MARCO REFERENCIAL

A rainy rush-hour morning. A woman enters the bus from the back door. The other passengers sit facing forwards in their rows of seats, a uniformly paced group of shoulders and heads like plaster busts viewed from the wrong side in a museum. No eye contact. Good. She too becomes the back of a head, directing her eyes, like the others, into the distance in front of her. They could be sleeping, except even sleep would be expressed by a slump of the shoulders. They won’t remember this journey, they already no longer remember getting onto the bus, sitting down in the seat, directing the eyes; they are not aware of their own efficiency. The light inside the bus is muted; flickering yellow overhead light. The rhythm of the bus: low engine rumble, vibrating metal heater, a bell, the faint sound of money. Today is identical to every day but today is also absolutely singular. Words and phrases from conversations begin to drift back, though no-one moves their head to address another; they are not talking to each other but to themselves, aloud. The voices - random, now here, now there.

‘Governments are short-sighted’

‘Don’t accuse governments. No government in the world can boast that it is governing’ It’s the masses that determine events’

‘Obscure forces whose laws are unfathomable’ ‘Yes something drives us against our will’

You have to go along with it’

And we do so so as not to appear conspicuous' ‘So who is it that makes a mockery of humanity?’ ‘Who’s leading us by the nose?’

‘The devil probably’

And now, abruptly, all sound stops. The bus lights go off but on-one moves. The bus driver leans out of the cab into the bus, turning his head to face the passengers, then freezing in this position, with his eyes off the road, the bus slides silently into a lamp post. For a while nothing moves. There is no sound. Just frozen non-eye contact. Gradually, all around the outside of the bus, people in cars begin to honk their horns until the sound becomes one long deafening noise. ^

X

Condensed into slightly more than two minutes of film, the bus sequence from Le diable, probablement, contains the nexus of Bresson’s cinematic work. An ordinary day, though always rather extra-ordmary in a Bresson film, everything functioning smoothly, so smoothly as to be inhuman and suffocating. The people travelling on the early morning bus occupy their space and roles with neither flicker of hesitation nor thought. For the viewer, for most of this sequence the travellers are faceless, one only gets to know them visually by

^ Partial transcription, partial interpretation of a scene from Robert Bresson’s Le diable, probablement fThe Devil, Probably], 1977, 35mm, 92m, colour.

the backs of heads, static postures and close-ups of hands resting on laps, ticket taking, button pressing and money passing. Hands in Bresson’s work are more important than faces. Yet in this scenario, unlike the Tokyo underground trip, Monday 20th March 1995,^ those woven into the fabric of this waking sleep begin to speak. One cannot say they communicate, because Bresson doesn’t allow them the freedom to leave their interior position and truly interact,^ Rather, words are in the air - odd unconnected ideas and dialogue which are of course really connected. Within the closed environment of the bus, the enclosed inhabitants open just a little, ajar rather than open, and each begins to wonder ‘aloud,’ to no-one in particular but to everyone at the same time including us the viewer, about the controlling force behind their world. Is it the government? The people? Us? Then a name is suggested, the devil, though only probably. Perhaps the devil is nothing more than a scapegoat. Nevertheless this utterance is enough to create a rupture in the habitual scheme of things; time changes, a breach occurs where all is frozen in place, as though the devil, named and brought into the field of consciousness, has taken the life out of things. As though in a psychoanalytic group session at the height of free association, the unspoken tumbles out from just beneath the surface where it waited to be voiced: The Devil, The break, an empty frozen suspended moment, broken again by the overwhelming impatience of travellers outside this vacuum of a bus which is now the space of a group unconscious. Soon after things will resume their rhythm and the devil will not be mentioned again for the duration of the film, though now he has been suggested to our cinematically hypnotised minds, his shadow never quite goes away. Still, the film returns to its empty fluidity and one follows the events, as one always does with Bresson’s later films, with a sense that something small has happened which is actually not small, but will alter the entire course of events that follow in this closed world of the film. The sleepwalkers, jolted awake for a brief moment could not sustain wakefulness - the question is: do we?

I have chosen to look at the films o f Bresson because of his self-confessed use of habit and repetition in every aspect of his film-making process, from controlling the movements and gestures of the figures in his films to the final stage of editing and his notion of cinematography in general. Where much of my thesis has involved looking at habit from the empirical point of view of its host, Bresson’s work provides a means of testing how

^ Cf, Chapter Three, pp, ,,,

^ Richard Roud, ‘The Redemption of Despair,’ Film Comment, September-October, 1977, p, 23, describes ‘dialogue’ in Bresson’s films as ‘alternating monologues,’

habit and repetition affect the viewer when used as an aesthetic device. The typical surface aesthetic of a Bresson film is highly composed and flat, a monochrome two-dimensional vision of everyday life, even when the film stock is colour."^ In addition to this, Bresson tends to suffocate narrative tension, adopting instead to use habit and repetition to build up both an intensity of unexpressed emotion, and an hypnotic suspension in the viewer.^ Both of these elements escalate into an under the surface claustrophobia and panic, in which one longs for stoppage or escape from the blank sameness o f it all, without perhaps realising one has been lulled into this position. Bresson is in this respect like Beckett but colder, denying even the chance for shifty laughter. As one endures the film, some kind o f rupture becomes vital, and Bresson doesn’t deny us that release, though the rupture itself might only occupy a moment and as in the bus sequence of Le diable, probablement, might easily be missed.

