One of the many episodes added by Bresson in his film A Gentle Woman, based on Dostoyevsky’s short story, depicts an evening at the theatre to see a performance of Hamlet. The performance displays all the vices Bresson attributes to theatrical practice in his long essay Notes on the Cinematographer. The actors playing at being Hamlet, Gertrude or Laertes, dressed in troubadour style, posture, gesticulate and overdo their voices and expressions. When she returns home that night, the gentle woman goes straight to Shakespeare’s text. She wants to see whether the actors cut the passage containing the prince’s instructions to those performing his play within the play: ‘speak the speech … trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines.’
The episode has a demonstrative value. It is on this kind of bad theatre that cinema draws, itself contributing only photography. It contrasts with the cinematic language, in which the image is no longer a copy dedicated to resemblance but the element of an autonomous discourse, where the level, inexpressive tones of the forms or modèles enable the naked truth of our intimate selves to come out instead of the charades of the stage.
The demonstration is clear, even too clear, in that form of clarity that places a decoy to mask a more secret difficulty. I do not know if that is how Hamlet was played in 1969 but I do know that even before Bresson was born, various poets and thespians had made the staging of a Shakespeare drama the touchstone for a critique of theatrical realism. Mallarmé praised in Hamlet ‘the latent lord who cannot become’ and denounced the pretension of actors to bring their characters to life when they ought only to be patterns in a tapestry.1 Edward Gordon Craig’s production of Hamlet had its protagonist lying down, separated by the barrier of art from the mass of courtiers wrapped with the king and queen in the same golden cloak. Maeterlinck suggested placing princes and lords in the background and replacing them centre stage with the obscure forces speaking through them, focusing the drama for example on a old man motionless under his lamp, listening silently to the sounds of the unknown all around him.2
All three were suggesting basically the same thing: the theatrical word should be brought up to date with literature and the silent word. The silent word is not simply the word that equalizes in the silence of writing the continuous line of the narrative with the vocal outbursts of quoted speech. On a deeper level, it is the word that causes what is silent to speak, deciphering the silent signs written on things or, inversely, assuming the pitch of their absence of meaning to record the silent intensities and anonymous noise of the world and of the soul. More generally, it is the word that always steals, takes back into itself the marvels of imaginary sensuality that it deploys. This identity between a power of incarnation and a force of disincarnation has formed the basis of literature since it overturned the two great principles of the classical representative order: the primacy of plot and its intelligibility principle – the ordering of actions according to necessity and probability; the system of expressing emotions, feelings and wishes through a codification of appropriate discourses and attitudes.
If Bresson was able to formalize the contrast between the cinematograph and theatre, it was because the literary power of the silent word had already questioned – in the first place on the stage itself – the representational logic of the primacy of plot and the codification of expression. So the real problem is not the contrast between the cinematograph and ‘filmed theatre’ but the relationship between the cinematograph and literature. Cinema did not arise against theatre, it arose after literature. This does not mean it simply places stories from books onto the screen. Rather, cinema comes after the literary revolution, after the overturning of the relations between signifying and showing that, in the name of literature, it has arrived at the art of telling stories. The problem, then, is not only to invent, with moving images and recorded sound, procedures able to produce effects analogous to those of literary processes. Here we have a classic problem of correspondence between the arts. Now the aesthetic order of arts, to which cinema and literature both belong, has obscured, along with the relations between showing and signifying, the very principles of correspondence between the arts. A number of consequences come out of this that I would like to consider through the film Mouchette, which Bresson adapted from the tale by Bernanos, Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette.
The problem with such an ‘adaptation’ is simply expressed: literature is not simply the art of language that would need to be put into plastic images and cinematic movement. It is a practice of language that also carries a particular idea of ‘imageness’ (imagéité) and of mobility. It invented for itself a sort of cinematographism which can be defined in three broad strokes. First comes the privilege of the silent word, of the power of expression granted to the silent presence – meaningful, enigmatic or insignificant – of the object. Next, the equality of all things represented. The equal attention Mouchette gives to a human face, a hand turning the crank of a coffee grinder or the clink of a glass on the counter of a bistro: Bresson finds the model for this in Cézanne.3 But beyond Cézanne, it refers to that great equality of noble and profane subjects, of speaking beings and dumb things, of the significant and the insignificant theorized and practised by literature since Flaubert. And finally there is the sequential treatment of tempo. I use this term for the treatment that builds the narrative out of unequal blocks, discontinuous in space and time, as opposed to the representative model, the homogeneous temporal chain of cause and effect, of wishes turning into events and events leading to other events. The tempo instituted by the literary revolution is a sequentialized tempo, divided into blocks of presents piled up on each other and might be called in anticipatory fashion ‘sequence shots’. This literary cinematographism is particularly noticeable in Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette. It is the story of a despised and feral adolescent girl whose father is an alcoholic and mother is sick with tuberculosis. When Mouchette is raped by a poacher and her mother dies, the young girl kills herself. Bernanos’s tale is exemplary as a sequential narrative, not only because he tells it in short chapters but also because he introduces breaks between them. The passage from the account of the rape to the following episode is an example. The rape scene ends: ‘The last embers were crumbling to ash. There was no living thing in the darkness but the hurried panting of handsome Arsène.’ The next chapter jumps without any link into another sequence shot which begins: ‘She has curled up in a ball in a clump of broom where she takes hardly more space than a hare.’4
This image of Mouchette curled into a ball can remind us of the Schlegelian theory of the fragment rolled in a ball like a little hedgehog or the Deleuzian concept of time-image: a present that forms a loop with its own infinity; a cut and a reconnection out of the void, a link in the form of a non-link. Literature produces a certain type of time-image, marked by two characteristics: the internal tropism of the sequence and the cut between sequences. This tropism and this cut activate an inertia principle that in Bernanos’s work accords with the fictional datum: the destiny of humans who have abandoned themselves to resignation, both rebellious in their resignation and resigned in their rebellion. They are also in harmony with the general line of the narrative, with its imaginary physics: the rush into the abyss of a human obedient to the laws of the fall of bodies.
