What a film demands from a viewer varies a great deal. Often not much is demanded. Keeping the characters straight, remembering what has happened, and following the plot are usually enough for much commercial cinema to “work,” to make sense and entertain. We easily accept the illusion that we are watching a fictional cinematic world in which we are not present or detectable, and we allow ourselves to imagine that we are watching, unobserved, what simply happens in that world. We can occasionally notice that an actor is doing a fine job or that a director has edited a sequence in a confusing way, but if that happens too frequently something is going wrong. Things are going well when we are absorbed in the depicted world, not attending to the world as filmed; that is, when we attend to the filmed world, not to the film world, the world of the actors, the sets, the music, the directorial decisions.
Some cinema addresses its viewer in a different way, though. Something brings us up short when viewing it alters our immediately absorbed attentiveness and seems to demand a regimen of reflective attentiveness. We can still be absorptively engaged in the filmed world; a level of concern, interest in what is happening, tense expectation, still engage us — but in parallel, and, if done successfully, in a way that does not interfere with the normal reaction. We are puzzled that we are looking for several seconds at an empty staircase or an open door or an empty meadow, that the camera lingers on a scene several seconds after a character has departed it, that between one scene and a later one a temporal slice has gone missing and we are not shown events that have happened that we would expect to have seen. We are puzzled that characters speak in a somewhat flat tone, or with minimal affect; that unusually long periods of silence occur; that our attention is drawn to various sounds in scenes, sounds that would not be salient in the normal filmed fictional world; that our angle of vision into the world is highly unusual; that characters’ faces are blank when we would expect great expressiveness. And as just noted, this is what can be risky. If not done well, we end up mainly noting a film’s self-consciousness about its own artifice and self-conception. If we begin attending too much to the world-on-film, then the fictional world itself ceases to grip our attention and we suspect an artistic or “artsy” pretension that has itself as its own object. This distracts us. And it destroys the sense of genuineness and credibility that a film can, uniquely among the arts, create. It can be the directorial version of the actor’s classic absorption-destroying mistake: looking into the camera.
Yet an implicit rejection of a viewer’s conventional expectations about movies and movie watching, or our sense, by contrast, that the film is demanding something unusual from us, need not destroy the cinematic credibility of the movie world. The films of Robert Bresson (1901-1999) are frequently said to be “demanding” and “difficult,” and in that way often “bring us up short” in the way described above. But the films themselves, in all their unconventionality, are so powerful that it is hard to imagine not being moved, anxious, sad, absorbed and invested in the experience of watching what Bresson has made. (It is hard for me to imagine it, at any rate; I realize that some viewers report being bored or baffled.)
Over a forty-year career, Bresson made thirteen filmed fictional narratives that he claims are not even movies or films at all. They are, instead, “cinematographs.” He insisted on this because he was dissatisfied with the fact that movies have failed to make full use of the medium-specific capacities of motion picture photography and have instead rested content with being “filmed theater.” His contention is that such a compromise with theatrical conventions has resulted in aesthetic representations that are themselves theatrical, or must inevitably be experienced as staged, and therefore not credible in their presentation of a human world and in some sense false, untrue both to what cinema can do and untrue to what should be cinema’s goal: truth itself, truthfully illuminating the human world as lived. Bresson’s experiment is to show that the world-on-film can be both the world-as-it-can-be-uniquely-available-to-film and yet, by virtue of cinema’s unique capacities, also present fundamental dimensions of the world as such, in its truth, “how it really is” in various psychological, social, and even metaphysical dimensions.
Bresson has a great deal of confidence that a camera can disclose something true about being human that cannot be disclosed otherwise. Truth as something disclosed rather than asserted is immediately controversial: most philosophers would insist that only propositions can be bearers of truth. That restriction would seem extreme, though. It seems quite reasonable when someone says that she suddenly “saw” something about a person’s character, given an action that the latter just performed. If the philosopher says that what could be true in what she saw can only be the proposition that expresses what she saw, and that proposition could only be said to be true if we can state clearly its truth conditions and whether they have been fulfilled, then two things seem to be going wrong. First of all, it might not be possible to state determinately in propositional form just what it is she saw, even though she can be rightly convinced that the person is now disclosed as not as she had thought, that is, as someone who would do that. And the truth conditions just take us back to the experience of what she saw, and that is an interpretive issue, not an empirical one. We accept the possibility of disclosed truth as a relatively common feature of ordinary life, without accepting the strict determinacy and propositional restrictions.
