Although Godard is quoted as stating Pickpocket was the main inspiration for Le Petit Soldat (1960), Bresson’s influence is perhaps best observed in Vivre sa vie (1962). His standing as one of cinema’s “patron saints” marks his work as genuinely intimidating. Nonetheless, Susan Sontag has called Bresson "the master of the reflective mode in film. The image most associated with the French film director Robert Bresson, who has died aged 92, was that of an austere, pessimistic critic, a Jansenist at odds with the modern world.
He makes bad films, but he defends them so interestingly.
Ms. Wiazemsky, a granddaughter of the Nobel literature laureate François Mauriac, was a leading lady in Godard …
The cause was cancer, her French book publisher, Éditions Gallimard, said. He upsets the official cinema, which cares only for profits. Unlike Bresson, Godard’s entire output isn’t a stationary filmography, but a compelling work in progress. The Thanks to Henri Langlois is an especially moving tribute to the his friend and great archivist. Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The timeline concerns his work at Cahiers before his spectacular debut. Although Robert Bresson is widely regarded by movie critics and students of the cinema as one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century, his films are largely unknown and are rarely shown in the English-speaking world. And yet so many otherwise astute viewers fail to appreciate any of it, a phenomenon that surfaced in rather ugly terms when “Film Socialisme” premiered at Cannes. “Bluntly put,” J. Hoberman wrote in Village Voice, “To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago.”
Robert Bresson 101 The films of Robert Bresson are daunting, no doubt. Robert Bresson on Jean-Luc Godard (1970) This short exchange is from a Robert Bresson interview which is available on-line Interviewer: That reminds me of Godard. Godard on Godard is just that, a reflective assortment of pieces, a bit of manifesto, a great deal of analysis and a brilliant homage. The film’s steady accumulation of incident, charac… Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. Bresson: His films are interesting. Critical pieces, dazzling as he probes.
He makes bad films, but he defends them so interestingly.
Ms. Wiazemsky, a granddaughter of the Nobel literature laureate François Mauriac, was a leading lady in Godard …
The cause was cancer, her French book publisher, Éditions Gallimard, said. He upsets the official cinema, which cares only for profits. Unlike Bresson, Godard’s entire output isn’t a stationary filmography, but a compelling work in progress. The Thanks to Henri Langlois is an especially moving tribute to the his friend and great archivist. Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. The timeline concerns his work at Cahiers before his spectacular debut. Although Robert Bresson is widely regarded by movie critics and students of the cinema as one of the greatest directors of the twentieth century, his films are largely unknown and are rarely shown in the English-speaking world. And yet so many otherwise astute viewers fail to appreciate any of it, a phenomenon that surfaced in rather ugly terms when “Film Socialisme” premiered at Cannes. “Bluntly put,” J. Hoberman wrote in Village Voice, “To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago.”
Robert Bresson 101 The films of Robert Bresson are daunting, no doubt. Robert Bresson on Jean-Luc Godard (1970) This short exchange is from a Robert Bresson interview which is available on-line Interviewer: That reminds me of Godard. Godard on Godard is just that, a reflective assortment of pieces, a bit of manifesto, a great deal of analysis and a brilliant homage. The film’s steady accumulation of incident, charac… Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey is. Bresson: His films are interesting. Critical pieces, dazzling as he probes.