Category Archives: Pascalian cinema

FIRST REFORMED, SCHRADER REINVENTED

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by in Bible on film, Bresson, cinema of hyperbole, Creation, crucifixion films, Doubt, God, metaphysical film, Pascalian cinema, predestination, redemption, spiritual cinema

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Paul Schrader was born in 1946, so he is 72 years old and maybe feeling the chariot of death pressing on behind. While there is time he needs to make not just another film, but to revisit his youth in all its intensity: the rigour of his Calvinist upbringing, the life-changing discovery of moving images, the heady atmosphere of radicalism engendered by US involvement in the Vietnam War.

So, obviously, he must go back to Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, art-house deities of his youth. Schrader belongs to that cine-literate Hollywood generation that emerged in the 1970s – Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas and others – only his cine-literacy was as much in the European arthouse film as in commercial or pulp film-making. As a measure of his precocious obsession, he published a book on Dreyer, Bresson and Ozu in 1972 at the age of 26, and when he got down to script-writing and later directing, their intensity informed his narratives. His main protagonists are ulcerous, and it seems in character that Schrader started his script for Taxi Driver while hospitalised for ulcer treatment in 1972. Travis Bickle wrestles on behalf of us all.

First Reformed draws on two particular films, Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne/ Diary of a Country Priest and Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna/ Winter Light, and the Reverend Toller is in a lineage that begins with the young curé of the Journal, and moves to Pastor Ericsson in Winter Light. (Bergman claimed to have been tremendously fond of Bernanos’ original novel, and had seen Bresson’s film of it seven or eight times before he made Winter Light.) Watching First Reformed, I felt blissfully happy to see that this noble line had not been extinguished.

First Reformed

So – First Reformed consciously, deliberately and imperiously starts from Bresson and Bergman, and in the Facebook age, Schrader asserts a deeper historical continuity about human corruption and the compelling need for salvation. The film is Pascalian just when I thought we had forgotten how to be so. Big question: do you believe in the environmental apocalypse to come? Big answer: it is better to say yes, since if you’re right you will do something about it. Anyway, can you dare bet it won’t happen in view of what we are doing to the planet? This is a version of Pascal’s Wager, and, as Bresson said in 1965, “Pascal is for everyone.” We are predestined for destruction, and although Toller argues that humans cannot predict the future, you have a sense that having wrestled like Jacob with the angel in the person of the young environmental activist Michael, he cannot get rid of the idea that the future is determined for us, and it is grim. This engenders not doubt about the existence of God (as with Pastor Eriksson), but doubt that he can ever forgive us.

For a Hollywood film, it is extremely spare. Admittedly Ethan Hawke plays Toller, well known to audiences from a lot of films, especially those of Richard Linklater, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he manages to offload this baggage. At any rate to me the rest of the cast are unknowns, and certainly unfamiliar. Although Schrader is closer to the Bergman mantra, “Actors are trained to express complexities” than to Bresson’s idea of the actor as ‘model’ who is “involuntarily expressive”, yet with his small cast of characters Schrader manages to echo in an authentic manner the whole society Bresson conjures up in Journal.

I watched the film wondering whether it would end with Bernanos’/Bresson’s “All is Grace” but Schrader steers it convincingly in his own non-slavish direction. And the boldest, super-contrarian move he makes is to film his story in the 4:3 format of classical cinema, which in an age of hyperbolical wide-screen film-making especially catches us out, reminding us that this format has not been bettered for allowing the intense, microscope-like gaze of the camera.

The big theme of the film is apocalypse. The narrative not just reinvents the curé’s psychosomatic cancer in Journal, but Michael’s pessimism about the environment rhymes with Persson’s fear of nuclear destruction in Winter Light. It rhymes too with the central idea of Bresson’s most pessimistic film, Le Diable probablement / The Devil Probably, which in the face of man-made environmental catastrophe rejects the church, Marxism, outright libertarianism – and other nostrums – in favour of suicide. Is this too melodramatic? But then so many powerful dramas and films hinge on a melodramatic premise, and in First Reformed the idea makes for compelling viewing. It poses too a central challenge for theists. A director as Bible-literate as Schrader manages deftly to bring in the counter-arguments to outright pessimism: the apostle Paul’s “The whole of creation is groaning for release from bondage” (Romans 8.22) and God’s words in Job chapter 38.4: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” But are they a sufficient counterweight?

How all this comes to a climax should be discussed as well, but I shall refrain for fear of revealing the ending. Suffice it to say that Schrader unexpectedly moves into Tarkovskian territory with the levitation from Offret / The Sacrifice, but then goes beyond it, and miles too beyond the Bressonian universe, with a magical sequence of digital film-making. You almost wish he had done the whole film in 3-D.

