‘O doux miracle de nos mains vides !’ The renouveau catholique in French cinema (Bernanos, Bresson, Béguin and Godard)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Ever since the 1950s, the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos has exerted a particular influence on French cinema, both through the adaptations of his work by Robert Bresson and through his political writings, which Godard incorporated into films such as For Ever Mozart (1996). In this paper, the author aims to unearth this legacy of Bernanos in particular, and of the renouveau catholique, i.e. post-war Catholic revivalism, in general. What persists in French cinema is first and foremost an understanding of ‘incarnationalist realism’, a term the author derives from the literary critic Albert Béguin. This notion expresses a double ideal, namely that cinema is bound to ‘sensuous appearances’ and that it should reveal ‘the inner life’. In the twentieth century Bernanos noticed a decline of the inner life, and of spirituality, which accounts for the presence of evil in his novels and the condemnation of ‘the modern world’ in his political writings. This worldview, I will argue, is key to understanding the cinema of Bresson and Godard. However culturally reactionary these filmmakers may have been, this worldview brought about an artistic revolution in cinema, as they reflected on the medium’s specific potential to express the ‘unsayable’ – be it the presence of evil or the manifestation of Grace.