Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛsɔ̃]; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999)[1] was a French film director. Known for his ascetic approach, Bresson contributed notably to the art of cinema; his non-professional actors, ellipses, and sparse use of scoring have led his works to be regarded as preeminent examples of minimalist film. Much of his work is known for being tragic in story and nature.

Robert Bresson
Bresson c. 1960
Born(1901-09-25)25 September 1901
Bromont-Lamothe, France
Died18 December 1999(1999-12-18) (aged 98)
Droue-sur-Drouette, France
Occupation(s)Film director, screenwriter
Years active1933–1983
Spouse(s)Leidia van der Zee (m.1926)
Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch

Bresson is among the most highly regarded filmmakers of all time. He has the highest number of films (seven) that made the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the 250 greatest films ever made.[2][3][4] His works A Man Escaped (1956),[5] Pickpocket (1959)[6] and Au Hasard Balthazar (1966)[7] were ranked among the top 100, and other films like Mouchette (1967) and L'Argent (1983) also received many votes.[8] Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music."[9]

Life and career

Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, Puy-de-Dôme, the son of Marie-Élisabeth (née Clausels) and Léon Bresson.[10] Little is known of his early life. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, close to Paris, and turned to painting after graduating.[11] Three formative influences in his early life seem to have made a mark on his films: Catholicism, art and his experiences as a prisoner of war. Robert Bresson lived in Paris, France, in the Île Saint-Louis.

Initially also a photographer, Bresson made his first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs) in 1934. During World War II, he spent over a year in a prisoner-of-war camp−an experience which informs Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped). In a career that spanned fifty years, Bresson made only 13 feature-length films. This reflects his painstaking approach to the filmmaking process and his non-commercial preoccupations. Difficulty finding funding for his projects was also a factor.

Although many writers claim that Bresson described himself as a "Christian atheist",[12][13] no source ever confirmed this assertion, neither are the circumstances clear under which Bresson would have said it. On the contrary, in an interview in 1973 he said,

There is the feeling that God is everywhere, and the more I live, the more I see that in nature, in the country. When I see a tree, I see that God exists. I try to catch and to convey the idea that we have a soul and that the soul is in contact with God. That's the first thing I want to get in my films.[14]

Furthermore, in a 1983 interview for TSR's Spécial Cinéma, Bresson declared that he had been interested in making a film based on the Book of Genesis, although he believed such a production would be too costly and time-consuming.[15]

Bresson was sometimes accused of an "ivory tower existence".[16] Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, an admirer of Bresson's work, argued that the filmmaker was "a mysterious, aloof figure", and wrote that on the set of Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) the director "seemed more isolated from his crew than any other filmmaker I've seen at work; his widow and onetime assistant director, Mylene van der Mersch, often conveyed his instructions."[17]

Bresson died on a Saturday in December 1999, at his home in Droue-sur-Drouette southwest of Paris. He was 98. He made his last film, L'Argent, in 1983 and had been unwell for some time.[18]

Themes and style

Bresson's early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from that of the theater, which often relies heavily upon the actor's performance to drive the work. Film scholar Tony Pipolo writes that "Bresson opposed not just professional actors, but acting itself,"[19] preferring to think of his actors as 'models'. In Notes on the Cinematographer (original French title: Notes sur le cinématographe; also published in English as Notes on the Cinematograph), a collection of aphorisms written by Bresson, the director succinctly defines the difference between the two:

HUMAN MODELS: movement from the exterior to the interior. [...]
ACTORS: movement from the interior to the exterior.[20]

Bresson further elaborates on his disdain for acting by appropriating a remark Chateaubriand had made about 19th century poets and applying it to actors: "what they lack is not naturalness, but Nature." For Bresson, "to think it's more natural for a movement to be made or a phrase to be said like this than like that" is "absurd", and "nothing rings more false in film [...] than the overstudied sentiments" of theater.[20]

With his 'model' technique, Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw. This, as well as Bresson's restraint in musical scoring, would have a significant influence on minimalist cinema. In the academic journal CrossCurrents, Shmuel Ben-gad wrote:

