My personal hero of the aforementioned European art-movie genre -- Robert Bresson -- is the subject of a new book edited by James Quandt. Robert Bresson includes interviews with the director by fellow filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Paul Schrader and French film critics Michael Delahaye and Michel Ciment. There are also homages from directors like Martin Scorsese and Rainier Werner Fassbinder, as well as essays by Roland Barthes and Alberto Moravia. One might wonder why such famous and accomplished people took the time to write about a French filmmaker whose movies are not known to the general moviegoing public. The answer is that the late Bresson actually was one of the great figures in cinema. His austere directing style relied on slow and beautiful imagery and much suffering on the part of his main characters, resulting in films that, once experienced, is never forgotten. One can describe Quandt's book the same way

last year i recieved one of the best christmas presents i could ask for: this book. while i wouldnt recommend it to anyone that isnt a bresson fan it holds plenty to mull over for those that are. while a few of the articles are dull and/or pretentious more often than not they are highly illuminating as to the director's methods. there are one or two articles devoted to each of his films and a few that are just about his films in general. this first section of the book ends with bresson's cinematographer for "diary," through to "joan of arc" writing about his love/hate relationship with bresson and an interview with the young man who played the lead in "the devil, probably." the second part of the book contains three interviews with bresson: the paul schrader, which is fidgety and odd; the godard, which is exhaustive, rambling and very enlightening; and the final one whose author slips my mind which is great but unfortunately short (conducted after the completion of what would be bresson's last film, "l'argent"). the final section of the book is basically several directors talking about why they like bresson. this section ranges from short, humorous stories (the fassbinder and aki kaurismaki) to long essays on bresson's style(malle, etc.). other directors quoted in this final section include tarkovsky, bertollucci, wenders, hal hartley, and atom egoyan.

Imagine a young film director making a somewhat controversial first film, with a script by someone on the order of Saul Bellow, followed by a more successful film with recognizable stars and a labyrinthine script by someone like Harold Pinter. Have him drop out of sight for four years, only to emerge from obscurity with a movie about a country priest, filmed (spectacularly) in rural (RURAL!) Massachusetts. Etcetera. There is really no way to imagine Robert Bresson otherwise. We owe it to the French film industry (if something so UNconsolidated could be called an industry) that Bresson was permitted to flourish at all. It wasn't simply as if he was waiting around, all his life, for a financier (14 films in forty years of activity). But where else on earth could this austerely Catholic artist have found work but in France, the most religiously cynical country in Europe? His films are a rebuke to anyone stupid enough to expect anything conventional. Bresson questioned everything in film - even the central point of the medium. His films deny the viewer the usual crutches en route to an idea. Bresson leads us silently, without promptings, toward a disbelief we had long since suspended but never seriously questioned. He makes the word 'master' clean again.

Kent Jones offers a third way for film lovers who want to appreciate the films of Robert Bresson, but are daunted by both their reputation for austere formal rigour, and by critics' insistence on their Christian doctrinal severity. Jones advises us to reverse the usual process, which is to weld Big Themes onto the films, and instead look at what's on the screen closely, the 'sensual details' of Bresson's art, such as the hands that do routine work, the sway of coffee in a mug, a glass of wine falling on the floor, the sound of a rushing stream.

On a purely visual level, the ex-painter Bresson's films can seem unusually flat, but if you connect this deliberate flatness to Bresson's use of sound and light, and the careful way he builds scenes through precise composition and 'punchy' editing, a unique three-dimensionality is achieved. If you know how to look, Bresson's pessimistic films glow with life; if you don't, they seem mean and drab. Jones' book does what literature on film should do and rarely does - it opens your eyes. I rewatched 'L'Argent' soon after reading this study and the experience was revelatory. What I had previously watched with dutiful admiration suddenly became vibrant and urgent.

Jones' book is a very old-fashioned piece of film-criticism, with no recourse to psychoanalysis or feminism, no attempt to discuss the film's production process or its cultural context, or to apply biographical information (probably because, in Bresson's case, there is so little known). For Jones, 'L'Argent' is a Great Film by a Great Auteur, and analysed accordingly, as if it were a book, each detail dissected and related to the whole. This procedure is so refreshing because in most theory-based criticism, the actual films tend to get lost (never mind any love for the medium), as minor details are absurdly inflated into whole theses.

