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ART CINBMA AND THB IDBA OF AUTHORSHIP
I
ndividuals and institutions affect history, but so do ideas. One of the most influential ideas in cinema history is the belief that a director is
most centrally responsible for a film's form, style, and meanings. Most historians have made this assumption since at least the 1920s, but it was examined and articulated with particular force in postwar European film culture. The debates of that period, along with the films that were drawn into them, shaped filmmaking all over the world.
THE RISE AND SPREAD OF THE AUTEUR THEORY
Since the mid-1940s, French directors and screenwriters quarreled over who could …show more content…
properly be considered the
auteur,
or author, of a film. The
Occupation period had popularized the notion that the mature sound cinema would be the "age of the scriptwriter," but Roger Leenhardt and Andre Bazin claimed that the director was the main source of a film's value. These two critics wrote for the journal other American directors. An important statement of this line of thought was Alexandre As truc's 1948 essay on
Revue du cinema
(1946-1949), which championed Orson Welles, William Wy ler, and
la camera-stylo
( "the camera-pen"). According to
Astruc, the cinema had achieved maturity and would attract serious artists who would use film to express their ideas and feelings. "The filmmaker author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen."l The mod ern cinema would be a personal one, and technology, crew, and cast would be no more than instruments in the artist's creative process. In 1951, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze founded the monthly magazine
Cahiers du cinema
( "Cinema Notebooks"). Bazin quickly became its
415
416
CHAPTER 19
Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship
central critic. The first issue reviewed as a Billy W ilder film, Robert Bresson film,
Sunset B oulevard D iary of a Countr y Priest as a The Little Flowers of Saint Francis
Moreover, considering Bergman an auteur allows us to look for common elements across his films. One motto of auteur criticism was Renoir's remark that a di rector really makes only one film and keeps remaking it. Recurrent subjects, themes, images, techniques, and plot situations give the director's films a rich unity. Knowledge of the auteur's other films may thus help the viewer understand the one at hand. In particular, the auteur critic was sensitive to ways in which a director's work developed over time, taking unexpected turns or returning to ideas broached earlier. Finally, auteur criticism tended to promote a study of film style. If a filmmaker was an artist like a writer or painter, that artistry was revealed not only in was said but in
as a Roberto Rossellini film, and so on. Soon younger
Cahiers
critics such as Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol,
Jean-Luc Godard, and Fran�ois Truffaut began pushing the auteur approach to the point of provocation. The first scandal came in 1954, with Truffaut's essay, "A Certain Tendency in the French Cinema." He attacked the Cin ema of Quality (p. 375) as "scenarists' films," works that revealed a lack of originality and a reliance on literary classics. According to Truffaut, in this tradition the screenwriter hands in the script, and the director simply adds the performers and pictures, thereby becoming only a metteur
what
en scene,
a "stager." Truffaut named a few gen
how it was
said. Like any creator, the
uine auteurs: Jean Renoir, Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Tati, and others who wrote their own stories and dia logue. Fulfilling Astruc's dream of the camera-stylo, these directors were true "men of the cinema." In making the issue of screenwriting central, Truf faut was providing a rationale for
filmmaker ought to be a master of the medium, exploit ing it in striking and innovative ways. Auteur critics dis tinguished directors by uses of camera work, lighting, and other techniques. Some critics drew a distinction between filmmakers who emphasized staging and cam era placement (the so-called mise-en-scene directors like Max Ophiils and Renoir) and filmmakers who relied on editing (montage directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Sergei Eisenstein).
Cahiers's
tastes. The
journal had praised those European and American di rectors who composed or controlled their scripts. Truf faut's initial conception of authorship was also held by
Cahiers's of the
rival magazine
ist and surrealist in
Positif (founded 1952). Marx its inclinations, Positif shared few
Cahiers
writers' tastes, but like them it concen
trated primarily on directors who had a great deal of control over the scriptwriting process. Some of the younger
AUTHORSHIP AND THE GROW TH OF THE ART CINEMA
Such ideas of authorship meshed smoothly with the growing art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Most of the prestigious directors of the period wrote their own scripts; all pursued distinctive themes and stylistic choices in film after film. Film festivals tended to honor the di rector as the central creator. In a commercial context, Tati, Michelangelo Antonioni, and others became "brand names," differentiating their products from the mass of "ordinary" cinema. Such name recognition could carry a film into foreign markets. During the 1950s and 1960s, auteurist critics tended to focus on filmmakers who developed the cinematic modernism discussed in the last three chapters. Au teurism sensitized viewers to narrative experiments that expressed a director's vision of life. It also prepared viewers to interpret stylistic patterns as the filmmaker's personal comment on the action. Auteur critics were es pecially alert for ambiguities that could be interpreted as the director's reflection on a subject or a theme. This chapter examines the careers of Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Jacques Tati, and Satyajit Ray. They are not the only auteurs in the
Cahiers
critics went further,
claiming that great directors in Hollywood had managed to express their vision of life without having any say in the screenplay. T his hard-core version of auteurism proved most controversial throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Bazin could not accept the extreme views of his young colleagues, but critics elsewhere were quick to take up the
politique des auteurs
-
the policy of treating
any director with a personal style or a distinct world view as an auteur. In the early 1960s, American critic Andrew Sarris began promulgating what he called the "auteur theory" as a way of understanding U.S. film his tory. The British journal
Movie
(founded in 1962) was
auteurist from the start. While Sarris and the ics were sympathetic to the
Movie crit
Cahiers
European canon,
they concentrated chiefly on Hollywood directors (see "Notes and Queries" at the end of this chapter). Once we have declared, for example, Ingmar Berg man to be an auteur, how does this help us understand a Bergman film? Auteur critics argued that we can exam ine the film as if it were a piece of "pure" creation, like a novel. The film can be understood as expressing Berg man's view of life.