In many ways Bresson is a cruel and unforgiving film-maker, hard on himself, hard on those he works with and hard on the viewer; but I hope to show that perhaps he is so, necessarily.

'But I don't want to d ie '... 'Of course you do'

Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and thought.^

Bresson’s films are populated by habitual bodies which move like zombies as though dead or asleep; they display no psychological depth, no sense of self or memory, and rarely any emotion. Their impersonal, automated movement is what Bresson refers to as ‘natural’ movement - though for the viewer of his films, these figures seem far from natural, and are perhaps the ultimate sleepwalkers.

^ Exceptions to this rule can be found, for instance, in Bresson’s largest budget film, Lancelot du Lac [Lancelot of the Lake], 1974, 35mm, 85m, col., which is a ‘costume drama’ (of sorts). However, even with this and other historical allegories such as Le Procès de Jeanne d ’Arc [The Trial of Joan of Arc],

1962, 35mm, 65m, bw., Bresson maintains a rather flat quality of everydayness.

^ This is also apparent in the films of Chantai Akerman. She describes how she uses time and pace in her film-making to achieve this: ‘I want the audience to feel their own sense of time, the pacing and timing of the movie is not there as information to make the story go forward. You have to feel something, and that happens through time and pace. That’s the essence of movie making.’ Akerman interviewed by Hone Cheshire, Film Waves 14:1, 2001, p. 23.

^Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin, London: Quartet Encounters, 1986, p. 22. Bresson remained reclusive throughout his working years, making only 13 films between 1943-1981. Apart from a few scattered interviews over the years, this slim book of short oracular pronouncements remains the only account from Bresson himself on his own working

Many of the issues addressed throughout this thesis: habit, repetition, automatism, somnambulism, fate, death and the unconscious are explored in Bresson’s cinematic project, and through his manipulation of these themes, Bresson’s quest is to find and reveal the other ‘tenth’ of human movement, (it is only nine-tenths of human movement that obey habit and automatism), though he never elucidates in words what the other tenth might be. Over his lifetime Bresson’s stringent aesthetic control became more and more urgent and more and more pessimistic in regard to human freedom, and the missing ‘tenth’ is relegated to smaller and smaller moments of rupture. In 1977, the bus sequence in Le diable, probablement provides the film’s only break from a sense of absolute cold pre-determination. Nine years later in his next and final film, L ’Argent, the final tenth of movement has virtually disappeared. Watching the trajectory of Bresson’s films is in some senses like watching the process of someone gradually losing faith in any kind of human freedom from ‘fate.’^ The (disappearing) theme of human freedom, for Bresson, may or may not be theological,* but ultimately, one can situate Bresson’s question as: how can we, human beings, know precisely what it is that is determining us - and do we have any say in the matter? This was also Kleist’s dilemma. When he chose the puppet and the God as representatives of ‘grace,’ it was because both are ultimately free from human consciousness and the destabilisation of an only partial knowledge. Bresson’s figures do have a puppet-like quality, though as we

practise. Originally published in 1975 as Notes sur le cinématographe, it consists of working notes accumulated between 1950 and 1974,

^ A number of articles chart the increasingly despairing tone of Bresson’s films. Cf. Jan Dawson, ‘Invisible Enemy,’ Film Comment, September-October 1977, pp. 24-25; Michael Dempsey, ‘Despair Abounding: The Recent Films of Robert Bresson,’ Film Quarterly, Fall 1980, pp. 2-15; and Colin L. Westerbeck, ‘Robert Bresson’s Austere Vision,’ Artforum, November 1976, pp. 52-57.

* The spiritual dimension of Bresson’s films is a much debated point, particularly given Bresson’s supposedly orthodox Catholicism. Cf. in particular, Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, California: Da Capo Press, 1972, pp. 57-109. On the other hand, Bresson’s films are often written about from a purely formalist perspective, as in P. Adams Sitney, ‘Cinematography vs. the Cinema: Bresson’s Figures,’ Modernist Montage: The Obscurity o f Vision in Cinema and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 81-100. Stephen Shapiro ‘A Note on Bresson,’ The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, pp. 241-254, describes Bresson as a materialist and compares his films with Andy Warhol’s, both of whom, he says, share a common materialist ground of ‘surface aesthetics,’ ‘unsignifying details,’ ‘focus on the body,’ ‘stasis’ and ‘refusal of emotional involvement.’ As almost all of the claims about Bresson’s ‘spiritual’ or religious beliefs have at some point or another been rejected by Bresson himself, I will not pursue his work as illustrating any particular religious belief, feeling closer to Deleuze’s description of the ‘spiritual’ in film as a ‘movement of thought,’ to which I will refer later. In general, I go along with Kent Jones, L Argent, London: BFI, 1999, p. 19, who points out that ‘as ‘perfect’ as [Bresson’s] films seem, as systematic and as governed by firm beliefs, there is no intellectual or spiritual ‘last stop’ - there is no key, either formal or religious that will unlock the door to ultimate meaning.’ For my part, I have no desire to find an ‘ultimate meaning’ or a ‘key’ to understanding Bresson’s films, which both move and fascinate me perhaps precisely because there is no single key.