There is a credibility in Bresson's models: They are like people we meet in life, more or less opaque creatures who speak, move, and gesture [...] Acting, on the other hand, no matter how naturalistic, actively deforms or invents by putting an overlay or filter over the person, presenting a simplification of a human being and not allowing the camera to capture the actor's human depths. Thus what Bresson sees as the essence of filmic art, the achievement of the creative transformation involved in all art through the interplay of images of real things, is destroyed by the artifice of acting. For Bresson, then, acting is, like mood music and expressive camera work, just one more way of deforming reality or inventing that has to be avoided.[21]

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote that Bresson's directorial style resulted in films "of great passion: Because the actors didn't act out the emotions, the audience could internalize them."[22]

Some feel that Bresson's Catholic upbringing and belief system lie behind the thematic structures of most of his films.[23] Recurring themes under this interpretation include salvation, redemption, defining and revealing the human soul, and metaphysical transcendence of a limiting and materialistic world. An example is A Man Escaped (1956), where a seemingly simple plot of a prisoner of war's escape can be read as a metaphor for the mysterious process of salvation.

Bresson's films are also critiques of French society and the wider world, with each revealing the director's sympathetic, if unsentimental, view of society's victims. That the main characters of Bresson's most contemporary films, The Devil, Probably (1977) and L'Argent (1983), reach similarly unsettling conclusions about life indicates the director's feelings towards the culpability of modern society in the dissolution of individuals. Of an earlier protagonist he said, "Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations."[24] Film historian Mark Cousins argues that "[i]f Bergman and Fellini filmed life as if it was a theatre and a circus, respectively, Bresson's microcosm was that of a prison", describing Bresson's characters as "psychologically imprisoned".[25]

Bresson published Notes on the Cinematographer in 1975, in which he argues for a unique sense of the term "cinematography". For him, cinematography is the higher function of cinema. While a movie is in essence "only" filmed theatre, cinematography is an attempt to create a new language of moving images and sounds.

Legacy

Bresson is often referred to as a "patron saint" of cinema, not only for the strong Catholic themes found throughout his oeuvre, but also for his notable contributions to the art of film. His style can be detected through his use of sound, associating selected sounds with images or characters; paring dramatic form to its essentials by the spare use of music; and through his infamous 'actor-model' methods of directing his almost exclusively non-professional actors. Mark Cousins writes:[25]

So complete was Bresson's rejection of cinema norms that he has a tendency to fall outside film history. However, his uncompromising stance has been extremely influential in some quarters.

Bresson's book Notes on the Cinematographer (1975) is one of the most respected books on film theory and criticism. His theories about film greatly influenced other filmmakers, particularly the French New Wave directors.

French cinema

Opposing the established pre-war French cinema (known as Tradition de la Qualité ["tradition of quality"]) by offering his own personal responses to the question "what is cinema?",[26] and by formulating his ascetic style, Bresson gained a high reputation with the founders of the French New Wave. He is often listed (along with Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin) as one of the main figures who influenced them. New Wave pioneers praised Bresson and posited him as a prototype for or precursor to the movement. However, Bresson was neither as overtly experimental nor as outwardly political as the New Wave filmmakers, and his religious views (Catholicism and Jansenism) were not attractive to most of the filmmakers associated with the movement.[26]

In his development of auteur theory, François Truffaut lists Bresson among the few directors to whom the term "auteur" can genuinely be applied, and later names him as one of the only examples of directors who could approach even the so-called "unfilmable" scenes, using the film narrative at its disposal.[27] Jean-Luc Godard also looked upon Bresson with high admiration ("Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music."[28]) Screenwriter and director Alain Cavalier describes Bresson's role as pivotal not only in the New Wave movement, but for French cinema in general, writing, "In French cinema you have a father and a mother: the father is Bresson and the mother is Renoir, with Bresson representing the strictness of the law and Renoir warmth and generosity. All the better French cinema has and will have to connect to Bresson in some way."[3]