The question then arises: what can cinema do with the literary ‘cinematographism’ that precedes it? We have a pointer. Between handsome Arsène’s hurried panting and the little thing curled up in the clump of brooms we might have expected Bresson, in keeping with a certain idea of ‘modernity’, to accentuate the cut. But he chose instead to attenuate it. In the film the rape scene ends not with Arsène’s panting but with Mouchette’s hands slipping round his neck to express, in a rather familiar fashion, the passage from pain to pleasure. And the next connection is not Mouchette as a little hare or hedgehog. It is Arsène opening the door and calling out her name. Bresson joined the two shots with a dissolve, a method he often used but not so appropriate here to bring out the traumatic quality of the event. So at first sight there is, between the literary datum and its cinematic treatment, not just a gap but a counter-movement.
Here we encounter a paradox more formidable than the one identified by André Bazin in Journal d’un curé de campagne. He noted that Bresson, forced to cut from the original book also by Bernanos, had not cut its most ‘literary’ material – the writing of the journal – but in fact the most visual and sensory. ‘Of the two,’ Bazin noted, ‘it is the film that is literary and the novel that is teeming with images.’5 For example, Bresson removed the wealth of sensory detail in the meeting with the Count on his return from a day’s hunting, carrying a pile of dead, muddy and bloody rabbits but out of which one animal’s gentle eye seemed to be staring back at the priest. A naturally visual art, cinema had to reduce the excess of visual imagery that literature used to project itself in imagination beyond its own powers. Hence the quintessential character of the film, carrying the literary narrative to a higher level of abstraction.
But this example reveals things are rather more complicated. The rabbit was not only an image intended to put flesh on the bones of the narrative. It was also, according to Flaubertian logic, a pause in the narration: the dead animal’s eye was an inert object, a still point in the middle of the conflict of wills whirling around the priest. The sensory excess of the description and the discontinuous structure of the narrative have the same effect: both subtract meaning from the action and weight from the plot. Together they construct that suspenseful logic by whose means literature produces incarnation and disincarnation at the same time. By dropping the over-sensual image, Bresson also removes the suspenseful power inherent in the hyper-sensorial description. It is in relation to that suspenseful power of literary excess that Bresson’s highly fragmented montage acquires meaning. To understand this clash of logics, it is useful to compare the opening of the novel with that of the the film. This is how Bernanos begins his narrative:
The dark west wind, the sea wind, was already scattering the voices in the darkness. It toyed with them a moment and then lifted them all together, dispersing them with an angry roar. The voice which Mouchette had just heard hovered in the air a long time, like a dead leaf floating interminably.
Mouchette had taken off her clogs in order to run better. She put them on again, but on the wrong feet. Tant pis! They were Eugène’s, and so wide that she could push all five fingers of her little hand under the top while she was wearing them. They had one advantage – if she pushed her toes to the end, treating them like a pair of enormous castanets, as she ran across the asphalted schoolyard, she could make the kind of noise that drove the mistress wild.
