I was introducing the films of Robert Bresson, the greatest master of form and rhythm the cinema has ever known, to Wendall who mostly paints houses and sells used records, for which he has a genuine knack. He got me my copy of Ornette Coleman'a Science Fiction. I made a very funny joke, I thought: I told him that because Bresson's art is both austere and clinically severe it is expected of all true adherents and acolytes alike that when pausing the movie to get snacks or go to the toilet we only do so when one or another of the characters in whichever film we're watching is in the process of passing through a doorway. After we finished watching Procès de Jeanne d'Arc from '62, Wendall immediately commented with big, wide eyes that there sure were a lot of doors and boy did they clank and such. Wendell added that the film was a "stone-cold death trip" and wondered what caused me to pick that one in particular in order to introduce him to Monsieur Bresson. I told him I just got the BFI Blu-ray and hadn't watched it yet but also it's the optimal place to begin because it is the most spare, rigorous, and precise of the director's early black and white films. You have established camp in the higher altitudes; tomorrow we reach for the summit, L'argent, Bresson's final film once and for all but also the last of those sublime colour ventures, often Dostoevsky-minded, though L'argent adapts a Tolstoy story. The rhythm and tone have been finessed to a point of peerless vision and control and in L'argent there are no longer relics or revenants of European cinema or commercial cinema, there is only the handsome ace formalist Bobby Bresson, down for whatever as long as it's classy, and when his art is in his own hands rather than those of some chump front office clerk, he uses it to say that it's a hell of a lot worse out there than anybody's telling you now but it's buttered fucking scones compared to what's incoming. Anyway, if we wanted to be really severe we could easily argue that L'argent is the only true Bresson film.
Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (Robert Bresson, 1962)
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