Reception and influence

Bresson has also influenced a number of other filmmakers, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Chantal Akerman,[29] Jean Eustache,[29] Abel Ferrara,[30] Philippe Garrel,[29] Hal Hartley,[29] Monte Hellman,[29] Jim Jarmusch,[31] Louis Malle,[32] Michael Haneke, Olivier Assayas, Atom Egoyan, the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismäki,[29] and Paul Schrader, whose book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer includes a detailed critical analysis. The Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman praised and admired Bresson's films such as Mouchette and Diary of a Country Priest, although he disliked Au Hasard Balthazar.[33][34][35] The French filmmaker Jean Cocteau held Bresson in high regard.[36] The French filmmaker Alain Resnais was a strong admirer of Bresson and his work.[37] The French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville was also fond of Bresson and his work.[38] The French filmmaker Jacques Rivette has acknowledge to Bresson's influence on his films.[39] The Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieślowski was also influenced by him and ranked Bresson's film, A Man Escaped as one of the top ten films that "affected" him the most.[40] The German filmmaker Werner Herzog praised Bresson's films such as Pickpocket and Au Hasard Balthazar.[41] The Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr was influenced by Bresson and listed Bresson film Au Hasard Balthazar on his top ten films of all time.[42][43][44] The Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami was highly influenced by Bresson and mentioned the personal importance of Bresson's book, Notes on the Cinematographer.[45][46] The Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos listed Bresson's film Pickpocket on his top ten films of all time.[47]

The German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder was influenced by Bresson and championed and paid homage to Bresson's film The Devil Probably with his film The Third Generation.[48][44] When Fassbinder was a member of the jury in the 1977 Berlin Film Festival, he even went so far as to threaten to leave the jury (when his enthusiasm was not shared by his peers) unless his appreciation for Bresson's film was made known to the public.[49] The Dardenne brothers's film L'Enfant was influenced by Bresson's film Pickpocket.[50] The German director Margarethe von Trotta lists Bresson as one of her favorite directors.[51] The American filmmaker Wes Anderson listed Au Hasard Balthazar as one of his favorite films in the Criterion Collection library and called Bresson's film Mouchette, "terrific".[52] The American filmmaker Richard Linklater was influenced by Bresson's work and listed Au hasard Balthazar and Pickpocket in his top 10 film list from the Criterion Collection.[53][54] The British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan was influenced by Bresson's films (specifically Pickpocket and A Man Escaped) for his film, Dunkirk.[55] Benny Safdie named the Bresson's film A Man Escaped as his favorite film of all time.[56] Martin Scorsese praised Bresson as "one of the cinema's greatest artists" and an influence on his films such as Taxi Driver.[57][58] Andrei Tarkovsky held Bresson in very high regard,[59] noting him and Ingmar Bergman as his two favourite filmmakers, and stating: "I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman."[60] In his book Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky describes Bresson as "perhaps the only artist in cinema, who achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand."[28]

Filmography
Year Film English Title Director Writer Notes
1933 C'était un musicien "He Was a Musician" No Yes
1934 Les affaires publiques Public Affairs Yes Yes Short film; also editor
1936 Les jumeaux de Brighton The Brighton Twins No Yes
1937 Courier Sud Southern Mail No Yes
1938 La vierge folle The Foolish Virgin No No Assistant director
1943 Les Anges du péché Angels of Sin Yes Yes
1945 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne Yes Yes
1951 Journal d'un curé de campagne Diary of a Country Priest Yes Yes
1956 Un condamné à mort s'est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut A Man Escaped
a literal translation is, "a man condemned to death has escaped, or, the wind blows where it will"		 Yes Yes
1959 Pickpocket – Yes Yes
1962 Procès de Jeanne d'Arc The Trial of Joan of Arc Yes Yes
1966 Au Hasard Balthazar "Balthazar, at random" Yes Yes
1967 Mouchette – Yes Yes
1969 Une femme douce A Gentle Woman Yes Yes
1971 Quatre nuits d'un rêveur Four Nights of a Dreamer Yes Yes
1974 Lancelot du Lac Lancelot of the Lake Yes Yes
1977 Le Diable probablement The Devil Probably Yes Yes
1983 L'Argent "Money" Yes Yes

Bibliography
  • Notes sur le Cinématographe (1975)—translated as Notes on Cinematography, Notes on the Cinematographer and Notes on the Cinematograph in different English editions.
  • Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983 (2016)—translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, edited by Mylène Bresson, preface by Pascal Mérigeau.

