The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and his Market. By Colin Burnett.

Abstract

Studies of Robert Bresson have by and large tended to treat his work as a species of cinematic hapax, perhaps influenced by Jean Cocteau’s celebrated assertion that Bresson was ‘“à part” dans ce métier terrible’. Colin Burnett’s impressively researched study sets out to rebut that implication, through reference not only to the filmic texts themselves but also to the biographic and institutional contexts from which they sprang. This underpins the work’s constant allusions to Bresson’s ‘cultural market’ — a doubtless advertent flirting with lèse-majesté in writing about so resolutely uncommercial a film-maker, tainting the demiurge with vulgar materialism, but amply and fascinatingly justified with copious documentation about in particular his work as surrealist-influenced fashion and advertising photographer and his collaboration with André Bazin and the under-rated but immensely important Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in the founding of the Objectif 49 ciné-club, ‘which aimed to create a nouvelle avant-garde in postwar narrative film-making’ (p. 17). The key Bressonian notion of the modèle (as opposed to the actor) is understood by Burnett not only spiritually but materially and above all visually, proposing as it does ‘that the human figure on screen be viewed as a pictorial element first and foremost’ (p. 151) — a redressing of the balance from pro-filmic to filmic which quite literally enables us to view the films in a new light. In this respect Burnett follows on from Brian Price, whose Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), as the wink to ‘L’Internationale’ in its title suggests, reads the œuvre as politically engaged. Significant too is his stress on the importance of rhythm, visual as well as verbal, in Bresson’s filmic writing. There are a few oversights and infelicities: Georges Charensol’s mocking, apropos Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945), of the very idea of a modern-day adaptation of Les Liaisons dangereuses is uncannily prescient of Roger Vadim’s film version a decade later (1959), which might have been thought to undercut his argument, while a long(ish) sentence beginning ‘What is more’ (p. 106) appears to this reviewer all but incoherent (a proofing problem?). But Burnett offers us an important contribution to work on Bresson, which significantly expands and complements existing, more text-rather-than-context-bound studies.