Mouchette slid as far as the top of the bank and settled down to watch, her back against the dripping hedge. From her post the school still seemed quite near, but the yard was deserted now. After playtime on Saturdays the children assembled in the main hall, which was decorated with a bust of the Republic, an old portrait of Monsieur Armand Fallières, which had never been replaced, and the flag of the gymnastics society rolled up in its oil-cloth sheath.6
This opening is a perfect demonstration of literary cinematographism. It starts off with a long shot establishing atmosphere: wind, falling leaves, snatches of indistinct voices. Then a medium shot frames the moving character, who stops and shows us her loose clogs in close-up. After that a new long shot reveals to us what she sees from the vantage point where she has stopped moving. Many films begin in recognizably similar fashion. But the promise of the wealth of images, sounds and movements to come has a strange entropy about it. The text begins with the word ‘but’. It is not only artifice that places us in medias res, it is also a second thought, an impulse that makes the hand offering this wealth withdraw it at the same time. That ‘but’ introduces a wind endowed with a blackness manifestly borrowed through metonymy from the cloud driven before it. That wind which may be the sea wind, according to one Antoine (of whom we will learn nothing more), scatters voices in the night. And it scatters them twice: in the mode of physical description and that of the figure of speech, scatters them ‘like’ those ever-falling leaves. And ‘those’ leaves in their turn fall into indeterminacy, for the demonstrative can indicate the fact that leaves in general whirl in the wind or designate leaves that are actually falling around Mouchette. All the sensory qualities are subjected to the rule of that scattering of voices and leaves, to the rule of that like. The shackle of that ‘like’ makes them travel into a zone of indeterminacy between the narrator’s words and the perceptions and sensations of the fictional subject Mouchette: a zone where they become what Deleuze calls percepts and pure affects.
How can cinema respond to that indeterminate sensoriality of scattered voices, of writing? Cinema, Bresson tells us, is ‘a writing with images in movement and with sounds.7 What relationship does this ‘writing’ have with the scattered voices and subtractive images of literary art? We get the answer from the beginning of the film. Its first five minutes have no effective connection with the beginning of the book. Bresson has swept aside the many images and concrete sensations offered by the text and replaced them with a series of invented episodes. Instead of the whirl of dispersed voices, the pre-title sequence confronts us with a statue-like face placed in an indeterminate space difficult to identify as a church, despite the echo of footsteps on flagstones. It is Mouchette’s mother whom Bresson has dragged from the sickbed she had been confined to in the novel, to speak a tragic prologue, an allegorical voice which says in substance: ‘I am the death that is coming’. So Bresson has put a leitmotiv in place of a scattering, something like the first four solemn notes of fate knocking on the door. There follows another episode, also invented and opposed to all scattering, since it is made out of a series of imperious links between gazes and hands. We first see a hand holding a gun, then a body attached to that hand, that of the gamekeeper in the process of hiding to keep watch. From his gaze through the foliage we then see another hand, that of the poacher setting a snare. We then get a close-up of the snare awaiting its prey, a partridge that walks towards it and is then caught, watched by the gamekeeper. Next we go from the gamekeeper’s hand freeing the bird to the gaze of the poacher watching his prey escape. The gamekeeper then moves through the grass up to the road where he meets the children on the way to school. Only now is Mouchette glimpsed for the first time, but for a short moment. The episode that follows takes place at the bar of a bistro. Here the poacher drinks, the barmaid looks at him longingly, the gamekeeper is shown the door and Mouchette’s father and brother bring in smuggled bottles of alcohol. Only when we follow them home do we find the urchin in her habitat.
This reinvented opening is marked by exacerbated use of fragmentation: of shots and spaces and images of fragments of bodies. We see in turn the gamekeeper’s gaze and the poacher’s hand or vice versa, never the two together, although the close-ups of what they are both doing and seeing suggest proximity. What are we to make of this fragmentation? In Notes on Cinematography Bresson says:
This is indispensable if one does not want to fall into REPRESENTATION. To see beings and things in their separate parts. Isolate those parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence.8
Deleuze, for his part, sees Bresson as an example of ‘haptic’ montage, setting out to connect spaces blindly, by feel, and thus the opposite of any optical and sensorimotor imperialism.
Mouchette, Robert Bresson, Argos Films, 1970
But it is not so certain that the fragmentation practised by Bresson obeys some anti-representational principle. At the heart of representational logic lies the idea of the whole whose parts all fit together exactly. The fact that it may be necessary to dismantle the totalities given to the gaze was something known to ancient painters who composed images of beauty using features borrowed from several models, or classical dramaturges who gave the events in their plots a perfect necessity never present in life. That is really the tradition followed by Bressonian cutting and editing. ‘To set up a film,’ he says, ‘is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.’9 In these sequences of Mouchette, it is the relationship of one shot to another that fulfils the gaze’s trajectory. This montage separates Bresson radically from a presumed fellow in Christianity and cinematic modernity: unlike what happens in Rossellini, it is rare with Bresson for the gazer and the gazed-at to be in the same shot, rarer still for their gazes to meet. Fragmentation is primarily a principle of strict narrative economy: there is nothing to see in the shot of the gamekeeper hiding in the bushes but the mobility of the eyes watching in turn the prey and the poacher. And the shot of the snare is, like the snare itself, pure expectation of the creature that will be caught in it. Fragmentation forbids the image to be anything more than a relay between the previous one and the next one.