Luis Buiiuel (1900-1983)
417
history of cinema, of course, but they were considered among the giants by critics promoting the theory of au thorship during these decades. In the Introduction, we stated that films could be im portant historically because they were good in them selves, because they typified broader trends, or because they were influential. Although each of these directors was significant within his own country's cinema, none was typical of the national trends and movements in film making that came and went during his long career. All remained resolutely individualistic, and, although some (especially Fellini and Antonioni) have been influential, most directors have avoided direct imitation of these auteurs' distinctive films. We treat them here partly to examine their bodies of work as wholes-an approach encouraged by authorship studies-and partly to put them in an international context. These directors typify broader tendencies in world film production. All made breakthrough films in the 1950s. All triumphed at film festivals and won interna tional distribution, even gaining some foothold in the inhospitable American market. The institutions of film culture helped them to fame, and these directors' suc cesses in turn strengthened the authority of coproduc tions, national subsidy programs, festivals, and film journals. Some, such as Antonioni and Bergman, made films outside their own country, and several more en joyed the benefits of international funding. Their ca reers thereby highlight important trends in the postwar cmema. In addition, these directors became the most cele brated exponents of 1950s and 1960s modernist film making. Critics considered that each director had enriched film technique while also expressing an idio syncratic vision of life. The directors' work exercised wide influence on other filmmakers. Since these di rectors all considered themselves serious artists, they shared auteurist assumptions with audiences and crit ics. Fellini inadvertently echoed Astruc: "One could make a film with the same personal, direct intimacy with which a writer writes.,,2 During the 1960s and 1970s, auteurism helped cre ate film studies as an academic discipline (see "Notes and Queries" at the end of this chapter). Students and fans soon made the idea of authorship a commonplace in the culture at large. Journalistic reviewers now usu ally assume that a film's primary maker is its director. Many ordinary moviegoers use a simple version of au teurism as a criterion of taste, not only for art-film directors but also for Hollywood filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, James Cameron, and Oliver Stone. The Surrealist films During the late 1960s and the 1970s, not all of our exemplary auteurs sustained their reputations. Most suffered critical and commercial setbacks (often result ing from their incompatibility with post-I968 political cinema). To a considerable extent, however, these direc tors regained critical acclaim after the mid-1970s, and in the intervening decades their work has continued to command attention.
1 9. 1
The nun's crown of thorns becomes kindling ( Viridiana).
LUIS BUNUEL ( 1 900-1 983)
Un Chien andalou (1928), L'Age d'or (1930), and Las Hurdes (1932) established Buiiuel's
distinctive personal vision, and most critics believed that he continued to express it in Mexico, Spain, and France. Bazin found Buiiuel's films deeply moralistic; for Truf faut, they exemplified rigorous scripting and a concern for entertainment; for Sarris, they embodied the mystery of a style without style; and for the critics of
Positif,
Buiiuel remained the great, long-lived remnant of cine matic surrealism, attacking bourgeois values with im ages of savage beauty. His Mexican films of the postwar decade showed that he could insert his personal obsessions into accessi ble comedies and melodramas. In
Viridiana
(Spain,
1961), the novitiate Viridiana attempts to establish her uncle's farm as a Christian community, but her plans fall prey to the cynicism of her uncle's son, Jorge, and to the rapacity of the beggars who swarm over the farm. Her ideals chastened, Viridiana joins Jorge and his mis tress in a game of cards while a child tosses Viridiana's crown of thorns onto a fire (19.1). The protagonist's loss of innocence recalls that of the hero of As
Nazarin
(1958), trying vainly to bring grace to a fallen world.
Los O lvidados
(1950) had put Buiiuel back on the
418
CHAPTER 19
Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship
1 9.2, left The dead Julian chortling under the bed: Pedro's dream in Los Olvidados. 1 9 . 3, right Mort en ce jardin (19 5 6 ) : i n the jungle heat, ants invade the Bible.
map (p. 413),
Viridiana,
which won a major prize at
Buiiuel charged Italian Neorealism with lacking au thentic "poetry." In
Cannes, revived his fame during the 1960s-especially since he had made this blasphemous film under Fran cisco Franco's very nose. In the 1960s, Buiiuel moved toward more distinctly modernist experiments that had been partially sketched in
Los Olvidados,
the poetry is often
provided by disturbingly violent or erotic images. Neo realism never generated as unsettling and enigmatic a scene as Pedro's dream, featuring floating chickens, im ages of his mother bringing him a slab of meat, and a shot of a murdered boy grinning and bleeding under the bed ( 1 9.2). His more self-consciously modernist films relied on simple staging, long takes, and panning move ments to follow the actors. Buiiuel's straightforward style serves to heighten haunting images that disturb received notions of religion and sexuality. In
L'Age d'or. The Exterminating Angel
(1962) inexplic
ably entraps partygoers in a house for days, their polite manners decaying under pressure. With
D iary of a
Chambermaid
(1964) Buiiuel began his "French phase,"
in which major stars and the scriptwriter Jean-Claude Carriere became central to his work. As he had used the Mexican commercial cinema for his ends, so he began to exploit the conventions of the European art film: the
Un Chien andalou,
Bunuel shows ants
crawling out of a man's hand; thirty years later, they are gnawing their way through a Bible ( 1 9.3). In on the floor of a prison cell.
Belle de jour (1967), the episodic narratives in The Milky Way (1969), the ambiguous, interwoven dreams of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and the device of using two actresses to portray the same character in That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Some of the films became sub stantial successes on the art-house circuit, and Discreet Charm won an Academy Award. At the end of his life, the elderly anarchist became that rarity, a modernist filmmaker whom audiences found entertaining. In both mass-market films and art films, Bunuel's accessibility was partly due to the sobriety of his tech nique. Of the major auteurs, he had the least distinctive style. In the Mexican films, he adhered to the conven tions of classical Hollywood cinema, including moder ate deep focus and restrained camera movements. His third Mexican film,
mixture of fantasy and reality in
Susana
(1950), a spider scuttles across a cross-shaped shadow
Nazarin
(1958), based on a
classic novel, comments on the ineffectiveness of naive religious faith. The frigid housewife who becomes a prostitute in
Belle de jour is visited by a Japanese client
who shows her a box, from which issue buzzing sounds; the audience never learns what the box contains. Buiiuel gives obsessions to his characters and then insidiously invites the audience to share them. In
The
Criminal Life of Archibaldo de La Cruz
(1955), the hero
is shown as a young boy, staring at a music box ( 1 9.4); he comes to associate this with the death of his governess, shot by a stray bullet at the window ( 1 9.5). As a grown man, he rediscovers the music box ( 1 9.6). This stirs in him the desire to kill sexually alluring women. He never succeeds, but after he has practiced strangling a man nequin and drags it away, Buiiuel calmly shows us the dummy's fallen leg (1 9.7). We, not Archibaldo, make the association with the slain governess and find ourselves firmly within his morbid fantasy. Buiiuel's modernism emerges as well in his experi ments with narrative construction. The films are full of repetitions, digressions, and movements between reality and fantasy. ( "Don't worry if the movie's too short," he once told a producer. "I'll just put in a dream."3) His
Los O lvidados
( "The Young and
Lost," 1950), depicts juvenile delinquents in a poor neighborhood of Mexico City. Shot largely on location, the film announces in its opening that it is based strictly on facts. These elements encouraged many European critics to see the film as a Mexican version of neoreal ism. Yet Buiiuel offered no warmhearted liberal opti mism. Instead of the virtuous poor of bitter vagrants.
The Bicycle Thief,
he presented vicious youth gangs, unfeeling mothers,
Ingmar Bergman ( 19 18-
419
1 9.4-1 9.7
Four shots from Archibaldo
de La Cruz.
