Notes on Cinematography
BY Robert Bresson
(Urizen Books, 1977)

It is important to stress the nonfiction aspect of the film not from an aesthetic standpoint (the question of the film’s authenticity as a historical document, much less as an artfully cinematic document, is never entertained by Bresson) but, paradoxically, from the standpoint of original act; or to use poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s apt phrase, from the “inner standing point” of the artist/model. The inner standing point isn’t to be confused with the psychological function of the actor (François Leterrier) who plays Fontaine, much less with the inner psychology or dynamic value of the hero. Bresson was well-known for detesting and curbing any dramatic, “actorly” qualities in his performers, to whom he assigned the more restrictive roles of “human models.” For Bresson, the art of “cinematography” (as he preferred to call filmmaking) had very little to do with a character’s development, as it would for instance in dramaturgy and theatre, because what the camera does best is to strip away the layers that obscure a person’s inherent essence. In Bresson’s view, the actor who strives to fool the camera by wearing masks and feigning a psychological behavior foreign to the actor’s own sensibility stays a mere mask. The very thing itself that is meant to be limned — corpus, eyes, visage: the actor’s body-in-kinema — is replaced by a disingenuous performance. The human model is a living, breathing archetype of a (possibly) transcendent idea, or a flesh-and-blood module in search of a certain liberty (often too a kind of submission) which can only be described as spiritual. The human model exhibits powerfully static emotions that are methodically stripped away to a pulp in a countermeasure of restraint, silence, and iconographic passivity. In his Notes on Cinematography, Bresson dictates a formula for his (non-)direction of the (non-)actor:

It is easy to suspect that a muted metaphysicality lurks in Bresson’s way of thinking. BEING (in capitals) is directly opposed to SEEMING; essence over and against semblance. But closely watching his films, and reading more of his Notes, “Being” to Bresson has a Heideggerian slant, insofar as the human model (“being”) isn’t any particular man — isn’t necessarily this man — and yet can be nothing other than the living breathing concept of “man” — of a species particularized in time by a generalized force, the cinematographic eye. The human model, alloyed as it is by the concrete fibers of the body and the immaterial vicissitudes of the mind, is a sculpture in time, a composite of Bergsonian duration. To the degree that the mental life of a human model is unknowable except through the acts of the body, Bresson’s cinematographic art devotes itself to exposing the body-mechanics that provoke epiphany (what I have already suggested as developing the human model’s “body-in-kinema”). To Bresson, the human body remains the visible and quite tactile canvas on which the hermetic spirit flickers and manifests.