Bresson gives us two analogies to explain this dependence. He first mentions painting: one shot is to another like the touch of colour that modifies the adjoining touch.10 But the analogy is misleading. The first touch is no longer on the surface when the ‘adjoining’ touch appears. In Bernanos’s story, haunting internal memories came to colour present sensations. With Bresson, on the other hand, each shot seems conceived to contain nothing more than a determined moment of the action. Leading to the other analogy, that of language: images are like words in the dictionary which have value only through their position and relation.11 That sort of idea of language chimes with the structural ambiance of the period. But it is rather remote from the one that literature practises, where the word constantly projects around it the halo of shifting images that both supports and contradicts the progress of the action. Literature sought to go beyond itself by becoming cinematic in its own fashion. Inversely, the idea of the language of images tends to de-visualize the image. It subjects each visual fragment to a double constraint: it is a piece of action which only retains the part of a body concerned by the action – a gaze, hands, feet … and it is a piece of language in the sense Bresson means it: a word that has meaning only in relation to another. But that relation, as he conceives it, is reduced to a stimulus/response arrangement. That is illustrated by an episode of the film in which Mouchette throws handfuls of earth at her classmates. It is inserted into the narrative of the film after another episode: the singing lesson in which Mouchette’s class sings the famous prize-giving cantata, with Mouchette stumbling obstinately over a B flat. Those two episodes really do come from Bernanos. But they are treated very differently in the novel. In Bernanos’s text, Mouchette’s wrong notes, the giggling of her classmates and the teacher’s fury brought out in the girl ‘that stupid expression with which she knows how to disguise her joys’. Bresson replaces the success of this fabricated expression with tears that admit failure and shame. With the handfuls of earth it is the other way round. In the novel, Mouchette in a rage threw a single clod that made the girls scatter and landed in the middle of the road. The film opposes that with a principle of integral success. Every shot is a bullseye, hitting the target shown to us in advance: a head, a satchel, a chest, a back. And by a singular connection, it is only the part of the body hit that is turned towards the offender: chest or head depending on which is the target. The principle of the connection is neither the contrast of tones nor the arbitrariness of the sign. It is the imperious relation in which one shot is to another as a projectile is to its target.
So fragmentation is in no way an anti-representational principle. On the contrary, it annuls the suspension of action, the stretching of time, the breaks in causality that literature had used to emancipate itself from representational logic. The literary revolution had broken the functional logic of narrative sequential order. Bressonian fragmentation by contrast imposes a principle of hyper-functionality. Every visual fragment is equivalent to a piece of language which is itself a piece of narration. So the filmic narration appears as a cynegetic form that seems to fit exactly with the narrative data. By adjusting the visual fragmentation to the telling of a story about finding game, the film’s opening sketches a summary of Mouchette’s destiny. For the time being, she is still like the partridge freed by the gamekeeper. Soon she will be like the hares encircled and massacred by a troop of hunters in another episode invented by Bresson and placed by him at the end of the film, just before the girl’s suicide.
The insertion of these two hunting scenes merits examination in itself. It is not in fact an invention ex nihilo but the product of a process of transposition on two levels. On one level, the two episodes literalize metaphors present in Bernanos’s text. I have already mentioned Mouchette ‘curled up in a ball in a clump of broom where she takes hardly more space than a hare’. With Bresson the quasi-hare becomes a real hare. The stylistic image is transformed into a visual element and the pursuit of game evoked by the metaphor becomes the structure of the filmic action, a structure symbolized by these episodes but already reflected in each of its articulations. But the hare hunt is also a quotation borrowed from the hunting scene in La Règle du jeu. By borrowing hares and their symbolic value from Renoir, Bresson also pulls in the whole narrative chain constructed around them. Also lifted from Renoir is the ‘professional’ and love rivalry between the gamekeeper Schumacher and the poacher Marceau, which is projected onto the gamekeeper Mathieu and the poacher Arsène. So the plot changes direction. Bernanos’s narrative was wholly focused on Mouchette whose path to the cross he followed stage by stage. Bresson makes Mouchette a helpless hostage ensnared in the rivalry between the gamekeeper and the poacher for the favours of the barmaid (whose existence only gets a single passing mention in the novel). In this way he rounds off the relation of equalization between screenplay and mise en scène. By making each shot the target of another, the mise en scène is made to serve a game hunting screenplay. And inversely that screenplay serves as an allegory for the mise en scène. This is one of the constants of Bresson’s cinema. Each of his films tells more or less the same story: that of a hunter/director – policeman or hoodlum, jealous husband or abandoned mistress, gamekeeper or poacher – laying out semblances to lure a prey into their net. Bresson defines his mise en scène elsewhere as an arrangement for capturing truth. What is the exact relationship between these two hunts or these two mise en scènes?
