Against Interpretation (27 page)

In
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
the elderly man in the adjoining cell asks the hero, querulously, “Why do you fight?” Fontaine answers, “To fight. To fight against myself.” The true fight against oneself is against one’s heaviness, one’s gravity. And the instrument of this fight is the idea of work, a project, a task. In
Les Anges du Peché,
it is Anne-Marie’s project of “saving” Thérèse. In
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
it is the revenge plot of Hélène. These tasks are cast in traditional form—constantly referring back to the intention of the character who performs them, rather than decomposed into separately engrossing acts of behavior. In
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
(which is transitional in this respect) the most affecting images are not those of the priest in his role, struggling for the souls of his parishioners, but of the priest in his homely moments: riding his bicycle, removing his vestments, eating bread, walking. In Bresson’s next two films, work has dissolved into the idea of the-infinite-taking-of-pains. The project has become totally concrete, incarnate, and at the same time more impersonal. In
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
the most powerful scenes are those which show the hero absorbed in his labors: Fontaine scraping at his door with the spoon, Fontaine sweeping the wood shavings which have fallen on the floor into a tiny pile with a single straw pulled from his broom. (“One month of patient work—my door opened.”) In Pickpocket, the emotional center of the film is where Michel is wordlessly, disinterestedly, taken in hand by a professional pickpocket and initiated into the real art of what he has only practiced desultorily: difficult gestures are demonstrated, the necessity of repetition and routine is made clear. Large sections of
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé
and
Pickpocket
are wordless; they are about the beauties of personality effaced by a project. The face is very quiet, while other parts of the body, represented as humble servants of projects, become expressive, transfigured. One remembers Thérèse kissing the white feet of the dead Anne-Marie at the end of
Les Anges du Peché,
the bare feet of the monks filing down the stone corridor in the opening sequence of
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc.
One remembers Fontaine’s large graceful hands at their endless labors in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
the ballet of agile thieving hands in
Pickpocket.

Through the “project”—exactly contrary to “imagination”—one overcomes the gravity that weighs down the spirit. Even
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
whose story seems most un-Bressonian, rests on this contrast between a project and gravity (or, immobility). Hélène has a project—revenging herself on Jean. But she is immobile, too—from suffering and vengefulness. Only in
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc,
the most Bressonian of stories, is this contrast (to the detriment of the film) not exploited. Jeanne has no project. Or if she may be said to have a project, her martyrdom, we only know about it; we are not privy to its development and consummation. She
appears
to be passive. If only because Jeanne is not portrayed for us in her solitude, alone in her cell, Bresson’s last film seems, next to the others, so undialectical.

6

Jean Cocteau has said (
Cocteau on the Film,
A Conversation Recorded by André Fraigneau, 1951) that minds and souls today “live without a syntax, that is to say, without a moral system. This moral system has nothing to do with morality proper, and should be built up by each one of us as an inner style, without which no outer style is possible.” Cocteau’s films may be understood as portraying this inwardness which is the true morality; so may Bresson’s. Both are concerned, in their films, with depicting spiritual style. This similarity is less than obvious because Cocteau conceives of spiritual style aesthetically, while in at least three of his films (
Les Anges du Peché, Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
and
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
) Bresson seems committed to an explicit religious point of view. But the difference is not as great as it appears. Bresson’s Catholicism is a language for rendering a certain vision of human action, rather than a “position” that is stated. (For contrast, compare the direct piety of Rossellini’s
The Flowers of Saint Francis
and the complex debate on faith expounded in Melville’s
Leon Morin, Prêtre.
) The proof of this is that Bresson is able to say the same thing without Catholicism—in his three other films. In fact, the most entirely successful of all Bresson’s films—
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé
—is one which, while it has a sensitive and intelligent priest in the background (one of the prisoners), bypasses the religious way of posing the problem. The religious vocation supplies one setting for ideas about gravity, lucidity, and martyrdom. But the drastically secular subjects of crime, the revenge of betrayed love, and solitary imprisonment also yield the same themes.

Bresson is really more like Cocteau than appears—an ascetic Cocteau, Cocteau divesting himself of sensuousness, Cocteau without poetry. The aim is the same: to build up an image of spiritual style. But the sensibility, needless to say, is altogether different. Cocteau’s is a clear example of the homosexual sensibility that is one of the principal traditions of modern art: both romantic and witty, langorously drawn to physical beauty and yet always decorating itself with stylishness and artifice. Bresson’s sensibility is anti-romantic and solemn, pledged to ward off the easy pleasures of physical beauty and artifice for a pleasure which is more permanent, more edifying, more sincere.

In the evolution of this sensibility, Bresson’s cinematic means become more and more chaste. His first two films, which were photographed by Philippe Agostini, stress visual effects in a way that the other four do not. Bresson’s very first film,
Les Anges du Peché,
is more conventionally beautiful than any which have followed. And in
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
whose beauty is more muted, there are lyrical camera movements, like the shot which follows Hélène running down the stairs to arrive at the same time as Jean, who is descending in an elevator, and stunning cuts, like the one which moves from Hélène alone in her bedroom, stretched out on the bed, saying, “I will be revenged,” to the first shot of Agnès, in a crowded nightclub, wearing tights and net stockings and top hat, in the throes of a sexy dance. Extremes of black and white succeed one another with great deliberateness. In
Les Anges du Peché,
the darkness of the prison scene is set off by the whiteness of the convent wall and of the nuns’ robes. In
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
the contrasts are set by clothes even more than by interiors. Hélène always wears long black velvet dresses, whatever the occasion. Agnès has three costumes: the scant black dancing outfit in which she appears the first time, the light-colored trench-coat she wears during most of the film, and the white wedding dress at the end.… The last four films, which were photographed by L. H. Burel, are much less striking visually, less chic. The photography is almost self-effacing. Sharp contrasts, as between black and white, are avoided. (It is almost impossible to imagine a Bresson film in color.) In
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
for instance, one is not particularly aware of the blackness of the priest’s habit. One barely notices the bloodstained shirt and dirty pants which Fontaine has on throughout
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
or the drab suits which Michel wears in
Pickpocket.
Clothes and interiors are as neutral, inconspicuous, functional as possible.

