APRIL 4-9, 13-15, 19-23, 25-26

"EVERY FILM IS A MUST-SEE!" 
DAVE KEHR, NEW YORK TIMES

The French director Robert Bresson (1901-1999), one of film’s most important and influential artists, was master of a spare, rigorous, intensely metaphysical cinema that explored, with rare poetry and purity, the human struggle for grace and redemption.

Bresson made but 13 features in a film career spanning five decades; that body of work is one of the most extraordinary and uncompromising in the history of cinema. Bresson’s singular style — a stripped down, affectless aesthetic that miraculously turns austerity and asceticism into amplitude and manages to approach the immanent, express the ineffable — has been famously described, by Paul Schrader, as transcendental. Drama in a Bresson film is internal, spiritual; it derives not from plot, character, or psychology but emanates from an intense materialism that transforms objects and gestures into manifestations of the transcendent and renders, in ways both painterly and profound, the mysterious interior battles we wage with freedom, sin, salvation, and truth. One of the defining (and most controversial) characteristics of Bresson’s style is his use of actors — or, as he preferred to call them, “models.” Bresson, after his first two features, eschewed the use of professional actors; he didn’t want performers performing, actors emoting. Instead, his “models” were just another element, another object, to be manipulated in the service of his minimalist, rigorously controlled aesthetic, his aim to remove everything extraneous and leave only what is essential. “One does not create by adding,” Bresson said, “but by taking away.”

"Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music."
JEAN-LUC GODARD

It is the paradox, and the great art, of Bresson’s cinema that this intense minimalism, this intense materialism, this almost fanatical focus on gesture and objects and physical details, becomes the stuff of a profoundly metaphysical experience; an expression of the deep yearning for redemption and transcendence; a heightened, hyper-real cinema of great beauty and elegance, of rare emotional and spiritual power. It is also, as James Quandt, the curator of this touring retrospective, argues, a cinema that demands to be seen on the big screen: “No director’s work more demands it because of the physiological effects of his sound and image editing, the sheer physical authority of his meticulously constructed worlds ... Encountering Bresson on the big screen for the first time can induce a kind of vertigo, as eyes and ears dulled to inattention by conventional cinema are suddenly forced to new or heightened awareness, an effect that registers somewhere between bracing and life changing.”

Supported by:

Acknowledgments: This touring retrospective has been organized by the TIFF Cinematheque, Toronto. We are grateful to James Quandt, Senior Programmer, TIFF Cinematheque, for his dedication to this project.

Thank you also to the Institut Français; Mylène Bresson, Paris; Delphine Selles Alvarez, French Cultural Services, New York; Brian Belovarac and Sarah Finklea, Janus Films; Eric Di Bernardo, Rialto Pictures; Jake Perlin, The Film Desk; Paramount Pictures; La Cinémathèque française, Paris; Pierre Lhomme, Paris.

For assistance and support in the presentation of this retrospective in Vancouver, Pacific Cinémathèque is very grateful to the Consulate General of France in Vancouver.