Biography

Robert Bresson

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Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Public Affairs (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Angels of Sin (1943) in 1943. His next film, Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) would be the last time he would work with professional actors. From Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951) (aka "Diary of a Country Priest") onwards, he created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film (often, crucial details are only given in the soundtrack), with the actors (he calls them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances. It's a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which means that his films never achieved great popularity (it was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but he has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema. He retired in the 1980s, after failing to raise the money for a long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis.
- IMDb mini biography by: Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

Thematically bleak films
Always cast non-actors or (as he called them) "models" to give the characters an impassive, naturalist feel
Catholic-based themes and images
Characters who go through emotional crisises and who find themselves hopeless by the end (with the notable exception of A Man Escaped (1956)
Shots of a character reading from or writing in a book

Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "Bresson is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.".
According to Andrei Tarkovsky, Bresson is "perhaps the only artist in cinema, who achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand".
Andrei Tarkovsky held Bresson in very high regard, noting him and Ingmar Bergman as his two favorite filmmakers.
Did not direct his first feature film until he was 42 years old.
In his development of auteur theory, François Truffaut lists Bresson among the few directors to whom the term "auteur" can genuinely be applied.

Cinema is interior movement.
Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater; those that employ the resources of cinematography
Cinematography: a new way of writing, therefore of feeling.
For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.
Painting taught me to make not beautiful images but necessary ones.

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