Notes on Notes on the

Cinematographer
Filmmakers on Film
by Donato Totaro Volume 8, Issue 4 / April 2004 10 minutes (2375 words)

Though not exactly voluminous, there is a longstanding tradition of filmmakers who

have written critically on cinema. The nature of this writing has taken many forms, from
strictly theoretical (early Soviet masters Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, Pier
Paolo Pasolini), to essayistic (Carl Dreyer, Antonioni, Guy Maddin), to interview-based
(Truffaults Hitchcock on Hitchcock, the Farber X on X series, etc.), to
poetic/philosophical (Andrei Tarkovsky), to autobiographical (many), and to more
conventional film criticism (the New Wave auteurs, Dario Argento, Olivier Assayas).
Robert Bresson wrote a slim volume of his thoughts on cinema called Notes on
Cinematographer which defies categorisation.
What is striking and unique about Bresson is how his writing is so much like his
filmmaking: the elliptical style, the epigrammatic prose, the obtuse meanings, the
material rigidity, the conciseness, the frugality of means. It is all there in both his work
and his words. Andrei Tarkovsky, whose own work of film philosophy Sculpting in
Time is among one of the finest written by a filmmaker, admitted that not all of the
aesthetic and theoretical ideals he writes about were consummated in his film work. The
only filmmaker whom he felt did match up with his theoretical ideal was Bresson. This
is another indication of the uncanny similarity between Bressons writing and film style.
It would be ludicrous for me to try and replicate Bressons inimitable writing style, but
Id like to honor his prose by varying my own writing style and allow for a free-form,
speculative probing of his classic work Notes on the Cinematographer. Over the
following pages I will respond to selected passages of Bressons book with a
combination of spontaneous responses, analytical interjections, and frame stills from
Bressons films.

To begin, Bressons use of the term Cinematographer is not to be restricted to its

traditional meaning: a person who is placed in control of a films lighting. In short,
Cinematographer is the art of moving sound and image. Moving in the fullest sense of
cinemas vast potential for movement and rhythm: editing, actor movement, object
movement, camera movement, and the intended movement that the eye ordains both in
the diegetic world and the spectators vision unto that world.
The Model
If, on the screen, the mechanism disappears and the phrases you have made them say,
the gestures you have made them make, have become one with your models, with your
film, with you then a miracle (Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, p. 33).
Models. Mechanized outwardly, Intact, virgin within (Bresson, 77).
An actor needs to get out of himself in order to see himself in the other person. YOUR
MODELS, ONCE OUTSIDE THEMSELVES, WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET IN
AGAIN (Bresson, 43). 1

The First Bressonian model: Claude Laydu as the priest in Diary of a Country Priest
The model is the single word that appears most often in Notes on Cinematographer,
and the term most evoked by critics trying to describe Bressons cinema language. To
Bresson the model refers simply to the performer who lays bare their soul to the camera.
The model is sometimes used interchangeably with actor, but the two are not identical.
Model encompasses an attitude, the Bressonian attitude, which goes beyond
performance.
There are two general senses we can give to the meaning of model. Since so many of
Bressons performers are physically attractive, the term can refer to its most obvious
meaning: a person of compelling beauty with the classic physique of a fashion model:
slim, gaunt, almost weak and sickly looking in some cases. A second more nuanced
possibility is template, meaning as a prototype. This makes sense when you consider
that Bresson never used the same actor twice, hence each actor provides their own
template which is then broken and reshaped by another model.

Paradoxical Thought
Unbalance so as to re-balance (Bresson, 33). Absolute silence and silence obtained by a
pianissimo of noises (Bresson, 38). Practice the precept: find without seeking (Bresson,
56). Simultaneous precision and imprecision of music (Bresson, 57). Provoke the
unexpected. Expect it (Bresson, 90).