Moreover, the issue to be discussed in the following — being oriented in a world, understood as a horizon of possible meaningfulness — is not an object that is given to discursive articulation. It can only be known as indirectly disclosed (for reasons to be discussed shortly), subject to the ambiguities of interpretive complexity, and so it seems quite natural to say that Bresson is trying “to show us something true cinematically.” He clearly understands his project that way and so he accepts the implications of such a claim about disclosive truth: “One recognizes the true by its efficacy, its power,” he observed in Notes on the Cinematograph. (Bresson was an articulate, widely read intellectual who gave a number of interviews over the course of his career, and in many of them he was quite forthcoming about why he made his cinematographs as he did, and, like all serious artists, considerably less forthcoming about the “meaning” of his films. In 1975 he published Notes on the Cinematograph, a collection of notes and aphorisms that he had been compiling over the years, in which he touched on all the distinctive formal features that have come to be associated with his films.)
This all means, though, that in order to avoid the directorial “mistake” noted above — the fallacy of filmed theater — Bresson had to work to develop a style that has been rightly described as “austere,” “rigorous,” “pure,” “minimalist,” “bare,” all in a way that does not distract from but even enhances the primary mode of a viewer’s receptivity: our “emotional” responsiveness. His success in this attempt would mean that we are still engaged in, deeply emotionally involved in, gripped by, the world filmed, even while the film itself invites a different sort of absorbed attention, one inspired by a different sort of ambition, the highest level of aesthetic ambition: again, truth. We need then to understand the distinctiveness of the “cinematograph” and what it could mean for such a vehicle to be the bearer of truth, to be even a mode of philosophy.
The first step in understanding Bresson’s ambition is to understand that deliberately refusing to invite conventional cinematic absorption in a movie world is motivated by more than a commitment to aesthetic concerns, to cinematic purity, to formal and medium-specific rigorousness. It has to do with a range of radical philosophical commitments. (None of this means that the films are vehicles for the expression of those views. The films are the views.) I offer this as a corrective to the widespread view that the seriousness, even the solemnity, of Bresson’s films must reflect his views about a “transcendent” dimension of human life, a religious sensibility that is honest about profound human sinfulness (even depravity) as well as its possible redemption in moments of grace, understood as a divine gift.
Bresson did make four films about characters who avow religious commitments, Angels of Sin (1943), Diary of a Country Priest (1951), The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) and Lancelot du Lac (1974). Aside from that unusual focus (films about religious life and experience are relatively rare), the influence of the initial reception of Diary of a Country Priest, especially by Catholic critics at the Cahiers du Cinéma, such as Andre Bazin, Amédeée Ayfre, Henri Angel, and Roger Leehardt (all of whom wrote for the Catholic journal Esprit), in the influential book by Paul Schrader, The Transcendental Style in Film, which appeared in 1972, and in Susan Sontag’s essay “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson” in 1964, helped to establish the view, still quite widespread, that Bresson was not only a religious, but a Catholic, and even a Jansenist, filmmaker, and that the films are vehicles for the expression of his religious commitments. It should be obvious, however, that making films about characters with religious commitments is not the same as being a “religious filmmaker,” and I want to present an alternate interpretation of Bresson’s enterprise by attending to his most famous and most beautiful film, Au hasard Balthazar, from 1966. (The title translates as “Balthazar at random” or “Balthazar by chance”; Balthazar in a world of randomness and chance.)
This is not to say that many elements of his films cannot be interpreted in a Jansenist way, especially given Bresson’s references (not all of which are positive) to Pascal — in accord with the Augustinian idea that with man’s fall our natures became irremediably corrupt and predestined, that there is no way by our own efforts or by what the Jesuits called “mental discipline” to avoid sin, and that only divine grace makes it possible to resist sin. The Jansenists take their bearings from such passages as I John 2:16: “For all that is in the world is the concupiscence of the flesh and the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life, which is not of the Father but of this world.” In the face of such inevitable depravity, the curé’s final proclamation seems the only response: “All is grace.” And Bresson is clearly interested in the situation of a religious sensibility in a world where there is next to no social resonance for the expression of such commitments, especially characters such as the curé.
Yet it is important to note that all of the supposedly Jansenist themes in Bresson’s films need have no religious meaning. We have little control over own fate, although not no control (as we see in A Man Escaped); chance events, shifts in what had seemed important but suddenly can seem insignificant, can drastically alter a life; what Kant called the “serpent of self-love” makes virtuous conduct almost impossible; owing to self-deceit, self-knowledge and therefore intentional self-transformation are rare. Those are not religious ideas. The notion that “all things conceal a mystery” can mean no more than that we cannot discursively account for, or make rationally intelligible, the source of significance, the hierarchies of matterings, in the historical world into which we find ourselves simply thrown.
