Biography for
Robert Bresson

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Robert Bresson trained as a painter before moving into films as a screenwriter, making a short film (atypically a comedy), Affaires publiques, Les (1934) in 1934. After spending more than a year as a German POW during World War II, he made his debut with Anges du péché, Les (1943) in 1943. His next film, Dames du Bois de Boulogne, Les (1945) would be the last time he would work with professional actors. From _Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951)_ (aka "Diary of a Country Priest") onwards, he created a unique minimalist style in which all but the barest essentials are omitted from the film (often, crucial details are only given in the soundtrack), with the actors (he calls them "models") giving deliberately flat, expressionless performances. It's a demanding and difficult, intensely personal style, which means that his films never achieved great popularity (it was rare for him to make more than one film every five years), but he has a fanatical following among critics, who rate him as one of the greatest artists in the history of the cinema. He retired in the 1980s, after failing to raise the money for a long-planned adaptation of the Book of Genesis.

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Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One, 1890-1945". Pages 55-63. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1987.

Friend of Emmanuelle Cuau.

Personal Quotes

"Cinema is interior movement."

"Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater; those that employ the resources of cinematography"

"Cinematography: a new way of writing, therefore of feeling."

"For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real."

"Painting taught me to make not beautiful images but necessary ones."

A film is not a spectacle; it is preeminently a style.

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