have seen with Kleist, the most important attribute of grace is not necessarily found in the appearance of a particular kind of movement, but is linked rather to what structures a particular kind of movement - thus in ‘On the Marionette Theatre,’ not only is the puppet described as graceful, so too is the instinctively driven fencing bear.^ What these exemplars of grace have in common is their freedom from self-consciousness. Likewise, in order to achieve a conceivable quality of grace, Bresson knows that no amount of prescribed aesthetic training can lead to the kind of movement that stems from lack of consciousness - one can’t devise a graceful quality that can be consciously repeated and mimicked; Bresson is not interested in the easily admired, superficial ‘grace’ o f the skilled and seductive actor. For Bresson, grace is already in us all, only we have buried it so deeply in our understanding of ourselves, we have forgotten we have it. The kind o f grace Bresson seeks to reveal is in this respect often somewhat unsettling for the viewer to see because it animates his figures in a way that makes them seem ‘inhuman’ in their self-certainty; one does not receive from them the kind of conscious gestural or facial cues of expression that can be easily read; these are mysterious figures, neither alive nor dead - sleepwalking through a filmscape. Although as we will see, Bresson does use very strict methods with the actors in his films, he positions himself only partly in the role of puppet master because what he is interested in revealing is what neither he nor the figures themselves can control - but that this, as we saw in Chapter 4, must be literally forced out. Intense constriction of the body through highly controlled habit is Bresson’s means of forcing the necessity of such an ‘escape.’

Like Kleist, Bresson’s own position is something o f a self-crucifixion between two ultimately untenable extremes; an attempt to sustain a precarious balance between the desire for both absolute control and absolute subm ission.A nd, as though mutely echoing Christ’s words, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ Bresson’s work expresses the precarious and finite situation of human ignorance as to whether it is something transcendent like a God that speaks through our movements, or something earthbound. The frequency of suicide in, and the enormous pessimism of his later films reveals Bresson’s development of this issue. In earlier films, he inevitably reconciles the individual with the animating hand of a benevolent God, as we see in Un condamné à mort s ’est échappé^^ in which the protagonist, Fontaine, against all the odds, is represented as ultimately bound for liberation and escape.

^ Cf. Chapters 1 and 2 in relation to Kleist’s ‘On the Marionette Theatre.’

It is for this reason perhaps more than any other that I have chosen to look at the work of Bresson rather than directors such as Chantai Akerman in relation to cinema and habit. I find myself placed in a dilemma with Bresson’s films, on the one hand being extremely drawn to them, while on the other finding them deeply problematic, whereas with Akerman, my position feels more stable.

In later films, as with the conversation during the bus scene from Le diable, probablement', when the anonymous passenger asks ‘Who’s leading us by the nose?’ he is informed by another anonymous passenger, that we are controlled by the devil - probably. This probably is telling, because although it still contains within it a glimmer of hope, as with Pascal’s Wager, one is reduced to gambling on possibilities; belief is fading.

In the midst of all this there is habit and Bresson’s particular focus on habit in his work. Habit is both the modulation between the conscious body in the world and its deeper set of unconscious tendencies or instincts, but also maintains an element of autonomy and choice - it begins with consciousness, thus prevents the one from being reduced to the limited scope of the puppet, and also prevents one fi'om attaining ‘grace’ in Kleist’s sense. While on the other hand, Bresson uses habit very specifically as an aesthetic device - the people we see in his films are not habitual, but are habituated by Bresson. His view of, or perhaps fear of, the world as completely mechanically determined, leads him to create in his films not a representation of a completely determined world, because his films bear no resemblance to our empirical experience of the world. This is a world artificially determined by him, and in the same way that Kleist saw in the puppet and its master a miniature, ‘ideal’ version of the roles of God and human contained on the stage, Bresson uses the environment of film as a microcosm of the world.

Paradoxically, the other tenth of movement that Bresson hopes will emerge beyond his control is precisely what gives rise to his use of habit as a working process, ‘It is not necessary to believe that one can only arrive at truth through truth. I try to arrive at truth through something ... mechanical if you like.’’^ In a peculiar reversal, Bresson presents the automatism of nature as automatism - it therefore appears absolutely unlike nature in terms of nature’s empirical unpredictability. In effect, he uses habit to recreate an appearance of the automatism of nature as it should appear in terms o f an idea of automatism, i.e. like clockwork. And through this he forces the viewer to consider the consequences of belief in a mechanistic universe, forces them into the tightest comers in which a vague desire for

" Bresson, Un condamné â mort s ’est échappé [A Man Escaped], France, 1956, 95m., bw.