Awards and nominations

Cannes Film Festival
Year Category Nominated work Result Ref.
1957Palme d'OrA Man EscapedNominated[61]
Best DirectorWon
1962Palme d'OrThe Trial of Joan of ArcNominated
Jury Special PrizeWon
OCIC AwardNominated
1967Palme d'OrMouchetteNominated
OCIC AwardWon
Special DistinctionWon
1974FIPRESCI PrizeLancelot du LacNominated
1983Palme d'OrL'ArgentNominated
Best DirectorWon

Berlin Film Festival
Year Category Nominated work Result Ref.
1960Golden BearPickpocketNominated[61]
1971Four Nights of a DreamerNominated
OCIC AwardWon
1977Golden BearThe Devil ProbablyNominated
Silver Bear Grand Jury PrizeWon
OCIC AwardWon
Interfilm AwardWon

Venice Film Festival
Year Category Nominated work Result Ref.
1951Golden LionDiary of a Country PriestNominated[61]
OCIC AwardWon
International AwardWon
Italian Film Critics AwardWon
1966Golden LionAu Hasard BalthazarNominated
OCIC AwardWon
San Giorgio PrizeWon
New Cinema AwardWon
Jury HomageWon
Cineforum 66 AwardWon
1967Pasinetti AwardMouchetteWon
1989Career Golden Lion Award—Won

Works on Bresson
  • Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film by Tony Pipolo (Oxford University Press; 407 pages; 2010) pays particular attention to psychosexual aspects of the French filmmaker's 13 features, from Les Anges du péché (1943) to L'Argent (1983).
  • Le Journal d'un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson by André Bazin (Cahiers du Cinéma, No. 3, Jun. 1951)
  • Robert Bresson (Cinematheque Ontario Monographs, No. 2), edited by James Quandt
  • Transcendental Style in Film: Bresson, Ozu, Dreyer by Paul Schrader
  • Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film, by Joseph Cunneen
  • Robert Bresson, by Philippe Arnauld, Cahiers du cinéma, 1986
  • The Films of Robert Bresson, Ian Cameron (ed.), New York: Praeger Publishers, 1969.
  • Robert Bresson, by Keith Reader, Manchester University Press, 2000.
  • "Robert Bresson", a poem by Patti Smith from her 1978 book Babel
  • "Spiritual style in the films of Robert Bresson", a chapter in Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation and other essays, New York: Picador, 1966.
  • Robert Bresson (Revised), James Quandt (ed), Cinematheque Ontario Monographs, 2012 (752 pages) (ISBN 978-0-9682969-5-0)
  • Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics by Brian Price (University of Minnesota Press, 2011, 264 pages).
  • Bresson on Bresson: Interviews, 1943–1983 by Robert Bresson, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, edited by Mylène Bresson, preface by Pascal Mérigeau (New York Review Books, 2016)
  • The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market by Colin Burnett, Indiana University Press, 2016.