The answer is clear enough concerning the narrative sequencing of the shots. We have seen that visual fragmentation was harnessed there to the gaze and expectations of the hunter. Complication sets in when it comes to the expression of bodies in the shot. Bresson formulates the problem through a critique of the actor. The actor to him is the liar in the Platonic tradition, the double being who is not himself but Hamlet, but is not Hamlet either, since he is playing him as he would play any other role. Bresson also shows the door to the beguiling mimic and replaces him with the model. The model does not act. It is primarily a body that poses for the camera as it would for a painter. But the pictorial analogy is also misleading here. The model must differentiate himself from the actor in his way of speaking. He must utter unthinkingly, without putting any meaningful intent into the words decreed by the director, accompanied by any movements he orders. In this way, Bresson tells us, he will express his inner truth, as opposed to his conscious thought. Mise en scène fabricates through repetition of words and movements a material automatism intended to awaken another: the unfabricated automaton, the inner automaton whose movements no one can programme and which, if deprived of all outlets, must behave in sole accordance with the truth of its being. In Notes on Cinematography Bresson offers a theorem based on the one by Archimedes: ‘Model. Thrown into the physical action, his voice, starting from even syllables, takes on automatically the inflections and modulations proper to his true nature.’12 Any moving body subjected to the law of equality of signifying elements would express its own truth automatically. This theorem concerning the model seems at first to combine with the shot’s cynegetic logic to complete the game-seeking logic. But in fact it introduces a decisive gap. For the truth expected from the model is a completely different effect from the one produced by stringing target-shots together. The model is doomed to speak his truth. The ordered mechanism of shots in sequence and wills in conflict gives way to the freedom of the automaton. The automaton does not control the effect. But the director controls it still less. Thus does wisdom come to coincide with non-wisdom, the voluntary with the involuntary.
The cinematic model thus seems to solve the problem posed by those theatre men – Maeterlinck, Gordon Craig and some others – who had tried to suppress the actor’s mimicry. They saw this mimicry as a parasitic manifestation, inadequate to express the power of destiny carried by the words of the drama. A power like that needed a clean body: a body virginal of all the habits that adjust intonation and gesture to specific sentiments. But such a body could only be a lifeless one, android or super-marionette. With the live automaton, the spiritual automaton liberated by the mechanization of the model’s movements and words, the cinematograph apparently escapes from the theatrical dilemma. But this success poses two problems. For a start, cinematographic art establishes its own difference where it concentrates on what it contains that is most ‘theatrical’, dialogue between characters. The transposition of Mouchette is a case in point. Bresson reinvented the plot, throwing out the images offered by the novel and projecting into the Provençal sunshine the atmosphere of muddy northern gloom dear to Bernanos. On the other hand he retained what is least ‘cinematic’ in the novel and has, since Flaubert, become the holy grail of novelists: dialogue. Novelists had often tried to dissolve it in the perceptions of characters. Bresson put it back in the form of blocks of words facing each other. And it is in its manner of speaking a literary text that the cinematographic model is distinct from the actor in filmed theatre.
But here the second problem arises: what exactly is this ‘truth’ produced by the automatism of equal syllables enunciated in an even tone? Journal d’un curé de campagne gave us a troubling demonstration on this point. The good pupil Seraphita has recited the catechism perfectly on the mystery of the Eucharist. The priest took her aside after the class to congratulate her and ask if she was eager to receive the body of Christ. No, she replied, ‘that will come when it comes’. So why did she listen to the priest so attentively? ‘Because you have very beautiful eyes’, she replied cheekily as her friends nearby giggled audibly. Seraphita has done what the director requires of the model: she has spoken the exact words she has been made to learn. She has spoken them without adding any expression, in the strict monotone that one could call the catechism tone. But what truth has she revealed in the process? Not the truth of the incarnation, anyway. Her reply on the contrary mocks the stalker of truth incarnate. Whether some private truth lies hidden behind the provocation we will never know. By speaking in the same singsong tone the words of the catechism and the provocative remark, by refusing to give importance to the words stating the truth of the word made flesh, or to consider them different from the fine talk of a doe-eyed young male, Seraphita inseparably entangles obedience to an ordained stream of words with the refusal to deliver its expected effect.
Seraphita’s insolence, that capacity to obey an instruction without fulfilling its meaning, unsurprisingly drives God’s servant to distraction. But it has a different meaning for the Catholic writer, sensitive to the force of calm disobedience present in those normally thought least capable of duplicity: the poor and their children. In Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, whose story Bernanos wrote two years after the publication of Journal d’un curé de campagne, in the midst of the Spanish civil war which had devastated his political beliefs, Seraphita’s malicious cunning is transformed into a positive virtue of resistance. Mouchette becomes the representative of a ‘nobility of the poor’ embodied in the women and children of republican Spain done to death by Franco’s executioners, confronted with a fate beyond their control. Bresson lacks Bernanos’s political sensibility, but he gives Mouchette an unexpected brother: the child revolutionary martyr Joseph Bara. And he takes up the challenge of giving her insolence, in other words the nobility of the poor, the voice and body that suit him. The theory of the model delivering its truth is insufficient to explain what passes through Mouchette’s voice. Her entire vocal line tends in effect towards an upsurge of insolence, to be fulfilled by the cry of ‘Merde!’ in response to her father’s moralizing discourse and the provocative answer to her interrogation by the Mathieu couple: ‘Mr Arsène is my lover.’ The mise en scène has to extract from her body a voice apt for such insolence, the voice of a body that deviates from the exchange of words included in the game-seeking scenario. Its power must be constructed both from Mouchette’s words and from her silences, and from the way her body receives, absorbs or deflects the instructions it is given. Mouchette is often silent. She speaks sometimes with her hands, more often with her feet which she enjoys hitting on the pavement or scuffling in the mud to bring disorder to the civilized space inhabited by the teacher and her favourites. That ill-will has to become a positive capacity no longer expressed only by her feet and hands manipulating mud, but asserted through the flash of a word giving a specific vibration to the very dullness of ‘expressionless’ speech. The strength of Mouchette’s resistance has to be constructed by the director as a way of setting her voice, her gaze and her body at the same distance from the screenplay – both narrative and visual – of the game-beating expedition.
