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4 items from 2012

18 April 2012 10:40 AM, PDT | The Playlist | See recent The Playlist news »

“We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films,” Martin Scorsese said in the 2010 book “A Passion For Film,” describing the often overlooked French filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.”

But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at »

- The Playlist

7 February 2012 5:38 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Robert Bresson: The Over-Plenty of Life is a series we've been running in conjunction with the complete retrospective of Bresson's work that'll be touring North America through May. I thought I'd supplement Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essays, Daniel Kasman's observations and Adrian Curry's collection of posters with a roundup of pointers to pieces on Bresson that have appeared over the past month or two. One of the occasions of the series, as I mentioned in the entry on the initial announcement (with its basic schedule of cities and dates) is the publication of an expanded and illustrated edition of series curator James Quandt's collection, Robert Bresson (Revised), so let's open this go round with notes on another book, Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his review for the Summer 2010 issue of Cineaste, in which he calls it…

one of the most careful and »

13 January 2012 2:59 PM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

Asked by Sight & Sound to name the ten greatest films of all time, Robert Bresson submitted the following, somewhat notorious list:

1. City Lights

2. City Lights

3. The Gold Rush

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

There are two ways in which Robert Bresson is rarely spoken about: as a comic filmmaker (though, as the above demonstrates, he could be pretty damn funny) and as someone whose work displays the influence of other directors. 

Let's begin with that second point. Going back to some of the earliest defenses—as well as the earliest dismissals—of his work, Bresson has largely been described as a filmmaker "without precedent;" his detractors from the 1940s to the 1960s complained that his films didn't work the way movies were supposed to, and his supporters were more than happy to praise his films for the exact same reasons (Jacques Becker, for one, took the pages of L'Écran français to defend the poorly-received Les dames du Bois de Boulogne »

6 January 2012 9:31 AM, PST | MUBI | See recent MUBI news »

A tonic for the New Year: for the next two weeks Film Forum is running a near-complete retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson programmed by the Tiff Cinematheque. The posters for Bresson’s films are a fascinating grab-bag of styles, verging from melodrama to minimalism to symbolism to the wildly inappropriate (see the Italian Mouchette), as designers tried to express and occasionally subvert Bresson’s celebrated and increasing austerity. My favorite may well be this lovely, witty French grande for Pickpocket, illustrated by the great Christian Broutin (best known for his iconic Jules and Jim posters). But there are plenty of other standouts, most especially Raymond Savignac’s series of playful cartoons for Bresson’s final three films: Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, and the stunning Czech surrealism for Une femme douce.

I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order. »

4 items from 2012