Against Interpretation (26 page)

Notice, too, that in the first type of doubling—where we hear what’s going to happen before we see it—there is a deliberate flouting of one of the traditional modes of narrative involvement: suspense. Again, one thinks of Brecht. To eliminate suspense, at the beginning of a scene Brecht announces, by means of placards or a narrator, what is to happen. (Godard adopts this technique in
Vivre Sa Vie.
) Bresson does the same thing, by jumping the gun with narration. In many ways, the perfect story for Bresson is that of his last film,
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
—in that the plot is wholly known, foreordained; the words of the actors are not invented but those of the actual trial record. Ideally, there is no suspense in a Bresson film. Thus, in the one film where suspense should normally play a large role,
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
the title deliberately—even awkwardly—gives the outcome away: we know Fontaine is going to make it.
16
In this respect, of course, Bresson’s escape film differs from Jacques Becker’s last work,
Le Trou
(called, here,
Nightwatch
), though in other ways Becker’s excellent film owes a great deal to
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé.
(It is to Becker’s credit that he was the only prominent person in the French film world who defended
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
when it came out.)

Thus, form in Bresson’s films is anti-dramatic, though strongly linear. Scenes are cut short, and set end to end without obvious emphasis. In
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
there must be thirty such short scenes. This method of constructing the story is most rigorously observed in
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc.
The film is composed of static, medium shots of people talking; the scenes are the inexorable sequence of Jeanne’s interrogations. The principle of eliding anecdotal material—in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
for instance, one knows little about why Fontaine is in prison in the first place—is here carried to its extreme. There are no interludes of any sort. An interrogation ends; the door slams behind Jeanne; the scene fades out. The key clatters in the lock; another interrogation; again the door clangs shut; fadeout. It is a very dead-pan construction, which puts a sharp brake on emotional involvement.

Bresson also came to reject the species of involvement created in films by the expressiveness of the acting. Again, one is reminded of Brecht by Bresson’s particular way of handling actors, in the exercise of which he has found it preferable to use non-professionals in major roles. Brecht wanted the actor to “report” a role rather than “be” it. He sought to divorce the actor from identifying with the role, as he wanted to divorce the spectator from identifying with the events that he saw being “reported” on the stage. “The actor,” Brecht insists, “must remain a demonstrator; he must present the person demonstrated as a stranger, he must not suppress the ‘he did that, he said that’ element in his performance.” Bresson, working with non-professional actors in his last four films (he used professionals in
Les Anges du Peché
and
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
), also seems to be striving for the same effect of strangeness. His idea is for the actors not to act out their lines, but simply to say them with as little expression as possible. (To get this effect, Bresson rehearses his actors for several months before shooting begins.) Emotional climaxes are rendered very elliptically.

But the reason is really quite different in the two cases. The reason that Brecht rejected acting reflects his idea of the relation of dramatic art to critical intelligence. He thought that the emotional force of the acting would get in the way of the ideas represented in plays. (From what I saw of the work of the Berliner Ensemble six years ago, though, it didn’t seem to me that the somewhat low-keyed acting really diminished emotional involvement; it was the highly stylized staging which did that.) The reason that Bresson rejects acting reflects his notion of the purity of the art itself. “Acting is for the theater, which is a bastard art,” he has said. “The film can be a true art because in it the author takes fragments of reality and arranges them in such a way that their juxtaposition transforms them.” Cinema, for Bresson, is a total art, in which acting corrodes. In a film,

each shot is like a word, which means nothing by itself, or rather means so many things that in effect it is meaningless. But a word in a poem is transformed, its meaning made precise and unique, by its placing in relation to the words around it: in the same way a shot in a film is given its meaning by its context, and each shot modifies the meaning of the previous one until with the last shot a total, unparaphrasable meaning has been arrived at. Acting has nothing to do with that, it can only get in the way. Films can only be made by bypassing the will of those who appear in them; using not what they do, but what they are.

In sum: there are spiritual resources beyond effort, which appear only when effort is stilled. One imagines that Bresson never treats his actors to an “interpretation” of their roles: Claude Laydu, who plays the priest in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
has said that while he was making the film he was never told to try to represent sanctity, though that is what it appears, when viewing the film, that he does. In the end, everything depends on the actor, who either has this luminous presence or doesn’t. Laydu has it. So does François Leterrier, who is Fontaine in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé.
But Martin Lassalle as Michel in Pickpocket conveys something wooden, at times evasive. With Florence Carrez in
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc,
Bresson has experimented with the limit of the unexpressive. There is no acting at all; she simply reads the lines. It could have worked. But it doesn’t—because she is the least luminous of all the presences Bresson has “used” in his later films. The thinness of Bresson’s last film is, partly, a failure of communicated intensity on the part of the actress who plays Jeanne, upon whom the film depends.

5

All of Bresson’s films have a common theme: the meaning of confinement and liberty. The imagery of the religious vocation and of crime are used jointly. Both lead to “the cell.”

