Background

Robert Bresson was born on September 25, 1901 (some sources say 1907) in Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France. He was the son of Léon Bresson, a French officer, and Marie-Élisabeth Bresson.

Education

Robert Bresson was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, and turned to painting after graduating.

Career

Robert Bresson originally began his career as a painter and photographer before moving to films. In the mid-1930s, he worked as a scriptwriter on comedies. Bresson's writer credits include C'Était un Musicien (1933), Les Jumeaux de Brighton (1936), and Courier Sud (1937), which was based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novel. He was also René Clair's assistant on the uncompleted Air Pur. Bresson's first film, Les Affaires publiques (1934), was made to serve as a "filter" to precede the main feature.

He was a prisoner of the German Army in 1941 while serving during World War II and after his release he completed his first feature film, Les Anges du Peche (title means "Angels of the Streets") in 1943. Bresson never joined in such cinema movements as the French New Wave, choosing instead to make films that suited his own taste. In 1945 he produced Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne).

In 1947, Bresson went to Rome to work on a screenplay of the life of St. Ignatius Loyola, but the film was never realized. Based on a novel by Bernanos, Journal D'un Curé De Campagne (1950) was awarded the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion and became a commercial success. This was his last use of Grunenwald and any professional actors. Subsequently, he cast by face, gesture and even by voice over the telephone.

In 1956 Bresson made the film that became - and remained - his greatest popular success, Un Condamné à Mort S'est Echappé (A Man Escaped). Although life for Bresson never became easy, this success led to six features in the following 15 years - Pickpocket (1959), Le Procès De Jeanne d'Arc (1961), Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1969) and his first films in colour, Une Femme Douce (1969) and Quatre Nuits D'un Reveur (1971), the last two taken from Dostoevsky. Bresson's first use of Dostoevsky was more obliquely in Pickpocket, where the inspiration is Crime And Punishment.

In 1974, Bresson completed a long cherished project. Once planned as an English-based film, Lancelot Du Lac was reissued in 1994 and still looked years ahead of its time, with its timeless quality and its concern with spirituality and earthliness. He followed this classical work with his most controversial one, Le Diable, Probablement (1977), inspired by a newspaper report of a student who committed suicide by proxy - paying another boy to shoot him.

In addition to the screenplays, Bresson completed one book: Notes sur le cinematographe (title means "Notes on Cinematography") in 1975. In 1983 Robert Bresson made his last film L'Argent (title means "Money").

Achievements

• Robert Bresson was perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir. He created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form's grammatical and expressive possibilities. Bresson received numerous awards during his lifetime and took top honors at the Cannes Film Festival for A Man Escaped and L'Argent.
  
  He has influenced a number of other filmmakers, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch, the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismäki, and Paul Schrader. His book "Notes on the Cinematographer" is one of the most respected books on film theory and criticism.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Notes on the Cinematograph

    (Notes on the Cinematograph distills the essence of Bresso...)

    1975

• movie

  • A Man Escaped

    (Based on the account of an imprisoned French Resistance l...)

    1956
  • The Trial of Joan of Arc

    (A reconstruction of the trial of Joan of Arc (based entir...)

    1962
  • Au Hasard Balthazar

    (A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmm...)

    1966
  • Pickpocket

    (This incomparable story of crime and redemption from the ...)

    1959
  • L'Argent

    (In his ruthlessly clear-eyed final film, French master Ro...)

    1983
  • Four Nights of a Dreamer

    (The 'dreamer' is Jacques, a young painter, who by chance ...)

    1971
  • Angels of Sin

    (Anne-Marie (Renée Faure), a well-off young woman, decides...)

    1943
  • Mouchette

    (A young girl living in the French countryside suffers con...)

    1967
  • The Devil, Probably

    (An alienated Paris youth and his friends seek life's mean...)

    1977
  • Ladies of the Bois de Bologne

    (A society lady engineers a marriage between her lover and...)

    1945
  • Diary of a Country Priest

    (A new priest arrives in the rural French village of Ambri...)

    1951
  • A Gentle Woman

    (The film opens with a falling scarf, leading us to a youn...)

    1969
  • Lancelot of the Lake

    (King Arthur has sent out 100 knights to retrieve the Holy...)

    1974

Views

Robert Bresson believed that aspiring filmmakers should study music, painting and poetry - and not attend film school.

Quotations: "Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head."

"My movie 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 to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water."

Personality

Robert Bresson was notorious for refusing to discuss his personal life, or even to talk much about his own work. He was also an accomplished pianist, playing until he "lost the nimbleness" in his fingers. Music remained a dominant interest in his life.

Quotes from others about the person

• "He [Robert Bresson] is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." - Jean-Luc Godard.

Interests

• playing piano, music

Connections

In 1926 Robert Bresson married Leidia Van der Zee. Later, she died. In the early 1990s, he married Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch, who had been his assistant director from Quatre nuits d'un rêveur.

Father:

Leon Bresson

Mother:

Marie-Elisabeth Bresson

Spouse:

Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch

late spouse:

Leidia Van der Zee

References

• Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film
  2003
• Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film
  2010