Let us return to the scenario. The following day, Fontaine, now more or less recovered from the brutality he received earlier, mentally sizes up his cell. Cinematic space is converted to actuality: “My cell barely measured three meters by two. It was sparsely furnished, a wooden bedstead with a straw mattress and two blankets.” He notices more objects and openings: a sanitary pail, a stone shelf, and an iron-grated window through which he sees three men, French prisoners, walking in an inner courtyard. It is a peculiar irony that of the three clean-shaven, well-dressed men who walk methodically across the courtyard, Fontaine catches the attention of the one in the middle, a man who looks remarkably like Robert Bresson himself. Fontaine asks this man, who introduces himself as Thierry, whether he knows how to deliver letters to the outside. Thierry cautiously answers, “I know a way.” If we momentarily mistake the character for Bresson the director, the response assumes a greater significance: Bresson, the director whose method of filmmaking is, metaphorically speaking, responsible for Fontaine’s imprisonment (behind the impermeable walls of cinema) suggests that liberation is possible through the self-same artifice of the cinematographic method. In other words, one has to reform one’s way of seeing, of composition and selectivity, in order to break down the obstacles of convention, history, and isolation.

…one has to reform one’s way of seeing, of composition and selectivity, in order to break down the obstacles of convention, history, and isolation. Living in prison swiftly becomes the analogy for living in self.

Living in prison swiftly becomes the analogy for living in self. But this enforced monk’s habit is hardly the description of an advanced solipsism; it is the adumbration of a physiological victory, a kind of materialist transcendence. I have probably misled the reader to think that Fontaine is a man alone in his projects, that he is consistently isolated from the other prisoners. Since no man is an island unto himself, A Man Escaped features numerous scenes where Fontaine interacts with other inmates, many of whom participate and share in Fontaine’s unvanquished hopes for freedom. From the very beginning, Fontaine habitually taps on the prison walls to communicate with the inmates neighboring him; after he is transferred to another room, he strikes up a communication with an initially reluctant older inmate named Blanchot, a man more willing to kill himself than endure the terror and waiting of condemnation. Fontaine’s unflagging optimism and relentless stratagems for escape inevitably inspire Blanchot to share in the Lieutenant’s enthusiasm for hope and the possibility of freedom. During the scenes when Fontaine and the other inmates on his floor are marched out to empty their sanitary pails, Bresson utilizes the “Kyrie Eleison” from Mozart’s Mass in C minor as a motif to signal the mass-like qualities of the inmates’ congregation; though they are imprisoned and vulgarly trotted out to empty their waste and line up for inspection, Bresson celebrates the unifying element in their gathering, one of the rare weekly occasions when the prisoners are allowed to walk outside and see each other’s faces. It could be averred that the use of Mozart seems to contradict Bresson’s assertions that nondiegetic music is superfluous to the designs of a film (Notes: “No music as accompaniment, support or reinforcement. No music at all. Except, of course, the music played by visible instruments”), but Mozart’s music during these parts seems to spring forth from the very bodies of the inmates, giving the “Kyrie” a diegetic origin. In the same fashion that Fontaine’s voice-over consciousness emerges from outside the scenario’s physical trappings, the “Kyrie Eleison” swells from the worn bodies of the inmates as they march in solemnity through the sun-struck courtyard. For Bresson, the music of communal presence is responsible for upholding the faiths of the condemned and lowly. Fontaine’s progress is also their consolation; their belief in him is his encouragement.