Film Center's Bresson Retrospective A Not-To-Be Missed Opportunity

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 18, 2012 8:40PM

Get ten film nerds in a room and you are likely to get ten different answers to the question "Who is the greatest director of all time?" Well, first you're going to get a lot of obnoxious hemming and hawing about the semantics of the word "best." The point is, there are a lot of acceptable answers and no single conversation-ending response ("Mozart," "Shakespeare," "Jordan," "1985 Bears," "The one where Duck Phillips tried to crap on Don Draper's couch," etc.). One thing you can bet on is that if you were to throw out Robert Bresson as your answer, they would all nod knowingly, stare into the distance and swoon dreamily, "Ah, Bresson."

The DNA of Bresson's 13 films can be found in the mitochondria of practically every European director of the past four decades and, thanks to vectors such as Martin Scorsese and Jim Jarmusch, nestled in the guts of U.S. filmmakers far and wide. His films are earthy but spiritual, intellectual but easy to understand, austere but soul-nourishing. Not a second spent watching them is wasted, and whether or not they suit you, any encounter with one will be an experience not soon forgotten. Opportunities to enjoy these works, unarguably among the greatest expressions of cinematic art, in theaters is criminally rare.

Which is why news that the Siskel Film Center would showcase the most complete retrospective of his films in 14 years, programmed by the Toronto International Film Festival Cinematheque, got us making room in our calendar to take in as many as possible. Spanning from his early, more traditionally furnished films of the 1940s, through the full flowering of his most influential work in the 60s and early 70s and right through the imposing final chapters (1977 and 1983), this touring collection has it all. (Well, except for his early short, Public Affairs, an unfortunate casualty of "availability issues" scratched for now from the program - which we can't pretend doesn't disappoint us).

Bresson is most well-known for his use of nonprofessional actors (whom he dubbed "models") part of an obsession with stripping his films of all theatricality. A former painter, he yearned to exploit the camera and sound recording devices to create works that could only exist in the cinema, rather than filmed meditations of theatrical events. Many find his films spiritually moving, and while his Catholic upbringing and experience in a German POW camp are often facilely read into each work, there can be no doubt that existential questions and profound yearnings haunt each frame.

For the completely uninitiated we might point to the popular and hopeful A Man Escaped, whose prison escape plotline offers an innate suspense that other titles may lack. Though there is surprisingly little critical consensus about Bresson's best film, either Mouchette or Au Hasard Balthazar may deliver the best bang for your buck if you can only see one film in the series. For topicality, perhaps The Devil, Probably, with its depiction of young people disaffected among affluence, merits first consideration, but consider yourself warned: it was once banned to anyone under 18 for fear that it may encourage suicide.

The glorious economy of his camera work, his ingenious use of sound, his striking employment of narration and music, and his elliptical structures are legendary, but you will find no technique used for showy effect. Taken as a whole, only the output Stanley Kubrick approached a body of work so completely driven by its creator's all-encompassing vision. But Bresson is Kubrick unpasteurized, still teeming with life, still nourishing to the human spirit with no aftertaste of the laboratory. That Bresson so relentlessly sought an elusive purity of form made him great, that he so often achieved it made his works masterpieces.

The Robert Bresson retrospective takes place at the Gene Siskel Film Center from Jan. 21 through Feb. 29. Tickets are $7 ($6 or $4 for members), with discounts being offered on the second half of the Saturday double features if both tickets are bought together.