Bresson’s ideal of cinematic absorption, and with that his ideal of cinematic truth, is based on philosophical views about the nature of worldly absorption. The films call attention to our ways of being responsive to sources of meaningfulness in a life in a particular historical world. (For the most part, with the exception of Les Dames du Bois de Bologne, The Trial of Joan of Arc, and Lancelot du Lac, it is our world, the contemporary world, rural and urban life typified by the French village and the city of Paris.) By meaningfulness, I mean the ways in which individuals purposively direct their lives on the basis of what has come to matter to them, and this on the assumption that something mattering, experienced as significant, is distinct from, and may even conflict with, conscious beliefs about what ought to matter, and distinct also from consciously desiring ends. Mattering in this sense is fundamental, original, primary; we “find ourselves” treating something as significant. Our engagement with anything in the world already assumes the emergence of what is salient in significance and what is negligible, and this experience does not depend on any views we might hold about what is or should be of significance. (Something can matter to us that we think ought not to matter, or we can believe something ought to matter to us but know that it actually doesn’t matter, even if we take action to secure it.)
Framing the issue this way also allows us to see the possibility of the failure of meaningfulness or mattering. What had seemed so significant for so long can come to seem, in ways we do not seem to control, insignificant. Moreover, the sources of meaningfulness in a cinematic world, both for the characters in the filmed world and for the film world, are inseparable from the question of the possibility of sources of meaningfulness in a historical world in general. We tend to think of meaningfulness as radically individual, that what might matter to one farmer in a small village need not matter to another, nor to a young student in Paris. But such individual inflections of meaning are inflections of a common historical world, the shared historical world of the second half of the twentieth century. And this notion of a world, as used by Heidegger, or of a form of life, as used by Wittgenstein, this horizon of possible meaningfulness, is not itself available as any sort of object in the world. It is available only in worldly comportments, doings, and projects, where “available” is clearly in the “can be shown but not said” category. (What matters can be said, but the source of possible mattering is always already presupposed.) Bresson believes that it is uniquely, if also indirectly and elliptically, available to the camera. The same inseparability of individual matterings and world-historical possibilities is true when trying to understand the failure of meaningfulness, which is the main theme of Bresson’s later films, beginning with Au hasard Balthazar.
Let me first summarize the unique cinematic properties of a Bresson cinematograph, and its philosophical dimensions. By far his most well-known directorial decision, beginning with his casting of Claude Laydu in Diary of a Country Priest, was to avoid professional actors and to cast unknowns as his major characters, nonprofessionals whom he would never use again in any other roles. (Laydu came to Paris to study acting in 1948, but he was only twenty when he was introduced to Bresson by the filmmaker Jacques Becker and had almost no experience and no film work. He agreed to Bresson’s request to live for some weeks in a monastery, but not to discontinue his acting career. Several other unknowns in later films also had careers as actors, although Bresson preferred it when they did not.) His summary account of this was that these unknowns were to be understood not as actors but as “models,” in the sense that one would speak of a painter using models for his work. Bresson explains his decision by expressing skepticism that film actors can succeed in doing what they are asked to do. “The actor: ‘It’s not me you are seeing and hearing, but the other man.’ But being unable to be wholly the other, he is not that other.” (I will be quoting from Notes on the Cinematograph.) This is because “a cinema film reproduces the reality of the actor, at the same time as that of the man he is being.” Bresson clearly believes it is impossible to submerge the former into the latter; no matter how talented the actor, we always see the pretense.
By contrast, what would it mean to instruct a model not to “act”? Bresson’s answers to this question more and more disclose an intertwining of aesthetic and philosophical commitments, just as we would expect. A view about what is necessary in order to avoid falseness in the depiction of what human-mindedness and attempts at communication involve, or “are really like,” so as to avoid mere seeming and to depict it being as it is, must involve some determinate commitment to how it really is, what it in the simplest sense looks like. And his report of his instructions to his models makes clear that he has strong views about mindedness itself: “Radically suppress intentions in your models.” This will result in what can seem an apparent automatism in line delivery and expression. “Nine-tenths of our movements obey habits and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought.”
He wants to accomplish this — which he does by “directing” his models about how not to act and by shooting scenes dozens and dozens of times to insure a merely habitual line reading — because of some quite general views that will require attention to the films to understand fully. “Models mechanized externally, internally free. On their faces, nothing willful. ‘The constant, the eternal, beneath the accidental.’” Bresson obviously does not believe that in ordinary life people communicate with each other in what can sometimes seem an affectless, monotonic, robotic way, but he clearly does believe that on camera, the suppression of deliberate or visibly intentional expressiveness, and the use of minimalist voice inflection will allow the camera to record something that the human eye misses in rapid normal interchanges and that is psychologically revealing: aspects of the soul will, in essence, “leak out.” This in itself is a modernist strategy with which Bresson, a former painter, would have been quite familiar. Manet’s Olympia or Cézanne’s Bathers are both paintings that clearly do not aim at representational verisimilitude, but do try to picture something about beings in a world otherwise missed in ordinary perception. (“On the watch for the most imperceptible, the most inward movements.” “Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”)
Bresson made these decisions about models and line delivery because he was clearly skeptical that a wide range of meaningful comportment with objects in the world and with others is conceptually self-conscious or at all cognitive, and suspicious as well that actions we perform are rightly understood by references to the intentions that we would self-consciously avow. That is, his suspicion of movie acting reflects a suspicion that why we do what we do is best understood by what intentions we would consciously express when asked why we are so acting, whether because of ignorance, habit, or self-deceit. This may be true in most cases, of course, but the situation is usually much more complicated in critical or decisive situations. (Au hasard, Balthazar opens with a reminder of this when the father flatly refuses to buy a donkey for his children and then, in a quick cut to the very next scene, they are taking Balthazar the donkey home.)
