I wanted to write pages and pages and pages about Bresson, but I just don't have the time to dedicate to these write-ups that I used to have. Still, Bresson is one of the most brilliant of all filmmakers. Tarkovsky adored him. He once said, "I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman." And it seems he loved Bresson even more than Bergman. Bresson influenced so many filmmakers, from Tarkovsky to Tarr to Vlácil to Costa to Straub/Huillet, and many more. He is truly one of the ten or so most important figures in the history of cinema.

Bresson's particular brand of minimalism was completely unique. It was a novelty at the time, and remains one today. Bresson took minimalism to an extreme that wouldn't be rivaled or surpassed until Straub-Huillet. Minimalism for Bresson didn't just mean cinematography, art direction, narrative devices like ellipsis, et cetera. It meant everything. Even the actors themselves didn't escape Bresson's minimalistic impulses. He brought his minimalism to the way he direct them as well. His actor-model technique (in which he had actors repeat takes over and over and over until any semblance of conventional acting or performance had been drained from the shot) was troubling for audiences who were used to a more theatrical approach to filmic storytelling, in which actors and their performances drive the story and therefore the film. For those who could see past this, Bresson was (and remains) deeply reward. I absolutely love that Bresson pays no mind to performance (in any conventional sense) whatsoever. I get very tired of actors acting -- performing -- always trying to do too much. So Bresson's complete disregard for traditional acting and performance is immensely refreshing for me.

Ebert once said something of Bresson's cinema that I think is soon on. He referred to Bresson's films as films of great passion, and said, "Because the actors didn't act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them." This is the key to everything with Bresson. He leaves you the space to create your own movie our of the material he's given you. Godard did the same thing. Many great directors have done this, and, in fact, it's really what minimalism is all about. By doing less, you ultimately end up with a film that does more. You allow the film to emphasize certain movements, certain gestures, certain sounds or words and vocal inflections, or other elements of the filmic experience that would otherwise go unnoticed in a film that is filled with plot and noise and action and so forth. At the extreme end of minimalism, you get a film like Jean-Marie Straub's "Not Reconciled", or Marguerite Duras' "Nathalie Granger", in which so little is offered to the viewer that he or she almost has to create the bulk of the film him/herself. The result is a truly collaborative work of cinema, in terms of the relationship between author and viewer (Godard always said that cinema is a collaboration between the filmmaker and the viewer). In a film like "Nathalie Granger", the viewer ends up defining the film as much or more than the filmmaker has. Bresson wasn't quite this extreme in terms of his minimalism, but he wasn't far from it.

It's also interesting that Bresson distinguished between filmmaking and cinematography (well, we all do, but not in the same way Bresson did). For Bresson, cinematography didn't refer to the art of motion picture photography itself, which is what we know the word to mean today; rather, it was more of a synonym for the overall act of filmmaking, except that Bresson made a very important distinction: for Bresson, filmmaking simply meant making a film. Anyone who learns the craft can do it. For him, it often added up to filmed theater, nothing more. Cinematography, on the other hand, for Bresson, referred to the act of using images and sounds in order to develop a unique, strictly cinematic language. Bresson truly believed, as most great filmmakers do (and most great film lovers as well), that cinema could be used to create a whole new language. And, indeed, I would argue that in the entire history of cinema, there has never been a filmmaker (or perhaps only one) who developed his own filmic language through his work more than Bresson did. There are those who come close -- Tarkovsky, Weerasethakul, Fellini, Robbe-Grillet, Pasolini, Angelopoulos, Tarr, maybe some others -- but the only one who could rival or surpass Bresson in this regard, in my opinion, would be Godard. Bresson didn't just make films; he used his own visual and filmic grammar to create a language unto itself,

To wrap things up, I'll offer one more quote. Shmuel Ben-gad wrote of Bresson:

"There is a credibility in Bresson's models: They are like people we meet in life, more or less opaque creatures who speak, move, and gesture [...] Acting, on the other hand, no matter how naturalistic, actively deforms or invents by putting an overlay or filter over the person, presenting a simplification of a human being and not allowing the camera to capture the actor's human depths. Thus what Bresson sees as the essence of filmic art, the achievement of the creative transformation involved in all art through the interplay of images of real things, is destroyed by the artifice of acting. For Bresson, then, acting is, like mood music and expressive camera work, just one more way of deforming reality or inventing that has to be avoided."