On Robert Bresson & the Perfect Film
So what is the perfect film ? Hydra's own Jose-Luis Moctezuma interrogates this question by exploring the greatness of Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped.
— By Adri Wong | December 8, 2010
still from "A Man Escaped" (1956), dir. Robert Bresson
So what is the perfect film ? Or (one might choose to ask the more precise question): from whence does that perfection derive? Hydra‘s own Jose-Luis Moctezuma interrogates this question — with all its cinematic and metaphysical nuances — in the current Fall/Winter Issue of Cerise Press, through an article exploring the greatness of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped.
Wondrous indeed the film which is both perfect and great; rarer still the film whose perfection derives from a deliberate minimalism and severe reduction of expression. Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) is one of those rare instances of a work whose greatness is directly characterized by its mechanisms of refinement; the film does not so much present a sheen of indisputable perfection as it reveals the hidden engine by which its nature produces a kinema of inward and outer symmetry.
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The art of cinematography, as we well know, derives from a technologic origin, so that the cinematograph (the element of kinema inscribed on film) is produced through an arrangement and operation of mechanisms. Bresson’s intention, however, is not to repeat or sublimate the mechanism at work as its own end, but to transcend and transform dumb machinery via the corporeal and emotional actuality of the human model, its covenant inscribed on film by the model’s acts of faith (or contrary acts) …
You can find Jose’s complete discussion of the film and of Bresson’s theory of cinematography in “Anatomy of a Perfect Film: Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped,” available in Cerise Press’s online journal.
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Cerise Press is an international online journal based in the United States and France, builds cross-cultural bridges by featuring artists and writers in English and translations, with an emphasis on French and Francophone works.
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Could you clarify why you chose to use the word ‘kinema’ in certain sections of your essay and then used the word ‘cinema’ in others ?
I’m glad you brought this up Oscar. Cinema, as you know, is used in the essay as it is used anywhere else, to signify more or less the body of work and cultural practice that mark the entirety of film history as it stands today. Kinema, however, has a very particular function in the essay. It’s derived from the greek word for motion, from kinein, “to move”; in the context of the essay, it signals the phenomenological varieties of movement that can be analysed in relation to, and strictly within, the cinematic frame; a duplicity because each frame, naturally, is a motionless picture, a photographic still. Kinema takes shape (in the same way that a statue takes shape within its mold) as the illusion of movement when these frames are played in succession.
Kinema as I regard it in Bresson’s film(s) doubles as movement within the frame but also as a movement gesturing toward liberation from the frame: thus, kinema may represent the desire for life (freedom) from within the “prison-house of cinema” (in this case, a desire strongly felt by Fontaine, the hero of A Man Escaped) — and it is a desire defined by the volition to break free from the photographic realm and steal away into “the real” (whatever that should mean to the protagonist, whose liberty can only be dimly pondered at the very moment he disappears from the frame).
“Also, for Aristotle, movement in a broad sense, which he termed kinesis, separated the animate from the inanimate, and without kinesis there would be no soul, and thus no kind of consciousness or intuition.”