The Director's Chair - Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson occupies a unique place in cinema. Certainly too inaccessible for the established mainstream viewer and quite separate from his contemporaries and countrymen attached to the French New Wave. He fervently explored the theme of redemption in his increasingly idiosyncratic and bare minimalist style with flat austere images, vague descriptions, lack of flowing narrative and often unrealistic dialogue further emphasized by the use of purposely expressionless non-professional actors (he called them 'models'). Bresson rejected the artificiality and dependence of "photographed theater" with it's superficial reliance upon publicized performers and instead emphasized a pure, elliptical approach to narrative, making a masterful use of natural sound. His films are regarded as a demanding and difficult work to approach - intensely personal - leaving his cinema to never achieve great popularity.