THE POETRY OF PRECISION: THE FILMS OF ROBERT BRESSON at TIFF Cinematheque (350 King West) from today (Thursday, February 9) to March 30. tiff.net. See Indie & Rep Film. Rating: NNNNN
There can be poetry in stillness. More effectively than any other narrative medium, film allows us to watch a story unfold – to truly examine it, from every angle and in incredible intimacy – before our eyes.
A handful of filmmakers have been able to turn that intimacy into art, and from art into transcendence. Yasujiro Ozu did it. Chantal Akerman. Terrence Malick. And then there’s Robert Bresson, who may well have done it best.
The French filmmaker, who died in 1999, will be celebrated at the Lightbox starting this week with a new retrospective organized by TIFF Cinematheque’s James Quandt. Titled The Poetry Of Precision, it’s the first full Bresson retrospective in 14 years, allowing Toronto cineastes to expand their understanding of the filmmaker beyond the handful of titles available on DVD in North America.
And trust me, Bresson deserves your understanding. A filmmaker of profound ideas and obsessive intellectual focus, he uses the film frame as an arena for spiritual inquiry. Employing a cinematic language that borders on the stark, he approaches his subjects almost as specimens, steeping us in their environments and allowing them to reveal themselves over time.
Bresson’s uncluttered, austere filmmaking never draws attention to itself, even when the story might call for it. His 1957 drama A Man Escaped, which opens the series on Thursday and is shown again Sunday (February 12), is the most existential film about a prison break ever made.
The filmmaker’s subject is a French Resistance leader (François Leterrier) awaiting execution in a Nazi POW camp. Meticulously reconstructed from actual events, this could be the stuff of a white-knuckle thriller, but Bresson presents it as an existential drama, measuring out the meticulous preparations for escape as more and more precious time slides away. Plenty of movies feature heroes who say they’re risking everything A Man Escaped allows us to glimpse what that might really be like, and the moral choices that go along with it.
Morality was always a focus of Bresson’s films, whether it was personal, situational or spiritual. Diary Of A Country Priest (Sunday, February 12 March 3) finds a young padre (Claude Laydu) with a terminal illness looking for grace among his venal congregation. Au Hasard Balthazar (February 26 and March 1) seems to consider all of human existence through the experiences of a donkey passed from owner to owner.
And then there are the films inspired by Russian literature. Pickpocket (Friday, February 10 March 1) transposes the action of Dostoevsky’s Crime And Punishment to 1959 Paris, as a thief (Martin LaSalle) moves from one unwitting victim to the next, ruining lives without remorse or reflection.
Decades later, Bresson would play a variation on Pickpocket’s theme in his final film, L’Argent (March 17 and 18). Adapted from a Tolstoy novella, the 1983 feature follows a counterfeit 500-franc note as it’s passed from hand to hand, corrupting everyone it touches and eventually landing in the possession of an unwitting truck driver (Christian Patey).
These aren’t Bresson’s only great works, mind you. His filmography also includes the glorious mythological reinterpretation Lancelot Du Lac (February 20 and March 6), the grim procedural The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (March 2) and the fascinating The Devil, Probably (March 4 and March 15), a study of college-student nihilism dubbed “the most punk film ever made” by none other than Richard Hell.
It may seem odd, a director as composed and precise as Bresson being credited with making a punk movie. Just watch, and see, and you’ll understand.
normw@nowtoronto.com
