![]() ![]() ![]() A small book of runic observations, composed for the most part over the decade of the 1950s, sets out a manifesto for the precise, elliptical style, defined by its uses of suppression and subtraction, that made Bresson famous: a director who admired Debussy for playing the piano with the lid down, an apt enough metaphor for his own restraint. To read Bresson’s Notes alongside his interviews gives the same experience, of an author who needs no signature. ![]() In his Notes on the Cinematograph, Bresson quotes a sentence spoken by Racine to his son Louis: ‘I know your handwriting well enough, without your having to sign your name.’ Of the thirteen feature films Bresson directed over a career of forty years, it could also be said that they require no signature or, rather, that their signature is embedded in each film already-an economical and anti-theatrical style identifiable by its syntax of faces, hands, isolated objects and empty spaces, shot starkly with a 50mm lens and cut to a rhythmic soundtrack stripped of musical accompaniment. ![]()
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