This is the deviation we can observe in the scene where Arsène, in his shack, tells Mouchette what to say when questioned by the gendarmerie. In it we see in effect two different courses of words differentiate. The first is in a straight line in which the words, reduced to minimal information units, are pronounced in what we call an even tone. That is essentially Arsène’s part, the director (as it were), telling Mouchette what she must say and answering her queries in brusque monosyllables. ‘Got to tell about the traps?’ – ‘Yes’ – ‘Even to the gendarmes?’ – ‘Yes’. In Bernanos’s rendering Arsène took the trouble to scold Mouchette for her naughtiness and explain the reason for apparently strange instructions: better to admit poaching than be suspected of murder. In Bresson’s adaptation Arsène answers only with yes and no. That is also why it is permissible for him to speak off-screen. Mouchette’s part is different: her voice is never a voice-off and it is projected more than those of the other characters. Above all she is always related to an attentive body. But there are different ways to be attentive, and the one adopted by Mouchette with Arsène is worth observing. Arsène barks out his orders facing the camera. Mouchette receives them sideways, at a tangent so to speak, as if her body’s outline were introducing precisely a swerve in relation to that course of minimal information which the film sometimes carries to the point of caricature. Not only her words are resistant, but her ‘attention’ itself, her way of absorbing the other’s words without her face letting us know what she makes of them. At this point the mechanical evenness of the vocal automaton encounters the much more complex logic of a face automaton.
‘Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body’13 – this is how Bresson defines the model. And no one corresponds to it better than the actress who played Mouchette, Nadine Nortier, achieving here one of the most astonishing performances in the history of cinema. Mouchette’s face to which she lends her features appears as an articulate head, planted on a body often rendered indistinct by the grey pinafore and sharp chiaroscuro that illuminates one half of the face and plunges the other in shadow. The roundness of the face, accentuated by prominent cheekbones, is underlined by its contrast with the black hair and the two astonishing locks hanging on either side. She is accentuated in the night scenes by the contrast between the pale face and the dark pinafore; in the daylight scenes by the contrast of black eyes and hair with the white blouse and petticoat. And she is punctuated lastly by the mobility of eyes which continuously open and close, are raised and lowered, look sideways and backwards, and make use of the white as well as the iris.
Mouchette, Robert Bresson, Argos Films, 1970
It is thus a ‘face in black and white’ that concentrates and intensifies the cinematographic black and white, a screen face, even a screen eye that functions as a surface for the inscription of signs. But this surface reinforces the inscription and disperses it. On this face the words, actions and events meet different fates. Sometimes they rebound in the projection of a word. Sometimes they silently sculpt the face in the same way ‘the invisible wind’ is betrayed by the surface of ‘the water it sculpts in passing’.14 And sometimes, in the end, they are absorbed. Mouchette is represented in a constant state of attention. But that attention is divided: on one side it is the posture of a vigilant animal, in keeping with the scenario of hunts contained within hunts. But on another, Mouchette seems simply to absorb what happens to her and transform it into thought without that thought being communicated to the audience. The ‘nobility of the poor’ is then transformed into a formal capacity. Bernanos emphasized the gap between what was happening in Mouchette and how much of this she could understand. Bresson gave the girl’s body a positive ability to use a synthesis of what happened to her for her own purposes. The surface for the reception of signs starts to resist its function, to absorb signals without returning them, to assert a positive capacity not to say. The high point of the chase becomes the point where its prey escapes. She was expected to reveal her ‘inner truth’. What she displays instead is a talent for opacity. But that opacity does not concern only the character’s condition. It affects the sequential logic of the film itself by setting up a countertendency opposed to the logic of the game-shoot. The speaking body that removes itself from the linear course of exchanges demolishes in the same stroke the project of a ‘language of images’. Its countervailing effort prevents the image from identifying with a linguistic element and prevents the shot from being a simple piece of language and narration in sequence with others. So cinema does with the literary word the equivalent of what literature was doing with its visual evocations. In Bernanos’s novel the image made more opaque the narration and thus ran counter to the logic of wills in conflict. We have seen that Bressonian fragmentation of images worked backwards by making the sequencing of images correspond with the hunting plot. But the performance of the body speaking words from literature comes to obstruct this work of adjustment. With Mouchette’s speaking body, in fact, the director constructs another story, that of a singular performance that reinforces the narrative line and inverts its logic. This performance sometimes involves resistance or provocation, sometimes positive virtuosity.
