François Leterrier as Fontaine
Un condamné à mort s'est échappé
(A Man Escaped)
DIRECTED BY Robert Bresson
(© Gaumont, 1956)

Fontaine is brought to prison, spat upon, and beaten. We don’t see his beating. Bresson’s restraint is such that screen violence is never an imperative. We don’t even see the faces of his assailants; that Fontaine’s persecutors are Nazis means nothing in the course of things; they may as well be hostile foreigners in an uncharted territory. What we do see is enough: Fontaine stands in a corner in the way children being disciplined stand in a classroom, his face to the wall and his back to us, while clamorous German voices rattle off-screen. An SS Guard walks up to Fontaine, spits at his withdrawn face, then, to complete his humiliation, they turn him around toward the camera, toward us, and we see his face, bloodied from a gun-butt to the head. This evokes Dreyer’s Jeanne d’Arc (the gun-butt occurred right when Fontaine was brought back to the car, after his failed attempt to flee, and one of the soldiers leans toward him and with the butt of his pistol raised…. Bresson then fades out, the clarity of the stroke is obscured — because the gesture suffices to denote a brief and contained sphere of violence). More men come and lead Fontaine to a chamber, inside which the camera does not dare enter. Instead it focuses on the hands of the prison guards who walk in after Fontaine and grasp heavy rods. (Fade out.) Again, the minimal gesture of a hand lifting a revolver, a hand grabbing a bludgeon, or a hand surreptitiously feeling the door handle of a car suffices to outline the general figure of a scene. In this scene the hero desires to flee; in this scene he is tormented and punished; in this scene he is humiliated: like the Stations of the Cross that depict the stages of Christ’s Passion in stained glass icons, each scene is a complete unit in and of itself, progressions in the formulation of a uniquely agonistic existence. Bresson’s art relies on restraint because subtlety well-wrought registers a lengthier and sustained resonance. An action interrupted or halted, in the midst of its occurring but never quite finishing, already engenders the entirety of the action, like in the positioning of figures in an early Netherlandish painting who convey a whole philosophy in the relaxation of a finger, in the tilting of a head, in the color of a garment.

A Man Escaped is a work of a very particular type of consciousness awakening, strengthening, growing: a mechanical consciousness invested in spiritual cognition.

It could be wagered that the film by this point hasn’t properly begun yet. A Man Escaped is a work of a very particular type of consciousness awakening, strengthening, growing: a mechanical consciousness invested in spiritual cognition. The German soldiers lay Fontaine, beaten-to-unconsciousness, down on the floor of a small cell, and exeunt. We fixate our attention on Fontaine’s closed eyes and bloodstained countenance (though it appears no more bloody than how he looked before the beating — Bresson’s realism has no interest in the gruesome or gratuitous). We sense his eyes move, as eyes do during rapid eye movement, and after a few seconds, a voice springs up (Fontaine’s eyes are still closed): “I could feel I was being watched. I didn’t dare move.” Instantly we are aware of ourselves: does he sense we are watching him? Unequivocally, we know the voice is his — he speaks in first-person, and it is his countenance we study. Though it had not spoken before, the voice rhymes with Fontaine’s lain body, and to confirm it, Fontaine opens his eyes a brief instant to absorb his surroundings in a glance, as if verifying that indeed the consciousness which has just awoken is his. It is at this crucial junction that the film properly begins. Fontaine’s body-in-kinema (his living body submerged in the liquid fragmentation of cinematic space-and-time) is awakened only upon the presentiment that he is being watched, not only by the German guards who position themselves behind the cell door and spy on him, but also by the medium itself, the cinematographic eye. The Germans who persecute Fontaine are nameless, faceless, because the camera too is nameless, faceless.