1 9.4
1 9. 5
1 9.6
1 9.7
plots depend particularly on outrageous delays.
The Dis
can be seen as a reflexive parable that makes cinematic narrative akin to sexual flirtation. If the fun is in the waiting, not the ending, the Buiiuel film will often stop arbitrarily. In from his chair. In
creet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is virtually nothing but a series of interrupted dinners. The ostensible action, something about corrupt businessmen smuggling co caine, is buried in a series of bourgeois rituals gone awry: encountering a restaurant's staff gathered around the corpse of the manager, finding an entire army troop invading one's parlor. The film's surface consists of mad deningly banal conversations about tastes in food, drink, and decor. Whenever the story seems to have reached a climax, a character wakes up, and we realize that previ ous scenes-how many?-have been imaginary. Most modernists attack narrative in order to turn the viewer's attention to other matters, but Buiiuel treats narrative frustration as itself the basis of pleasure. The very title of
Belle de jour,
the supposedly crippled husband miraculously rises
D is creet Charm,
the Mirandan am
bassador finally gets to eat a piece of leftover lamb from his refrigerator. And in the final scene of Buiiuel's last film, a terrorist bomb destroys the chic shopping arcade through which Fabert still pursues Conchita. Buiiuel's films at once criticize social conventions and play cun ningly on those narrative conventions that maintain our fascination with storytelling.
Tha t O bscure O bject of D esire
alludes to
INGMAR BERGMAN ( 1 9 1 8Like his mentor Alf Sjoberg (see p.
the impossibility of satisfying one's deepest wishes. Trav eling on a train to Paris, the wealthy Fabert tells other passengers of his obsessive pursuit of the virginal Con chita. He gives her money, clothes, even a house of her own, and yet each time he tries to seduce her she eludes him. When he pulls away, she returns to lure him on and humiliate him more brutally. Whenever Fabert pauses in his tale, the passengers urge him to continue; their avid curiosity makes them stand-ins for us. At the end of Fabert's story, Conchita appears on the train, and the cycle of frustrated desire starts again.
384),
Bergman came
from the theater. After a stint as a scriptwriter, this prodigiously energetic man began directing in
1945;
by
1988,
he had made nearly forty-five films and directed
even more plays. As a filmmaker, Bergman gained a reputation as a serious artist commanding many genres. His earliest films were domestic dramas, often centering on alienated young couples in search of happiness through art or na ture
O bscure O bject
( Summer Interlude, 1951; Summer with Monika,
420
CHAPTER 19
Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship
1 9. 8, left Art as a mysteriously power ful spell ( The Magician ).
right The ringmaster badgered by his performers in a deep-focus long take (Sunset of a Clown).
1 9 . 9,
1953). Soon, with a repertory of skillful performers at his call, he focused on the failures of married love sometimes treated comically, as in ing psychodramas such as
In it dwell the nurturing woman, the severe father fig ure, the cynical man of the world, and the tormented vi sionary artist. They enact parables of infidelity, sadism, disillusionment, loss of faith, creative paralysis, and an guished suffering. The setting is a bleak island landscape, a stifling drawing room, a harshly lit theater stage. Despite the obsessive unity of Bergman's concerns, there are several stages in his career. The early films por tray adolescent crises and the instability of first love (e.g.,
A Lesson in Love
(aka
(1954), but at other times presented in probing, agoniz
Sawdust and Tinsel
The
Naked Night,
1953). He moved to more self-consciously
artistic works: the Mozartian (1955); the parablelike orate flashbacks in
Smiles of a Summer Night The Seventh Seal (1957); a blend
(1957; see 16.3).
of expressionist dream imagery, natural locales, and elab
Wild Strawberries
Summer with Monika ) .
The major films of the
For many viewers and critics, Bergman's career climaxed with two trilogies of chamber dramas: first,
1950s tend to explore spiritual malaise and to reflect upon the relation between theater and life. The bright spot is often a faith in art-symbolized in (1958) as a conjurer's illusion (19.8). The two trilogies of the 1960s solemnly undercut the religious and humanistic premises of the early work. God becomes distant and silent, while humans are shown to be confused and narcissistic. Even art, and
Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1963), and The Si lence (1963); then, Persona (1966), Hour of the Wolf (1968), and Shame (1968). Bergman was at the height of
The Magician
his fame: critics wrote articles and books on his work; his screenplays were translated; his films won festival awards and Oscars. Even people who usually did not take the cinema seriously as an art form saw him as an exemplar of the film director as artist. Soon, however, after some ill-judged projects and fi nancial setbacks, Bergman could not get funding for his films.
Persona
Shame
suggest, cannot redeem human dignity in an
age of political oppression. In the deeply pessimistic films of the 1970s, almost every human contact-that between parents and children, husband and wife, friend and friend-is revealed to be based on illusion and de ceit. All that is left, again and again, is the memory of infantile innocence. This becomes the basis of
Cries and Whispers
(1972) was paid for with his
savings, some actors' investments, and money from the Swedish Film Institute. It had worldwide success, as did
Fanny and
Scenes from a Marriage
(1973) and
The Magic Flute
Alexander,
a film set in a world that has yet to know the
(1975). Pursued by tax authorities, Bergman abruptly began a period of exile and poorly received coproduc tions. He returned to Sweden to make Fanny
catastrophes of the twentieth century.
"I am much more a man of the theatre than a man of the film."4 Bergman was able to turn out films quickly partly because he cultivated a troupe of per formers-Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Harriet Andersson, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, and Max von Sydow. His staging and shooting techniques have usu ally been at the service of the dramatic values of his scripts. His 1950s work applied deep-focus and long take tactics to scenes of intense psychological reflection
and Alexan
der
(1983), which was an international box-office tri
umph and winner of four Academy Awards. Following the completion of his television film
After the Rehearsal
(1984), Bergman retired from filmmaking. Into his films Bergman poured his dreams, memo ries, guilts, and fantasies. Events from his childhood
Fanny and A lexander. His loss of a lover shaped Summer Interlude, while his domestic life was the basis of Scenes from a Marriage.
Thus Bergman's private world became public property.
recur from his earliest works to
( 1 9.9). After Cries and Wh ispers he relied more on zoom shots. Throughout his career he drew on the ex pressionist tradition (19. 1 0, 1 9.1 1 ).
Ingmar Bergman ( 19
18-
421
1 9. 1 0
Expressionistic dissolves open Sunset of a Clown.
1 9. 1 1
The Knight questions the "witch" in The Seventh Seal.
1 9. 1 2 Summer with Monika: "Have we forgotten," wrote Godard, "...that sudden conspiracy between actor and spectator ...when Harriet Anderson, laughing eyes clouded with confusion and riveted on the camera, calls on us to witness her disgust in choosing hell instead of heaven?"
