Robert Bresson

Jean-Luc Godard pronounced that "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." With Godard and Jean Renoir, Bresson (1901-1999) was the most revered and influential French director of the postwar period. His body of work was small — thirteen features and one short film, made over five decades — but it established him as one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.Though Bresson's subjects and sources ranged widely — his films are derived from Diderot, Dostoevsky, Bernanos, and Tolstoy, from the transcripts of the trial of Joan of Arc and the Arthurian legends — his severe style remained constant. Awed, inspired, and sometimes mystified by the beauty and austere perfectionism of Bresson's style, critics and directors have been moved to passionate debate about his singular ideas on the use of sound, actors, editing, and music.Despite, or perhaps of, his rejection of the core tenets of traditional filmmaking, Bresson exerted a profound influence on many directors, from the French New Wave and American independents to countless contemporary Asian and European auteurs. Robert Bresson (Revised) , as its title suggests, updates and amends the original volume, which accompanied a major retrospective of the director's films and was the first English-language collection of essays on Bresson in many decades. Greatly expanded and richly illustrated, this examination of Bresson's vision and style draws together over two dozen important articles by leading critics and scholars, including classics studies by Susan Sontag and André Bazin, and commentaries by Roland Barthes and Alberto Moravia. Provocative new analyses by such august film historians as David Bordwell, Jean-Michel Frodon, and Shigehiko Hasumi join a selection of articles by emerging scholars that break new ground in relating Bresson's cinema to hitherto unexamined intellectual, aesthetic, and philosophical currents. The book is rounded out by four essential interviews with Bresson; the illuminating testimony of L. H. Burel, the cinematographer of four of his greatest films; and several essays by leading directors, from Michael Haneke tot the Dardenne brothers, which reveal why Bresson is considered first and foremost "a film-maker's filmmaker.