Running throughout Bressons book is this notion of paradoxical thought, of the

incongruent: movement in stillness, emotion in neutrality, expression in stoicism,
silence in sound. I would summarise this with my own Bressonian phrase: Create a
formidable construct and then make it disappear.
Materialist or Spiritualist?
See beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give
them a new dependence (Bresson, 84).
In Colin Burnetts two-part Text Here essay Reassessing the Theory of Transcendental
Style he refers to the ongoing critical debate between those who persist on seeing
Bresson as an unrepentant Transcendentalist and those who read him as a
Materialist. A likely response is that he is at once both, someone for whom the beauty
and the horror of the spiritual is manifest on earth through bodily presence, the
physicality of objects and the relationship between the two. Perhaps the most important
being the latter, as the above quote suggests. This is why he gives so much space to
objects that sear through the screens surface significance and reverberate upon the
emotional state of the human character. Is his attachment to bodily detail and physical
objects just that: a love of things themselves? Or does the probing go further? Perhaps
this partially explains the many suicides that occur in Bressons films: suicide as an
expression of the ultimate and final separation of spirit and body, the transcendent from
the material. In either case, one can never truly claim that Bresson is a Materialist in the
sense of one who believes only in the reality of matter. Bressons film world, or at least
the experience of viewing his films, is more complex than what any duality could
suggest.

The Devil, Probably

Montaigne: The movements of the soul were born with the same progression as
those of the body (Bresson, 34-35).
This quote again invokes the noted debate between the Transcendentalists and
Materialists. The body = the soul, not the body and the soul. This passage and its
repercussions recalls Henri Bergsons attempts in Matter and Memory (1897) to resolve
the mind-body dualism. To help solve this age-old philosophical problem Bergson
distinguished between two types of memory, habit formed memory and pure
recollection (habitual memory and pure memory). The former is stored in the brain
(matter), the service-house of action, and the latter within consciousness (life). The
brain, with the aid of perception, censors the memories and selects the ones that are
most necessary for immediate action. Pure perception helps select what is necessary for
the bodily function. However, pure perception and pure memory exist only in theory
because perception is always affected by memory and pure memory is dependent on the
brain for materialization. Therefore the brain, which cannot actually produce a
representation or image, can be seen as the meeting house for mind and matter.
Bergson applies this logic to attain balance between idealism (mind) and realism (body).
Neither pure consciousness nor pure things-in-themselves exist wholly independently of
one another. Although the brain and the body may be matter based and consciousness
and pure memory spirit based, common sense dictates that they intersect, since the
mind/brain/consciousness partakes of the same material world. Likewise in Bressons
films, one gets the sense that objects and human beings never exist wholly
independently of one another.
Out of this we can construct a Bergsonian thought which suggests Bressons
materialist spiritualism: perception is consciousness projected out into the world of
matter. Perception is a selective function of the brain that appraises the field of matter
according to its bodily purpose or action. One could understand Bressons exacting
editing in much the same way, isolating only what is necessary to the singularity of the
action. Like the brain, Bressons directing functions as a service-house of action
censoring his models emotional spectrum by having them repeat lines again and
again as A way of recovering the automatism of real life (Bresson, 59). What features
as an unhappy yet necessary part of quotidian life in Bergsons philosophical
understanding of social utility habitual, memorized behaviour becomes a source of
instinctive and lucid meaning in Bressons films.

Inward Movements
Unusual approaches to bodies. On the watch for the most imperceptible, the most
inward movements (Bresson, 34-35).
Your camera catches not only physical movements that are inapprehensible by pencil,
brush or pen, but also certain states of soul recognizable by indices which it alone can
reveal (Bresson, 97).

Pickpocket
What can Bresson mean by inward movements? The movement that we
paradoxically see in stillness? This can again be related to Bergson. The mind perceives
the real world, creates an idea of it, but the mind itself is made of the same substance as
that which it imagines. Hence Bresson, like Bergson, makes no distinction between
movement imagined or movement seen, which translates cinematographically, to
movement expressed through editing and static glances, or movements enacted
physically through moving subjects or moving camera.
Bergson writes that it is indisputable that one man is distinct from another man, as is
each tree or stone; and yet, the separation between a thing and its environment can
not be absolutely definite and clear-cut; there is a passage by insensible gradations from
one to the other: the close solidarity which binds all the objects of the material
universe. 2 Bergsons insensible gradations parallel Bressons inward movements,
which inform the metaphysical link that exists between objects and humans across all of
Bressons work.

The priest encounters the wrath of an ugly husband from Diary of a Country Priest
The rhythmic value of a noise (Bresson, 42).

Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence (Bresson, 52).
Why does Bresson give such great stress on sound, even more so than the image? There
are two general responses. The following quote points the way to the first:
One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is
none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life (Bresson, 60).
We can see here how sound has a more realistic and graphic potential than the image.
Both the camera and the sound recorder are mechanical interventions, and yet Bresson
sees one as being less of a distraction as a reproduction of the original. What this
implies is that the ear is less likely to discern or be ontologically bothered by a
technologically mediated difference. The ear accepts reproductions more willingly than
the eye.
A locomotives whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station (Bresson, 72).
For Bresson sound evokes a spectators imaginative faculties more than any images can,
which pits Bresson against the commonly held Western bias for the hierarchy of sight
over the other senses.
The Soundtrack Invented Silence (Bresson, 38).
Here we are reminded of another stalwart cinema enfant terrible, Stan Brakhage, who
once said in relation to his own late era silent films, that true silent cinema only became
possible with the advent of sound.
All husbands are ugly (Bresson, 40).

The priest encounters the wrath of an ugly husband from Diary of a Country Priest
The priest encounters the wrath of an ugly husband from Diary of a Country Priest
Your images will release their phosphorus (Bresson, p. 82).

Pickpocket
On Looks
The ejaculatory force of the eye (Bresson, 12).

Editing
Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence
(Bresson, 20).
Dont let your background (avenues, squares, public gardens, subway) absorb the faces
you are applying to them (Bresson, 29).

One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another matter. (Not to
spread out.) (Bresson, 87).
Empty the pond to get the fish (Bresson, 87).
Obvious travelling or panning shots do not correspond to the movements of the eye.
This is to separate the eye from the body. (One should not use the camera as if it were a
broom) (Bresson, 89).
No director has ever expressed as much with as little. Bresson recalls the great electric
blues guitar masters, such as B.B. King and Albert King, who would express more with

their limited range of pet phrases than other guitarists would with their busy, rapid-fire
speed runs. Like those blues masters, Bresson demonstrates just how important style is.
On the surface Bressons films may seem like a neo-realist mantra about showing 90
minutes in the life of a man where nothing happens. Bressons films also show us the
mundane non-happenings and non-dramatic aspects of life, but they feel completely
different from the neorealist trappings of Zavattini, Rossellini, and De Sica. Why?
Firstly, the sucking out of drama is done dramatically: things that are normally shown
are withheld. In The Devil, Probably, the camera is inside a bus with its load of
passengers. We hear the sounds of an accident, screeching wheels and a loud bang, but
the camera stays inside filming the uneventful fully opened bus door (doors being a
central recurring prop in Bressons work). Things that are shown are shown with
abnormal force and precision. One only has to recall the many close-up shots of
working hands and fingers and pockets and purses in Pickpocket; in one famous
exchange (also in a bus) the fluid montage likens the art of thievery to a majestic ballet.
As Raymond Durgnat nicely phrased it, The physical is spiritualised; the eternal
verities permeate the material world. The location photography neo-realism- express
not just a particular place, a mood, but a spiritual condition of man without God.(46)
3
Ill leave the final words to Andrei Tarkovsky, who was, notoriously so, not one to
throw away compliments:
Robert Bresson is for me an example of a real and genuine film-makerHe obeys only
certain higher, objective laws of ArtBresson is the only person who remained himself
and survived all the pressures brought by fame. 4

Notes
1. All quotes by Robert Bresson are taken from Notes on the Cinematographer.
1975 With an Introduction by J.M.G. Le Clzio. Translated from the French by
Jonathan Griffin (London: Quartet Encounters, 1986).
2. Matter and Memory. Translation from the French by Nancy Margaret Paul and
W. Scott Palmer. 1896. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1988, p. 209.
3. Raymond Durgnat, Le Journal dun Cure de Campagne, in The Films of
Robert Bresson, ed. Ian Cameron. (New York: Praeger, Inc.), 42-50.
4. Andrei Tarkovsky, printed in Kinovedcheskie zapiski 14, 1992, quoted in Julian
Graffy, Private Lives of Russian Cinema, Sight and Sound, March 1993, 29.