1 9 . 1 3 At the climax of Cecilia's speech, in a shot lasting almost two minutes, she claws forward into extreme close-up, her face starkly lit ...
1 9. 1 4 ... before falling back exhausted into the nurse's arms.
Perhaps more distinctive is a technique that owes a good deal to the Kammerspiel tradition of August Strind berg and German cinema. Bergman pushed his perform ers close to the viewer, sometimes letting them challeng ingly address the camera (19.12). In the chamber dramas, Bergman began to shoot entire scenes in frontal close-up, with abstract backgrounds concentrating on nuances of glance and expression. Brink of Life ( 1 958) illustrates Bergman's adoption of theatrical technique. The plot centers on three women in a maternity ward during a critical period of forty-eight hours. The sense of a Kammerspiel world is reinforced by the first shot, which shows the ward's door opening to admit Cecilia, who is in labor. The film will end with the youngest woman, Hj ordis, resolutely departing through the door toward an uncertain future. The women's pasts
are revealed through dialogue. In addition, each actress is given one hyperdramatic scene. The first, and perhaps most impressive, presents Cecilia's reaction to the death of her baby. Characteristically, Bergman dwells on this display of shame, anguish, and physical pain, played in virtuosic fashion by one of his regular actors, Ingrid Thulin. In a drugged haze, cradled by a maternal nurse, Cecilia recalls her worries about the delivery, accuses her self of failing as a wife and mother, and alternates among sobs, cries of agony, and bitter laughter. The monologue runs for over four minutes, filmed in long takes and stark frontal close-ups (19.13, 1 9.1 4). Persona is perhaps the furthest development of this intimate sty le. In a little more than sixty minutes, Bergman presents a psychodrama that challenges the au dience to distinguish artifice from reality. An actress,
422
CHAPTER 19
Art Cinema and the Idea of Authorship
1 9 . 1 5, left Persona: Elisabeth and Alma struggle. 1 9 . 1 6, right The mysterious child gropes for an image that is a composite of the film's two protagonists.
Elisabeth Vogler, refuses to speak. Her nurse, Alma, takes her to an island. Having gained Alma's trust, Elis abeth then torments her; Alma retaliates with violence
flashback construction in a more daring way than had any European film of the period. In twelfth-century Kyoto, a priest, a woodcutter, and a commoner take shelter from the rain in a ruined tem ple by the Rashomon gate. There they discuss a current scandal: a bandit has stabbed a samurai to death and raped his wife. What really happened in the grove during and after the crimes? In a series of flashbacks, the partici pants give testimony. (Through a medium, even the dead samurai testifies.) But each person's version, shown in flashback, differs drastically from the others' . When we return to the present and the three men waiting out the rain at the Rashomon gate, the priest despairs that hu mans will ever tell the truth. The woodcutter abruptly reveals that he had witnessed the crimes and relates a fourth contradictory version. Kurosawa's staging and shooting sharply demarcate the film's three major "time zones" (19.17-19.19). These stylistic differences make for great clarity of exposition, but they do not help the viewer determine exactly what happened in the grove. As with
(19.15). Several techniques suggest that the two women's personalities have begun to split. A hallucina tory image of a boy groping for an indistinct face fur ther suggests a dissolution of identity (19.16). Bergman frames the story within images of a film being projected, suggesting the illusory nature of a world that can so deeply engross the spectator. At a mo ment of particular intensity, the film image burns, yank ing the audience out of its involvement with the drama.
Persona 's
ambiguity and reflexivity made it one of the
key works of modernist cinema. Bergman's roots in modern theater and his treat ment of moral and religious issues helped convince western intellectuals that cinema was a serious art. His films, and his personal image of the sensitive and un compromising filmmaker, have played a central role in defining the postwar art cinema.
Paisan
and other neore and some unreliable
AKIRA KUROSAWA ( 1 9 1 0-1998 )
Kurosawa began his directorial career during World War II (p. 396), but he quickly adapted to Occupation policy with
alist works, the film does not attempt to tell us every thing; like
The Bicycle Thief, Voyage to Italy, Rashomon's
of Bergman's works, Kurosawa's film leaves key ques tions unanswered at the end. flashbacks were a logical step beyond 1940s Hollywood experimentation in flashback technique and beyond Eu ropean art cinema as well. By presenting contradictory versions of a set of events, In the years after
No Regrets for Our Youth
(1946), a political melo
drama about militarist Japan's suppression of political change. Kurosawa followed this with a string of social problem films focused on crime ernment bureaucracy
Rashomon
made a significant
(Stray Dog, 1949), gov
contribution to the emerging tradition of art cinema.
( Ikiru, "To Live," 1952), nuclear war ( Record of a Living Being, aka I Live in Fear, 1955), and corporate corruption ( The Bad Sleep Well, 1960). He also directed several successful jidai-geki (historical films),
Rashomon
was introduced to
European audiences, Kurosawa became the most influ ential Asian director in film history. His use of slow motion cinematography to portray violence eventually become a cliche. Several of his films were remade by Hollywood, and George Lucas's from
Seven Samurai (1954) and including The Hidden Fortress (1958) and Yojimbo ("Bodyguard," 1961). It was Rashomon (1950) that burst upon western culture, which greeted it as both an exotic and a mod ernist film. Drawn from two stories by the 1920s Japa nese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the film utilized
starting with
Yojimbo spawned the Italian Western. Star Wars (1977) derived part of its plot Hidden Fortress.
Throughout his career, he had been considered the most "western" of Japanese directors, and, although this
Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)
423
1 9. 1 7 Rashomon's "three styles": the present-day scenes in the temple during the cloudburst rely on compressed wide angle and deep-focus compositions.
1 9 . 1 8 The scenes of testimony in the hot, dusty courtyard employ frontal compositions.Witnesses address the camera as if the audience were the magistrate.
1 9. 1 9 The sensuous forest flash backs emphasize close-ups, dappled sunlight, and mazelike tangled brush.
1 9.20 The bureaucrat Watan a be waiting for death in Ikiru.