Jones begins with an overview of the critical reception of Bresson's work (either over-reverent or baffled), the ways in which Difficult Ideas have obscured the essence of Bresson's cinema. He then discusses the film's source, Tolstoy's relentlessly didactic novella 'The Forged Coupon', locating the radical differences between the two works, in narrative detail, thematic emphasis and aesthetic process, thus revealing the deeper meanings of 'L'Argent'. The bulk of the study comprises a meticulous, scene-by-scene, shot-by-shot analysis of the film, the story of a young worker who, paid off with counterfeit notes, is dragged into an inexorable narrative of robbery, jail, marital breakdown, suicide and serial murder. This procedure could have been plodding, but Jones alerts us to every camera angle, every cut, and, especially, every sound, making this film in particular, and, potentially, films in general, live and resonate. He shows how Bresson gives each scene its own heightened integrity, free from the mechanical, explanatory chaff that blights most movies, resulting in high-pitched narrative of uncommon intensity. Only when we have properly absorbed what's on the screen, can we begin talking about what isn't, abstract themes, morality, religion etc. Jones' high-minded, high-art tone should grate, but seems refreshing in post-modern times that promised egalitarian energy and gave us nothing but conformist sludge.

Kent Jones deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Jonathan Rosenbaum and J. Hoberman and Gilberto Perez, and this is an exhilirating analysis of an astonishing and unfairly maligned film by Bresson, who was God.

"Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective by Peter Galassi, Robert Delpire" is an essential purchase for anyone with more than a passing interest in photography.

As the images and essays in this retrospective of HCB's work make clear, Cartier-Bresson invented 35 mm photography as a visual form. What studying, or even browsing through this massive collection makes clear is that despite being known as a "photographer," Cartier-Bresson is not being disengeuous when he eschews that descriptive: he is not a photographer; he is an artist whose primary tool for about 50 years was a camera. But he wasn't "taking pictures," he was creating art, and happened to use a camera to do it.

A careful examination of this collection of images leaves one with the impression is that the reason HCB has had such an enormous impact on the history of photography in many different forms - including "street photography," "photojournalism," and "documentary photography," is the fact that he is one of the great artists of the 20th century.

Even if you think you know all Cartier-Bresson's work; even if you own all the books in which most of these photos originally appeared over the past 50 years, "Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Man, the Image and the World: A Retrospective" is a book worth owning because of the overview it provides, and because of the insightfulness of several of the essays included.

This book has some really amazing photography, they have a really powerful message. I like photos that make me feel something and Robert Capa's photos difinatly do that. Robert Capa was in the right place and the right time with alot of his photos. The only thing the book lacked i feel is more background on the photos.

Ordinary people caught under extraordinary circumstances are what give these images the power that they have and elicit pure empathy from the viewer. Robert Capa earned his place in photographic history and left behind a body of work for us to consider...

Not what I expected. This book is more philosophical, than literal. I like it, but it's like reading a lot of proverbs, you cannot absorb it all, only the few that strike you at that moment.

If you want a step by step, how to make film book, you're better off browsing the bookstore at your local film school.

If you are a novice filmmaker, and you want to make art with film or video, and you want a guidebook on how to THINK and FEEL about your chosen art form, this is a must.

Bresson inspired the French New Wave filmmakers, and in my opinion was one of the few directors this world has seen who actually considered the particular reality of the moving image and created a set of principles to guide his choices as a director based on the medium itself, and not on any inherited traditional technique. One of the primary divisions in film theory is whether you believe film to be an extension of theatre or something entirely different.

For Bresson theatre is a more intellectual, mind based experience, whereas film is an EXPERIENTIAL art form. Bresson was highly interest in TRUTH over the APPEARANCE of truth. For Bresson the camera and audio recorder capture the essence of a thing, and therefore he cautions against using actors, and sets, and instead suggests people being themselves and shooting on actual locations.

