The Cinematheque

“Life must not be rendered by a photographic reproduction of life, but by the secret laws in the midst of which we can sense models move.”

Robert Bresson

French director Robert Bresson (1901–1999), one the 20th century’s most important and influential film artists, was master of a spare, rigorous, intensely metaphysical cinema that explores, with rare poetry and purity, the human struggle for grace and redemption.

Bresson made but 13 features in a career spanning four decades; that body of work occupies a rarified space in the pantheon of film history. His singular style—a stripped down, flattened, affectless aesthetic that miraculously turns austerity and asceticism into something approaching the immanent, ​“the ineffable,” he wrote—has been famously described by Paul Schrader and Susan Sontag as transcendental. Bresson didn’t trivialize the higher pursuit of his art, insisting that his distinctive methods, a radical departure from those prevailing in narrative film, be designated differently: not cinema, but ​“cinematograph.”

Drama in a Bresson film is internal, spiritual. It derives less from plot, character, or psychology than from an exacting ​“visible parlance” that 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 contentious) characteristics of the Bresson style, apart from his stark distillation of diegetic sound, was his use of actors—or ​“models,” as he preferred to call them. After his first two features, Bresson eschewed the use of professional actors entirely; he didn’t want performers performing, actors emoting. Instead, his ​“models” exist principally as components of the mise-en-scène, as objects of choreographed, automated movement to be manipulated in the service of his severely controlled form—his aim being to remove everything extraneous and leave only what is essential. ​“One does not create by adding,” Bresson said, ​“but by taking away.”

It has been 13 years since our last Bresson retrospective—it is due time for another. Drawing its title from the enigmatic rules governing his filmmaking ethos, ​“Secret Laws of the Cinematograph” brings together all of Bresson’s uncompromising features, many screening in digital restorations marking their Vancouver debuts.

“To not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures.”

J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“In four decades, Bresson made only 13 features, works of extraordinary lucidity and profound mystery, of absolute rigor and overwhelming emotion.”

Dennis Lim, Bookforum

“What men have accomplished up to now in poetry, in literature, Bresson has done with cinema. You could say that up to this point, the cinema was parasitical; it proceeded from the other arts. And that we have entered, with him, a pure cinema. One that is his alone.”

Marguerite Duras