1 9.21 In Red Beard, the young intern and a cook (both in the foreground) watch a disturbed girl try to make friends with a little boy amid a forest of quilts hung out to dry.The long lens flattens the space and creates an a bstract pattern of slots and undulations.
is not completely accurate, his films proved highly acces sible abroad. He drew many of his stories from western literature. Throne of Blood and Ran (" Chaos," 1 985 ) are based on Shakespeare; High and Low ( 1 96 3 ) , on a detec tive novel by Ed McBain. Kurosawa's films have strong narrative lines and a good deal of physical action, and he admitted that John Ford, Abel Gance, Frank Capra, William Wyler, and Howard Hawks influenced him. Critics looking for an authorial vision of the world found in Kurosawa's work a heroic humanism close to western values. Most o f his fi l m s concentrate on men who curb selfish desires a n d work for the good of others . This moral vision informs such films as Drunken Angel ( 1 948 ) , Stray D og, and [k iru . It is central to Seven Samurai, in which a b a n d o f masterless sword fighters sacrifice themselves to defend a village from bandits . Often Kurosawa's hero is an egotistical young man who must learn discipline and se l f-sacrifice from an older, wiser teacher. This theme finds vivid embodi ment in Red Beard ( 1 9 6 5 ) , in which a gruff, dedicated doctor teaches his intern devotion to poor patients .
After Red B eard, however, Kurosawa's films slide into pessimism. Dodes 'kaden ( 1 970 ) , made after he at tempted suicide, presents the world as a bleak tenement community holding no hope of escape. Kagemusha and Ran depict social order as torn by v a i n struggles for power. Yet Dersu Uzala ( 1 975 ) reaffirms the possibility of friendship and charitable commitment to others, and Madadayo ( 1 9 9 3 ) becomes a p o ignant farewe l l to a teacher's humanistic ideals. The first few years of Kurosawa 's postwar career es tablished him in three genres: the literary adaptation, the social-problem film, a nd the j idai-geki. To a l l these he brought that pluralistic approach to cinematic technique typical of Japanese filmmakers. His first film, Sanshiro Sugata ( 1 943 ), displays immense daring in editing, fram ing, and slow-motion cinematography (p . 25 5 ) . Soon after the war, perhaps as a result of exposure to a variety of American films, Kurosawa a dopted a Wellesian shot design, with strong deep focus (19.20). He later explored ways in which telephoto lenses could create nearly ab stract compositions in the widescreen format (19.2 1 ).
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1 9 .22 In the opening sequence of Record of a Living Being, the suppos edly mad Kiichi is brought in for his court hearing. A camera from one side of the set shows him in medium shot arguing with his sons .
1 9 . 2 3 A second shot, taken by a cam era with a less long lens, establishes them in a more frontal view.
1 9 .24 A third camera, from the right side of the set, uses a very long lens to supply a close-up of the old man's rage.
1 9 . 2 5-1 9 . 2 7
Axial cutting enlarges a n image abruptly in Sanshiro Sugata.
He also experimented with violent action. In Seven Samurai, the combat scenes were filmed with several cam eras. The cameramen used very long telephoto lenses and panned to follow the action, as if covering a sporting event. Kurosawa began to apply the multiple-camera technique to dialogue, as in Record of a Living Being (19.22-19.24). His revival of multiple-camera shooting (a commonplace of the early sound era; see p. 1 96) allowed the actors to play the entire scene without interruption and to forget that they were being filmed. Both telephoto filming and the multiple-camera technique have become far more common since Kurosawa began using them. Throughout his career, Kurosawa was noted for his frantically energetic editing. In Sanshiro Sugata he boldly cuts into details without changing the angle, yielding a sudden " enlargement " effect (19.25-19.27). When us ing the multiple-camera, telephoto-lens strategy, how ever, he has a penchant for disj unctive changes of angle. These editing strategies can dynamize tense or vio lent confrontations. There is a more static side to Kurosawa's style as well. His 1 940s films exploit extremely long takes, and his later works often utilize rigidly posed compositions, as in the
startling opening of Kagemusha, which holds for several minutes on three identical men ( Color Plate 1 9.1 ) . This tendency toward a bstract composition can be seen in his settings and costumes. Early in his career, Kurosawa depicted environments in extremely naturalistic ways; no film was complete without at least one scene in a downpour and another in a gale. But this tendency steadily yielded to a more stylized mise-en-scene. After Dodes 'kaden, the orchestration of color in the image be came Kurosawa's primary concern. Originally trained as a painter, he lavished attention upon vibrant costumes and stark set design. In Kagemusha and Ran, the precise compositions of the early works give way to sumptuous pageantry captured by incessantly panning cameras. It was Kurosawa's technical brilliance and his ki netic treatment of spectacular action in particular that won the reverence of Hollywood's " movie brat" genera tion. (George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola helped finance Kagemusha and Ran; Martin Scorsese portrayed Vincent Van Gogh in Akira Kurosawa 's Dreams [ 1 9901 ) . I n addition, his preoccupation with human values com prehensible to a u diences around the world has made him a prominent director for almost fifty years.
Federico Fellini ( 1 920-1 9 9 3 )
425
1 9.28, left The holy fool worships the stolen statue in I Vitelloni. 1 9.29, right La Strada: Gelsomina and the acrobatic angel .
1 9.30, left La Strada: Gelsomina mimes a tree. 1 9.31 , right Teenagers scamper out of the forest to console the heroine of Nights of Cabiria ( 1 95 6 ) .
FEDERICO FELLINI ( 1 920-1 993)
In 1 95 7, after Fellini had made five feature films, Andre Bazin could already detect a web of recurring imagery. He pointed out that the angel statue of I Vitelloni ("The Yo ung Calves, " 1 9 5 3 , 19.2 8 ) reappears a s the angelic wire-walking Fool in La Strada ( " The Road , " 1 9 5 4 ; 19.29). In other fi l m s , t h e ange l 's wings a r e associated with bundles of sticks carried on people's backs . Bazin's conclusion-"There is no end to Fellini's symbolism " s is amply proved by the director's whole career. The films return compulsively to the circus, the music hall, the des olate road, deserted squares at night, and the seashore. La Strada begins by the seashore and ends there as well, with Zampano, who has left Gelsomina for dead, sob bing alone. In La Dolce Vita (" The Sweet Life , " 1 9 60), Marcello is in almost exactly the same posture as dawn breaks over the sea and he cannot reply to the little girl who is calling him. There are recurring characters a s well, such as the holy fool, the narcissistic m a l e , the n urturing mother figure, the sensual whore . There are invariably parades, parties, shows-al l usually followed by bleak dawns and dashed illusions . And there are the odd, privileged moments that offer a glimpse of mystery (19.3 0, 19.31). Echoing Renoir, Fellini admits, " I seem to have always turned out the same film . " 6 Fellini's ability t o create a personal world on film was central to his fame during the 1 9 5 0 s and 1 9 6 0 s .
