A list of chaotic impressions. Short notes, an attempt to pin down the evanescence of the first guesses on the film’s assumptions . I find them hard to articulate, what i know for sure is that it(the movie)s goal is very ambitious and very hard to equal.
Until seeing this film, i did not realize that my notion of “humanity through the ages” was based primarily on psysiological and anthropological elements, on a meticulous, statistical inventory of external facts: if it has 2 hands, makes kids, is a drunkard, prays and struggles for freedom, if it has a tendency towards an aesthetical and symbolical organization of space – then, voila, it’s human!
Human continuity is facilitated by mere structural regularities, that get a different content from one civilization to another. Briefly – except hunger,lovemaking and housebuilding, nothing really ties us to bygone days. Emphasizing “cultural context” by accumulating ethnographic and historical details can actually amplify distances and make alterity even more acute, instead of bringing people closer. This is painfully true especially for past mentalities and worldviews, a situation encouraged by our (false?) impression that the age we live in is far more open-minded and susceptible of possessing the “Truth”, be it scientifical or philosophical. The past, if it’s to be contemplated and evoked, should only appear as a compelling dish seasoned with grandeur, richness, naivity, melancholy and smirks of complicity towards the viewer, who must be reassured that, undeniably, centuries of religious barbarity and feudal delirious nonsense about don-quixotesque values are gone and ridiculed. Yore must be show, entertainment, circus or melodrama. It cannot afford the luxury of being complex, spiritual, critical, justifiable in its radical difference, its circumstantial errors .
Often, directors of historical flics ingratiate themselves with the viewers by mutillating, simplifying, abusively modernizing, vulgarizing the characters, making them more digestible for an audience spoiled on a diet of warm mash that serves “history” only if it comes with a heavy glaze of familiarity and your-usual-tough-guy smell. In the end, the viewer can throw a patrician thumb-down to the arena where the fake-blooded gladiators expire their last script remark, before raising from their fictitious demise to unanimous ovations.
Bresson does the opposite thing: he gently gets the viewer down from his position of privilege, stripping him of his judgmental prerogatives, of his magistrate toga, of his ability to veto an era. He does not drive the characters humbly to us, but takes us to them, instead. And not to the characters per se, but to the human entities they embody. Cinema is a way of achieving this, but Bresson does does not bow to it. It is a proud product of a narcissistic time, but Bresson does not succumb to its arbitrary demands. He masterfully keeps it at the level of neutral means, though its pervasiveness tends to be greater than that.
He challenges it by challenging the pop culture hero type. Cinema is demiurge in its ability to create a world, a language of itself, a set of rules for decoding situations and characters that inhabit it. But it is not all-permissive. It is, rather, dictatorial, imperative, ideological in its tendency to create types, classes, multitudes and strictly delimited behaviours, in its compulsive drive to generalize, agglutinate, moralize and simplify, instead of allowing for an unlimited variety of unique configurations. We recognize a hero if he has qualities a, b, c, d. Shortcuts for reading, for mapping, for orientation in an artificial ambient, slogans, lapidary formulae. Cinema has its revolutionaries, whose claims it absorbs, reshaping them in new restrictions. Bresson seems to be aware of this sometimes dangerous quality of seduction, of distortion under the mask of purest veracity, of setting the mind into “auto-pilot” mode, that belong to the machine of cloned reality – cinema. He refuses the game. Instead of an accurate material reconstruction of an epoch, he sets landmarks for spiritual continuity , restoring efficiently, yet never pushy, the normality of affects and fidelities that often serve as staple boxing bags for times of purported greater insight.
Being subjected to an utterly tremendous experience, I could never expect such a steady theoretical assault from a historical movie, i could never imagine that an attack on cinematic convention and its ability to distort even things beyond its realm, could take on this form. It is subversive, whether i could show it or not. A true masterpiece.