Matt, thanks for your response, which I've been thinking about for a
bit. Unfortunately, I don't remember that moment in "L'Argent," which I
have not seen in a long time, well enough to comment on it. But you
bring up a more general issue too, of camera awareness and awareness of
individual characters.

First, I don't think Bresson films are generally "about" their
characters as flesh and blood human beings in the way that a Hollywood
melodrama might be. "Is it even about him" seems a good question to ask,
and usually answer is "no." Even the moments that seem to be exceptions,
such as the ending of "Mouchette," seem to me to prove the rule. Is the
issue there the fate of a particular human being, or is it something
that "feels," in Bresson, much larger than that? I think it's the second.

You also raise the general question of the way in which one is aware of
the camera's presence. I could recast the issue you raise in terms of
how much the image feels like a cinematic construction, and how much it
feels like a piece of a pre-existent actuality. Thus on one side we
might have Eisenstein and Brakhage and Hitchcock, and on the other Ozu
and Bresson and Rossellini. It's not that there is a rigid border
between these groups either; there's some constructed-ness in each and
some sense of the larger world in all, and of course each filmmaker is
also very different from the others.

In the case of Bresson, his oblique angles have an effect that I think
is very different from what it might logically seem such shots should
have. He's a great lesson in how there are no formulas for understanding
how film style works; the same type of camera movement might mean
something totally different in Sirk or Borzage. (I still groan at the
memory of the film textbook used in the first course (in 1972) that I
ever was a TA for, Louis Giannetti's "Understanding Movies." I see that
it appears to be still in general use. I hope he has long since fixed
such howlers as his claim that 95 per cent of all camera movements
express "the instability of the universes," or something like that.)

Anyway, you might guess that Bresson's oblique angles and austerely
cramped compositions should call attention to themselves, and to the
filmmaker as image composer, and surely they do do that at first glance.
But ultimately they serve, as you say, more as a "window" than as a
"canvas." Cramping things together, creating artificial rather than
Renaissance spaces, is a way for Bresson to introduce what I think he
really wants to evoke, which is a strange, almost unnamable "continuity
of emptiness." One always feels one is looking *past* what is
immediately in front of the camera lens, "into" an unseeable world in
which objects can mysteriously commune with each other. This can lead to
a kind of freedom or a kind of horror, depending on the "plot," and in
Bresson there isn't necessarily that much difference. The scraping
against prison walls in "A Man Escaped" is a good metaphor for what
Bresson's style tried to do: take us out of the "prison" of a world of
separate objects and into a vaster, and massively less physical, realm.
Even if the "subject" is a closeup of a face or of a hand writing, one
is looking "through" it toward something else. Cramped, constrained,
sidelong glances function in Bresson to reduce the powerful illusion of
physical objects, to encourage you to look past them as much as or more
than at them, and to create a sense that they can all commune with each
other, the priest with his writing paper, Mouchette with the forest,
Yvon with the blackness at the end of "L'Argent."

Fred Camper