A Bresson Weekend

Had a nice Bresson weekend. Started with L'Argent, which I saw dog-tired but which kept me up through it and hours after. The feeling is like witnessing a nice human being get his brains splayed out by a pick-ax, and then it takes awhile after to clean up the mess of brain matter from your clothes. Proponents for Bresson-as-spiritualist/transcendentalist should do well to see the extremely cynical and nihilistic ending - there is nothing pure or beautiful in this film, it's a whole pessimistic view of the gruesome world in all its evil, making this essay suddenly seem very persuasive.

Then I saw one of the perennial faves Au Hasard Balthazar, and it soon became one of mine too. Then I can see what the spiritualists are going on about. Bresson definitely never shies away from cruelty, but suffering and the loss of innocence are portrayed with such sanctity and nobility that it is all too easy to see him as a hardcore Calvinist. The moments of fragile beauty found constantly suppressed under the reign of materialistic evil, albeit fleeting, are made all the more stunning because of its brevity, Bresson's commitment to realism. And if you don't know what I'm saying, I don't know too - it's so hard to put any Bresson picture in words.

The funny thing about Bresson, to me, is not only his enigma and the absolute impossibility to define (and fully understand) him, but why the pictures of his that I love occupy less space in my mind than the pictures that I don't. I don't hate any of his pictures, but those that I don't love perplex me and badger my mind because of that. L'Argent, for example, forces me to go back again and again to its brutality. Maybe it's his deep-seated nihilism that I'm really attracted to, except I often get distracted by his colorful bursts of transcendence.

I'm gonna revisit Pickpocket soon, for what reason I don't know, since I didn't understand it either. It's a little hard to come down from the Bresson 'perch' after standing up there for awhile, he makes everything else look indulgent and talky. Why was he canonized anyway? I don't think anybody could ever come up with a sastifactory answer (21st century criticism, especially, 'dictactes' that we have to be lucid and recognize all his contradictory aspects), so I'll just join the cult of him like some newborn baby.