A BitterSweet Life

[Robert Bresson’s words] shine like stars, showing us the simple and difficult path toward perfection. - J. M. G. Le Clézio

In 1975, French director Robert Bresson published Notes sur le Cinématographe, a book of noted ideas on filmmaking. The publication is commonly translated as Notes on Cinematography or Notes on the Cinematographer, though a faithful translation to Bresson’s concept of cinema would be Notes on Cinematograph (cinematography in French is “cinématographie”). When Bresson speaks of cinematograph, he speaks of a cinema elevated to its own proper art form. This form of cinematic art stood against what he viewed to be movies as recordings of theatre, or filmed plays. He states, “As much as theater is an external and decorative art—which is not pejorative in my mind—to that same degree, the goal, the destination of cinematograph—I do not say cinema [but] cinematograph, that is to say the art of cinema if it exists—is interiorization, intimacy, isolation. That is to say, profoundness.”

Metteur en scène or director. The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself

Two kinds of films: those that employ the means of theatre (actors, staging, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce, and those that employ the means of the cinematograph and use the camera in order to create.

Cinematograph is a writing with images in movement and with sounds.

Cinematographic film where expression is obtained by relations of images and of sounds, and not by mimicry, of gestures and intonations of voice (whether of actors or of non-actors). One that does not analyze nor explain. One that recomposes.

It is necessary that an image transforms itself by contact with other images like a color in contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

Cinematographic film where images, like the words in a dictionary, only have power and value through their position and relation.

Of two deaths and three births.

My film is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.*

*To “cinematograph” someone is not to endow him with life. It is because they are living that actors render a stage play alive.

Filming. To put oneself in a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet to see things beforehand.

Cinematograph, military art. To prepare a film like a battle.*

*At Hedin, we all stayed at the Hotel of France. During the night, I was haunted by Napoleon’s saying: “I make my battle plans with the spirit of my sleeping soldiers.”

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

Let it be the intimate union of the images that charges them with emotion.

A too expected image (cliché) will never seem right, even if it is.

Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the opposite.

Montaigne: The movements of the soul were born with the same progression as those of the body.

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outside.

The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive. The whistle of a locomotive imprints in us a vision of the whole station.

One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another thing. (Not to spread out.)

The beauty of your film will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable that they will emit.

The future of cinematograph is to a new race of young solitaires who will shoot films by putting their last cent into it and without letting themselves be owned by the material routines of the trade.

DIVINATION, this name, how not to associate it with the two sublime machines which I use for my work? Camera and tape recorder, take me far away from the intelligence that complicates everything.