Typing from a notebook dated 2021, I bumped into my ramblings on Robert Bressons' Notes on the Cinematograph (NYRB Classics), introduced by J.M.G Le Clézio and translated by Jonathan Griffin.

1

For Bresson, silence is constituitive to filmmaking, an act which creates text through juxtaposition of images that form relationships, and modify one another by existing and proximity:

A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view, a restricted space....

The ellipsis here belongs to Bresson, who reminds the reader: "Don't run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses)."

Bresson’s ellipses serve an architectural role as "joins", and architecture signifies since the image is "transformed by contact with other images," a transformation he likens to how color is changed by contact with other colors.

2

"Cinematography is writing with images in movement and with sounds."

Images have power and value only through "their position and relation," Bresson writes, comparing images in a film to words in a dictionary: one could say each film has its lexicon.

3

Actors as "models" who sit to be painted, to become part of the canvas.

"Cinema films are historical documents whose places are in the archives," Bresson notes, so that a play or a piece as performed by X on the date of X in X year.

The role of the "look" for Bresson: "To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks."

We don't see the color of each other's eyes: "two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks."

He follows with a note from Vivaldi that any concerto that includes the word solo needs only one violin: "Not to use two violins when one is enough."

4

One night, Bresson stayed up in a hotel, haunted by Napoleon's saying: "I make my battle plans from the spirit of my sleeping soldiers." He compared the preparation of a film to the preparation of a battle, with an eye to intersections and the point of intersection on the maps.

"Don't let your backgrounds ( avenues, squares, public gardens, subways) absorb the faces you are applying to them."

Don't let the use of a place become dehumanizing, or crowd-faced. But he also quotes Renoir telling Matisse that he often paints bouquets on the side where he hadn't planned them. Emphasizing the power of the "flattened image," Bresson invests in repetition, the mystery of an image being multiple: "The same image brought in by ten different routes will be a different image ten times."

5

“Images and sounds are like people who make acquaintances on a journey and afterwards cannot separate.”

No background music. No music without visible instruments. "The noises must become music."

It is "the feelings that bring about the events," not the events which cause the feelings.

In all caps, Bresson says: "THE SOUNDTRACK INVENTED SILENCE."

In film, "absolute silence" can be reached through a "pianissimo of noises". Things made "visible" not by rare light but by changing angle which regards them. "Images…like the modulations in music."

Positioning himself against tactics of speed, noise, extravagance, Bresson opts for "tactics of slowness, of silence."

Claude Debussy played piano with the lid down.

Corot said "one must not seek, one must wait."

Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The last syllable of the last word, or the last noise, like a held note.

Perhaps the ellipses work like a sustain pedal on a piano: it opens the echo of the held sound towards silence, thus, extending it?

6

Scene and setting are established by the sameness of sound and sonority; "the true is inimitable, the false untransformable."

The model should speak as if speaking to themselves: "monologue instead of dialogue."

Thinking is working one's way through the world, a form of action. In these proximities, "the bonds that beings and things are waiting for, in order to live."

A locomotive's whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.

The subject is altered by juxtaposition of images and sounds—religious subjects receive their dignity and their elevation from the images and sounds, not the other way around.

Reorganize the unorganized noises (what you think you here is not what you hear) of a street, a railroad station, an airport... Play them back one by one in silence and adjust the blend.
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.

7

Rule for writers from Bresson: "To TRANSLATE the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing."

And: 'Letter of Mozart's, about some of his own concerto's (K. 413, K. 414, K. 415):

They hold the happy mean between the two difficult and the two easy. They are brilliant..., but they missed poverty.

"Avoid paroxysms (anger, terror, etc) which one is obliged to simulate, and in which everybody is alike," Bresson continues.

Voice and face are things which have formed together and have grown used to each other.

Your film is not readymade. It makes itself as it goes along under your gaze. Images and sounds in a state of waiting and reserved.

8

In an interview about The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962), Bresson compares the relationship between the cinematographer and the actor to the relationship of author to character, where "each gives to the other" profoundly:

I believe we communicate by looking at one another. There's a beautiful paragraph about this in Proust. I think he compares glances between people to rubber bands, or threads, that connect us. I think looking is everything. If, in the street, you look at a person passing by, at first glance she might seem like a moving statue. As soon as you exchange a look, then suddenly, something happens: this isn't a statue, it's a living being, a body and a soul. So, the way people look at each other is, for me I was going to say the only important thing in a film. Because, after all, to succeed in making these shadows on a screen come to life, these beings that are not alive but that have a certain kind of life, they must exist in relation to each other, and each of them in relation to objects in the world. This interdependence is, I believe, created by the act of looking. There has to be an interdependence. Not to depend on anything is not to live. For me gaze, the exchange of looks—daily life depends on them. I mean that these exchanges make us realize that we—others and ourselves, ourselves and objects—depend on each other.

The question of Joan's gender-violations comes up, to which Bresson replies: "Joan took up dressing like a man again, after agreeing to stop, in order to protect herself from English soldiers; another, her confessor, insists that it was the English who hid her dress in a bag to force her back into men's clothes." He continues:

We did our best not to locate the greatness of Joan's life in uncertainties. One thing we do know: She was not the ignorant peasant of legend. At Chinon, she became fast friends and instant equals with the seigneurs of the highest order, whom she went on to command militarily and to instruct in artillery. She rode magnificent horses. She was very elegant, of a royal elegance, which is not to say that she was anything like the kin of Charles VII. He was reproached at the trial for his gowns of gold, his fur coats. Another certain, poignant fact: her abundant tears before dying. I thought of a phrase from Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks. He says that before death, the soul weeps because it has to separate itself from this marvel that is the body. Joan had a very beautiful body: "I am happy to die. But I don't want to be burned, to be turned to ash.”

