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This chapter suggests that the transcendental tradition of Bresson criticism has been too much concerned with the theological implications of cells and too little concerned with the crimes themselves. In Bresson’s early work, crime is considered not as the predicate to a confinement that leads to the acceptance of grace, but as a form of social liberation, as a necessary form of revolt against the dominant social formation and the reeducative function of the prison described so well by Michel Foucault. In the criminal dimension of A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, crime is not a prelude to religious conversion, but the beginning of a revolutionary conception of crime presented in the most incendiary of all forms.

Paul Schrader’s connection with director Robert Bresson is often explored through his male characters, the ‘man in his room’ of Light Sleeper and American Gigolo, but Taxi Driver before them and First Reformed most recently. However, Schrader’s two primary experiments with female characters, Cat People (1982) and Patty Hearst (1988), also follow a similar Bressonian trajectory and end with each female character incarcerated, yet finding a kind of spiritual freedom that helps them realize their identities. This chapter explores Schrader’s women primarily through close examination of Cat People’s Irina (Nastassja Kinski) and Natasha Richardson’s eponymous heroine in Patty Hearst, but use his representation of women in the male-driven films for points of comparison and contrast. In addition, this chapter approaches Schrader’s women as reflections of his male characters, many of whom are driven by existential anxiety that motivates them to seek self-actualization in redemptive violence.

This chapter reads First Reformed as an embodiment and fulfillment of Paul Schrader’s career, a capstone that serves as a meditation on our responsibilities toward each other, our earth, and god. The transcendental style, the quest for redemption, a sense of restraint punctuated by violent action--these qualities have dominated Schrader’s career since the publication of Transcendental Stylein Film until 2017, when he updated that text while writing and directing a film about a struggling pastor in a small church in upstate New York. First Reformed also contains nods to his filmic influences, including Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and his own work on Taxi Driver. This chapter surveys these many influences and self-references to read Schrader’s most recent film as a culmination of his life in film.

This chapter looks at four main styles representing the most important trends that influenced art filmmakers during the late modern period. Not all these tendencies were equally strong or influential in all periods during late modern cinema. Some of the general forms are not late modern inventions. Minimalism, for example, appeared already in the early modern period. Some of the forms discussed in the chapter may also characterize classical films, such as theatrical stylization. What makes the styles genuine ingredients of modernism is their specific manner of depicting the main aesthetic formal principles: abstraction, subjectivity, and reflexivity. The chapter also discusses three main trends within modern minimalist form. The first is metonymic minimalism, epitomized by Robert Bresson's films. The second is analytical minimalism, represented by Michelangelo Antonioni's films between 1957 and 1966. The third is expressive minimalism, and its main representative is Ingmar Bergman in his films made between 1961 and 1972.

This essay examines Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar in which, through the filmic congruence of animal and human bodies, we are made to rethink the meaningfulness of the distinction that separates animal and human forms of embodiment—specifically, we are asked to rethink the roles of reason and will in making us who we are, a reconception that owes a debt to “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” For Montaigne animal communication, which does not depend on speech or even voice, has a human equivalent in involuntary gesture and posture.

This essay engages two strains of Tolstoy’s writing. In the first, the sight of death is the foundation of ethical understanding; in the second, if ethical understanding is practiced, there is no death of any consequence. The latter half of the essay turns to Bresson’s L’Argent, a filmic adaptation of Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon” which transforms Tolstoy’s gospelized ethics to an immanent ethics, raising the question of whether ethics is phenomenal and embodied (as in Levinas and Derrida) or whether it is evental (as in Badiou). An examination of aspects of Wittgenstein’s writing on ethics, T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, and Tolstoy’s fable “Alyosha Gorshok” sharpen the consideration of whether ethics is natural or supernatural.

This essay examines how Bresson’s cinematography captures phenomena outside a situating placement, specifically the ways in which The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette, and A Man Escaped dismantle characterlogical, ideological, and taxonomic understandings of the essence of a thing. Deleuze’s concept of the abstract face and Eisenstein’s theory of “pathos” (the ecstatic leap whereby a thing exceeds its ordinary conditions, as well as the leap out of the self experienced by the spectator when he witnesses such a breakthrough) illuminate the terms in which in Bresson’s films phenomena must be identified in relation to what lies beyond their ostensible boundaries.

Where chapter two deals with ordinary moments in extraordinary films, chapter three explores another aspect of the spectrum of the everyday in cinema: the concept of the everyday as a film style, and its relationship to the everyday as subject matter. This chapter examines the way the everyday as film style has been theorised—predominately as an aesthetic sensibility that privileges the undramatic and routine as a conduit to the profound or transcendent. Chapter three asserts that while this scholarship has been useful in illuminating positive representations of the everyday, its attempts to quarantine the everyday from the dramatic are problematic and ultimately reductive. Instead, through detailed case studies of Bresson’s Money (1983) and Haneke’s The Seventh Continent (1989), the chapter presents an alternate approach that allows for a more nuanced appreciation of everyday aesthetics, allowing for films which do not treat the everyday as strictly positive. These films are unsettling precisely for their lack of authorial guidance on how to respond to horrific narrative events; film style is pared back in such a way that moments of violence are afforded the same aesthetic weight as the representation of ordinary and mundane routines.

