L’Argent and Robert Bresson. Feeling VS Reason.
December 24th, 2023. Written in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States.
‘There is a temptation, understandably seldom resisted, for the makers of adaptations in terms of moving pictures, to follow the inclination towards the spectacular, to concentrate on what will look good in film.’ (Giddings, 1990: xv)
“And then there are other films, where you’re continually noticing little details, films that leave room for all kinds of possibilities. Those are mostly films where the images don’t come compete with their interpretations.” Wim Wenders in the Logic of Images.
European and American film directors have been of a common inclination toward the exhibit of the aesthetic spectacular since the 1990s and the earlier Hollywood age, relying on what they think ‘looks good’ in film when they have nothing to show from the place of meaning. In this essay I will demonstrate that Robert Bresson (1901-1999) does not intend to convey the aesthetic spectacular, but conversely expresses the place of meaning, in image. Bresson achieves his chief aim by expressing feeling through images and through his anarchic avoidance of the aesthetic spectacular, has created some of the most forceful, startling and vivid imagery in the history of cinema.
Big budget Hollywood films are often little more than a sly reliance on the aesthetic spectacular, this can be gleaned by any careful or careless observer. So too today, so called art house directors present little more than this sly reliance. There is a preponderance of bombastic imagery in action films and art films and there is a confused semblance of half-arsed poetry in many art house films where the viewer is left thinking: what is this wank? Why bother with this pretentious drivel? What has all this to do with my life?
L’Argent is loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s novella The Forged Coupon (published posthumously in 1911). It was Bresson’s final work. Bresson is, outside of Japan, the arbiter in film of the principle of feeling over intellect, he is the supreme enemy of the analytic and the logician alike. Here are quotations taken from an interview he gave in the late 1950s (the date is unspecified and the interview is rare, please see the bibliography) as well as a press conference he gave in 1983 discussing L’Argent and his film making technique. Italics are my own. “I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it”, “I shouldn't think, I should work. I’m allowed to think between films” “I’d rather feelings arise before intellect...and that is the atmosphere I wanted to express... the theatricality that I reject... is expression by means of facial cues, gestures and vocal effects.” and from the 1983 press conference on L’Argent: “It is not about understanding it is about feeling, which is different.” “Feelings were the same 200 years ago as now, it is just a question of transposing them to our time”, “in the film I wanted to express uncertainty until the very end.”, “Cinema could become something great and admirable if it evolves. If we don’t remain stuck doing ‘filmed theatre’ with actors.” We can see here that Bresson is describing an attempt to make the very opposite of the aesthetic spectacular, where the aesthetic spectacular requires various states of rational intentional willing and theatricality as well as control of the present and obsessive prodding in the creation of the image being expressed. Feeling on the other hand, just is and this just is, is enough. The audience doesn’t need to be told what to think or feel and Bresson maintains this at heart with consequence, consistency and conviction.
“One produces a representation through a lie”, so Bresson expresses feelings through the lie, echoeing August Rodin’s (1840-1917) statement that “A photograph is a lie”. When asked what is film, he states to the interviewer: “there is a person who feels things and tries to reproduce them so other’s feel them.” and film is “the attempt to reproduce something that someone feels.” Bresson’s simplicity is the supreme knife to pretentious flab, the perennial rebuttal of rebuttals, to the muddled and kitschy attempts at all controllers, meddlers and makers of the aesthetic spectacular.
So the question that faces us head on is, how does Bresson express feeling in images rather than the aesthetic spectacular rationalised through over thinking pomposity?
His intentions are diametrically opposed to the spectacular.
“My films cannot be entertainment.”
Feelings in the Images of Bresson
Bresson pares down his visual language to express feelings in place of thought. He does not wield the gush of ornament and baroque-esque decoration like Fellini does in La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960) and 8 ½ (1963), or the painterly perfection of Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) L’Eclisse (1962), Red Desert (1964) The Passenger (1975). He also does not experiment with expressionistic flourishes of gesture like Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), or F.W Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Fritz Lang with Metropolis (1927), or M (1931). Bresson is perhaps the most realistic of film directors in that he films with sparsity, he removes rather than adds and where there is flourish, his images are only in a state of expressivity to serve the feeling he intends to convey. There is small space for the imagination of the viewer in his images, only that space which is required to make the story palpable and relatable (universal in as far as that is possible).
