“Mon Dieu, il faut que je l’écrive!” — cinematography between writing, speaking, and seeing in Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951)

Abstract

Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951) assumes a special place in the career of the French filmmaker Robert Bresson. Joseph Cunneen describes the film as “a major step in the discovery of his own approach to cinema” and for Tony Pipolo Diary of a Country Priest is Bresson’s “first truly great work … that augurs a formal breakthrough.” The film has been celebrated for transposing the materiality of writing into the realm of cinema. It is praised both as an ingenious adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s diary novel as well as a unique vision of cinematography. Although these two aspects have been widely discussed by film critics and scholars, little attention has been paid to the role the diary plays in adapting the novel and exploring a writerly vision of cinema. On the one hand, Bresson’s recourse to the diary form is true to its literary source. As a highly performative mode of writing, the diary foregrounds the dramatic structure of the film. In this respect the film also deviates — more so than the novel — from the diary form as an open or even plotless genre. On the other hand, the diary provides a congenial frame for reflecting on his ideas of cinematography as “a writing with images in movement and with sounds” (Bresson). This paper examines the diary as a figuration of the medium of film that simultaneously defines film and defies a definition of film.