The first form finds its best illustration in the scene with the vigil-keeping nun, in which Bresson turns Bernanos’s logic entirely to Mouchette’s advantage. In Bernanos, the scene is one of seduction. The vigil-keeper – in love with the dead – tells Mouchette the story of the most memorable event of her youth: the relationship she had when she was a sick-nurse with a young girl from a good family, whom she has in some sense vampirized. When Mouchette hears this story she is overcome by a kind of lethargy, a ‘strange softness’ that ‘weaves about her the threads of an invisible web’.15 The result is not only the state between life and death that drives Mouchette to her fate but also a second rape: the old woman forces her secret out of her. The confession will take place offstage (as it were), but the end of the sequence makes us share in its pain by showing us the old woman crouched in her armchair waving her fingers like ‘two small grey beasts in pursuit of an invisible prey’. After that, the account moves without transition to the location of the suicide: ‘It is an old sandpit long abandoned’,16 in Bernanos’s novel; in the film Bresson transforms the scene of capture into a scene of resistance. Mouchette’s lethargy takes on an opposite meaning. Sunk deep in an armchair, clasping her can of milk, cheeks puffed out, Mouchette’s slanting sidelong stare removes any hint of seduction. Her secret can no longer be got out of her. Her only answer is her muddy feet that she wipes methodically on the spotless carpet. The body has become an impenetrable exterior. It sends nothing back, apart from that mud. And this withdrawal of Mouchette’s body into itself gives her the full mastery of her act of death. The body fallen victim to the machination of wills in conflict and interconnected causes, and summoned to yield its truth, escapes from all that it is required to say and do.
But Mouchette’s activity is not restricted to these provocative gestures. Mouchette asserts her ability to invent movements and mannerisms that strictly speaking are her performance. The exemplary episode evidently is the one in which she looks after Arsène when he is having an epileptic fit. Here the film follows the book quite closely, but a few small differences create the gap. Firstly, in the Bernanos version, the air Mouchette sings is a ‘Negro dance tune’ she hears every Sunday on the tap-room phonograph, a tune that haunts her permanently, while those of her schoolmistress – ‘Madame’s tunes’ – are immediately forgotten. What Mouchette sings here, though, is precisely a tune from her schoolteacher, the famous prize-giving anthem the woman had vainly struggled to get Mouchette to sing correctly. The notorious B flat presents no problem this time, as Mouchette had made the song her own. In Bernanos’s rendering the song was the ‘secret’ of Mouchette’s youth suddenly revealed. She would like to ‘plunge her hands’17 into it. But the song stops, the hands are empty. In Bresson’s film there are no empty hands; what comes after the song repeats what precedes it: a smile. It is a smile of success, a double success. Firstly it is the response to a situation. The teenage child whom the poacher will rape a few minutes later has for the moment made him into a child she can comfort by transforming the prize-giving cantata into a lullaby. But Mouchette’s success is also a more secret line of escape, the assertion of a gaming ability, a virtuosity.
The invention peculiar to the film is this secret virtuosity Mouchette possesses which has little to do with the model theory. We are reminded of course of the film’s celebrated dodgem cars sequence at the Sunday fair, which was entirely invented by Bresson. It is the beginning of the trial of strength between the gamekeeper and poacher in which Mouchette will be crushed, but it also provides her with an opportunity to play and be involved. Even more significant perhaps is the much quieter scene of the coffee that starts the day. Here we see Mouchette inventing games in the everyday constraints she faces: she whirls the coffee-mill around like a rattle, negligently held at arm’s length. She plays at filling the grouped bowls at speed in one go by turning the coffee pot into a watering can, then does the same with the milk before tossing the lid back onto the coffee pot with perfect aim. The routine has become a pure exercise in virtuosity, a game for no reason: the café au lait she is making will not be consumed by anyone on screen, unlike the gin circulating from hand to hand and mouth to mouth, and thus moving forward the straight line towards capture. Moreover Bresson shows Mouchette from behind at this point, as if she is acting clandestinely and escaping from the director’s gaze. She is humming an unidentifiable tune – neither the ‘Negro tune’ nor her schoolteacher’s cantata – that appears as the pure vocalization of the freedom she at least has in her gestures. Mouchette establishes in this way her own means of escape, carried along certainly by the movement of the chase, but at the same time asserting her independence, as one swayed by a different dynamic.
