Apologies for the delay between entries in my French New Wave series, the end of the semester came and went, and kept me busy. It’s been over a month since the last post! But hopefully I can stick to a more regular writing schedule now that its summer and I have gotten myself some summer work.

Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

If there’s one post-war French realist everyone interested in film should seek out, it’s Robert Bresson. His movies are some of the most powerful, moving cinema that anyone has ever created. And he invented a cinematic language of suffering and transcendence that would be pursued by countless directors, from Eric Rohmer to Paul Schrader and Darren Aronofsky. Paul Schrader, writer of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, director of American Gigolo, Mishima, and First Reformed, famously called it the “transcendental style in film,” grouping Bresson with Yasujiro Ozu and Theodor Dreyer.

Dreyer is the most obvious precursor to Bresson, but if you watch Dreyer’s famous silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) back-to-back with Bresson’s version of the same material, The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), you will experience two wildly different styles. Dreyer’s film is famous for its faces. Probably one of the most intensive portrayals of suffering on human faces of the silent era (including a striking performance by Antonin Artaud), it is film as a religious sculpture. In contrast, Bresson used almost exclusively amateur actors whose delivery and performances are intentionally flat. Dreyer uses close-ups of faces to trigger our empathy and overwhelm us with the feeling of Joan’s sacrifice. Bresson is cold, giving us almost nothing to read on his impassive faces. And yet, arguably, the effect of his films are even more moving, in part because we never feel manipulated by his style.

Most people agree that Bresson’s films have a profound simplicity, giving us a situation with little commentary or interpretation. They are focused on processes and actions, not emotions and motivations. At the same time, the films can provoke deep feeling in ways that are not at all intellectual. Understanding how Bresson achieves so much emotion with so little is the topic of one of Andre Bazin’s best essays of film criticism, “Le Journal D’Un Cure De Campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson” (1951).

This essay, on Bresson’s first mature film (known in English as Diary of a Country Priest) is one of the great essays on directorial style, and I recommend it to everyone. Remarkably, it was written and published in Cahiers du Cinema in 1951, the same year as the film’s release. Before Country Priest, Bresson had only made two films, Les Anges du péché (1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), both of which are fairly conventional period dramas with famous actors and typical melodramatic plotting. The second film is a bit slow-paced but only has the barest hints of Bresson’s style, which arrived fully formed with his third film, “Country Priest” in 1951. Bazin’s essay is thus based on a single film, and yet has such a clear vision of Bresson’s style that it predicts the aesthetics of his later masterpieces A Man Escaped (1956), Pickpocket (1959), and Au Hazard Balthazar (1966). It is an essay of masterful insight.

Again, I recommend just reading it yourself if you can locate it, but in an attempt to capture the realism of independent French film directors before the New Wave, I think it is worth going over the major points and examining an instance in a later Bresson film. One clear connection with the French New Wave is Bresson’s use of non-professional actors. But whereas New Wave casting of friends and each other helped them create an iconic culture of celebrity cool alternative to the studio systems, Bresson’s amateurs are practically faceless and nameless, utterly forgettable as personages. And they don’t so much create characters and performances as simply recite text. As Bazin writes, “The plan of attack not only rules out any dramatic interpretation by the actors but also any psychological touches.” There is simply nothing here but a human body or mask, speaking a text blandly with little expression.

What does this accomplish? How can this make for such immensely affecting and emotional films? Bazin suggests, “What we are asked to look for on their faces is not some fleeting reflection of the words but for an uninterrupted condition of the soul, the outward revelation of an interior destiny.” In Bresson’s aesthetics, both the face of a movie star and the craft of acting would be artifice that distracts from the essential truth he is trying to capture on film. He does not want to imitate the real through craft, but reveal it through his camera, as already there in the countenance of us all. For Bresson, “realism” is spiritual. His characters suffer greatly, with almost no emotional reaction to their suffering. They simply keep doing what they do, engage in practical tasks, like building tools for an escape from a Nazi prison, or picking pockets. These are all repetitive tasks that don’t need to be acted, just enacted, often filmed in close-ups of hands and tools. So much of a film like A Man Escaped is just the work of the central character slowly building a rope from strands in his mattress, finding ways to hide it from guards, or patiently and painstakingly carving out a small pinhole to observe the prison floor in the wooden door to his cell. The films are about such processes, not character.

The processes themselves are often alienating and spiritually deadening: the country priests rounds visiting with corrupt and unbelieving local landowners and sermons to nearly empty churches; the obsessive process of building tools and a plan for escape with nothing else to do in the prison; the pickpocket’s constant violations of other people’s persons and property. The blankness of the performances tends to contribute to that effect. These are not people who are spiritually present in their lives, so the absence of character contributes to rather than detracts from the drama.

The drama is also not between characters, even though the entrance of other people into their lives often have striking impacts on Bresson’s protagonists by precipitating spiritual crises. The dramas are internal ones of alienation, obsessive processes, and often an eventual moment of grace. But how do you realistically depict grace? Here’s an example from my favorite Bresson film. In A Man Escaped, the protagonist (Fontaine) is eventually given a cellmate, just as he comes close to finishing preparations for his escape plan. The cellmate is a younger French man (really still a boy), named Jost, who had fought for the Vichy government and was accused of desertion. Fontaine suspects that he is a spy for the Nazi guards, living as he has for years in the paranoia of the resistance underground. But there is no way for him to carry out his escape plan without Jost knowing. He thinks about killing him the night of his escape, but decides at the last minute to trust him and tell him his plans. His conversations with Jost reveal nothing to him or the audience about whether he should trust Jost; it is entirely an internal struggle with trust and paranoia with life-or-death stakes. So consumed by his process and the tools of escape, so alienated from his own emotions, it would seem the most natural thing in the world for Fontaine to take this step of killing the boy to achieve his goals. Such is the overwhelming dehumanization of his situation.