Besides refusing the visual, Bresson’s later films also renounce “the beautiful.” None of his non-professional actors are handsome in an outward sense. One’s first feeling, when seeing Claude Laydu (the priest in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
), François Leterrier (Fontaine in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé
), Martin Lassalle (Michel in
Pickpocket
), and Florence Carrez (Jeanne in
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
), is how plain they are. Then, at some point or other, one begins to see the face as strikingly beautiful. The transformation is most profound, and satisfying, with François Leterrier as Fontaine. Here lies an important difference between the films of Cocteau and Bresson, a difference which indicates the special place of
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
in Bresson’s work; for this film (for which Cocteau wrote the dialogue) is in this respect very Cocteauish. Maria Casarès’ black-garbed demonic Hélène is, visually and emotionally, of a piece with her brilliant performance in Cocteau’s
Orphée
(1950). Such a hard-edge character, a character with a “motive” that remains constant throughout the story, is very different from the treatment of character, typical of Bresson, in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne, Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
and
Pickpocket.
In the course of each of these three films, there is a subliminal revelation: a face which at first seems plain reveals itself to be beautiful; a character which at first seems opaque becomes oddly and inexplicably transparent. But in Cocteau’s films—and in
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
—neither character nor beauty is revealed. They are there to be assumed, to be transposed into drama.

While the spiritual style of Cocteau’s heroes (who are played, usually, by Jean Marais) tends toward narcissism, the spiritual style of Bresson’s heroes is one variety or other of unself-consciousness. (Hence the role of the project in Bresson’s films: it absorbs the energies that would otherwise be spent on the self. It effaces personality, in the sense of personality as what is idiosyncratic in each human being, the limit inside which we are locked.) Consciousness of self is the “gravity” that burdens the spirit; the surpassing of the consciousness of self is “grace,” or spiritual lightness. The climax of Cocteau’s films is a voluptuous movement: a falling down, either in love (
Orphée
) or death (
L’Aigle à Deux Têtes, L’Éternel Retour
); or a soaring up (
La Belle et la Bête
). With the exception of
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
(with its final glamorous image, shot from above, of Jean bending over Agnès, who lies on the floor like a great white bird), the end of Bresson’s films is counter-voluptuous, reserved.

While Cocteau’s art is irresistibly drawn to the logic of dreams, and to the truth of invention over the truth of “real life,” Bresson’s art moves increasingly away from the story and toward documentary.
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
is a fiction, drawn from the superb novel of the same name by Georges Bernanos. But the journal device allows Bresson to relate the fiction in a quasi-documentary fashion. The film opens with a shot of a notebook and a hand writing in it, followed by a voice on the sound track reading what has been written. Many scenes start with the priest writing in his journal. The film ends with a letter from a friend to the Vicar of Torcy relating the priest’s death—we hear the words while the whole screen is occupied with the silhouette of a cross. Before
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé
begins we read the words on the screen: “This story actually happened. I have set it down without embellishment,” and then: “Lyons, 1943.” (Bresson had the original of Fontaine constantly present while the film was being made, to check on its accuracy.)
Pickpocket,
again a fiction, is told—partly—through journal form. Bresson returned to documentary in
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc,
this time with the greatest severity. Even music, which aided in setting tone in the earlier films, has been discarded. The use of the Mozart Mass in C minor in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
of Lully in
Pickpocket,
is particularly brilliant; but all that survives of music in
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
is the drum beat at the opening of the film.

Bresson’s attempt is to insist on the irrefutability of what he is presenting. Nothing happens by chance; there are no alternatives, no fantasy; everything is inexorable. Whatever is not necessary, whatever is merely anecdotal or decorative, must be left out. Unlike Cocteau, Bresson wishes to pare down—rather than to enlarge—the dramatic and visual resources of the cinema. (In this, Bresson again reminds one of Ozu, who in the course of his thirty years of film-making renounced the moving camera, the dissolve, the fade.) True, in the last, most ascetic of all his films, Bresson seems to have left out too much, to have overrefined his conception. But a conception as ambitious as this cannot help but have its extremism, and Bresson’s “failures” are worth more than most directors’ successes. For Bresson, art is the discovery of what is necessary—of that, and nothing more. The power of Bresson’s six films lies in the fact that his purity and fastidiousness are not just an assertion about the resources of the cinema, as much of modern painting is mainly a comment in paint about painting. They are at the same time an idea about life, about what Cocteau called “inner style,” about the most serious way of being human.

[
1964
]

Godard’s
Vivre Sa Vie

P
REFACE
: Vivre Sa Vie
invites a rather theoretical treatment, because it is—intellectually, aesthetically—extremely complex. Godard’s films are about ideas, in the best, purest, most sophisticated sense in which a work of art can be “about” ideas. I have discovered, while writing these notes, that in an interview in the Paris weekly,
L’Express,
July 27, 1961, he said: “My three films all have, at bottom, the same subject. I take an individual who has an idea, and who tries to go to the end of his idea.” Godard said this after he had made, besides a number of short films,
A Bout de Souffle
(1959) with Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo,
Le Petit Soldat
(1960) with Michel Subor and Anna Karina, and
Une Femme est Une Femme
(1961) with Karina, Belmondo, and Jean-Claude Brialy. How this is true of
Vivre Sa Vie,
his fourth film, which he made in 1962, is what I have attempted to show.