A small gap is thus opened up to divide the ‘literary’ fall of bodies into two lines that are sometimes entangled and sometimes separate. This line of escape – or line of virtuosity – is the one followed by the enjoyment of the dodgem-cars and the effectiveness of the song, but also the deft gesture with which Mouchette tosses over her shoulder into the woman’s basket, the croissant she has been given by the grocer who has just humiliated her. A line that will end in a suicide removed from the weight of destiny, re-appropriated like a game. In the novel, Mouchette’s suicide was anticipated by the old woman’s discourse and the dead woman’s dress she has passed onto the girl. The reader observed the idea of death growing imperiously, both in Mouchette’s mind and Bernanos’s prose, to propel the girl naturally into the pond. The film is different. Mouchette is playing the children’s game of rolling down a slope to the bottom. In the game she is obstructed by a small bush that prevents her body progressing towards the pond. So she attempts to roll fast enough to go over the bush without being stopped. At the third attempt her body will disappear. The heroine of the book, at the very end, felt life stealing away as her nostrils became filled by ‘the very odour of the tomb’.18 The film ends on a surface of water that is disturbed by a large splash, then returning quickly to stillness. The death/destiny emblematized in the pre-title sequence has become a child’s game: the game of art, one might be tempted to say.
But that would be pushing on a little fast. Between Mouchette’s second and third rolls down the slope, Bresson has inserted an episode drawn from the novel. Like the girl in the book, the film’s heroine is distracted by a sound: a horse and trap that in the film, set in modern times, becomes a tractor. Mouchette gives a furtive flap of her hand in the direction of its distant driver, a gesture that could just was well be an appeal for help or a casual greeting to an acquaintance. But above all, between the exit from the old woman’s house and the suicide, Bresson has inserted the invented episode I mentioned earlier – a massacre of rabbits by members of a hunt – that anticipates the ending in its way by strengthening the pervasive logic of the game-shoot which is about to lay hold of its quarry in definitive fashion.
Thus in the film, from start to finish, the two lines are in company and the two logics interlaced. Around the novel the film constructs not one but two cinematic plots. On the one hand, the director uses fragmentation of shots and strict determination of their function to deploy a hyper-narrative principle. He transforms the inertias and breaks of the literary narrative into a hunting story in which the staging procedures are exactly synchronized with the fictional data. In this way he takes literary sensoriality backwards to the old logic of representational sequences. The linearity of the hunting plot is strengthened by a logic in the sequencing of fragments governed by a strict principle of action and reaction. It is a relay-image logic in which nothing exceeds the sign.
But, on the other hand, the filmmaker’s ‘hunt’ builds another logic that inversely radicalizes the aesthetic power of the silent word. That logic boasts automatism, the equality of signifying elements that automatically reveals the ‘internal truth’ of ‘models’. But that ‘revelation’ is itself a decoy. What the construction of an automaton produces is much more a screen-image logic that gives the surface of the shot the internal density and the power to bifurcate sequences that fragmentation tended to remove from it. What the constraint imposed on the model produced is not subjection of its words and movements to the ‘language of images’. It is the power of a body constructing its own performance by setting itself at cross purposes with the ordering of that language. The ‘language of images’ is not a language. It is a compromise between divergent poetics, a complex interlacing of the functions of visual presentation, oral expression and narrative sequencing.
The filmmaker’s work blurs the dividing line between the relay-image logic and the screen-image logic. He leads them both to that still pond into which Mouchette and the film disappear together. What comes after literature is not the art or the language of pure images. Nor is it a return to the old representational order. Rather it is a double excess which pulls the literary datum backwards on one side and ahead of itself on the other. It is what I have suggested elsewhere might be called a logic of the contradicted fable.19
1 ‘Crayonné au théâtre’ in Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard, Paris, 1945, p. 300.
2 Maeterlinck, ‘Le tragique quotidien’ in Le Trésor des humbles, Brussels: Labor, 1998, p. 101. The documents on Edward Gordon Craig’s 1912 production of Hamlet in Moscow are held in the Craig bequest at the BNF (French National Library). Craig covers the same ground in ‘The Ghosts in the Tragedies of Shakespeare’, in On the Art of the Theatre, London: Heinemann, 1980, pp. 264–288.
3 See Robert Bresson, Notes sur le cinématographe, Paris: Folio/Gallimard, 1995, p. 135.
4 Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, Paris: Plon/Pocket, 1997, pp. 65 and 67.
5 André Bazin, ‘Le Journal d’un curé de campagne et la stylistique de Robert Bresson’, in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1997, p. 110.
6 George Bernanos, Mouchette, New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 7–8.
7 Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, (trans. Jonathan Griffin), New York: Urizen Books, p. 2.
8 Ibid., p. 46
9 Ibid., p. 6.
10 Ibid., p 22.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., p. 16.
13 Ibid., p. 15.
14 Ibid, p. 77.
15 Bernanos, Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, p. 129.
16 Ibid., p. 141.
17 Ibid., p. 59.
18 Ibid., p. 154.
19 Jacques Rancière, La Fable cinématographique, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2001.