These are notes the filmmaker Robert Bresson made to himself, to try to express what it was he was attempting in the medium of film (which, in and through his hands, he referred to as “cinematography”) , and how that differed from ordinary film, or “cinema”, in which he saw the inauthentic reproduction of the theater. Herein we find his theory of “models” (in opposition to “actors”), his theory of cinematographic economy, his belief in the centrality not of images and sounds per se but in their inter-relationship, in the transcendent revelation made possible by just the right sequence and juxtaposition (and how similar he found that to music). Read these notes if you find something in the works of Bresson, whether it be confounding or illuminating.
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