I Vitelloni brought him to international attention, and La Strada became a huge success, winning the Academy Award in 1 95 6 . La D o lce Vita received the grand prize at Cannes, and its depiction of the orgiastic lifestyles of the idle rich shocked and tantalized audiences around the world . It quickly became one of the most profitable films Italy ever exported . With 811z ( 1 9 63), another Oscar win ner, Fellini created perhaps the most vivacious modernist film of the era, a reflexive study of a film director unable to make the film he has planned. After Juliet of the Spir its ( 1 9 6 5 ), a counterpart to 8 1/2 told from a woman's viewpoint, Fellini adapted Petronius's Satyricon ( 1 969). This loose, episodic spectacle established the new Fellini mode: teeming, grotesque spectacle reminiscent of com media dell'arte, often lacking a linear narrative. He con tinued to work steadily throughout the 1 970s and 1 9 80s, always to a chorus of controversy. With Bergman, he be came the most widely seen and intensively interpreted of European filmmakers. The films are frankly autobiographical . Fellini's school days inform the flashback scenes in 8'1z; his adoles cence in Rimini shapes I Vitelloni, the story of a band of young loafers, and Amarcord ( 1 9 74), a lyrical treatment of a small town. His childhood fascination with Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, and the Marx Brothers emerges again and again, notably in the mimed comedy of Giulietta Masina's performances. Yet like Guido, the hero of 8 '/2, Fellini claimed not to know where memory leaves off and fantasy begins. He
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offers not literal autobiography but personal mythology : a life mixed with fantasy. This expressive side of Fellini, seen most clearly in 8 '12, influenced other directors, such as Paul Mazursky (Alex in Wonderland, 1970), Bob Fosse
1 9 . 3 2 Cabiria shares a look of hope with the viewer.
(All That Jazz, 1979), and Woody Allen (Stardust Memo ries, 1980; Radio Days, 1986). Up to La D o lce Vita, the films were firmly rooted in the real world, albeit one that harbored my steries. With 8 '/2 and Juliet, the realm of dream and hallucina tion opened up. In an important sense, the protagonist of each Fellini film became Fellini himself-or, rather, his imagination. Satyricon is a series of fragments uni fied by a phantasmagoric vision. He launched extrava gant spectacles-Th e Clowns ( 19 70), R oma ( 1972),
1 9 . 3 3 One of Amarcord's many storytellers.
Casanova ( 1976), City of Women ( 1980), The Ship Sails On ( 1983), each announcing itself as revealing more of the director's obsessions, fears, aspirations. For some critics, the films became increasingly narcissistic exer cises; for others, they carried the consistent theme that only through the creative imagination could people find freedom and happiness. There is also a less personal side to Fellini 's work. Several of the films since the late 1950s fused autobiog raphy and fantasy with an examination of social history. Like many of the auteurs who came to prominence in the 1950s, Fellini steadily turned away from interest ing the audience in a story to interesting them in the very act of storytelling. At the end of Nights of Cabiria, the heroine, rescued by the dancing youths, smiles shyly at the camera (19.32) and then glances away, as if un certain of our existence. By Amarcord, Fellini structures the film around characters openly and casually chatting with us (19.3 3 ). "It seems to me that I have invented al most everything: childhood, characters, nostalgias, dreams, memories for the pleasure of being able to re count them."7
La D o lce Vita juxtaposes ancient Rome, Christian
Rome, and modern Rome, and it judges contemporary life decadent. Satyricon draws the same analogy, com paring the emotionally empty protagonists to hippies. For Fellini, Amarcord is not simply a placid look back at his boyhood but also an attempt to show how Benito Mussolini's regime fulfilled Italians' immature needs.
Casanova 's obsessed, mechanical sexuality can be seen as portray ing the protagonist as a proto-fascist. City of Women reacts to the feminist movement, while Orches tra Rehearsal ( 1980) presents contemporary life collaps ing under oppressive authority and random terrorism. As did Bergman, Kurosawa, and Ray, Fellini offers so cial criticism in the name of artistic sensitivity and human values. This attitude emerges clearly in G inger
MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI ( 1 9 12Antonioni's fame emerged somewhat later than Fellini's, and his pessimistic, cerebral films stood out in sharp con trast to Fellini's life-affirming extravagance. Nonethe less, throughout the 1960s, he helped define European cinema's "high modernism." Antonioni served his apprenticeship in Italian Neo realism with several short films and five features running from Story of a Love Affair (1950) to II Grido ("The Out cry," 1959). His most famous film was L'Avventura ("The Adventure," 19 6 0 ) ; though booed at the Cannes Film Festival, it became an international success. VAvventura was followed by La Notte ("The Night," 1961), L'Eclisse
and Fred ( 1986 ), which attacks the superficiality of tele vision and celebrates the more intimate performance associated with a dancing team from the 1930s (consist ing of Fellini's definitive couple, Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroianni ). Fellini's images depend on intricately staged action, and he proved a master of flamboyant costume, decor, and crowd movement ( Color Plate 19.2). He happily continued the Italian tradition of total postsynchroniza tion, preferring to control all dialogue and sound effects after filming. The canonical Fellini scene-a vast proces sion accompanied by lilting Nino Rota music-does not permit the direct sound recording favored by Bresson.
(Eclipse, 1962), and Red Desert (1964), the entire tetral ogy constituting an exploration of contemporary life. By the mid-1960s, as one of the half-dozen most prominent directors in the �orld, Antonioni accepted a contract
Michelangelo Antonioni ( 1 9 1 2-
427
1 9 .34
The modern city becomes a
1 9.35
A reminder of the fatal elevator
1 9. 3 6
The itinerant worker confronts
labyrinth that dominates human beings
looms over the couple in
Story of a
his wife in II
Grido.
(L'Avventura).
Love Affair.
