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Robert Bresson is a filmmaker,
director, most of whose films

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are like a great deal
when I have the patience

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to watch them.

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They're very slow.

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He uses non-professional actors
who he chooses as much as

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anything else, I think,
for their faces, which

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almost always reflect
a show, exude,

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a sense of very intense and
almost speechless inner life.

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Some of his films are Diary
of a Country Priest, Au Hasard

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Balthazar?

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There are people who, in the
circumstances that they're,

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in which are usually
peasant circumstances,

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are too sensitive for
the worlds that they

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live within, and
oftentimes too inarticulate

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to express their sensitivity.

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And their lives, as you
watch them on the screen,

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are triumphs to
everyone but themselves.

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The two references to the
priest and the young girl

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in this poem, which is titled
Homage to Robert Bresson

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are two main characters in
Diary of a Country Priest

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and the film Mouchette,
in which a young girl

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at the end of the
film commits suicide

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by rolling down into a river.

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Explained just the
beginning of the poem,

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his films are oftentimes--

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he does something
directors are not

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supposed to do as I learned
in the one film course

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that I took before I
dropped it because I

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had to learn lighting.

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He'll shoot a scene
with no one in it.

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Have someone walk
into it, and then

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walk out of it so
that in a sense,

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the dominant presence
within the frame

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is really the scene itself
or the objects themselves

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that are within it.

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And it creates a strange sense
of stillness and solitariness,

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and intensity in the characters.

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Spaces await their people.

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An alabaster row
of public urinals.

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An empty theater.

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A table, chairs, an
oak door, heavily

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grained, brass knob turning,
and who shall enter,

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already lost forever
in their lives?

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Now will a soul reveal its human
face, secret luminous flesh,

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and because the
soul is speechless

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there will be
little talk, better

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revealed in this single plate
sat like a day-moon or lidless

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before its chair.

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Who sits shall
eat, because it is

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important to stay alive to bear
the soul's countenance down

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into the streets, their
traffic, its endless movement.

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Here, a young
priest, shaken, prays

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to give false
solace to the dying.

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A girl, too young,
casually prepares to drown.

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Why are these forsaken,
too long in anguish?

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Why does the tree bear leaves,
the water bear downward

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into the Earth?

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This is the law, the
rest, a commentary.

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She takes off her
clothes, folding them.

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He enters a room.

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Though nothing can be done,
they are not resigned.

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