Book Review

Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film
By Joseph Cunneen
Continuum, New York |
200 pages
2003
$29.95
ISBN 0-8264-1471-0

The ellipse of faith

Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film by Joseph Cunneen, film critic for Commonweal and The Nation, is a rewarding revelation that contributes to the history and study of Catholics in cinema.

Robert Bresson was a French film director who was born in 1901 and died in 1999. Though he began his career as an artist, he never exhibited or sold a piece. In his forty-year career as a filmmaker, he produced only thirteen films, beginning in 1943 with Angels of Sin (Les Anges do peche’) and ending in 1983 with Money (L’Argent). American audiences will perhaps recognize his most successful film, which was released in 1951: Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d’un cure’ de campagne.)

Based on the 1937 classic French novel by Georges Bernanos (and still in print in English), Diary of a Country Priest is the story of the young cure’ of Ambricourt, who feels ineffective as a pastor and learns he is dying of cancer. The scenes in this black and white film are realistic, restrained, and look austere, almost bleak. We hear every footstep and the closing of every door. We witness every glance and hear the sparse and essential dialogue between the characters. This unadorned, intimate focus on detail is what Bresson’s admirers call the spiritual style of his films. Author Joseph Cunneen explains that this means “going beyond this surface realism while observing the relation between persons and things as closely as possible.” The deep viewing and listening that Cunneen suggests in his book results in the audience experiencing a film that is filled with the hidden presence of God.

Joseph Cunneen’s book is informed and readable, and you can sense his passion for his subject. It’s catching. The book will make you want to rent one of Bresson’s films in order to see the difference between a “movie” that entertains and a “film” that may inspire or nudge you to ask questions or look at human life in a different way.

To prepare to review this book, I had my own personal film festival and watched four of Bresson’s films: Diary of a Country Priest, Money, The Devil, Probably, and The Pickpocket. It is easy to see why Bresson can be called an “auteur” director. His films are characterized by a distinct and almost “unbearable austerity” according to the famous French Catholic film critic, Andre’ Bazin. Neither do his films fit any genre, unless the theme of humanity’s search for meaning could be called a category. Bresson rejected the idea of filming theater and preferred to think of his work as painting with film. If this is true, then he painted or filmed what he was feeling rather than what he was seeing – though he asks us to see, and to see deeply. He also refused to employ professional actors in his films. Instead he called them “models” so their celebrity would not distract from his reflective exploration of themes such as the meaning of life, the questioning of faith, conscience, divine providence, death, suicide, sin, the consequences and responsibility for one’s actions, grace, and hope – or the lack thereof - in human existence and relations.

If you watch one of Robert Bresson’s films, you will surely notice his use of ellipsis, or cutting from one scene to another in a disconnected way, trusting the viewer to fill in what happened. He also does not use the classic Hollywood movie construction in which we see three acts, come to know the back story of the characters, and arrive at a satisfying resolution to the conflict. His dramatic style is more like a tableau in which the film begins and proceeds to the final scene as if the action is walking past the front of the camera. Bresson did not and will not appeal to most contemporary U.S. audiences, who are used to the narrative style in our predictable formulaic genre movies. This is because Bresson made films rather than movies and the art form was cinema. His elliptical austere style is the content of his films.

Reading Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film and watching his films, I wanted to know more about what made Bresson tick. Various authors call him a “Catholic atheist” and a “Catholic agnostic.” I asked author Joe Cunneen about this, and he responded, “ It is obviously impossible to judge Bresson’s inmost soul, but the fact that the Pontifical Council for Culture gives out the Robert Bresson Award each year ‘ to an individual who has made significant contributions to the search for spiritual meaning in the world of cinema’ would suggest that there is no serious reason to question his Catholicism. However, Bresson was surely more pessimistic (he would say more ‘lucid’) about the human condition” than American audiences are used to.

Joseph Cunneen outlines his premise for Bresson’s reflective and spiritual style of filmmaking in the first chapter of his book, and then in each subsequent chapter he tells the story of each of Bresson’s films (in case the reader has not seen them) and analyzes the film according to style and purpose.

In the film Diary of a Country Priest, the young cure’s mentor tells him he has to choose a particular scene from the Gospels and make that his life-long inspiration. The young priest realizes that the most meaningful scene for him has always been the agony in the garden. I was reminded of how Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ portrayed this scene with such dark artistry and it made me wonder how that moment so long ago could be meaningful to this young and sickly cure’ in the throes of the dark night of the soul 2,000 years later. I am still contemplating this question, as was perhaps the filmmaker’s intention.

The only shortcomings to the book are that it has no index, thus limiting its usefulness to film students and writers, and it is somewhat repetitious, as if through the process of writing, Cunneen himself wants to have more clarity about the passion of Robert Bresson.

I believe that contemporary movies that entertain us -- the independent or art films and the older auteur films, as diverse as they are -- can provide us with ways to explore the human condition and experience the divine. Although Bresson’s films were relentless agents of tragedy, he also believed that film is an art form that provides outward signs of inward grace. Robert Bresson made his films because he felt them. There seemed to have been little or no desire for commercial gain in his art. Thus, his style also made it difficult for him to find funding for his next project.

When he was dying of cancer, the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Andrei Rublev) wrote on February 19, 1986 in his diary about Bresson: "Bresson is a genius. Here I can state it plainly — he is a genius. If he occupies the first place, the next director occupies the tenth. This distance is very depressing. No, a man who lacks culture will never create good cinema, never."

Joseph Cunneen has made a vital and valuable contribution to the dialogue between cinema and faith and the history of Catholicism and film. If you have the time to savor this book and Bresson’s films (especially Diary of a Country Priest), you will be richly rewarded. (Diary of a Country Priest is available for purchase on DVD and video on amazon.com, facets.org, or your local Catholic bookstore; some Blockbusters have it for rental.)

(An abbreviated version of this review was published in St. Anthony Messenger, October, 2004)