“Models who have become automatic … their relations with objects and persons around them will be right, because they will not be thought.” I suggest that he does not merely mean “will seem right on camera because not acted out.” The rightness to which he refers is owed to the avoidance of a superficial view of the role of self-conscious thought in our ordinary familiarity with objects and persons in the world and in our actions. In turn, this implies something much broader: that at the original or primordial level of our experience, simply how things show up as salient in our world, the availability of anything to experience, is first of all a matter of what he calls “impressions and sensations.” I think that what he is getting at will require a more perspicacious language than impressions and sensations, which can suggest mere affects causally produced (which is not at all what he means; he is not pleading for empiricism or behaviorism). He is committing himself to something quite controversial: that there is a mode of nondiscursive intelligibility by virtue of which the world and indeed our own being in such a world are originally familiar and meaningful. (Filmed thought is felt thought, in other words, but still very much thought.)
This is a level of meaningfulness prior to perceptual and conceptual discriminability. Likewise, the camera must try to capture a relation between an agent and her deeds that is not limited to the conscious intentions that the agent would avow. For example, Bresson wants to deny that the effect of his directorial instructions produces inexpressiveness: “Involuntarily expressive models (not willfully inexpressive ones).” And “no psychology of the kind which discovers only what it can explain.” “When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best — that is inspiration.” The terms “impressions and sensations” are too limited to capture what the cinematographs achieve, but what he is after is clear enough when he gives this advice about shooting a scene — “Stick exclusively to sensations. No intervention of intelligence which is foreign to these impressions and sensations” — all again, because the intention in shooting this way is to capture how it is, not how it seems.
This amounts to a position on the fundamental basic availability of a meaningful world of objects and others: that it is non-discursively and pre-cognitively available, that elements of a world become originally salient to us in their meaningfulness or mattering, and that we are onto any such meaning by being attuned to it in a way that parallels our unreflective absorption in a filmed world. Ultimately this entails something even more controversial philosophically: that a filmed fictional narrative can disclose something true about the human world, without such a truth being statable in a proposition.
Finally, while Bresson’s cinematographs have continuous plots, he does not believe that narrative continuity is the basic way that the films have the disclosive meaningfulness that they possess.
Cinematographic film, where expression is obtained by relations of images and of sounds, and not by a mimicry done with gestures and intonations of voice (whether actors’ or non-actors’). One that does not analyze or explain. That recomposes.
As its name implies, Bresson means to compare his method of composition to writing with images, where images are understood not as represented contents so much as acquiring meaning in sequences. (As in the philosophical view known as linguistic holism, where the basic unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence.) “Cinematography: A new way of writing, therefore of feeling.”
All this produced in Bresson’s work what commentators rightly call a “cinema of montage and rhythm,” one that is “primarily poetry and music, the creation of new relationships between things, beings, sounds and images, as in the succession of shots.” This notion of a “pure” or completely formal montage as a vehicle of meaning can be taken too far. Bresson’s films are not like plotless silent films without intertitles; they are fictional narrative films, with plots, dialogue, and beginnings, middles, and ends. The images, the individual shots, have content, and the link between the shots — that is, the comprehensibility of the sequences — depend heavily on a continuity of sense among these contents, as well as what Bresson is emphasizing by appealing to cinematography: an atmospheric emotional coloring built from montage, the sequence itself. (This goes considerably beyond Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiments with montage and its impact upon the interpretation of imagery, since Bresson is assuming that his sequences of images can build to create a non-cognitive attunement to matters of significance and meaningfulness not otherwise available. And it is a reminder that while Sontag is right that form is meaning in Bresson, it goes too far to say that meaning is exclusively form, as in abstraction in painting.)
All of these formal matters bear on the treatment of the existential themes in the films: loneliness, deracination, solitude, the near impossibility of genuine communication, the sources of commitment or the failures of such commitment, and the possibility of radical conversion in a life, but the way they bear on these themes requires a detailed look at the films. And my brief example is the film which many consider his masterpiece, Au hasard, Bathazar. Bresson had already been making films for thirty years, and was in his sixties when he made this one.
Au hasard, Balthazar is, in narrative terms, a dual plot film, and as in all dual plot narratives, the two are parallel and linked, each meant to shed light on the meaning of the other. One narrative depicts the fate and suffering of the donkey, Balthazar. Among other associations, Balthazar is traditionally taken to be the name of one of the three magi who visited the newborn Jesus. That status, as a witness, perhaps even as a figure for the director himself, is an important point by ironic contrast. What Balthazar witnesses in this world is not the birth of a god but unremitting depravity and evil. Besides that, another possible source is the story of Lucius in Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and the one Bresson cites, the story told by Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, about how a donkey’s braying relieved his depression.
