Interview Notes - Robert Bresson with Ronald Hayman (link)
Photographer Unknown
He is very eloquent on working with non actors, on improvisation, on being inside, on restraint and much else. Here are some especially powerful parts:
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Q: Is economy a different problem when you’re working in colour instead of black and white?
A: The problem of unity is the same. You touch people’s emotions with unity of effect. You must start from the blank screen and start from the silence. I like silence very much. When I read this little sentence—”Silence was pleas’d”—in Milton’s Paradise Lost, I liked the idea of silence being pleased.
Another thing I was aware of was that nearly all gestures, all of our ways of talking, are mechanical. It’s true. You put your hand like this. Look. There are two pages in Montaigne about the way our hands go where we don’t want them to go. He’s a writer who isn’t really difficult. You can always read a page or two and find something. Theatre consists of well controlled gestures and words. Cinema must be something different—not controlled. It must be the equivalent of life, like any art, but certainly not copied or simulated. There must be little elements of life, of reality, captured separately, little by little with the extraordinary machine which is the camera. Then when you put them together in a certain way, a sudden life comes out of it—cinematic life, which is not at all like everyday life. Nor is it like the life of the theatre. The life of the theatre is like life only because actors are alive. In the cinema, when you photograph somebody, you kill him on film. It’s dead images. Projecting a film is projecting people killed. But there is a certain way of doing it so that the images are transformed by their contact together. Then life comes into it, like flowers reviving in water. -
Q: What do you think of Tolstoy?
A: In comparison I find him very dry. He works much more from the outside than from the inside. With Dostoevsky you feel “I’m sure you don’t make mistakes about human beings.” That’s what I’m looking for—to remain on the inside.
Click on the link in the title for the full interview.
Posted 8 months ago
