A review by atticmoth
Notes Sur Le Cinema by Robert Bresson

challenging funny informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Robert Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe was my favorite professor’s textbook of choice in film school, and I see why. She would have us choose one of Bresson’s famous aphorisms (“Let it be the intimate union of the images that charges them with emotion”) and shoot a short inspired by it or using the technique that he puts forth. It’s only now that I read it through completely (and in French for the first time).  The book is composed solely of these poetic little witticisms, taken from Bresson’s journals, and if I were to read it all at once I wouldn’t understand his philosophy as well as I do having read just a page a day. I’ve only seen one of Bresson’s films, Pickpocket, and I can’t say I loved it, but his style was immediately obvious. Perhaps I should say lack of style: Sidney Lumet said “Good style, to me, is unseen style. It is style that is felt.” Bresson shows a tremendous commitment to naturalism and denounces a lot of techniques that he sees as disingenuous. There’s a commitment to depicting truth and reality; he calls actors “models” which is perhaps lost in translation but he doesn’t mean it in an objectifying way, he uses this technique to strip away layers of theatrical performance so the underlying raw emotion is felt onscreen. One of the things he perhaps unfairly criticizes throughout is theatricality (somehow managing to call Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc “masquerade”), which he sees as representing the inauthentic in every way. This stands in stark opposition to Lumet’s philosophy, which grew out of the time he spent in theater and live television, and his mastery disproves Bresson’s point. I couldn’t recommend one over the other because they complement each other; I think any masterclass in film would include both Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe and Lumet’s Making Movies.