with MGM to make three films in English. The first,
increasingly episodic treatment of narrative in I Vinti
Blow- Up (1966), amply justified Hollywood's faith, earn ing praise and profits around the world. But Zabriskie
(19 5 2 )
and II G rido, L'Avven tura moved sharply to
ward pure modernist storytelling. Wealthy vacationers descend on a Mediterranean island, and Anna wanders off. Her friends cannot find her. Her lover, Sandro, and her friend, Claudia, return to the mainland to continue the search. Gradually, as they become attracted to one another, Anna is forgotten . W hat starts as a detective story becomes the tale of an ambivalent love affair haunted by guilt and uncertainty. Other films in the tetralogy take different narrative paths. La Notte covers a twenty-four-hour period, trac ing the ways in which a couple's random encounters illu minate their disintegrating marriage. Red Desert presents an industrial landscape pervaded by ambiguity, in which the washed-out color schemes may be attributed either to the disturbed psyche of the heroine, Giuliana, or to An tonioni's vision of the blighted modern world. All the films utilize a slow rhythm, with many temps morts (in tervals of "dead time") between events. Scenes begin a bit before the action starts and linger after the action has ended. And all four films conclude with "open endings" perhaps most notably L'Eclisse's series of empty urban spaces where the two lovers might yet meet. From the start of his career, Antonioni demonstrated a mastery of deep focus ( 1 9 .3 5 ) and the long take with camera movement. The early works also pioneered the possibility of concealing the characters' reactions from the audience, often by means of setting ( 1 9.36; see also
Point (1969), Antonioni's rendition of student activism, was a financial disaster. After The Passenger with The Mystery of O berwald directed with Wim Wenders). Antonioni's historical significance rests principally on his early and middle-period films. During the first decade, he helped turn Italian Neorealism toward inti mate psychological analysis and a severe, antimelodra matic style. The films depicted an anomie at the center of Europe's booming economy, an indifference also por trayed in postwar Italian fiction. Antonioni's early por trayals of the rich could be seen as extending the social criticism inherent in the idea of Neorealism. But Anto nioni found numb, aimless people in the working class as well. The sluggish, inarticulate drifter of II Grido is far from the struggling hero of The B icycle Thief, who at least has his wife and son to sustain him. With the tetralogy of the early
(1975 ) , An
tonioni returned to Italy, breaking several years of silence
(19 81 ) , Identification of a Woman (19 82), and B eyond the Clouds (1995, co
1960s,
what Andrew
Sarris called "Antoniennui" deepens. L'Avventura under takes a panoramic survey of the upper classes' alienation from the world they have made ( 1 9.34 ) . Vacations, par ties, and artistic pursuits are vain efforts to conceal the characters' lack of purpose and emotion. Sexuality is re duced to casual seduction, enterprise to the pursuit of wealth at any cost. Technology has taken on a life of its own; an electric fan or a toy robot has a more vivid pres ence than the people who use it. ("It is things, objects, and materials that have weight today. " 8 ) One cliche of Anto nioni criticism-the "lack of communication"-takes on its significance within his broader critique of how all per sonal relations have shriveled in the contemporary world. These thematic preoccupations are expressed in in novative narrative forms and stylistic patterns. After an
16 .4) . L'Avventura
systematically extends this strategy
( 1 9.3 7 ) . The film's last image is an extreme long shot of the couple dwarfed by a building, staring out at Mount Etna, their backs resolutely to the viewer ( 1 9. 3 8 ) . The viewer can hardly feel close to characters presented so dispassionately. A similar detachment results from Antonioni's in creasingly abstract compositions. He reduces human be ings to masses and textures, figures on a ground ( 1 9. 3 9 ).
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1 9 .37 L'Avventura often presents characters turned from the camera, rendering emotional states uncertain.
1 9.38
L'Avventura: the ending.
1 9 .39 L'Avventura: two strong diagonals divide the frame and isolate Claudia.
With Red Desert, Antonioni's first color film, he pushed his a bstraction further. He p ainted fruit gray ( Color Plate 1 9 . 3 ) ; obj ects became blobs or s l a b s of color. In some scenes, space is flattened by long lenses; in others it becomes cubistic, as blocks and wedges of color frac ture the shot (Color Plate 19.4 ) . In B low- Up, the distancing effects of the previous films cooperate with a full-scale reflexivity. Thomas ac cidentally photographs a couple in the park; has he also filmed a murder ? The more he enlarges his pictures, the more granular and a bstract they become. Within a detective-story framework, the film probes the illusory basis of photography and suggests that its ability to tell the unvarnished truth is l imited. Like 8 '/2 and Persona, Blow- Up became a central example of modern cinema's interrogation of its own medium. Antonioni's muted dramatization of shallow or par a lyzed characters fou n d a sympathetic response in an era that also welcomed existentia lism. Perhaps more than any other director, he encouraged filmmakers to explore elliptical and open-ended narrative. Juan Bar dem, Mikl6s Jansc6, and Theo Angelopoulos learned from his distinctive style. Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation ( 1 9 74) and Brian De Palma's B low- O u t (1 9 8 1 ) derive directly from B low- Up . An entire genera tion identified film artistry with the silences and vacan cies of Antonioni's world, and many viewers saw their own lives enacted there.
Lancelot du Lac ( Lancelot of the Lake, 1 9 74), and L'Argent (" Money, " 1 9 8 3). Yet, from the early 1 950s on, Bresson was one of the most respected directors in the
ROBERT BRESSON ( 1 907-1 999)
Bresson's reputation rests upon a comparatively small body of work. After his first two significant films, Les A nges du peche ( 1 9 4 3 ) and Les Dames du B o is du B o u logne (1 9 4 5 ; p. 3 0 0), he made only eleven films in forty years, most notably D iary of a Country Priest (1 95 1 ), A Man Escaped ( 1 9 5 6), Pickpocket ( 1 9 5 9), Au Hasard Balthasar ( " At Random Balthasar, " 1 9 6 6), Mouchette ( 1 9 6 7), Four Nights of a D reamer ( 1 9 72),
world. Championed by the Cahiers critics, praised by Sarris and the Movie group, his rigorous, demanding films display an internal consistency and a stubbornly in dividualistic vision of the world. Bresson's reliance o n l iterary texts gave him some credibility i n the period when the Cinema of Quality reigned. His films are often structured around letters, di aries, historical records, and voice-over retellings of the action. Yet there is nothing particularly literary about the finished product. His work perfectly exemplifies As truc's camera-stylo aesthetic: he took l iterary works as pretexts, but he composed by purely filmic means. Bres son was fond of contrasting what he called "cinematog raphy "-" writing through cinema "-with " cinema , " or the ordinary filmmaking that is, he insisted, merely pho tographed theater. 9 Bresson concentrated on sensitive people struggling to survive in a hostile world. His two 1 940s features weave vengeful intrigues around innocent victims. With Diary of a Country Priest and on through the early 1 960s, a long second phase emerged in his work. The films pre sented austere images and subdued acting. In most of these works, suffering is redeemed to one degree or an other: the country priest dies with the realization " All is grace " ; in A Man Escaped, Fontaine breaks out of a Nazi prison by trusting in his cellmate; after a fascination with crime, the pickpocket learns to accept a woman's love. Bresson's interest in religious subj ects struck a strong chord during the revival of Catholicism in postwar France. During this phase, he gained his international rep utation as the great religious director of postwar cinema. After the mid- 1 960s, his films became far more pes simistic. Viewers who had identified Bresson as a " Cath olic " director were puzzled by his turn to the secular, even sexual , problems of young people in modern soci ety. Now his protagonists are led to despair and even sui cide. In Balthasar, Marie dies after a j uvenile gang has
Robert Bresson (1907-1 999)
429
stripped and beaten her. Mouchette and the protagonists of Une Femme douce ( " A Gentle Wo man , " 1 9 6 9 ) and The Devil Probably ( 1 977) kill themselves. In L'Argent, an unjust accident hurls a young man in and out of prison and toward unreason ing murder. Now Christian values offer no solace: the quest for the Grail in Lancelot du Lac fails; chivalry becomes a heap of bloodied armor. However bleak they may be, Bresson's films radiate mystery. It is diffic ult to un derstand his characters be cause they are typically examined from the outside . The performers-Bresson called them his " models "-are often non actors or amateurs. They are preternaturally still and quiet, breaking their silence with a clipped word or a brief gesture. In this cinema , a sudden raising of the eyes becomes a significant event: a shared look, a climax. The models are often filmed from behind, or in close-ups that fragment their bodies (1 9.40). In addition, Bresson's abrupt cutting, short scenes, bright track-ins or track-
1 9.40 Pickpocket: Michel's hand seems almost cut free from his arm as it moves freely i nto p u rses and pockets.
