Abstract
The films of French director Robert Bresson are considered sober and transcendental. However, in A gentle woman (1969) and in Four nights of a dreamer (1972), he included extracts of quite different genres, like a libertine comedy (the extract of film Benjamim by Michel Deville, 1968), a Shakespearean tragedy (a performance of Shakespeare´s Hamlet) and a gangster film (When love possesses us, produced by Bresson himself). In a way, those excerpts represent exactly the opposite of Bresson´s cinema. On the other hand, they still have some familiarity with it. We analyze the approach of those genres in the sequences in Bresson´s films, as well of the styles present in them by the use of music and images of paintings.
Highlights
This journal is published by the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
The films of French director Robert Bresson are considered sober, with a “transcendental style”[1], due to the economical use of music and the employment of non-professional actors, who recite the lines of the dialogues as if they were just reading them
In A gentle woman (Une femme douce, 1969) and Four nights of a dreamer (Quatre nuits dun rêveur, 1972), Bresson included excerpts of very diverse spectacles, some preexistent and some not: we see an extract of the film Benjamim, by Michel Deville (1969) and a representation of Shakespeares Hamlet; and When love possesses us, a sequence produced by Bresson specially for Four nights of a dreamer
Summary
A gentle woman is an adaptation of a novel by Fiodor Dostoevsky, A gentle maiden, which was published in 1876 and has the subheading “fantastic”, as the whole narrative happens in the conscience of the main male character, who walks around the dead corpse of his wife. We leave late nineteenth century Russia for Paris a century after. The basic core of the story remains the same: the owner of a pawnshop marries a poor younger woman and uses the marriage as a way to humiliate her, but he is surprised by the revolt of his victim. The fantastical atmosphere of the Dostoyevsky novel is, in a certain way, attenuated, as the images of consciousness are naturalized in flashbacks, which are a common cinematic narrative procedure. The film takes place mostly in the couples flat and in the pawnshop, we feel a great presence of the city of Paris through its parks (the Bois de Boulogne, the Jardin des Plantes), museums (of Modern Art, of Natural History) and other cultural spaces
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