See also

References
  1. "Robert Bresson". Les Gens du Cinéma (in French). 28 July 2004. Retrieved 19 February 2014. This site uses Bresson's birth certificate as its source of information.
  2. Perez, Rodrigo (17 August 2012). "Sight And Sound Top 250 by the Numbers: And The Auteur with the Most Films Is…".
  3. Institute, The British Film. "BFI – Sight & Sound – Robert Bresson: Alias Grace". old.bfi.org.uk. Archived from the original on 3 August 2012. Retrieved 9 August 2018.
  4. "The 1,000 Greatest Films (Top 250 Directors)". They Shoot Pictures, Don't They. Retrieved 25 June 2016.
  5. "Votes for A Man Escaped (1956)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 2 February 2017. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  6. "Critics' Top 100". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 7 February 2016. Retrieved 23 January 2018.
  7. "Votes for Au hasard Balthazar (1966)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 27 October 2016. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  8. "Robert Bresson". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 13 February 2016. Retrieved 27 January 2017.
  9. Godard, Jean-Luc (27 June 1972). Godard on Godard; critical writings [This comment on Bresson was taken from a special issue of Cahiers du Cinéma]. Viking Press. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-670-34277-8.
  10. "Robert Bresson Biography (1907–1999)". filmreference.com. Retrieved 9 August 2018.
  11. Liukkonen, Petri. "Robert Bresson". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 27 October 2007.
  12. James Quandt (1998). Robert Bresson. Cinemathèque Ontario. p. 411. ISBN 978-0-9682969-1-2. Around the time of 'Lancelot du Lac' (1974), Bresson was said to have declared himself "a Christian atheist."
  13. Bert Cardullo (2009). The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook. Anthem Press. p. xiii. ISBN 978-1-84331-796-8. A deeply devout man—one who paradoxically described himself as a "Christian atheist" – Bresson, in his attempt in a relatively timeless manner to address good and evil, redemption, the power of love and self-sacrifice, and other such subjects, may seem to us, and perhaps was, something of a retrogression.
  14. Hayman, Ronald (Summer 1973). "Robert Bresson in Conversation". Transatlantic Review (46–47): 16–23.
  15. Robert Bresson interview 1 (1983) with english subs. Event occurs at 11:17. Archived from the original on 11 December 2021 – via YouTube.
  16. "Robert Bresson". The Guardian. 22 December 1999. Retrieved 10 August 2017.
  17. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (1 April 2004). "Defending Bresson". Chicago Reader. Retrieved 2 March 2017.
  18. Riding, Alan (22 December 1999). "Robert Bresson, Film Director, Dies at 98". The New York Times. Retrieved 3 April 2020.
  19. Pipolo, Tony (2010). Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-531979-8.
  20. Bresson, Robert (1997). Notes on the Cinematographer. Green Integer. ISBN 978-1-55713-365-6.
  21. Ben-gad, Shmuel (1997). "To See the World Profoundly: The Films of Robert Bresson". CrossCurrents. Retrieved 25 September 2015.
  22. Ebert, Roger (23 December 1999). "Robert Bresson was master of understatement". Retrieved 25 September 2015.
  23. James Quandt, Robert Bresson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998), 9.
  24. Sadoul, Georges (1972). Dictionary of Film Makers. Translated by Morris, Peter. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. p. 228. ISBN 978-0-520-01864-8.
  25. Cousins, Mark (2011). The Story of Film. Pavilion. ISBN 978-1-86205-942-9.
  26. "Robert Bresson as a Precursor to the Nouvelle Vague: A Brief Historical Sketch". offscreen.com.
  27. Truffaut, François (1954). "Une certaine tendance du cinéma français ("A certain tendency in French cinema")". Cahiers du Cinéma. Retrieved 22 March 2023.
  28. "TSPDT – Robert Bresson". theyshootpictures.com. Retrieved 9 August 2018.
  29. Keith Reader (2 September 2000). Robert Bresson. Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-5366-5.
  30. Alison Nastasi (25 March 2015). "Abel Ferrara on His Strauss-Kahn-Inspired 'Welcome to New York,' His Battle With Distributors, and 'Pasolini'". FlavorWire. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  31. Jamie Sexton (24 April 2018). Stranger Than Paradise. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-85102-2.
  32. Keith Reader (2 September 2000). "The 'Prison Cycle'". Robert Bresson. p. 47. ISBN 978-0-7190-5366-5. Malle even suggests that he was unconsciously influenced by the Bresson film in his casting of Blaise.