Bresson expresses his feelings about money throughout L’Argent. By carving the image down, like a medieval woodcut, “the viewer perceives objects with extreme clarity in an unmediated present.” (Hasumi, 2012). These objects in extreme clarity are from my view, most often the characters hands. His use of shots of hands is strikingly similar to paintings by the likes of Albrecht Dürer (1471- 1528) and Jan Van Eyck (1390-1441) and this is worth exploring in depth elsewhere. In the hands we find the expression of the feelings of anxiety, of so called criminality, the ignorance of criminality, assumptions regarding criminality (think Crime and Punishment by F. Dostoevsky) and apparent benevolence on the part of the main character. The hands have a language of their own and express the meaningful content of the story he shows. The film is a “A brutal place where the sole part of the body capable of connecting with another person is the hands, a place where even the act of handing something to someone may serve only to sever communication.” (Hasumi, 2012, p545).
Stemming in part from his personal disgust with the theatricality of actors in general and those coming out of film schools, and in part as a stylistic gesture in his film making lexicon, Bresson demanded of his actors that they “do not attempt any sort of psychological expression”. He has been criticised by the film establishment for these demands, because according to those in charge of films made in the service of coin, there is only ever one way of doing things: the dogma of bullshitting the viewer while forcing whatever ineptitudes of self-importance the director has down the retina of the (what the director often assumes) moronic audience who know no better. Bresson, going beyond his disgust, called for a reduced theatricality so he could intensify the experience of his images. Rather than be distracted by the kitschy irrelevance of theatre in gestures or pretty faces, we can follow the life of objects and the story in a rarefied way, where a scene resembles more a Chanoyu or Sado Japanese tea ceremony than an advertisement for your next relationship or what you could never attain or be. Bresson disappears in the service of the impermanent and beauty. To Bresson, showy film is irrelevant, its primary function is to be the vehicle of images to express meaning and feeling. Let’s follow the narrative of L’Argent by viewing the objects Bresson presents to us, void of any nagging pretensions to the aesthetic spectacular.
There is no messing about at the start of the film. In the opening minutes the plot is suddenly expressed as money is handed over to the son, Norbert, of an apparently wealthy Parisian father. The moral and societal labyrinths of intrigue, of disaster, of pain and of loss are introduced between the trinity of the photography shop, the son and the father. Norbert, following the receipt of the money, after leaving his father's study, immediately lies and tells his mother that his father will not give him an advance. At 3 minutes 25s the counterfeit bill is first introduced. At 3 minutes 45s Norbert’s friend gives him a book of nudes. In this shot the subterfuge poison of the counterfeit note is compared with the beauty of the naked, the complexity of the situation is doubled due to the notes counterfeit nature. At 6min 45s we see for the first time the delivery driver Yvon working on a pump before entering the shop to complete a transaction for his work. We also see, for the first moment in the film, the two main colors which will be signals for important events and situations of fate throughout the film: red and green. He takes the bill into the shop. He hands the bill to Lucien, the young shop clerk. At 7 mins 55s the shop owner gives Yvon a bundle of counterfeit notes for his work. At 8 mins 40s Yvon enters a café and the turning point of his life begins, the disaster which will decimate his soul is set in motion. Yvon is accused of spreading these counterfeit bills inside the café as he attempts to pay for his coffee and has an altercation with the waiter as he is told that he is one of the the dirt who are spreading these counterfeit bills. At 9 mins 14s we see Yvon’s hand grip the waiter’s jacket and release him with astonishing brutality into a table. This image is the feeling of violence. We feel this violence physically, with the barest visuals given on screen: a hand in a tight fist holds a jacket, and releases the jacket. A simple table, tablecloth and 2 plates… the lilting drop of the tablecloth as the table is turned over by the hurled waiter, falling like a whispered curse across tomorrows. At 12 mins, Yvon is in the family home with his wife and child, he sits down on a chair and Bresson pays homage to Van Gogh’s At Eternity’s Gate, 1890. At 14 mins we see Lucien, the shop clerk, rewarded for lying about Yvon and the counterfeit bill to the police, with more money from his boss. He is told he can go and finally buy the suit he has always wanted.