Chapter 8 considers the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and how Europe was represented or interpreted in his work. It looks at the contradictions, problems and capacities of the photographic medium for the representation of Europe, and how these corresponded with Cartier-Bresson’s political, social, and aesthetic commitments. To this end it examines three spaces and their reception by their Paris audiences: first, his exhibition at the Musée des arts décoratifs in the Louvre (1955), which displayed his work from both Europe and the non-European world. Second, it looks at Cartier-Bresson’s record of the culmination of the Chinese Civil War and its subsequent presentation in a collection of 1954–D’une Chine à l’autre. This is contextualised in terms of the representation of Europe in terms of its Others. Third, it analyses his 1955 work Les Européens in which Cartier-Bresson’s impressions of his European travels were presented.

This chapter explores four versions of Dostoevskii’s 1848 story “White Nights,” whose nameless protagonist, referred to as the Dreamer, inspired many directors to transpose this early Dostoevskian short work into film. The focus is on four directors: Luchino Visconti, Robert Bresson, Sanjay Bhansali, and José Luis Guerín. As is argued in the chapter, each director takes a different approach to recontextualizing the first-person narrative in various locations, times, and cinematic traditions, ranging from Italian neo-realism and post-1968 Paris to Bollywood and Strasbourg. The author argues that the contemporary directors, Bhansali and Guerín take not only Dostoevskii’s story, but also, respectively, the earlier adaptations by Visconti and Bresson as their subtexts, thus forming a complex chain of intertextual connections.

This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.

Noting the difficulty of interpreting Bresson’s use of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in The Pickpocket as an adaptation per se, this chapter argues that the director takes part in the generic tradition of confession. Pickpocketing becomes not just a crime but also, through Bresson’s disruption of the psychological cause and effect that the viewer expects, a repeated attempt at confession. Because of Bresson’s hero’s inability to explain the motivation for his crime, he resembles not only Dostoevskii’s hero Raskolnikov, but also Meursault of Camus’s The Stranger. By creating these gaps, Bresson forces viewers to negotiate the borders not only between genres but between disconnected acts.

This chapter connects distinctive animal territories to specific uses of film language through a series of case studies, most notably Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte (2011), Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012). Significantly, becoming-animal cannot be represented by conventional point-of-view and shot-reverse-shot editing (the structural mainstay of filmic suture), because it ties the animal to the conventional (and thus delimiting) human vectorial space of Deleuze’s action-image. Instead, inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s seminal essay, ‘The “Cinema of Poetry”’, the chapter notes that all four filmmakers resort to a form of free-indirect discourse, whereby animality fills up the film from the inside as formative of the representation rather than rendering the subject within the structure of representation. Not unlike T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, where the character’s subjectivity is presented objectively in and through the mise-en-scène as well as individual focalisation (in this case the character is also on-screen), animal perception is able to be expressed by a form of camera self-consciousness, what Deleuze calls ‘cinema a special kind of cinema where the camera makes itself felt.

This introductory chapter presents an aspect of Robert Bresson’s production that portrays him as an engaged, militant filmmaker, indicating the political discourse that emerged around his work. Bresson’s films provoked a political response precisely because of their incendiary, revolutionary character. The book then offers an understanding of the revolutionary character of the cinema of Robert Bresson. It argues that Bresson’s works has been engaged with questions of revolutionary practice and radical politics from the very beginning, and says that part of the radical character of Bresson’s work issues from his interest in understanding the political dimension of religious life and religious law.

This chapter examines Michel Estève’s differentiation of Luis Buñuel’s Nazarin and Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest. The differences between these films is said to reside in Buñuel’s tendency to describe the dominant effect of social alienation as a turn to the erotic. The chapter then focuses on the work words do in Bresson’s early films, and what the obvious attention to the materiality of the signifier and his propensity for citation suggests. It deals with the possibility of monstration, and how an attention to language itself shares this revolutionary ambition.

This chapter examines Bresson’s first adaptation of Dostoevsky, Une femme douce, which initiates his transition to color filmmaking. According to Keith Reader, Bresson’s transition to color leads to a softening of the modernist intensity of his black-and-white work, improving the film fragment by camouflaging it in the colors of the phenomenal world. Bresson’s turn to color is conceptually consistent with his concern with logocentrism and nomination, with the violence that follows the authority of the word. While his earlier films all pose models for understanding the reversibility of law and morality, his later work takes on a more analytical quality, examining the problems of the dominant social formation in the aftermath of a perceived failure at revolution by way of varying color strategies.