Bresson, Bergman and Tarkovsky are central figures in my New Filmgoers Guide to God, published by Matador in 2014, available on Amazon.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

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REFLECTION ON BRESSON: Bresson and Melville

17 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by in Bresson, cinema and culture, gangster films, Pascalian cinema

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‘Two halves of the same sphere.’ This idea comes from the comparison of Bresson and Melville in my book, ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’. I wrote there about their pessimistic universes, about Melville’s imprisoning of the American gangster in the French existentialist universe, about how in his prison cycle (A Man Escaped, Pickpocket, Trial of Joan of Arc) Bresson interpreted prison as damnation from which escape was only through grace. This counterpointing of ideas was reinforced by a similarity of style: Melvillian is Bressonian, Bressonian is Melvillian. Bresson spoke of actors as models: the word can be appropriated, with a different meaning, to describe Melville’s mythological criminals, without psychology or apparent interiority. But there is a difference as well: Melville’s characters are ‘soul-less’, without a soul, whereas Bresson in his 1950s films was concerned with finding the soul of his protagonists and releasing it on screen. Compare too this counterpoint: Bresson used his models only in one film, whereas Melville liked to reuse the same star in different films, even if they always played the same character. This was notably true of Alain Delon, star of Le Samurai, Le Cercle Rouge and Un Flic.

Cercle Rouge - Corey

Corey in Cercle Rouge

One small but definite strand to Le Cercle Rouge is the philosophical musing of the Inspector General policing the police, in this case Mattei (the Bourvil character) up against the criminals, Cory, Vogel and Jansen. The IG tells Mattei about the corruptability of man: “all men are culpable – all men, Mattei.” The idea recurs to Mattei at the end of the film, not just as a final adornment to the story, but as if to appoint a moral.

Corruptability is an Augustinian/Calvinist idea: we are born into sin, and the only way out is through grace. However the IG does not talk about grace – and from the evidence of his films there is no indication that Melville believed in it. (This marginalizing of grace seems to me to be the snare into which Jansenism/Protestantism risks falling – by maturity we are steeped in sin, grace is a long way off, and it’s a suffocating outlook. Is Melville asserting its absence in Le Cercle Rouge specifically to thumb his nose at Bresson? It is intriguing to think so.)

So, if all is irredeemably corrupt, what might virtue look like in the Melvillian universe? It is to be found in honour, which means you practice total professionalism and total savoir-faire as a criminal, and you practice loyalty so that you never renege on a fellow criminal. The criminal code is a code of loyalty.

Pickpocket 1

 

Michel in Pickpocket

Compare Bresson’s view of criminality: one archetype for him is Michel in Pickpocket, who snaps out of criminality by the advent of grace in the form of Jeanne. There is no role for honour in making him do his duty, but is there a role for guilt? It would be a neat contrast between the two directors – to say Melville’s world is a shame culture (like Homeric Greece, like Mafia culture), and Bresson’s is a guilt culture (as in a Catholic culture) — yet such a contrast is not an obvious one since Bresson’s characters never embody the idea that they are suffering from or are strongly conscious of guilt (as they do, say, in Graham Greene’s novels). However, in the 1950s, Bresson was Augustinian in outlook, and human corruptability was a given, requiring no spelling out.

  • A Man Escaped – Fontaine escapes from damnation by his own hands aiding the operation of grace.
  • Pickpocket – Michel escapes from damnation by the love of Jeanne, the vehicle of grace.
  • The Trial of Joan of Arc – Jeanne is released from earthly trial: she suffers human justice but is saved by her faith in divine justice.

With Au Hasard Balthazar, Bresson takes this idea of corruptability to a deeper level, counterpointing the Christ-like sufferings of the donkey with the story of Mary, who falls from grace, or more precisely, who is an angel made to fall by the corruption of the society around her.

‘Two halves of the same sphere.’ Bresson’s portrait of a rural priest in Diary of a Country Priest must surely have been strongly in Melville’s mind when he made Léon Morin, prêtre, but that’s another story.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

Bresson & Melville: two halves of a sphere

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Pascalian cinema, War

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From c.5 of THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD:

“The solitary gangster struggles against the walls he erects around himself. For prisoners of war, on the other hand, incarceration is not of their making, and they have committed no wrong except that of being on the side of the vanquished. For the existentialists of mid-twentieth-century Europe it was the public oppression of Nazi Occupation, felt keenly everywhere, which led to the cogent articulation, especially in France, of a philosophical response. Hence a pessimism incubated during the war grew after it into intellectual doubt about human freedom, and gave enormous currency to a view of the world ungoverned by God, from which the only conclusion could be that he did not exist. Both Robert Bresson, the director of Diary of a Country Priest (see chapter 1), and Jean-Pierre Melville obsessed with the American gangster film, were strongly shaped by the experience of the war. Bresson spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1940-41, while Melville was evacuated to England after Dunkirk and served with the Free French forces in North Africa and Italy. When each turned to making a film about France under the Occupation, they avoided exact autobiography, but in choosing a narrative, they both made very personal films, to which they could bring some of their own experience and in which their ideas about the meaning of human existence were expressed in the purest form.”

I then write about Bresson’s Un Condamne a mort s’est echappe/ A Man Escaped and Melville’s Armee des ombres/ Army in the shadows. [Apologies to the French: accents not allowed in WordPress – shame on them.] Anyway, Bresson is Pascalian and salvific, Melville atheist and non-redemptive. They’re both terrific films, though.

Here’s Fontaine’s hands in the opening of A Man Escaped awaiting the advent of grace:

ucse 1