outs, and laconic sound tracks demand the viewer's utmost concentration. The reward is a markable balance between a penetration of the characters' experiences and a sense that their inner states remain elusive and mysteri ous, as in a scene from Diary of a Country Priest, when the protagonist discovers information about the author of a cruel anonymous letter to him (1 9.4 1-1 9.46).
Diary of a Country Priest: as the priest walks into the church, he picks up a fallen prayerbook and discovers that the inscri ption is i n the same handwriting as a cruel anonymous letter he has received. We make the discovery with him and share his curiosity to learn who has been persecuting him. But then we hear a door opening.He quickly puts the book in front of a pew and walks out of the frame.
1 9 .41
1 9.42 Bresson holds Oil the book for eleven seconds, tracking in as the offscreen steps approach.
1 9.43 The suspense is resolved when the governess from the manor house comes into medium shot, kneels, and opens the book.
1 9.44
She looks up.
1 9.45 Bresson cuts to a med i um-close shot of the priest walk ing into the chapel and looking briefly at her ...
1 9.46 ... before he makes his way to the altar, eyes lowered. As he k neels, the scene fades out.Her motivations, and his reactions, have been supp ressed.
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1 9 .47, 1 9 .48 O blique eyeline matches in Four Nights of a Dreamer: "To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks ."
1 9 .49, left Most directors would show Mouchette going to school by establish ing the locale with a long shot and then cutting in to a direct view of her walking along the street and joining her school mates. Instead, Bresson starts with a downward angle on the children's feet ... 1 9 . 50, right . . . lets Mouchette come in, her back to us . . .
1 9.51,
left . . . tracks a short way to follow her . . .
1 9 .52, right . . . and then stops before the school gate. The effect is to cut characters free of locale for a brief moment, suspending our knowledge of where they are in order to concentrate on their physical behavior.
After D iary of a Country Priest, Bresson began to avoid long shots. He typically created a scene's space by showing small portions of it and linking shots through characters' eyelines (19.47, 19.48). At other times his tightly framed camera movements suggest action by concentrating on details. In one scene from Mouchette, for instance, by showing no faces, Bresson calls atten tion to Mouchette's discouraged gait and her shabby clothes (19.49-19.52). Bresson also needs no l o ng shot of Mouchette 's school because he h a s evoked the setting through the sounds of the school bell and the students' chatter. " Every time that I can replace an image by a sound I do so. " 1 0 Against a background of pervasive silence, every obj ect in a Bresson film takes on a distinct acoustic fla vor: the scrape of the bedstead in Fontaine's cell, the clank of the knights' armor in Lance/at du Lac, the rusty bray of the donkey Balthasar. O ffscreen sound will es tablish a locale or will provide a motif that recalls other scenes. Bresson's intense concentration on physical de tails and isolated sounds often fills in for psychological analysis. The mystery and ambiguity of Bresson's style
proved suited to his treatment of s o l itary individuals who struggle to survive a spiritual or physical ordeal. These enigmatic gesture s, textures, and deta i l s are presented in a highly sensuous way. Bresson's images may be severe, but they are never drab. In Les A nges du peche, the nuns' habits create an angular geometry and lustrous range of tonalities (see 13.4S ) . His color films achieve vivid effects by minute means: a knight's armor stands out slightly by its sheen; a mail basket in a prison office becomes a vibrant blue ( Color Plates 19.5, 19.6). Bresson moved toward a bbreviated, elliptical story telling. From Pickpocket on, and especially in Au Hasard Balthasar, so much is left to the spectator's imagination that the very story events- " what happens"-become al most opaque. ("I never explain anything, as it is done in the theatre. " I I ) What gives the Bresson film a sense of ongoing structure are the subtly varied, almost ceremo nial repetitions-daily routines, replayed confrontations, returns to the same locales. The spectator suspects, as the individuals involved do not, that the apparently random action is part of a vast cycle of events governed by God, fate, or some other unknown force.
Jacques Tati (1908-1982)
431
1 9.53-1 9.55 Jour de fete: the camera arcs around the farmer to keep Franc,:ois in the background as a persistent bee plagues them both.
Bresson never sought the commercial success enj oyed by Antonioni, Bergman, and Fellini. Yet he influenced filmmakers as varied as Jean-Marie Straub (who saw po litical implications in ascetic images and direct sound) and Paul Schrader (whose A merican G igolo reworks Pick pocket) . Although Bresson never made his long-cherished version of the biblical book of Genesis, he remains one of the most distinctive auteurs of the past fifty years.
JACQUES TATI ( 1 908-1 982 )
With true a uteurist fervor Truffa ut once declared that " a film by Bresson or Tati is necessarily a work of ge nius a priori, simply because a single, absolute author ity has been imposed from the opening to 'The End . ' '' 1 2 The similarities between the two directors are enlight ening. Both made tentative starts o n their film careers during the 1 9 3 0 s , worked on films during the war, and became prominent in the early 1 9 5 0 s . Both spent years on each film; Tati 's output, with only six features be tween 1 949 and 1 9 73, was even s limmer than Bresson's . Both directors experimented with fragmented, elliptical narratives and unusual uses of sound. Unlike Bresson, however, Tati made some very pop ular films. Since he was a performer as well as a direc tor, he also became an international celebrity. From this perspective, Tati resembled Buiiuel in p u shing mod ernist tendencies toward accessible, mainstream tradi tion. At one level, Tati 's films are satiric commentaries on the rituals of modern l i fe-vacations, work, hous ing, travel . Declaring himself an anarchist, he believed in freedom, eccentricity, and playfulness. His films lack strong plots : things simply happen, one after the other, and nothing much is ever at stake. The film accumulates tiny, even trivial events-like the microactions of Italian Neorealism (p . 3 6 4 ) , only treated as gags.
Jour de (ete ( " H o l i d a y, " 1 94 9 ) set the p attern for most of Tati's subsequent works. A small carnival comes to a village, the townsfolk enjoy a day off, and the car nival leaves the next day. I n the midst of the celebra tion, the local postman, Fran