Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book “Notes On The Cinematograph” by Robert Bresson. I’ll be interested in reflecting back on this list in the future and going back to the book to give it a second read as I imagine my understanding and views on some of Bresson’s more thought provoking notes would develop or even change over time as i grow older, like a good film watched and analyze at a different stage of your life.
Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theatre (actor, director, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce ; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.
Cinematography is writing with images in movement and with sounds.
An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.
My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on filmed but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Applause during X’s film. The impression of “theatre” irresistible.
You will guide your models according to your rules, with them letting you act in them, and you letting them act in you.
Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.
The noise must become music.
Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated then, twenty times) and are them dropped in the medium of the events of your film - their relations with the objects and persons around them will be right, because they will not be thought.
A too-expected image (cliche) will never seem right, even if it is.
Immobility of X’s film, whose camera runs, files.
Let it be the feelings that bring about the events> Not the other way.
Someone who can work with the minimum can work with the most. One who can with the Mose cannot, inevitably, with the minimum.
Hide the ideas, but is that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.
Letter of Mozart’s, “They hold the happy mean between the too difficult and the too easy. They are brilliant…, but they miss poverty.”
The soundtrack invented silence.
Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which regard them.
Don’t think of your film outside the resources you have made for yourself.
To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased.
Because you do not have to imitate, like painters, sculptors, novelists, the appearance of persons and objects (machines do that for you), Your creation or invention confines itself to the ties you knot between the various bits of reality caught. There is also the choice of the bits. Your flair decides.
Slow films in which everyone is galloping and gesticulating; swift films in which people hardly stir.
One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another matter. (Not to spread out.)
A cry, a noise. Their resonance makes us guess at a house, a forest, a plain, a mountain; their rebound indicates to us the distances.
It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears.
Several takes of the same thing, like a painter who does serval pictures or drawings of the same subject and, each fresh time. Progresses towards rightness.
Films whose slowness and silences are indistinguishable from the slowness and silences of the audience are ruled out.
The public does not know what it wants. Impose on it your decisions, your delights.
Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.
It is useless and silly to work specially for a public. I cannot try what I am making, at the moment of making it, except on myself. Besides, all that matters is to make well.
Have a painter’s eye. The painter creates by looking.
X, to follow the fashion, puts into his films a little of everything, like a painter who works with too many colors.
Take action first. In London a gang broke open the safe a jeweler’s shop and laid hands on pearl necklaces, rings, gold, precious stones. They found, also, the key of the nearby jeweler’s safe, which they cleaned out, and this safe contained the key of a third jeweler’s safe.
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