The other story in the film depicts the fate and the sufferings of a village girl, Marie, whom we see as a young girl and as an adolescent. (One signal of the link between the two narratives occurs several times in the film when Marie’s father is looking for her and repeatedly calls out her name in a braying way — “Marie! Marie!” — that closely echoes the sound we hear from Balthazar several times.) Balthazar is by turns a pet, a beast of burden and farm animal, again a pet of service to Marie’s family, a baker’s donkey used for deliveries, owned by a drunkard, Arnold, to give rides on tourist tours, a circus animal, Arnold’s again, cruelly mistreated by a grain merchant, again Marie’s domestic animal, and finally stolen by the most evil character in the film, Gérard, and used to smuggle merchandise across the border with Spain. Marie’s fate is likewise miserable. Her childhood romance with the son of the first owners of Balthazar, Jacques, is ruined by her father’s bitter and catastrophic dispute with Jacques’ family. She enters into a relationship, often confused and conflicted, with the hoodlum and the sadist Gérard. Even more confused and conflicted, and desperate to obtain the money she would need to escape the village, she offers herself one night to the grain merchant before (apparently) changing her mind. An attempted renewal of her bond with Jacques first fails, then appears to succeed as she resolves to face down and break with Gérard and his gang. This does not end well. The gang strips and abuses and probably rapes Marie, and she disappears from the film, likely dying by her own hand. (Throughout the story of Marie, the mindedness of characters is apparently as opaque to them as it is to us; it is nearly impossible to discover intentions, motivations, or any self-reflective moments at all. Her inconstancy and inconsistency are major features in the film.)
Interwoven throughout the main two narratives are several subplots, and these and the two main plots intersect each other so frequently and unexpectedly that it is impossible to follow a continuous narrative line. (Bresson’s films are not content-less, but with all the ellipses, the reliance on montage, and the intersecting subplots, they are seriously “de-narrativized.”) Much of the editing appears au hasard, like chance events, like the drastic way in which the death of the child at the beginning, the sudden appearance of Arnold when Balthazar almost dies, and Arnold’s inheritance, impact the lives involved. The original owners of Balthazar and of the vacation home and farm that Marie’s father eventually farms for them begin the film in an eerie vignette — the illness and perhaps the death of the youngest child. This sad event is the reason the vacationing family never returns. The scene is a fine illustration of how the minimalization of expressivity can heighten rather than reduce the emotional impact of the images. The absence of any visible reaction to the child’s fate concentrates all the emotional power of the scene in the briefest indication of the terrible, limp lifelessness of the child, and then the sudden shock when we, as well as the characters, are suddenly propelled out of this childhood world by the crack of a whip. The scene is also typical of Bresson’s frequent use of ellipses. We leap ahead more than a dozen years to when Marie is sixteen.
Another subplot involves Marie’s father’s ruinous relation with Jacques’ family. He changes careers from being a schoolteacher to being a farmer and actually becomes quite successful, so successful that rumors start that he is cheating the owner, who then demands that the father produce the records of the farm’s business. “Rumors” only begin to characterize Bresson’s treatment of village life as a world of resentment, jealousy, paranoia, conspiracies, and intense mutual surveillance. (The situation is even more extreme in his next and even darker film, Mouchette.) The father claims that he is insulted by this lack of trust, refuses to compromise, and ends up ruining his family’s life. The film strongly hints that the father has actually cheated the owner. He tells his wife that he cannot produce his receipts because he has not kept them, but we are shown that he has all of them. What seemed like pride turns out to be greed, and as Marie correctly notes, what seems like his righteous indignation is really self-pity.
There is also a strange and one-sided attraction between a middle-aged baker’s wife and the nefarious Gérard. The attraction is hardly maternal and is not reciprocated. There is a mysterious murder investigation that we learn little about (we do not discover who was killed, when, where, or how), but both Arnold and Gérard’s gang appear to be suspects. Bizarre conversations about “action painting” and agent responsibility occur during one of Arnold’s guided tours of the Pyrenees. Balthazar briefly escapes and is captured by a circus, where he becomes part of a phony “animal genius act,” and is recaptured by Arnold. Arnold suddenly inherits a fortune, promptly gets drunk, falls off Balthazar, and dies.
