Movie Rites
Even before Robert Bresson died, an elegiac note had begun to sound in various essays and articles written about him. Elegiac not for him personally, but for his whole conception of cinema. The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, for instance, worried that Bresson’s films, in which the meticulous composition of shots and the precise spatial location of sound effects are of paramount importance, translate unusually poorly to home video; and, since video is where today’s would-¬be cineast gets acquainted with film history, the persistence of Bresson’s vision is called into doubt. In Robert Bresson, Cinémathèque Ontario’s 1998 collection of essays, Martin Scorsese put it this way: “I have to wonder whether or not young people who have grown up on digitally engineered effects and DTS soundtracks can actually find the patience required to watch a film by a Bresson or, for that matter, an Ozu or an Antonioni. In a way, it seems impossible: it’s as though they’re from different worlds.”
These are not trivial concerns. They suggest larger questions about aesthetic obsolescence, the effects of technology on culture, and precisely what sort of different world we uneasily inhabit now, in contrast to the world of 1960, or even 1980. Complaints of an ever-¬shortening audience attention span have been heard for decades; we are assumed to live, today, in a state of perpetual distraction, lacking depth or interiority, and I suppose the question really is, to what end? Charles, the protagonist of Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, provides an answer of sorts when he sarcastically recites a list of consumer products and banal leisure-¬time activities as the things he would lose if he killed himself.
I think of Bresson’s films as residue of an ever-¬receding moment, or perhaps of a state of mind, an atmosphere, that living in the present makes less and less available. It’s something like this: You go to a work of art and hope to be transformed. Quietly, secretly, to be roused from a waking sleep, agitated at some resonant depth in your psyche, shown something you ¬couldn’t have shown yourself. Bresson shocks you into reconsidering your whole existence. Not in the cheap sociological way that makes so many current movies “relevant,” but in the almost somnolently muffled, self-¬exasperated way that Sartre’s Nausea makes you see what is right in front of you as the infinitely strange, unassimilable horror that it is.
It occurs to me that I saw all of Bresson’s films except L’Argent in the era before home video, when to know about film one had to go to screenings—in other words, to schlep all over the city, in all kinds of weather, at odd hours, to places where twenty-¬five or thirty other people would have gathered to see the same movie. Those were social occasions as well as aesthetic experiences, and they had something to do with a kind of . . . well, communion with other people interested in film as more than idle entertainment, who had also carved out the time in their lives to see something special—something important enough, taking sufficient priority over other things, to claim the particular hours when the theater happened to be running the film.
The VCR/video store phenomenon has eliminated the sense of occasion around viewing any movie. With the generally welcome convenience of seeing films whenever you wish to, at home, on a television set or computer screen, something essential in the experience of film—I mean the aesthetic experience itself; in short, the entire point of it—has been diminished. Like many technical innovations, home video “saves time,” while leaching the flavor out of the time it saves. The idea of the intricately organized frame and its variegated effects, the precise use of sound, the scale of the projected image, everything that could give a film the multilayered, revisitable texture of a novel, has become less important than a kind of documentary immediacy. The expectation of seeing something new, life rendered from a fresh angle, in a complex way has also dimmed: The art no longer “advances” in time, one no longer has to keep up with it, all periods are jumbled together and equally available on a store shelf. The sense that certain movies were speaking to a particular, rarefied constituency, one that possessed a hard-¬won familiarity with the medium’s possibilities, disappeared at the moment when any slob could take those movies home. (Imagine that the only books you could get from the library were expurgated or condensed, or had parts of each page sheared off.)
With respect to Bresson, it seems to me that the things his films deal with are anathema to contemporary filmmaking: the alienation of his characters from quotidian, materialistic modeling of personality; their abject internal revolt against reality; their torturous movements toward grace; their obdurate unlikeableness—everything rendered in plain, often metonymic movements, gestures, glances, with gravid silences between laconic bursts of speech, spells of utter blankness, one thing following another with a maddeningly stingy economy, as if “almost nothing” were, for the filmmaker, a theological imperative. And then there is Bresson’s breathtaking avoidance of picturing key events; his selective foregrounding of sound over image; his refusal to use stars or even professional actors; his disdain for psychology; his lingering attention to everything that exists between thought and action; his exclusion of anything “theatrical”; the mesmerically even, unruffled tone of his films from beginning to end; and last but hardly least, his unequivocal loathing of capitalism. His films feel necessary in a way that other films just don’t. Bresson ruins our taste for the mediocre.