In the film Bresson continues to keep vehicles and objects to a minimum, often not numbering more than two a piece in any particular scene, and these objects and vehicles are always painted in the colours of red, green or blue throughout, reminding one of Kieślowski and Antonioni respectively, also worth a study elsewhere. Within 20 mins of the films beginning the photography shop is already decaying into a state of corruption: when a man walks in the store to buy a camera, the store prices change and Lucien the shopkeeper pockets the extra money he charges the man for the camera, writing the false transaction into the store book. Ultimately he has been encouraged in some sense in his deceit by the owner himself, having rewarded him for lying previously. Throughout all of this we do not have any images resembling what one could call spectacular, we have rarefied reality removed of all bombast, which directly conveys the idea and feeling of meanings. The story, the feeling, of a counterfeit bill and its wandering way through the characters, each by each, scene by scene. At 22 min 42s we see a woman sitting on a couch, we see only her body, in her underwear and she is slapped on her arse. Bresson in the following 4 seconds sums up many women's sociological and physical positioning in French society (not only in French society) again without bombast or appeal to the spectacular (think the aggressive noisy violence of post post feminism). At 23 mins 45 s we see the concept of transience; when Yvon leaves the café table. Breakfast is taken in Yvon’s flat at 24 m 25 s and the influence of painting is seen again, when the breakfast layout clearly resembles a Chardin (1699-1779) in it’s quiet and glow. Without the use of language, Bresson also conveys the feeling of humour when we see a man reading the newspaper at 24m 45s called Actualité (reality). What follows is a bank robbery which Yvon is witness to. At 27m 29s we see a black car crash into a white car, opposites collide. Bresson shows other film directors (he does not like the term film director but for want of a better word I will use it here) that they can be the bridge between the mystery of painting and clear expressions of meaning. There does not need to be movement on the screen and there is often no movement or very little at all e.g the tea cup being put down at breakfast, the brown leather shoes on the car accelerator before he witnesses the robbery, the violent stillness of the red robes and the white cuffs of the judges when Yvon enters the courtroom for his trial.
I want to further stress the importance of painterly influence in Bresson’s imagery. One needs to look further to all art forms as precursors for his ideas and departure points, as he has often no direct colleagues in the history of film. There are, in addition to the painters I have mentioned, direct connections with Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675). Vermeer in the placement of objects, curtains and the overall layouts of rooms in the film. I encourage the reader to explore this as a subject for deeper study and contemplation.
Hands in L’Argent, for Bresson, are the container of the entire expressive force of his work. Lucien uncannily resembles some distant bastard cousin of Philip IV in Velasquez’ portrait. The portrait of Philip IV in Armour painted in 1623 in the Prado, Madrid, resembles what we could assume to be Lucien after his stint in prison. Norbert looks like Velasquez’ Portrait of Calabazas in the Prado, Madrid painted in 1637-1639. Norbert, wringing his hands, and looking with blurred face, through an atmosphere of anxiety and unease, somewhere into unknown distances. I call the reader to look at these pictures also and wonder whether Bresson has seen them. I for one am certain of this.
At 30 mins the court scene begins. The banality of bureaucracy is revealed as Yvon is handed a 3 year sentence for a crime he did not commit. Now for the use of colour. 31m 40s blue and green, the green shadow under the car, the premonition of what is to come for the prisoner is shown beyond the green shadow on the prison door, which is the green of disease. 33 mins Bresson gives us the feeling of stark contrast between nature (the closeup of the tree and its bark) and the photography shop. 35 mins we see again the green bars of the cell, the green prison bed-the prison has now replaced nature for Yvon. His suit is also green, he has become the prison and he is wearing the prison (as it wears him). 35m 50s there are 2 green pens on table, a blue pen for the policeman. The prisoners are handed numbers on paper, what they have become.
