Scènes condamnées

As for me, and I come back to it, I attach enormous importance to form.

Enormous. And I believe that the form leads to the rhythms. Now the 

rhythms are all-powerful. That is the first thing. Even when one makes the 

commentary of a film, this commentary is seen, felt, at first as a rhythm. 

Then it is a color, (it can be cold or warm); then it has meaning. But the

meaning arrives last.

- Robert Bresson

A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut, Robert Bresson, 1956) 

The profoundly impassive man of curious scalpel-precise expressivity is named Fontaine . He is played by a non-professional (François Leterrier) the film's director calls a 'model,' this the term he uses for the entire on-camera company. He is condemned to death in the film whose title tells us so— 

just as it tells us, at least in original French, that he is to ultimately escpae with his neck.

 

There are the man's palms and the business of their irreducibility of business. They have to be busy. Somebody let me out of here. Palm up on lap. Weighing light. Weighing the weighing of the question of weighing light. Weighing the weight of the very supposition of light. We are in the back seat of a car, traffic noise can be heard but it is distant and impossibly [calculatedly] soft. Hands turn over on the lap. Irreducibility of the hands. The image encases us in the back of the car while the sound provides us corroboration of an outer world swamped in cotton swath. Bresson tells us that “freedom is greater with sound.” Here the sound literally represents the terrain of liberation, the outside, while the image places us in the back seat of the car, effectively already in prison.

An air of urgency, made to order. For a film about a man we already know escapes having been condemned to yet-to-set-a-date hangman's checklist, and yet the idea is that the mechanics of perception might make us make up [comprise and preemptively reprise] a hot and bothered invested-in-the-urgency...donkey.

The driver’s hand on the gearshift, prisoner reaching again for the door, waiting, waiting, pushing open a moment for acting, little fingers tadpoles, critical breathing, inimical breathing, clearly a sense of apprehension mixed with desperation. We hear a horse drawn buggy on the soundtrack but are unable to place the sound until it is corroborated a moment later on the image track. Throughout the film strange unknown sounds are presented to us only to be explained later visually. There is the buggy; there are the voices of the German guards who approach our man and take him to his cell moments later; there are the guards who come to our man's door throughout the film, revealed by their footsteps, their voices, or both; and most strikingly there is the squeaking of the bicycle during the escape sequence, which remains a mystery to us for a good ten minutes before one of our big kids on the skids finally peers over the wall and sees a guard riding it. Over and over we are left free by sounds only to have many of the holes filled in by the image. Many sounds are never filled in by the image. The guns that execute the prisoners in the distance are only ever heard. The voices of the guards are almost always disembodied. Sounds of movement outside the cell maintain a perpetual air of mystery.  

There are two specific ways sound is used in A Man Escaped to field dialogic resonating complexes (real) with respect to dynamics of freedom (virtuality) and containment (actuality). The first way is of course rather obvious. Sound as a terrain of liberated virtual space and invitation to abstract/virtual extrapolation/cartography. The world of flight and ESCAPE LOGIC contains sound, eavesdrop, resistance, unencumbered hands, and light(ness). The world of prisons is the image, the car, encasement, the bolted door. 

André Bazin espies in the film a suspension of space/time and a stunning absence of “dramatic geometry.” However, our man, lieutenant Fontaine, the model attentif, can hardly afford to come at matters from a like mindset.

We are unable to draw a suitable map of the prison in our minds. Or have we simply not had to try that hard?  This is exactly what our man is doing. He is branching out with his ears at night; documenting with all of his senses by day. All we see is waiting, or, more accurately, waiting counterpoised with bursts of effort and risk. We are confronted, just like our man, with the liberated space of sound and the imprisoned space of action-image. We too are building a world around the action with our ears. Quite simply, our eyes are situated on one side of the wall and our ears on the other, while we remain outside of the film. We build a film we watch and hear lined up against a wall, martial takedown or liftoff, experiencing points of connection, convergence, and intensive disjunction.

At the same time: guards, industrial machinery, draconian aurality. It is precisely these sounds that make it so hard for our man to carry out his escape. Using his ears, “dramatic geometry.” He is confronted with many sounds that re-inscribe imprisonment upon the sensorial body, connecting our man and his audience together through sound. It is difficult to “take the plunge” offered by the liberating enterprise because everywhere sounds retain their music of the prisons and ritual debasements. As escapes open, prisons re-inscribe: the plane of exposure. As soon as our man and his boy conspirator leave their cell there is no going back and this cannot be anything other than a done thing considered from any and every angle. All sounds become condensed, intensified. Sounds emanating from sources organized to vouch for and stage imprisonment can map a “dramatic geography,” or can be perversely fathomed to further induce productive building and risk within a context of conditional exposure.  The man arrives at the point of hearing himself and hearing the doors bolt shut there too. Or this is presumably what is at stake. (If I know it, it's 'cause I feel it first!) Sounds become important on the plane of exposure and then become the enlivenment of the planar exposure. What is most frightening to a man is his own future voice (preserved from one local-specific execution or not). It is “the noise I made and the constant fear of being caught.” The electric charge of chance further condenses and distills the sensory-motor vibrations while simultaneously increasing intensification in general. A realistic/naturalist bodily tension is created, nowhere to be seen (or heard) in standard prison movie fare. 

It had been cemented at the outset. Hands reach for the door, as such reaching merely and instinctually for the perhaps better. A sure hand conditions these tremulous claws-in-search-of-nook. Apprehension and desperation. Hand pulls away nervously, only to regenerate the gesture again and again until the courage is there. The ears are builders of the plane of exposure and the fingers tickle invisible ivories. The model must bridge the gap with his tools: hope, the momentary courage to act, the prevailing dumb luck that is all that which is left standing in the interim (the circus tent never an adequate hangar, this it's preeminent virtue). 

We bust from the car. Bust out. Blast off. 

At the beginning of the film. 

We are shot at, you are returned, I am beaten. It is because somebody lacks the third and final tool. Too many critics have mistaken this tool for something other than dumb luck. It is something other than luck, though, unless luck vibrates. Shut your mouth a moment and look upward. 

The hardest lesson I ever learned about escaping was to shut my goddamn mouth.