Perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form's grammatical and expressive possibilities. In thirteen features over a forty-year career, he held to an uncompromising moral vision and aesthetic rigor that remain unmatched. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is the first comprehensive study to give equal attention to the films, their literary sources, and psycho-biographical aspects of the work. Concentrating on the films' cinematographic, imagistic, narrative, and thematic structures, Pipolo provides a nuanced analysis of each film-including nearly 100 illustrations-elucidating Bresson's unique style as it evolved from the impassioned Les Anges du péche to such disconsolate meditations on the world as The Devil Probably and L'Argent. Special attention is also given to psychosexual aspects of the films that are usually neglected. Bresson has long needed a thoroughgoing treatment by a critic worthy to the task: he gets it here. From it emerges a provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist whose moral engagement and devotion to the craft of filmmaking are without equal.

Autorentext

Tony Pipolo is Professor Emeritus of Film and Literature at the City University of New York. He is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City.

Inhalt

Introduction Chapter 1 Rules of the Game (Les Anges du péche and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne) Chapter 2. Author, Author (Journal d'un curé de campagne) Chapter 3 Triumphs of the Will (Un condamné a mort s'est echappé and Pickpocket) Chapter 4 The Young Virgins of the Provinces: I (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc) Chapter 5 The Middle of the Road (Au hasard Balthazar) Chapter 6 The Young Virgins of the Provinces: II (Mouchette) Chapter 7 Dostoevsky in Paris (Une femme douce and Quatre Nuits d'un rêveur) Chapter 8 The Ultimate Geste (Lancelot du Lac) Chapter 9 Angels and Demons (Le Diable Probablement and L'Argent) Epilogue Index