri Bilge Ceylan to Paul Schrader in the BFI’s matching (11-film) season of Bresson-inspired films testifies – want to make films like Bresson. To quote J Hoberman – ‘starting with Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, there is scarcely a major European director to emerge since 1960 who does not in some way show his influence: Rivette, Marguerite Duras, Straub, Tarkovsky. Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman, Andrei Sokurov, Bela Tarr and Aki Kaurismaki are all in some way Bressonian.’

What applies in Europe, applies doubly outside. Hou Hsiao-hsien or Jim Jarmusch – incidentally, in voting for ‘Mouchette’, the only invited filmmaker in the S&S poll to plump for Bresson – are more than happy to acknowledge their debt and show it in their empathy, attention, patience, acceptance of silence and the revelatory nature of the supposedly mundane. Arguably, of even more importance for developing cinema – for directors such as Abderrahmane Sissako in Africa, Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Thailand or Cristi Puiu in Romania – is Bresson’s sublime economy, clarity and seriousness of purpose. It’s no mystery that he’s the patron saint of poor or strapped filmmakers worldwide.

The truth is, however, that Bresson’s influence goes deeper than the exemplary. He stands in relation to film much as Shakespeare does to literature. The words used to denote his developed style – minimalism, litotes, ellipsis (all words meaning leaving things out) – can not only be off-putting but misleading. As can descriptions of his aims: to explore the nature of redemption, to express spiritual transcendence or the workings of grace. Contrary to received opinion, his films are not empty but full of event, they are not obscure but set up the relationship with the viewer most directly. Neither are they austere, in the sense that they forbid beauty, incident or pleasure (sexual or otherwise).

Furthermore, his search for ‘purity’ of effect – whether on location with his poor ‘models’, gazing through the camera or engaged in the editing suite – helped define the language, the very syntax, of film itself. And, as such, you could argue, his language is used as much by the Dardenne Brothers and Chantal Akerman as it is by the likes of George Lucas or Chris Columbus. And you don’t get much more influential than that.

Finally, none of that would mean a thing were it not for the intimate knowledge of people – rather than of God – that Bresson displays and on which is based his unique ability to surprise. Bresson: ‘I don't think so much of what I do when I work, but I try to feel something, to see without explaining, to catch it as near as I can – that’s all . . . Thinking is a terrible enemy. You should try to work not with your intelligence, but with your senses and your heart. With your intuition.’ Why not let your intuition take you down to the BFI sometime this month. You could be in for a surprise.

The Bresson season is at BFI Southbank throughout Oct.

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