Bresson, Robert

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer (London Quartet Books, 1986). trans. Jonathan Griffen. 

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, directed by Caspar Wrede, 1971. Pickpocket, directed by Robert Bresson, 1959. 

This story outline and synopsis bear a strong family resemblance to a number of feature films in the escape genre, particularly Robert Bresson s A Man Escapes and Don Siegel s Escape From Alcatraz (said by Siegel, in fact, to have been heavily influenced by A Man Escapes). However, this story is set apart by its setting, the specific moral dilemma faced by the protagonist during the escape, and the ambivalence of the outcome. 

What I like about documentaries is they re very pluralistic. Tm not asking for a whole lot of documentaries to be made from the neo-con political position. But it seems to me that somehow, sometimes documentaries suffer from the fact that most of the people that make documentaries agree politically with each other. And I think the strength of filmmaking, like journalism, is that people should be unpredictable in their views, or they shouldn t have perceived views. They should actually rather look at things than have views about them. I mean, do we care that Cartier-Bresson was a lefiy No, we don t at all. Or Robert Capra. Well, ultimately I know what the filmmaker s views are, but that doesn t always translate into their documentaries, and they re much more subtle and richer because the/re about narrative. 

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