Throughout the two main narratives and these subplots, the film shows us a village in a modernizing transition, from one world to another, and the meaning of the transition is focused on consumer goods and technology, all as figures of later, or post-war, modernity: from donkey carts to automobiles, from ploughs to tractors, the intrusion of modern regulatory bureaucracy into rural farm life, a youth culture now fixated on transistor radios and motorbikes, parties fueled by alcohol and sex, money, and a general environment aptly summarized in perhaps the most basic bourgeois maxim of all by the grain merchant: “I love money and I hate death.” This is an explicit theme occasionally in the film. When we first meet Gérard, on his motorbike with his gang, he sardonically praises Marie’s father for his donkey: “very modern.” Throughout the film, and especially at the end, the only music we hear — non-diagetic music, that is, music heard by the viewers but not by the characters — is the andante movement from Schubert’s late piano sonata in A major D.959, a moving berceuse or lullaby-like section that seems associated with regret at both Balthazar’s and Marie’s loss of innocence and first exposure to a world aptly epitomized by that merchant’s motto.
Another framing device for the film is its beginning and its end, and this again emphasizes the notion of a world. At the beginning the baby donkey Balthazar is in his world, the animal world, being nursed by his mother, surrounded by sheep whom we barely see, their presence signaled by their tinkling bells. The film begins with him being torn from that world for the amusement of the children, who find him cute and want him as a pet. (The intrusion of one world into another is signaled by that human arm “intruding” into the animal world.) The film ends with Balthazar, after all his suffering in the human world, returning to the comfort of an animal world, dying amid a large flock of sheep and clearly comforted by them. Around the middle of the film, he returns to an animal world in a different way, when he first arrives in the circus and there is a justly famous depiction of some sort of mutual intelligibility among the animals, as if acknowledging to each other that this intersection of worlds is not where they belong, in cages and performing tricks. It is almost as if the circus animals are warning Balthazar to get out while he can.
It is this contrast between worlds that allows features of those worlds that would not otherwise be available to become indirectly accessible. The notion of world in such a claim is on the one hand very familiar — if we refer to the world of Citizen Kane, or the world of indigenous peoples, or the world of Balthazar, we know we do not mean merely the totality of encounterable objects — but on the other hand is quite philosophically complicated. World, in this sense, is not all that is the case (contra Wittgenstein’s famous dictum). It is a horizon of possible meaningfulness, a historical context that delimits what could matter to human beings at a time, and what could not, which enterprises are possible and which simply would not make sense. As noted, this idea of an always already deeply presupposed horizon of possible contextual significance is not something that could ever be an object in a world, because such a world is a condition for anything showing up meaningfully in experience at all.
A socio-historical account of facts about such a world is possible, but the possible significance or hierarchies of salience in common experience are not facts, and not even consciously held values. The same is true of “Quixote-like” projects; projects that just could not make sense. Everything we encounter in a historical world makes a kind of immediate familiar sense, pre-reflectively. I say immediate and pre-reflective, because this familiarity is not a matter of applying norms, rules, or conventions. The world of possible meaningfulness, by contrast, is itself not so encounterable. This original mode of meaningfulness is not originally a matter of conceptual classification or perceptual discrimination, but a far more direct form of familiarity. We do not first encounter perceptually discriminated objects and then bestow significance. The idea of such a two-step procedure is not phenomenologically credible (any more than a string of sounds is first heard as such and then interpreted as language). Entities and others in our experience show up, are salient, because of their degrees of significance in the practical tasks that a human being engages in, courses of action that are possible and could make sense at a particular time. (Or not.)
For an example, consider an animal world, an issue quite important to Bresson’s film. An animal species is, like us, not just visually attentive to everything perceptually present. What emerges as salient — prey, predator, shelter, mate — and what does not, what means nothing to them — highways, power lines, planets — so emerges because of its species form. The suggestion is that how elements of our experience emerge as salient is as well a function of their mattering, but without at all being limited to our biological species form. This all means, as incomplete as such an account is, that when we ask about the human world that the characters inhabit in Au hasard, Bathazar, we ask not about what beliefs they have about what matters — given Bresson’s obvious doubts about self-deceit and self-opacity, this would be pointless — but about what the camera can show, which emerges as the context of significance that seems to inform and guide the decisions and actions and experiences of the characters, even, paradoxically, if that context is failed meaningfulness, a depiction of absence. How being in such a world bears on possible courses of action is a major issue in all his films. This is what Bresson is trying to show us cinematographically.
Let us return to the issue of religion, and to the claim that Bresson is a religious filmmaker, even a Jansenist Catholic, all without any biographical evidence and in the face of his dismissal of the idea. Balthazar, for instance, is sometimes understood to be a kind of Christ figure, silently taking on and witnessing the burden of human depravity, until bearing that burden leads to his (perhaps) sacrificial death. But what these critics insist on as “transcendence” misdescribes the issue of significance discussed here. In Bresson’s film, objects are certainly not encountered as mere things or objects of perception, but this distinction does not establish a religious difference. The objects in his film are salient in the way they matter (or do not matter) within a world of possible mattering and in terms of what has come to matter to the persons who encounter them. They bear meaning, and often, as in the lingering shots of stairways and doors, just an intimation of meaning. Sometimes the meaning is aesthetic, as in the beauty of several scenes in his later film L’Argent. These are all matters of immanence, not transcendence.