  33. "Bergman about other filmmakers". Ingmar Bergman Face to Face. Ingmar Bergman Foundation. Archived from the original on 21 July 2011. Retrieved 26 May 2011. Ingmar Bergman: "Jag är också oerhört förtjust i En prästmans dagbok, som är ett av de märkligaste verk som någonsin gjordes. Nattvardsgästerna är ganska influerad av den."
  34. Philip Mosley (1981). Ingmar Bergman – The Cinema as Mistress. M. Boyars. p. 71. ISBN 978-0-7145-2644-7.
  35. John Simon. "Ingmar Bergman on Mouchette". RobertBresson.com. Retrieved 18 June 2021. John Simon: "What about Bresson? How do you feel about him?" Ingmar Bergman: "Oh, Mouchette! I loved it, I loved it! But Balthazar was so boring, I slept through it." John Simon: "I liked Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and A Man Escaped, but I would say The Diary of a Country Priest is the best one." Ingmar Bergman: "I have seen it four or five times and could see it again... and Mouchette... really..."
  36. Srikanth Srinivasan (17 August 2013). "Outtakes: Robert Bresson". The Hindu. Thg Publishing Pvt Ltd. Archived from the original on 30 June 2021. Retrieved 30 June 2021. Contemporaries such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Jean Cocteau and Marguerite Duras and the critic-filmmakers of the French New Wave held him in very high regard.
  37. Noel Burch; Alain Resnais (1960). "A Conversation with Alain Resnais". Film Quarterly. University of California Press. 13 (3): 27–29. doi:10.2307/1210431. JSTOR 1210431. Resnais is a shy, rather nerv- ... eclectic. He admires Bresson tremendously,
  38. Richard Neupert (20 April 2007). "Testing the Water". A History of the French New Wave Cinema. University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 62–63. ISBN 978-0-299-21703-7. Melville was fond of Hollywood cinema as well as of many of the contemporary French auteurs, such as Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, and Robert Bresson.
  39. Cinematheque Ontario (1998). Robert Bresson (Revised). Toronto International Film Festival. p. 77. ISBN 978-0-9682969-1-2. ...Jacques Rivette have repeatedly acknowledged their debt to Bresson.
  40. Joseph Kickasola (2004). The Films of Krzysztof Kieslowski – The Liminal Image. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-8264-1559-2.
  41. Literary Hub (10 August 2016). "Werner Herzog on the Books Every Filmmaker Should Read". Literary Hub. Retrieved 23 September 2021. Herzog: "...Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. This is phenomenal; it just make me ache. So intense and so beautiful… It makes you ache, it's so beautiful. And we also watched his Au hasard Balthazar about the donkey Balthazar. It's an incredible film."
  42. Eric Schlosser (1 October 2000). "Interview with Béla Tarr: About Werckmeister Harmonies (Cannes 2000, Director's Fortnight)". Bright Lights Film. Bright Lights Film Journal. Retrieved 28 June 2021. Interviewer: "Béla Tarr, is your work influenced by other filmmakers?" Béla Tarr: "I remember some movies from my young years, it was the time when I saw many movies. Now I have no time, and I don't like to go and watch movies as I used to. But people like Robert Bresson, Ozu. I like some Fassbinder movies very much. Cassavettes. Hungarian films too."
  43. "Béla Tarr". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 9 March 2016. Retrieved 28 June 2021.
  44. Codruţa Morari (July 2017). "An Elusive Style". The Bressonians – French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship. Berghahn Books. p. 59. ISBN 978-1-78533-572-3.
  45. Tom Paulus (9 December 2016). "Truth in Cinema: The Riddle of Kiarostami". Cinea. Cinea. Retrieved 30 June 2021. Kiarostami's greatest cinematic inspiration, Robert Bresson, was also convinced that the importance of the image is in its relationship to what comes before and after.
  46. Filmmakers; Larry Gross (6 July 2016). "Talkhouse Film Contributors Remember Abbas Kiarostami". Talkhouse. Talkhouse, Inc. Retrieved 30 June 2021. The next day he gave a press conference, talking about the personal importance of Bresson's book Notes on the Cinematographer for him...
  47. "Theo Angelopoulos". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 26 June 2012. Retrieved 28 June 2021.
  48. James Quandt (7 February 2018). "10 great films that inspired Rainer Werner Fassbinder". British Film Institute. Retrieved 28 June 2021. Like Godard, Fassbinder flaunted his influences through homage and citation – to Jean-Pierre Melville, Bertolt Brecht and Godard in his early crime films, to Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky in The Third Generation (1979), to many American directors throughout his career.
  49. Brian Price (2011). "6 – The Agony of Ideas". Neither God Nor Master – Robert Bresson and Radical Politics. University of Minnesota Press. p. 148. ISBN 978-0-8166-5461-1. Fassbinder threatened to leave the jury unless his support for the film, which was entirely unappreciated by his colleagues, was made public.
