Let me preface my comments by saying that Terrence Rafferty's glib article wouldn't
be worth mentioning in the slightest except for the discouraging fact that it was publishing in
the
NY Times, a fact which if kept clearly in mind helps to further contextualize and measure
the extent of Rafferty's failure here. It hardly needs to be stated by me that the
NY Times is
the world's most trusted daily, that people regularly and unreflectively cite it as an
authority—
the authority—on world and cultural affairs. Taken in this light, Rafferty's piece
is an unmitigated catastrophe, a retrogression in Bresson criticism and, needless to add,
deleterious to the readers whose opinions
it seeks to mold. It is, in a word, a blockade against reasonable critical and independent
thought, which, if not a bad thing in and of itself, is doubly bad in the context of Bresson.
However, while I certainly concur with a large part of Kevin Lee's passionate and
detailed rebuttal, particularly because it encourages one to return to the films again and to
actually study them empirically, I can't help but feel just as uncomfortable with some of his
comments as I do with most or all of Rafferty's. Let me cut to the chase. A Jonathan
Rosenbaum-like "secularist" or "materialist" polemic against proponents and disciples of
Schrader's transcendental interpretation, while certainly necessary and justified given what
the films are, only brings us half-way back to the films themselves. The reason for this is
that secular interpretations and approaches to Bresson, as Mr. Lee's response demonstrates,
still seem to be far too comfortable in attributing this or that view or position to the film's
maker. What I'm suggesting is that, given their style, the films make it extremely difficult to
attribute any opinion or personal expression to Bresson at all. It is just as hasty to claim that
Bresson the author believed that
"Tout est grace," the last words uttered in
Diary of a Country
Priest, as it is to state that "Bresson's reverence for the visual and aural sensuality of everyday
objects amounts to nothing short of hedonistic materialist fetishism!" or "Bresson tried to
embrace the world, to burrow deep into its textures, sensations and events, and in doing so,
perhaps, to redeem it." Now, whereas I realize fully that Lee did not intend for the first of
these lines to be taken at face-value and acknowledge the careful thought that went into the
placement of "perhaps" in the second, I do think that they both exhibit an approach that
seems to circumvent what I will call these films' challenge to interpretation.
Let me rephrase. In his films, Bresson is, I take it, only present in his absence. What
could this mean? It means that although Bresson is their maker, and that filmmaking on
broad terms, as a human action, is both intentional and necessarily 'about' or 'saying'
something, Bresson only 'speaks' to the viewer in a way that might be described, for lack of a
better term, as 'coded,' which seems to be corroborated by the aphorism in
Notes sur le
cinématographe that says, "
[l]es idées, les cacher, mais de manière qu'on les trouve. La plus importante sera
la plus cachée" (p.45), not to mention his brief musing on 'the internal' and 'the external' in a
translated passage collected in MOMA's
Rediscovering French Film:
|
It is the interior that commands. I know that this could seem paradoxical in an art
which is all exterior. But I have seen films in which everyone runs, which are slow.
And others in which the characters don't move, which are fast. I have ascertained
that the rhythm of the images is powerless to correct any interior slowness. Only the
knots which tie and untie in the interior of characters give a film its movement, its
real movement. It is this movement which I strive to portray through some thing—or
some combination of things—which may not only be dialogue.... (p. 155; italics in source)
|
On these grounds, Sontag's suggestion that Bresson was an esoteric filmmaker is spot on
and for reasons that she did not fully develop. Of course, it'd be silly to carry this to an
extreme and suggest that Bresson's films contain some secret and coherent teaching about
modern life, or something of that nature. Having said that, the films do encourage one to
think about certain things in certain ways and there are clues that guide us through these
thoughts. My view is that Bresson's films are—I hesitate to use this worn word—'open,' a
point which Lee would probably not deny, but for this reason they include all possible
interpretations of all audiences (secularists and transcendentalists alike) as well as the
intentions of their author. While our intuitions about the intentions of the author must in
some way act as a guide as we wade through the available information and interpretive
stances, let's face it: it is quite often extremely difficult to figure out what Bresson means—and
this expressly because it is difficult to figure out the motivations of his characters, of
certain visual, aural and other stylistic choices, and so on. The dictum that artists explain
what they mean only indirectly by the act of representation applies most strictly to a
modernist like Bresson. Of course, I am in no way suggesting that his films are absolutely
open or sheer possibility; if calling a Bresson film 'open' is correct, then there must be some
thing about which this description is accurate.
My suggestion is that we begin studying (and I choose that word carefully) Bresson's
films in a way that'll produce sound speculative insights based on close analysis and
interpretation of the films individually and only subsequently of the oeuvre as a whole. This is how
Plato's Dialogues have been studied for centuries and, while Bresson is no Plato and never
sought to be, I think that this careful and—I'm willing to admit—time-consuming approach
would benefit the films and how we understand them. Lee's approach starts us on our way
but may ultimately end up stopping too short by virtue of the premature, albeit attractive,
hypothesis that Bresson is a 'secularist,' even if the goal is only to apply the term to his color
work. A Bresson film pushes the interpreter to master the equivocal, and this cannot be
done if we focus on certain aspects at the expense of others.
But I don't want to leave the common viewer who has no time to 'study' these works
with the feeling that he/she is necessarily going to be disarmed or helpless when confronted
with them, for then I'd be no better than Rafferty.
Narration in the Fiction Film by David
Bordwell may have its shortcomings, but one of the book's highlights is the chapter on
Bresson's
Pickpocket, in which it is argued that the viewer's attention is pulled into a tug of
war between the perception of order (style) and the perception of meaning (content). I like
this suggestion because it accounts, in some way, for the challenge that a Bresson film poses,
in that it frustrates attempts at 'cataloguing' all the plot-driven details that are both shown
and not shown, not to mention the stylistic repetitions and slight variations on them that
carry the film forward. I therefore like the idea of latching onto a given detail (usually
stylistic) in a Bresson film and following it to the film's end. In
Lancelot, when and in what
context are we shown shots of horses' eyes? In
A Man Escaped, when and in what context is
the Mozart cued? While following these stylistic features all the way through may not
produce a solid grounds for concluding what they mean or how they work, this exercise does
help one to not only organize one's own thoughts about the films, but they assist one in
discovering how the text itself is organized.
