To this end, Fontaine’s revelations are meaningfully physiological, immanent on the same plane of rhythm as his own beating heart. The reduction which the film makes, archly representative of Bresson’s famed minimalism, is that of our own privileged consciousness (our historical consciousness that views Fontaine’s story as true) scaled down gradually but ceaselessly to the level of Fontaine’s immediate perceptual consciousness, which persists in the continually present nature of things, in the phenomenological domain of his secluded prison-scape. We never sense this reduction occurring, but it is relentless. The transition occurs with the unavoidable vicinity and cataloguing of things, of materials, actions, and silences, and continue with the immanent energies that lie dormant in things but which menace and call out through their very unity. The steps toward transcendence begin with a stolen metal spoon and a purloined pencil, continue with an eidetic and quite accidental meditation on the prison cell door, pass on to the shredding of clothes, the crushing of glass shards, the bending of wires and metal frames, terminate in the dull ring of a hook flung onto concrete and brick, and a body climbing up a rope in ghostly darkness.

Place and time are given substance, in this order, for the birth of our hero to transpire; that is, we cannot fail to recognize that Fontaine, the human model derived from the life of André Devigny, is also a living man of spiritual composition, or should we say, of mythic composition…

Let us return to the beginning. During the first frames of the film, Bresson’s camera gazes at a plaque which reads (in French): “Here during the German Occupation, 10,000 victims suffered at the hands of the Nazis. 7,000 of them perished.” We read this for obvious reasons. One, the story is true. Bresson goes out of his way to establish this fact. Even before our sighting the plaque, we read the preliminary superimposed text: “This is a true story. I’ve told it as it happened, without embellishment.” The statement is signed below by the director himself. The plaque, moreover, is to be taken as a physical fact of the world, the very same plaque that adorns the side of the actual prison camp, Fort Montluc in Lyon. Lest we lose sight of the realness of the setting, the very next frame informs us, “Lyon, 1943,” so as to append temporal realism to the story. Place and time are given substance, in this order, for the birth of our hero to transpire; that is, we cannot fail to recognize that Fontaine, the human model derived from the life of André Devigny, is also a living man of spiritual composition, or should we say, of mythic composition; alive now as he was alive for that time, a symbol equally for the French Resistance and for the French-Catholic perseverance. Secondly, we read the plaque because we are entreated to contemplate the cold brutal fact, just as when we visit the sites of the Holocaust, that the greater percentage of people who were interned, punished, tortured, and starved there did not survive. They perished, passing out of existence into the grim numerologies of fate. Hence, Fontaine’s situation is meant to be taken as a veritable miracle, the exception to the reality. A man who was purposed to die but didn’t.

The first thing we know about Fontaine are his hands. He is in the back of a speeding car, to the far right of two handcuffed men, the passenger door pressing him on his left. Furtively, his hands creep to the door handle: he is looking to exit the car at any given chance, and yet his hands aren’t handcuffed. This is very telling of who, intrinsically, Fontaine is: his hands are free to explore the range of his liberty, because this man is meant to be free. We have to attribute this oversight, factually speaking, to the ineptness of his captors, whose faces and voices are never fully, satisfyingly perceived; no dialogue ever starts up to familiarize us with the setting and action. The film’s soundtrack, which began in a lush movement of Mozart’s Mass in C minor, has segued into the tense silence of bound men and men with guns, and the oppressive one-note drone of a speeding car, the mechanical stutter of gears shifting, and the indifferent bustle of traffic assemble to contextualize the vividness of the scene. Bresson wastes no second to create suspense: a swift montage phrase incorporating Fontaine’s blank face, his hands creeping, stopping, creeping again to the handle, in tense parallel with that of the unseen driver’s hands shifting gears, slowing the car, accelerating, stopping, sparks a dramatic immediacy which is wholly cinematographic. When the car finally does stop, Fontaine takes his chance, lunges out of the car… but the camera stays put, fixated on the curious absence left behind by Fontaine’s uninhabited seat, while just outside the car’s rear window we see policemen shoot guns threateningly and rush out to recapture the fleeing Fontaine. We don’t wait long: he is quickly returned to his seat, and now he is handcuffed. But in a few seconds we’ve learned enough of a man of whom we know so little: he appears to be chronically, even involuntarily, committed to the one idea, freedom. It is possible that no thoughts circulate in his mind apart from the mechanically generated desire to be free; his actions are all that he is, and his actions risk life at the prospect of liberty. Out of the void of history, a man, whose name we still at this point don’t know, is a figure whose hunger for freedom is established a priori. In this way, we know more of him than can be possibly known by those to whom he was born naturally, in a historical and personal context, to his family, his friends, etc. In the eye of the camera, the figure of Fontaine mimics that of the angel who exists only to contemplate singularities.