This book is actually a collection of notes that Bresson wrote to himself over the course of his career. It is a wonderful look into the mind of an artist. In this book I have found a kindred spirit, whose insights into the nature of film and film production are distilled down to their essential forms. What kind of Truth does the camera capture, what elements go in the mise-en-scene which add or distort that truth, how do you illicit the inner truth of the actor (model) while still maintaining the requirements of the plot and script?

There are two books which have, for me, opened up the truest possibilities of film as an artform. These books are: "Notes on the Cinematographer" by Bresson, and "Sculpting in Time" by Tarkovsky. These books are a must read for anyone interested in exploring the true potential of film as an art form.

Also, this book goes in and out of print fairly regularly, so you should buy it whenever you see it being sold. Its relatively inexpensive, but contains a wealth of knowledge. It makes a great gift for someone interested in film or video as an art form.

"Notes on the Cinematographer" is a tidy, Zen-like summation of the special aesthetic Bresson brought to film. 'Cinema' to him was simply filmed theater. He wanted movies to do something more, to create a new language of images that could express a character's inner states and moods (I think this goal, more than anything, explains why he's so often labeled a 'spiritual' director). Bresson wanted faces, not actors; events, not scenes; "BEING instead of SEEMING." To this end he insisted on amateurs over trained actors, noises over music, slowness and close-ups over speed and pans. Cinematography as Bresson explains it here is a unique form of writing. His efforts to make an essentially mechanical & visual medium parallel the inwardness of the written word has to be one of the strangest and most fascinating projects in the history of film. Not surprisingly, he writes beautifully, and these aphoristic koans, surrounded by all that empty white space, are as haunting as anything he captured on film. A tiny masterpiece.

Cunneen's "Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film" is a good survey of Bresson's filmography. The subheading, however, "A Spiritual Style in Film," is a bit of an an overpromise as Cunneen does not explain what encompasses his understanding of "style" and subordinates the discussion of the truly cinematic, stylistic considerations such as cinematography, editing, lighting in favor of the more literary bases of film such as plot construction and narrative. Moreover, Cunneen borrows heavily from existing work on Bresson and actually devotes more space to summarizing Bresson's body of work rather than the actual analysis of Bresson's unique stylistic signature. A title that reads something like "Bresson: An Introduction" might have been more realistic. Paul Schrader's "A Transcendental Style in Film" offers a more insightful analysis of Bresson's style that lives up to its title. Unlike Cunneen's book, it is, primarily, about cinematic style, not just content analysis.

"Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film" by Joseph Cunneen is a much-needed introduction to a master film director. Cunneen, long-time movie critic for the "National Catholic Reporter," approaches Bresson's career in a way that easily explains the director's distinctive approach to cinematography.

Bresson rejects the artificiality and dependence of "photographed theater" with it's reliance of star performers and instead emphasizes an austere, elliptical approach to narrative, making a masterful use of natural sound.
Cunneen explores all 13 films of Bresson in chronological order, clarifying the development of Bresson's technique while making clear that his "spiritual style" is why Susan Sontag called him "the master of the reflective model in film."
Easily understood by the novice as well as the movie buff, this book should send readers hunting down Bresson movies in the better video stores, and begging local universities to stage retrospectives of Bresson's entire oeuvre.

To many, rather snooty, film critics, there are really only two or three great directors, one of whom is certainly Robert Bresson. But Bresson is the most difficult and least approachable of film masters, his films are full of pessimism, austerity, remoteness. Most difficult for many is that he is a Catholic artist, and his films often don't makes sense without some prior knowledge of the religion (which is not the case with, say, Graham Greene). Anyone who sees these cold, withdrawn, unyielding films might be surprised at those who find them deeply emotional and rapturous.

Keith Reader does an excellent job in explaining why this might be so. His book is a very old-fashioned study in many ways - it discusses the films as the works of one genius, rather than the more conventional method of genre, ideology, psychology etc.; he draws on old-hat theories by the likes of Lacan. But, though he cannot resist the odd slip of impenetrable jargon, this is a lucid study, explaining each work individually, outlining Bresson's methods and theories so precisely that you literally watch the films with new, more understanding eyes, open to epiphany. The study of 'A Man Escaped' is particularly moving.