Word: bressons
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...HASARD Balthazar (writer-director Robert Bresson) is an attack on sentimentality that manages to avoid all the depressing, self-affirming, grimy little pessimism that flaunts itself in the name of honest cinema. The conception here is far more complex: something of benign hopelessness with a comic sense. Bresson has something unpleasant to say, but he says it pleasantly. He sets his film in the countryside and makes of the story an inverted pastoral...
...Bresson is deliberately raising false expectations, testing a dramatic sense he has not the slightest intention of satisfying. He presents all the stock types of sentimentalized romance: the poor farm girl, wealthy lover, evil rival. But he reverses anticipated results. Chastity is a vain ideal; honesty goes unrewarded; villainy is not punished...
...Bresson is trying to approach an unsentimentalized naturalism, and by making Balthazar the surface dramatic center, he frees himself from artificially forcing the lives of his human characters into neat dramatic confrontations. He wants to present life not as artistically ordered but life as stumbled upon-in all its formlessness. This would make for tedious watching if not for the figure of Balthazar who becomes a principle of coherence, a kind of unspeaking narrator...
Color photography has no attraction for Cartier-Bresson, who did 17 color shots for France only at his publisher's insistence. "I don't like color," he told TIME Correspondent Christopher Porterfield. "By the time it goes through the printer, the inks and the paper, it has nothing to do with the emotion you had when you shot it. Black and white is a transcription of that emotion, an abstraction of it." Mechanics bore him. "Why talk about technique or equipment anyway?" he asks. "Do you talk about the pen and paper when you write? Or about...
...occasion, Cartier-Bresson has strayed from his specialty. In the late 1930s he served briefly as an assistant to the French film director Jean Renoir, and he is now finishing a half-hour television film for CBS on the American South. Video cassettes also interest Cartier-Bresson as a future medium. "One has to be aware of what's going to happen and be ahead," he says. "But at the same time,, one mustn't change one's style. The human being is still there. A baby still takes nine months to come...