The plots all have to do with incarceration and its sequel.
Les Anges du Peché
takes place mostly inside a convent. Thérèse, an ex-convict who (unknown to the police) has just murdered the lover who betrayed her, is delivered into the hands of the Bethany nuns. One young novice, who tries to create a special relationship with Thérèse and, learning her secret, to get her to surrender herself voluntarily to the police, is expelled from the convent for insubordination. One morning, she is found dying in the convent garden. Thérèse is finally moved, and the last shot is of her extending her hands to the policeman’s manacles.… In
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
the metaphor of confinement is repeated several times. Hélène and Jean have been confined in their love; he urges her to return to the world now that she is “free.” But she doesn’t, and instead devotes herself to setting a trap for him—a trap which requires that she find two pawns (Agnès and her mother), whom she virtually confines in an apartment while they await her orders. Like
Les Anges du Peché,
this is the story of the redemption of a lost girl. In
Les Anges du Peché,
Thérèse is liberated by accepting imprisonment; in
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
Agnès is imprisoned, and then, arbitrarily, as by a miracle, is forgiven, set free.… In
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
the emphasis has shifted. The bad girl, Chantal, is kept in the background. The drama of confinement is in the priest’s confinement in himself, his despair, his weakness, his mortal body. (“I was a prisoner of the Holy Agony.”) He is liberated by accepting his senseless and agonizing death from stomach cancer.… In
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé,
which is set in a German-run prison in occupied France, confinement is most literally represented. So is liberation: the hero triumphs over himself (his despair, the temptation of inertia) and escapes. The obstacles are embodied both in material things and in the incalculability of the human beings in the vicinity of the solitary hero. But Fontaine risks trusting the two strangers in the courtyard at the beginning of his imprisonment, and his trust is not betrayed. And because he risks trusting the youthful collaborationist who is thrown into his cell with him on the eve of his escape (the alternative is to kill the boy), he is able to get out.… In
Pickpocket,
the hero is a young recluse who lives in a closet of a room, a petty criminal who, in Dostoevskian fashion, appears to crave punishment. Only at the end, when he has been caught and is in jail, talking through the bars with the girl who has loved him, is he depicted as being, possibly, able to love.… In
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc,
again the entire film is set in prison. As in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
Jeanne’s liberation comes through a hideous death; but Jeanne’s martyrdom is much less affecting than the priest’s, because she is so depersonalized (unlike Falconetti’s Jeanne in Dreyer’s great film) that she does not seem to mind dying.

The nature of drama being conflict, the real drama of Bresson’s stories is interior conflict: the fight against oneself. And all the static and formal qualities of his films work to that end. Bresson has said, of his choice of the highly stylized and artificial plot of
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
that it allowed him to “eliminate anything which might distract from the interior drama.” Still, in that film and the one before it, interior drama is represented in an exterior form, however fastidious and stripped down.
Les Anges du Peché
and
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
depict conflicts of wills among the various characters as much or more than they concern a conflict within the self.

It is only in the films following
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
that Bresson’s drama has been really interiorized. The theme of
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
is the young priest’s conflict with himself: only secondarily is this acted out in his relation with the Vicar of Torcy, with Chantal, and with the Countess, Chantal’s mother. This is even clearer in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé
—where the principal character is literally isolated in a cell, struggling against despair. Solitude and interior conflict pair off in another way in
Pickpocket,
where the solitary hero refuses despair only at the price of refusing love, and gives himself over to masturbatory acts of theft. But in the last film, where we know the drama should be taking place, there is scarcely any evidence of it. Conflict has been virtually suppressed; it must be inferred. Bresson’s Jeanne is an automaton of grace. But, however interior the drama, there must be drama. This is what
Procès de Jeanne d’Arc
withholds.

Notice, though, that the “interior drama” which Bresson seeks to depict does not mean
psychology.
In realistic terms, the motives of Bresson’s characters are often hidden, sometimes downright incredible. In
Pickpocket,
for instance, when Michel sums up his two years in London with “I lost all my money on gambling and women,” one simply does not believe it. Nor is it any more convincing that during this time the good Jacques, Michel’s friend, has made Jeanne pregnant and then deserted her and their child.

Psychological implausibility is scarcely a virtue; and the narrative passages I have just cited are flaws in
Pickpocket.
But what is central to Bresson and, I think, not to be caviled at, is his evident belief that psychological analysis is superficial. (Reason: it assigns to action a paraphrasable meaning that true art transcends.) He does not intend his characters to be implausible, I’m sure; but he does, I think, intend them to be opaque. Bresson is interested in the forms of spiritual action—in the physics, as it were, rather than in the psychology of souls. Why persons behave as they do is, ultimately, not to be understood. (Psychology, precisely, does claim to understand.) Above all, persuasion is inexplicable, unpredictable. That the priest
does
reach the proud and unyielding Countess (in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne
), that Jeanne
doesn’t
persuade Michel (in
Pickpocket
) are just facts—or mysteries, if you like.

Such a physics of the soul was the subject of Simone Weil’s most remarkable book,
Gravity and Grace.
And the following sentences of Simone Weil’s—

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.

The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

supply the three basic theorems of Bresson’s “anthropology.” Some souls are heavy, others light; some are liberated or capable of being liberated, others not. All one can do is be patient, and as empty as possible. In such a regimen there is no place for the imagination, much less for ideas and opinions. The ideal is neutrality, transparence. This is what is meant when the Vicar of Torcy tells the young priest in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
“A priest has no opinions.”

Except in an ultimate unrepresentable sense, a priest has no attachments either. In the quest for spiritual lightness (“grace”), attachments are a spiritual encumbrance. Thus, the priest, in the climactic scene of
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
forces the Countess to relinquish her passionate mourning for her dead son. True contact between persons is possible, of course; but it comes not through will but unasked for, through grace. Hence in Bresson’s films human solidarity is represented only at a distance—as it is between the priest and the Vicar of Torcy in
Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne,
or between Fontaine and the other prisoners in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé.
The actual coming together of two people in a relation of love can be stated, ushered in, as it were, before our eyes: Jean crying out “Stay! I love you!” to the nearly dead Agnès in
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne;
Fontaine putting his arm around Jost in
Un Condamné à Mort s’est Échappé;
Michel in
Pickpocket
saying to Jeanne through prison bars, “How long it has taken me to come to you.” But we do not see love lived. The moment in which it is declared terminates the film.