It can look like several Jansenist commitments are evident in the films, if that is what one is looking for: the utter and unreformable sinfulness of human beings, predestination, salvation as a gratuitous and arbitrary gift of grace, never earned. On the one hand, while there is certainly unremitting depravity in many of Bresson’s films, he is more sensitive to the attractions of selfishness and resentment in the particular and concrete historical worlds that he is trying to depict. And there is certainly no universal sinfulness and depravity, no original sin, in Bresson’s films. Marie is well-meaning, but also confused; her mother is saintly; Jacques is weak and naïve, not sinful; and Arnold is more of a comic character than a villain. Similarly, the fatalism in the film need not be a religious doctrine either, but the consequence of there being very little in the way of concrete alternate possibilities in the depicted world, and “grace,” which is only stated as such in Diary of a Country Priest, could just as easily be an indication of the unexpected emergence of ways of mattering that could “by chance” (au hasard) drastically change or even redeem a boring or wasted life.
In Balthazar, the direct allusions to religion seem heavily qualified: quoted, rather than appealed to. The children’s baptism of Balthazar in the beginning is likely ironic, a faint suggestion that baptism itself is childish and useless, not to mention that animals are not born in original sin and do not need to be baptized. The early emphasis on the innocence and the happiness of the children — they are as innocent as Balthazar — does not call out for the washing away of any sin. The only “fall” we see is the fall into the profane modern adult world. The single scene in a church serves only to emphasize the superficiality and untrustworthiness of religious practices, since the sadist Gérard is capable of singing like an angel. When Marie’s father is dying, the priest who comes to comfort him offers a few lame platitudes which do nothing to comfort the father or be of any use at all to his wife. And when Balthazar appears all kitted-out in religious decorations, likely for the funeral of Marie’s father, the impression is clownish, not devout.
All this could still be said to be consistent with the paradoxical “presence of the absence of religiosity,” but that absence does not seem to have any real grip in the town, and one would still need to discuss how that failure in particular might bear on the possibilities or lack of them in the world we see. It appears in the film, in so far as it appears at all, the way tradition, family, work, or community appear: as another failed source. While it is possible to see Balthazar as Christ-like in being “too good for this world” and therefore doomed to die, he ends up dying burdened not with the sins of the world but with contraband consumer goods; he resists his role whenever he can, and he dies by accident and in a manner which makes clear that there will be no resurrection.
I have suggested that Bresson’s accomplishment is to have discovered a cinematic form that can disclose the meaning, or the failure of meaning, in a person’s life by cinematically shifting our attention away from explicit psychological attitudes, away from what characters think about themselves and others (if they ever do — this is rare in this film), and instead by drawing attention to the common historical world that these characters inhabit and the way their conduct is subject to the possibilities allowed by such a world. This is to be understood as a horizon of possible significance, a source of mattering that is not a matter of beliefs or commitments, but a non-discursive orientation from possibilities that might make sense or not. This means that the cinematic depiction of this collective attunement is, at least as Bresson sees it, also largely non-discursive, what Bresson calls “emotional,” without the “intervention of intelligence.”
This is not to say that the characters do not evince attitudes, beliefs, desires, and so forth, but that they rarely seem to be reflective subjects of such attitudes. They are, rather, subject to them. Of course, one cannot have a belief or desire without knowing that one does, but such an awareness is normally understood to open up the possibility of asking oneself such things as whether one actually believes what one takes oneself to believe, or why one wants something, or what actually matters to one. Yet the question of why Gérard acts as he does, why Marie’s father will not compromise, what the baker’s wife wants from Gérard, why Arnold saves Balthazar, why Marie changes her mind about Jacques — this is not a question that is available to the characters.
The cinematic technique expresses a philosophical commitment: a depiction of ordinary life which is characterized by a kind of self-forgetfulness, self-opacity, hierarchies of mattering that are not driven by reflective attitudes about what ought to matter, or even what actually does matters to one, but which rather seem to be inheritances of a common world that narrowly limits what could matter, even if that possibility is foreclosed, failed. Instead of appealing to expressivity, whether in language or even in intonation, facial expressions, and so forth, Bresson portrays what would normally be considered the attitudes and the desires of characters in an “external” way, as if those supposed “inner” states are actual only externally, in the public world that we see. “Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from the interior to the exterior.) The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.” Most often this is available only in what they do, although any access, for them and for the viewer, to why they do what they do, to their intentions, seems often, especially in critical, life-altering situations, unavailable.