Even before Robert Bresson died, an elegiac note had begun to sound in various essays and articles written about him. Elegiac not for him personally, but for his whole conception of cinema. The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum, for instance, worried that Bresson’s films, in which the meticulous composition of shots and the precise spatial location of sound effects are of paramount importance, translate unusually poorly to home video; and, since video is where today’s would-¬be cineast gets acquainted with film history, the persistence of Bresson’s vision is called into doubt. In Robert Bresson, Cinémathèque Ontario’s 1998 collection of essays, Martin Scorsese put it this way: “I have to wonder whether or not young people who have grown up on digitally engineered effects and DTS soundtracks can actually find the patience required to watch a film by a Bresson or, for that matter, an Ozu or an Antonioni. In a way, it seems impossible: it’s as though they’re from different worlds.”
These are not trivial concerns. They suggest larger questions about aesthetic obsolescence, the effects of technology on culture, and precisely what sort of different world we uneasily inhabit now, in contrast to the world of 1960, or even 1980. Complaints of an ever-¬shortening audience attention span have been heard for decades; we are assumed to live, today, in a state of perpetual distraction, lacking depth or interiority, and I suppose the question really is, to what end? Charles, the protagonist of Bresson’s The Devil, Probably, provides an answer of sorts when he sarcastically recites a list of consumer products and banal leisure-¬time activities as the things he would lose if he killed himself.
I think of Bresson’s films as residue of an ever-¬receding moment, or perhaps of a state of mind, an atmosphere, that living in the present makes less and less available. It’s something like this: You go to a work of art and hope to be transformed. Quietly, secretly, to be roused from a waking sleep, agitated at some resonant depth in your psyche, shown something you ¬couldn’t have shown yourself. Bresson shocks you into reconsidering your whole existence. Not in the cheap sociological way that makes so many current movies “relevant,” but in the almost somnolently muffled, self-¬exasperated way that Sartre’s Nausea makes you see what is right in front of you as the infinitely strange, unassimilable horror that it is.
It occurs to me that I saw all of Bresson’s films except L’Argent in the era before home video, when to know about film one had to go to screenings—in other words, to schlep all over the city, in all kinds of weather, at odd hours, to places where twenty-¬five or thirty other people would have gathered to see the same movie. Those were social occasions as well as aesthetic experiences, and they had something to do with a kind of . . . well, communion with other people interested in film as more than idle entertainment, who had also carved out the time in their lives to see something special—something important enough, taking sufficient priority over other things, to claim the particular hours when the theater happened to be running the film.
The VCR/video store phenomenon has eliminated the sense of occasion around viewing any movie. With the generally welcome convenience of seeing films whenever you wish to, at home, on a television set or computer screen, something essential in the experience of film—I mean the aesthetic experience itself; in short, the entire point of it—has been diminished. Like many technical innovations, home video “saves time,” while leaching the flavor out of the time it saves. The idea of the intricately organized frame and its variegated effects, the precise use of sound, the scale of the projected image, everything that could give a film the multilayered, revisitable texture of a novel, has become less important than a kind of documentary immediacy. The expectation of seeing something new, life rendered from a fresh angle, in a complex way has also dimmed: The art no longer “advances” in time, one no longer has to keep up with it, all periods are jumbled together and equally available on a store shelf. The sense that certain movies were speaking to a particular, rarefied constituency, one that possessed a hard-¬won familiarity with the medium’s possibilities, disappeared at the moment when any slob could take those movies home. (Imagine that the only books you could get from the library were expurgated or condensed, or had parts of each page sheared off.)
With respect to Bresson, it seems to me that the things his films deal with are anathema to contemporary filmmaking: the alienation of his characters from quotidian, materialistic modeling of personality; their abject internal revolt against reality; their torturous movements toward grace; their obdurate unlikeableness—everything rendered in plain, often metonymic movements, gestures, glances, with gravid silences between laconic bursts of speech, spells of utter blankness, one thing following another with a maddeningly stingy economy, as if “almost nothing” were, for the filmmaker, a theological imperative. And then there is Bresson’s breathtaking avoidance of picturing key events; his selective foregrounding of sound over image; his refusal to use stars or even professional actors; his disdain for psychology; his lingering attention to everything that exists between thought and action; his exclusion of anything “theatrical”; the mesmerically even, unruffled tone of his films from beginning to end; and last but hardly least, his unequivocal loathing of capitalism. His films feel necessary in a way that other films just don’t. Bresson ruins our taste for the mediocre.