But he doesn’t, and instead tells him his plan and involves him in his escape. What follows is some of the tensest moments of cinema I’ve ever seen as they carry out the escape in silence with minimal communication. Once again, it’s all process, but with the added tension that someone might slip, the guards might catch them, or Jost might yell and inform the guards at any time to save his skin, informant or not. However, they succeed, and then the grace comes; the two men hug, having shared the most intimate experience imaginable, having saved each other from certain death by an act of wild trust and a recognition of each other’s humanity under impossible conditions. It is a quiet moment, but it is unspeakably moving after the tension of the preceding sequence—transcendence emerging within the minimal spareness of Bresson’s filming technique, no artifice, no special effects, no music, no acting- just an embrace.

I think the one overwhelming lesson of Bresson’s films for New Wavers was the ability to make immensely compelling, moving, and complete works of art with such minimalism. There were certain material prerequisites for New Wave’s emergence, not least of which were cheaper handheld cameras and low-cost 16 mm black and white film. But in many ways, it was Bresson who taught them how they could do so much with so little, how visuals could capture internal struggles, how inserted closeups and fascinations with process and activity could be cinematic (Godard could not be further from Bresson in sensibility, but his use of editing and close-up inserts are variations on Bresson). The stripping away of the artifice of the studio, the movie star, the complex dramatic action of stage plays, opened up new cinematic vocabularies that the New Wavers developed to an even fuller extent.

The last important 1950s touchstone in French film for the New Wave I want to touch on was the emergence of the Cinema Verité movement. When Americans think of Verité, the most common reference point seems to be someone like Frederick Wiseman with his fly-on-the-wall documentary making that tries to merely show the truth of the institutions he films passively. But Wiseman and other American documentarists are not entirely representative of the movement as it began in France. Many early Verité films (most famously Chronicle of a Summer) were quite inventive and reflective about the way filming itself could alter the truth of what was being captured. They were not naive about the fact that people aware they are being filmed act differently than they do normally. One only needs to remember the French film pioneer Lumiere setting an early camera outside a factory and the workers looking directly at the lens

Jean Rouch was an early innovator, but he remains something of a troublesome figure in film history. He was an anthropologist. And his early films are documentary attempts at anthropology in Francophone West Africa. But he was coming to those places as a white man employed in the institutions of empire to film people who were, in the 1950s, still subjects of French colonialism. So, he was inheriting a long tradition of the anthropological project being wrapped up in colonialist extraction from and objectification of non-European people and cultures. Given the subject and contexts of his films, I think it’s also important to mention that he has been accused of racially targeted sexual harassment in a rather skin-crawling account.

He did attempt to address the problems of colonial positionality through the innovative involvement of his subjects in the writing and editing of his films. Most famously, Moi, Un Noir (1958) purports to be codirected and cowritten by its main subject: a young Nigerian man who has migrated to Côte d’Ivoire in search of work, who goes by the pseudonym Edward G. Robinson due to his stated admiration for the actor. It is a fascinating document of labor in West Africa on the eve of decolonization, but it unfortunately masks that context by focusing entirely on the private lives and work routines of its subjects. If the subjects had true authority over the final film product, there might be interesting questions here, but it has long been established that ultimately Jean Rouch had final cut, edited out quite a bit of material the subjects wanted to include, and inserted sequences, including a first-person filmed fantasy sexual encounter with the object of the main subject’s lust that I found to be a particularly grotesque act of colonial pornography given the aforementioned sexual harassment accusations. It seems the “co-authorship” claims about the film were in practice an authorizing fiction, not the truth of the project, and an act of sophisticated ventriloquism by a colonizer, not the creation of a structure to allow the subaltern to speak.

Nonetheless, Moi, Un Noir had a huge impact on French New Wavers, from filming technology and techniques (compare Godard’s shots of Paris streets in his early films to Rouch’s framing) to the sociological view of Parisien youth culture adopted by the films (once again, compare Belmondo’s Bogart obsession in Breathless to Edgar G. Robinson in Rouch’s film). And finally, Rouch’s co-authorship idea (if not practice) had a huge impact on the post-1968 worker collective film production groups that Godard and Chris Marker helped form—The Dziga Vertov group and the Medvekin group, respectively. I also think Jacques Rivette’s use of collective improvisation in his films may have been inspired by Rouch, even if something like Out 1 is more obviously connected to the experimental theater of Grotowski.

Ending this exploration of French precursors to New Wave, I don’t want to give the impression that there were no other aesthetic inspirations. For Claude Chabrol and Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock is an unavoidable and overwhelming influence. Godard is always exploring the influence of Hollywood film genres on global capitalism and subjectivity. Italian Neorealism was the other major post-war realist tradition that inspired New Wavers to film in the streets rather than on sets. But those topics are well-covered in discussions of New Wave, whereas the existence of precursors in France usually gets lost in the potted histories of French New Wave’s rebellion. For the next entry, I will start talking about New Wave proper, at long last, beginning with the early works of Varda, Resnais, and Marker.