Bresson’s L’Argent is a rigorous lesson in attention and a healer of the capacity for attention. When Yvon’s wife leaves him, two children are laughing at a prisoner, a mother leads another boy away from the conversation room by the hand, the boy is dressed in green and leaves reluctantly. At 37 mins we see an advertisement following this scene for the statistics of poor families in France. We see Lucien who has been fired following the theft of the money at the photography shop, with 2 friends. A young girls back is to us on the screen; instead of talking to her, perhaps starting his true love story with her, Lucien ignores her and walks past her to more crime, his sense of meaning, a Raskolnikov of spite. Her jumper is black and white, opposites again collide, reflected in the past as the two cars did in the bank robbery scene. 46m 27s we see all of the prisoners' belongings tied up in green bundles. At 54 mins Yvon is cleaning the prison hall. There are a series of doors, green lights behind the bars. At the 1 hour mark, by being falsely accused using counterfeit notes, Yvon has been thrust into worlds of the thief and his choices, his feelings are determined within the possibilities of the world of the thief. The money earnt, all of which were counterfeit notes, puts him into a state of debt. On release from trial he steals more money from the aptly named ‘Hotel Moderne’, stealing is his home and exile. At 1 hr 2 min Yvon follows a woman home who he saw take money from an atm. She has a dog, he hesitates close to her home when he considers following her inside. After this brief hesitation he walks directly into the house. The home is as a picture postcard of suburban life in France. Yvon, with virulent simplicity has entered and disturbs the gentle home. 1 hr 6 min the stove top and the coffee pot give a feeling of a gift, of comfort, of quiet ease. The door is light blue, the wall is green; the apron green-outside, we see the woman enter, nature blazing around her with its green and the lights of the sun. At 1 hr 11m the image resembles Millet’s the Gleaners, 1857. Potatoes of the earth. The blue apron, the earth, the green of the grass. 1 hr 13 m Yvon goes hunting for money through the woman's house for more money. 1 hr 15 mins Yvon gives some nuts he has scavenged to the woman, and the white of the sheets, announcement of innocent graces, peaces unbound… Two minutes later, he has slaughtered the man, the husband, the wife.
He then demands of the woman “where is the money?” After killing her he returns to the café where he was first accused of spreading the counterfeit bills. Someone resembles Lucien in the mirror… And the men in similar green uniforms to those he wore in prison… He confesses the crime. The end for us and the beginning of Inferno for Lucien.
In this film Bresson shows that, without appeal to the aesthetic spectacular, he can reveal the fundamentals of human nature, of feeling, of meaning, of desire, of loss, of kindness and cruelty and that these are all we have. They do not require the face of a model and they do not require exaggeration by artifice. They can be clearly and simply stated with rigorous honesty. It is safe to say that either artifice or the aesthetic spectacular on screen can be a sure sign of artistic mediocrity inbound reeking. He shows his reduced vision incisively, without resorting to the semblances of affectation or theatricality or the insult of a models mug.
Oh if only a film maker today, here or there, could express from this simple summit.
Dream and Deed.
Art Works
The reader will have to look up some of the artworks themselves as I have not been granted permission to include all images here. Here are links to those not included in the bibliography. For Van Gogh’s At Eternitys Gate, 1890 see: https://krollermuller.nl/en/vincent-van-gogh-sorrowing-old-man-at-eternity-s-gate
For Chardin’s Glass of Water and Coffee Pot 1761 see: https://www.pubhist.com/w52797
For Jean François Millet’s The Gleaners, 1857 see: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/gleaners/GgHsT2RumWxbtw?hl=en
Velázquez, Diego. Portrait of Philip IV, 1623, Oil on Canvas, Museo del Prado Madrid.
Velázquez, Diego. Portrait of Philip IV in armour, 1623, Oil on Canvas, Museo del Prado Madrid.
Velázquez, Diego. The Jester Calabacillas, 1623, Oil on Canvas, Museo del Prado Madrid.
Bibliography
Bresson, R. (1983) L’Argent Press Conference. Paris. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jzujl9dWHo [26th March 2020]
Bresson, R. (year not specified). Interview. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVODh2lkVdc [26th March 2020]
Hasumi, S. ed., (2012). Led by the Scarlet Pleats: Bresson’s L’Argent. In: Robert Bresson (revised). Indiana University Press. Pp.534-545.
Millet, J. (1857) the Gleaners. [Oil on Canvas]. Paris, France: Musée d'Orsay.
Sontag, S. (2017). Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson. Scraps from the Loft. Available at: https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/2017/09/26/spiritual-style-films-robert-bresson-susan-sontag/ [25th March. 2020].
Quandt, J. (2012) Robert Bresson (revised). Indiana University Press.
Velázquez, D. (1637-1639) The Jester Calabacillas. [Oil on Canvas]. Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado. Velázquez, D. (year) Portrait of Philip 4th in Armour. [Oil on Canvas]. Madrid, Spain: Museo del Prado.
Van Gogh, V. (1890) At Eternity’s Gate. [Oil on Canvas]. Otterlo, the Netherlands: Kröller-Müller Museum
Wenders, W. (1992) The Logic of Images. Faber and Faber: London.