  50. Manohla Dargis; A.O. Scott (22 May 2005). "Two Belgians Win Top Prize at Cannes for Second Time". The New York Times. Retrieved 30 June 2021. "The Child," a Belgian film directed by Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, won the Palme d'Or as best film at the 58th Cannes Film Festival on Saturday night. The film, which follows a young petty thief as he struggles with the moral dilemmas of fatherhood, was inspired by Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and influenced by the classic French film "Pickpocket," by Robert Bresson.
  51. Margarethe Von Trotta – Interviews. University Press of Mississippi. 19 January 2018. p. 5. ISBN 978-1-4968-1564-4. Interestingly, von Trotta's favorite directors, even today, are men: Ingmar Bergman, Carlos Saura, Robert Bresson.
  52. Zack Sharf (24 October 2019). "Wes Anderson's Favorite Movies: 30 Films the Auteur Wants You to See". IndieWire. Penske Business Media, LLC. Retrieved 30 June 2021. "We watched 'Au Hasard Balthazar' last night and loved it", Anderson told The Criterion Collection when naming his favorite films in the library. "You hate to see that poor donkey die. He takes a beating and presses on, and your heart goes out to him". Directed by Robert Bresson, the 1966 French drama follows a donkey and his various owners over the years. Anderson says he is also a fan of Bresson's "terrific" companion film "Mouchette", released in 1967.
  53. "Richard Linklater Presents Robert Bresson". A-BitterSweet-Life. A-BitterSweet-Life. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  54. "Richard Linklater's Top 10". The Criterion Collection. The Criterion Collection. 21 November 2008. Retrieved 30 June 2021.
  55. Leonard Pearce (28 February 2017). "Christopher Nolan Inspired by Robert Bresson and Silent Films for 'Dunkirk,' Which Has "Little Dialogue"". The Film Stage. The Film Stage, L.L.C. Retrieved 23 September 2021. "I spent a lot of time reviewing the silent films for crowd scenes –the way extras move, evolve, how the space is staged and how the cameras capture it, the views used", Nolan tells Premiere Magazine. The director revealed that he brushed up on silent films such as Intolerance, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Greed, as well as the films of Robert Bresson (notably Pickpocket and A Man Escaped, to dissect the process of creating suspense through details), Wages of Fear, and, of course, Saving Private Ryan.
  56. Jacqueline Coley (14 January 2020). "The Safdie Brothers' Five Favorite Films". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 15 July 2021. Benny Safdie: "Then the second one – and let's say, this was in no particular order – but A Man Escaped, the [Robert] Bresson movie. That has to be my favorite movie of all time, just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I've achieved something that the character achieves. And it tells you what happens in the title, and it makes it no less suspenseful the entire way. You're literally feeling the sound of the gravel as he puts his foot down – those shots of the foot or the spoon going into the slot. All of these things, the editing of it, the character, the way he's using these actors who you don't really know, they just – you feel like they're real people. It's just so perfectly put together, and it's something where I kind of feel like I'm going along with the escape in a way that's just done by a master. In a weird way, I feel like Bresson is the Fontaine character in that movie. But what's weird is I've watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it, where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other. And then you realize Bresson is just kind of making the same movie every time, just with different [settings and characters]. One's World War II, one's Lancelot."
  57. Neil Mitchell (11 January 2018). "Taxi Driver: five films that influenced Scorsese's masterpiece". British Film Institute. Retrieved 21 June 2021.
  58. Rodrigo Perez (18 April 2012). "The Films of Robert Bresson: A Retrospective". IndieWire. Penske Business Media, LLC. Retrieved 21 June 2021. "We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films", Martin Scorsese said in the 2010 book "A Passion For Film", describing the often overlooked French filmmaker as "one of the cinema's greatest artists".
  59. Le Cain, Maximillian. "Andrei Tarkovsky". Archived from the original on 23 March 2010.
  60. "Andrei Tarkovsky Quotes (Author of Sculpting in Time)". goodreads.com. Retrieved 9 August 2018.
  61. "Robert Bresson – Awards". IMDb. Retrieved 3 April 2020.

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