During her trial, Joan said that she signed the orders that went against her wishes with an "X". But it was also said she didn't know how to write. Joan’s letters survived as scribed by others, with a signature from her own hand.

"Nothing indicates that Joan didn't know how to write," Bresson tells Jean Guitton:

You could say that she was a being more perfect that us, more sensitive. She combined her five senses in a new way. She saw her voices. She convinces us of a world that exists at the limits of our faculties. She penetrates this supernatural world, but she closes the door behind her.
This will to believe isn't only about St. Michael. When she is asked: "How did you know it was St. Michael?," she replies: "Because he had the voice of an angel." -How did you know it was the voice of an angel?-"Because I had the will to believe it." A will that enhanced the apparition. She needed her will in order to accede to the realm. . . . What is most admirable about Joan throughout the trial is the heroism with which she deliberately sacrifices her life for the meaning of her life. After the abjuration, she pulls herself together and then loses herself to save herself. "I did not want to renounce my apparitions. Everything I have done is out of fear of the fire."

9

The conversation moves to Pickpocket (1959). Bresson tells the interviewer:

I have never wanted to make a moral film, far from it. I do want to give the audience the feelings I experience when faced with certain things, certain events in life, but it isn't the events themselves that count for me. I want to say that the events just provide the opportunity to access a life other than physical life, I mean an inner life, the life of the soul. Of course I'm obliged to use concrete things as a means to get there.

When the interviewer mentions "the guardian angel … the very sweet friend who isn't all that good," Bresson interrupts him sharply. "I was not thinking of a guardian angel," he says:

It's true that there are some correspondences, there are some coincidences in life for those who wish to see them. Unfortunately, our era is a bit like a school of inattention. I want to say that we are taught-that radio, magazines, television teach us to look without seeing and to listen without hearing. [Applause] But what I want is to teach the opposite: to teach us how to see. When I was young, I was taught only one thing, I was told "pay attention." And now, it seems as if the whole world is being told not to pay attention. It's very serious. It's an extremely serious thing and I am convinced of it (though I could be wrong). I have much more confidence in the real public, the one that feels, than in the small-minded audience that seeks to exercise its intelligence before feeling.

Bresson continues:

There's a line in Pascal that goes, I believe, "Every thing hides a mystery.* "To get to the mystery... But it isn't by theatrical means that would be impossible. I'll repeat what I was saying just now: A film must not be a play, must not be a spectacle. We are always pushing films in that direction. Spectacles demand presence, presence in flesh A reproduction. What is a reproduction of a painting? It's something dead. What I am trying to do by killing the actors in a way (I'm not at saying that I've succeeded) is to make them live again on screen. I would less like for the audience to attend a birth and not something that is already completed, that has already taken place-a birth that has already taken place, the phenomenon of which has been filmed.
A film is not made of images, it's made of relationships between images. And these relationships must give it life. The same as with colors in painting; a blue is a blue, but if you put it next to a yellow, it's not the same blue. Or next to a red and a yellow, it's no longer the same yellow, nor the same blue, nor the same red. I want to say not only that a film is made of elements that are images, but it's also made of sounds. And not only of relationships, but of rhythms. So you have to figure out how to move the audience with form. You know that Valéry said something similar to this: "Form must have the value of an idea." And you know in poetry, meter is already an idea. Above all, what I'm looking for—I don't claim to have achieved it—but I'm trying to speak cinema in a language all its own, and I refuse to get dragged into making filmed theater.

"The more things resemble each other the more they are different, in the sense that you notice their difference more," Bresson says. "If the two things are almost identical, any difference is explosive. So perhaps when I give this kinship, this and common ancestry to my characters, I make them more personal, more distinct."

Uncertainty is the dramatic foundation of Pickpocket:

All thieves are surrounded by uncertainty. What's terrifying for a thief is not to know whether he has been seen. The police told me that thieves usually die from heart attacks. [Laughter] These are people who live with an addiction to their own kind of drug-it's so much like an addiction that, apparently, they also can't handle prison. The majority of them commit suicide, or attempt suicide, after just a few months behind bars. So there's this drama surrounding them which they create, which is their drug – and which is, perhaps, the drama of uncertainty.

"The watch is very beautiful."

This statement replaces an answer to a question about whether a man loves a woman; and Bresson allows the music to start on that sentence.

An audience member comments that it is "as if nothing has been said, really, because it's such a banal sentence, but everything is suggested."

And Bresson agrees with the audience member; is "very moved" by that statement. He explicates his reticence along the edges:

There may be too much condensation in the film, but in fact what I'm trying to do is to come up to the edge of saying too little, in order to try to express with silence what other films express with words— the almost imperceptible things that happen on a face, or in a look in someone's eyes. But there is this curious thing: a few years ago people began to say that what makes a film cinema is if it has no dialogue at all.

Dialogue is overdetermined to Bresson; he says he's seen films "that are made entirely of pleonasms, in which the image adds absolutely nothing to what is said, and what is said adds nothing to the image."

Contra the impulse to dispel silence, Bresson aims "to verge on saying too little, on leaving everything mysterious and assigning weight to things through their rhythm."

There is discussion about how the representative for the French Minister of the Interior in charge of censorship objected to Pickpocket. An audience member speculates that this may be due to the "documentary aspect" that seems to demonstrate "pickpocketing techniques."

The piece in the film is Lully's "Suite in G Minor" which hadn't been recorded prior to the film.