My favorite excerpts from “Notes on Cinematography” by Robert Bresson
By: Solar Stone
Tags: Cinema, Robert Bresson, Cinematography

Master precision. Be a precision instrument myself.

Metteur-en-scene, director. The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.

An actor in cinematography might as well be in a foreign country. He does not speak its language.

Nothing rings more false in a film than that natural tone of the theater copying life and traced over studied sentiments.

Respect man’s nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.

Cinematographic film, where expression is obtained by relations of images and of sounds, and not by a mimicry done with gestures and intonations of voice (whether actors’ or non-actors’). One that does not analyze or explain. That recomposes.

An image must be transformed by contact with other images, as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theater, nor the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting. (What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theater, the novel, painting capture with theirs.)

Cinematographic film, where the images, like the words in a dictionary, have no power and value except through their position and relation.

An image must be transformed by contact with other images, as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without transformation.

The ejaculatory force of the eye.

Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks. (The reason why we get the color of a person’s eyes wrong?)

“Visible parlance” of bodies, objects, houses, roads, trees, fields.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

Counter the high relief of theater with the smoothness of cinematography.

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

The mixture of true and false yields falsity (photographed theater or CINEMA). The false when it is homogeneous can yield truth (theater).

In a mixture of true and false, the true brings out the false, the false hinders belief in the true. An actor simulating fear of shipwreck on the deck of a real ship battered by a real storm — we believe neither in the actor, nor in the ship nor in the storm.

You shall call a fine film the one that makes you think highly of cinematography.

Models who have become automatic (everything weighed, measured, timed, repeated ten, twenty times) and are then dropped in the middle of the events of your film — their relations with the objects and persons around them will be right, because they will not be thought.

CINEMA draws on a common fund. The cinematographer is making a voyage of discovery on an unknown planet.

In * * a film that smacks of the theater, this great English actor keeps fluffing to make us believe that he is inventing his lines as he goes along. His efforts to render himself more alive do just the opposite.

A too-expected image (cliche) will never seem right, even if it is.

It would not be ridiculous to say to your models: “I am inventing you as you are.”

Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.

CINEMA seeks immediate and definitive expression through mimicry, gestures, intonations of voice. This system inevitably excludes expression through contacts and exchanges of images and of sounds and the transformations that result from them.

Impossible to express something strongly by the coupled resources of two arts. It is all the one or all the other.

Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis, or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of. To attain that “heart of the heart” which does not let itself be caught either by poetry, or by philosophy or by drama.

Images and sounds like people who make acquaintance on a journey and afterwards cannot separate.

To be as intended, CINEMA films can only use actors, cinematography films models only.

Music takes up all the room and gives no increased value to the image to which it is added.

Generality of music which does not correspond to a film’s generality. Exaltation that hinders the other exaltations.

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

The actor: “It’s not me you are seeing and hearing, it’s the other man.” But being unable to be wholly the other, he is not that other.

CINEMA films controlled by intelligence, going no further.

Retouching the real with the real.

The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sounds and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition.

An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

A sound must never come to the help of an image, nor an image to the help of a sound.

If a sound is the obligatory complement of an image, give preponderance either to the sound, or to the image. If equal, they damage or kill each other, as we say of colors.

The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art’s form.

There is nothing to expect from a CINEMA anchored in the theater.

From the beings and things of nature, washed clean of all art and especially of the art of drama, you will make an art.

Music. It isolates your film from the life of your film (musical delectation). It is a powerful modifier and even destroyer of the real, like alcohol or dope.

The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a certain march of non-dramatic elements.

It is not a matter of acting “simple” or of acting “inward” but of not acting at all.

Model. You will pin down his image intact, not deformed by his intelligence, nor by yours.

What our eyes and ears require is not the realistic persona but the real person.

Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.

Your film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable that they will emanate.

Is it for singing always the same song that the nightingale is so admired?

Be precise in the form, not always in the substance (if you can).

Ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas. Go to the persons and objects directly.