One major disclosure of a character’s mindedness is Balthazar himself, who functions not just as a witness but also as a kind of screen on which what is at issue for the characters is projected. In some cases — “scapegoat” cases, we might say — Balthazar is treated as if he were the cause of some character’s mistake, failure, or misdeed. The most obvious is a rare instance of humor in the film, when a farmer driving a load of hay pulled by Balthazar drives recklessly, overturns the wagon, and then not only seeks out Balthazar to punish him as if he were at fault, but collects a group of his comrades to hunt down Balthazar, like the village mob out for Frankenstein’s monster. Arnold tries to beat Balthazar with a chair in what appears to be his own rage at himself for vowing not to drink and then failing in his resolve. Balthazar is sold by Marie’s father out of the same false pride (he thinks owning a donkey makes him look ridiculous) that leads him to destroy his family’s lives, without any sense that he knows what he is doing and why. The sight of Balthazar in the snow while Marie and Gérard carry on their assignations, and their indifference to him, their not caring about him, is a measure of the obsessive and self-destructive character of their involvement that is visible to us but not to Marie. The grain merchant’s indifference to any moral restraint — one could even say the state of his soul — is “visible” in the sight of Balthazar worked nearly to death, starved and beaten, and then in what appears to be an unmotivated reversal in his narcissism, manifested in his returning Balthazar to Marie’s family. Gérard’s frustration at his first failed seduction of Marie is projected onto Balthazar as he beats him gratuitously (as Marie, opaque and confused as ever, looks on.)
The early garden scene is a different sort of projection, as Balthazar serves as a transitional object for Marie’s emerging sexuality. What is striking in the scene is that neither of them seems consciously minded in some determinate way (much like Balthazar, obviously). It is very unlikely that Marie has any knowledge of what she is doing, and the lovers, Marie and Gérard, move toward each other deliberately but not quite intentionally, and then separate the same way. In the last scene, it is as if Gérard is angry and frustrated in what seems a purely reactive rather than determinately motivated way. Balthazar is not conceivably his rival, despite his vulgar fantasies at the beginning of the scene.
Marie adorns Balthazar as if he is a beloved, projecting herself in a fantasy of romance at once childish and provocative (it goes so far as a kiss), and she is clearly aware of the presence of someone else in the garden. We suspect, given her lingering there, that she knows it is Gérard. (As is often the case in Bresson, most famously in Pickpocket, hands bear a visual meaning that is at once powerful and also ambiguous.) In the conventional philosophical dichotomy between what I do and what happens to me, where the former is marked out by reflective intentions and the latter by such notions as drives, instincts, evolutionary imperatives, and being causally acted on rather than acting, the scene would probably be characterized by some version of the latter. But the dichotomy does not make room for what we see: someone who does not know why they are doing what they are doing but who is not impelled or driven to do it. Marie is acting deliberately but not knowingly, another indication of Bresson’s distrust of reflective consciousness in human affairs.
There is also a prominent emphasis on the obscurity of human motivation in the two most important scenes in the movie: the final “conquest” of Marie by Gérard, with her deeply ambiguous “submission,” and her encounter with the grain merchant, where Bresson’s ellipses make it impossible to know even what actually happened that night. In the former, Marie’s simultaneous attraction and repulsion are conveyed with almost no dialogue, except at the very beginning. Balthazar is again the transitional object — all that Marie has ever loved, all that she knows of love — as Gérard has set him up by the road, hoping to induce Marie to stop as she drives, and she does. And then we have the completion, as it were, of the first scene of “hands” from the garden episode, as she now endures Gérard’s touch, allowing the touch even as she weeps at the absence of affection or tenderness. And then finally, in a combination of childish play and an escape game, Marie acts out her confusion, finally ending in an ambiguous posture of what is either willing submission or resigned surrender, or neither, or both. All of which finally ends with Gérard’s contrasting certainty about his sadistic victory.
The village life that we see depicted ranges from the transactional and contractual to relations based on ego, vanity, and power, and these appear to be the only sources of meaningful life available in this world, something attested to, and witnessed by, Balthazar in the cruel treatment of him. (Even Marie allows him nearly to freeze to death when keeping her assignations with Gérard.) This is the source of the loneliness and the isolation that seems to envelop Marie and leads her to her most desperate but still conflicted act — her visit to the grain merchant, and an offer to sleep with him for enough money to leave the town — although she seems to withdraw the offer immediately, and then, perhaps, accept it on other terms. Bresson refuses to allow us any confirmation of whether Marie has resolved anything determinate.
The film leaves us with two indelible images that call to mind again the contrast between “worlds” to which the presence of Balthazar throughout the film awakens us. The first image is a silent judgment on the naked reality of modern sources of significance. The second invokes the possibility of a kind of ironic transcendence, not beyond this world into another redemptive one, but an “animal” peace and comfort that looks utopian when compared to what we have.
The distance between these two images might suggest that the right judgment to make about Marie’s world, with its meager resources of shared significance, is despair. But we know, and we know from the form of the film, that what happened both to Marie and to Balthazar is horrific. And as Shakespeare’s Edgar reminds us, “The worst is not/ So long as we can say, ‘This is the worst.’”
