Word: bressons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...distribution of shadows seems to miss the point, as though dwelling on style means slighting the substance. Worse, it suggests that the work was preconceived in a way that no reporting is supposed to be. The examples of artist-reporters like W. Eugene Smith and Henri Cartier-Bresson prove otherwise, but the assumption survives that artists have visions, journalists have assignments. They both may think to themselves, "I am a camera," but each means something different...
...ARGENT. In his most serene and terrifying parable in a 50-year career, French Film Master Robert Bresson cauterizes modern France as a society built and run on counterfeit values. The moral of this metaphysical slasher movie: greed kills...
Walking into a Robert Bresson film can be like waking up on top of Mount Everest: the air is thin and chilly, no living thing disturbs the silence, and the view is spectacularly disconcerting. Bresson's bleak tales (Pickpocket, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette) make high-altitude demands. Even the most adventurous viewer is The theme of L'Argent, oxygen Bresson's 13th film in a 50-year career, is both simple and brutal: capitalism is a contagious disease, and the carrier is money. Bourgeois parents reward their sons for lying about money. The surest...
...Bresson, a technician of metaphysics, is fascinated by the machinery of injustice. Everything from a bank's cash dispenser to the French legal system to a finely honed ax is considered for its practical application. Nothing works, except for Bresson's own favorite machine, the movie camera; like Yvon, it refuses to counterfeit obeisance to a society motivated by its own corruption. Bresson, too, regards humanity with the ferocious passivity of a stone lion on some abandoned antique isle. At 76 he has made his most serene and terrifying film to date, one that strikes at its target...
...photographs, and his alter ego speaks: "Shall I say it then, in front of all these people? She took my hand and placed it high on her thigh, raising her skirt and slightly opening her legs . . . And all the time we kept talking in loud voices about Cartier-Bresson and was photography an art." Using the same device in scalding counterpoint, Nichols has James and his alter ego collaborate on a steamy love letter to Kate at the same moment that it is being read aloud by Eleanor's alter ego to Eleanor and the person who intercepted...