Fontaine’s voice-over consciousness signals a doubling concomitant with a duality set in two alternate time-zones, by the Germans who peer at him behind the cell door (in fictional space-and-time), and by the spectator who peers at him even more closely from the perspective of the actual. In the next scene, when the prison guards storm inside his room during the late night, they wake up and order Fontaine to rise. He “instinctively” feigns weakness, implying, incredibly, that his strength has borne his suffering better than we expected, but also in an effort to fool the German officers into believing that he is too weak to get up. So he “performs” for them, as an actor would for an audience, rising with simulated anguish, falling to his bed slightly, then rising again with visible effort. Fictional space-and-time is pleased by this performance, the Germans decide that Fontaine really is too weak to stand and be executed properly, so they leave the actor to his reward (“Did that pathetic ruse save my life?” he wonders after being left alone). Fontaine’s “performance” briefly demonstrates his resolve to use his body-in-kinema (his body fragmented, pushed, and pulled by the camera’s eye) as a ruse of liberation. But his self-in-thought acts as a counterpoise to this body-in-kinema and generates a second perceptual track that reshapes the dynamics of the story. For one, Fontaine’s voice-over self seems to emerge from an invisible phenomenal realm, from the audio spectrality that dominates so much of what happens in A Man Escaped. When something occurs outside Fontaine’s cell, it exists only in sound: since we are restricted only to what Fontaine perceives directly, whatever happens outside his sight rings strictly on the audio sense. We imagine the world outside the fictional space of the cell as one potentially more real than where Fontaine eats, thinks, and sleeps — its rhythms, sensed by ear but unseen, develop a sharp unimpeachable realness (Bresson, Notes: “Rhythmic value of a noise. Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of footsteps, etc., for the sake of rhythm”). Resultantly, a fable of cinema blossoms from the mold: Fontaine finds himself imprisoned by the storied conventions of cinema and historicity, moving him to search for a way to break free of these fetters and escape into the “true life,” into freedom and actuality. Thrust into a fictional space by the cinematographic eye and corralled brutally by the irrational march of history (the Nazis, against all sense and reason, occupying France), Fontaine has no choice but to work with the meager utensils proffered him by an impoverished but rock-steady locus.

What chiefly matters to the mind starved of multiplicity and forced to inhabit a closed world (the confinement to a cinematic domain) is the extent to which its sanity and goodwill coincide with the realism that a realm of stringency presents to it.

This restricted consciousness is integral to the decisions Bresson makes on the scaffolding of the film’s diegetic space. A Man Escaped is abundantly famous for the perceptual limitations it imposes on Fontaine, who is locked away in solitude, and on the audience as well, who are forced to watch the film unfold from Fontaine’s closely-circumscribed perspective. As such, the objects and materials that constitute the actual space he inhabits (the cell door, the bed and mattress, the grated prison window, the concrete walls, the spoon, the pencil) assume a heightened importance. The same would be true of any long-term prisoner who is locked away in a state of poverty and dire reduction; objects, food, and thoughts become more precious, in some ways more tangible. What chiefly matters to the mind starved of multiplicity and forced to inhabit a closed world (the confinement to a cinematic domain) is the extent to which its sanity and goodwill coincide with the realism that a realm of stringency presents to it. The desire to escape into actuality, into freedom, is reciprocated by an inverse proclivity to acknowledge the reality of one’s closed space, and the objects within that space, which rest in close ineradicable proximity. Ultimate freedom appears distant, but its validity must be understood from the perspective of non-freedom; the real must be defined by what is consequently “artificial.” Herein lies the objective value of a cinematic space, formerly artifice and fallacy, now restored by Bresson to the undifferentiating eye of the camera: the body-in-kinema (Fontaine in his cell) learns to alchemize the props of a scenario into the instruments of a veritable aesthetic liberation (from the worn conventions of cinema, from the torment of history, from imprisonment, etc.). A pencil is more so a pencil in solitude, where one can speak to no one, because it presupposes the possibility of speech; in the fictional space of the cell, the powers of a single instrument become heightened in Fontaine’s estimation, become a way out. Diegetic space, defined by Fontaine’s dual consciousness, throws us into the direct ontologies of things and actions. To this end, Bresson’s art ruptures traditional symbolism (and by extension, disrupts a pure and idle metaphysics) by making a direct use of symbols, bestowing on symbols concrete values and utility. Fontaine learns to recognize their value insofar as these objects can be used against the scenario (the spoon can also be used as a chisel, the chisel can be used to take apart a door, the mattress cover can be used as rope, and so forth).