Robert Bresson is a filmmaker, director, most of whose films
are like a great deal when I have the patience
to watch them.
They're very slow.
He uses non-professional actors who he chooses as much as
anything else, I think, for their faces, which
almost always reflect a show, exude,
a sense of very intense and almost speechless inner life.
Some of his films are Diary of a Country Priest, Au Hasard
Balthazar?
There are people who, in the circumstances that they're,
in which are usually peasant circumstances,
are too sensitive for the worlds that they
live within, and oftentimes too inarticulate
to express their sensitivity.
And their lives, as you watch them on the screen,
are triumphs to everyone but themselves.
The two references to the priest and the young girl
in this poem, which is titled Homage to Robert Bresson
are two main characters in Diary of a Country Priest
and the film Mouchette, in which a young girl
at the end of the film commits suicide
by rolling down into a river.
Explained just the beginning of the poem,
his films are oftentimes--
he does something directors are not
supposed to do as I learned in the one film course
that I took before I dropped it because I
had to learn lighting.
He'll shoot a scene with no one in it.
Have someone walk into it, and then
walk out of it so that in a sense,
the dominant presence within the frame
is really the scene itself or the objects themselves
that are within it.
And it creates a strange sense of stillness and solitariness,
and intensity in the characters.
Spaces await their people.
An alabaster row of public urinals.
An empty theater.
A table, chairs, an oak door, heavily
grained, brass knob turning, and who shall enter,
already lost forever in their lives?
Now will a soul reveal its human face, secret luminous flesh,
and because the soul is speechless
there will be little talk, better
revealed in this single plate sat like a day-moon or lidless
before its chair.
Who sits shall eat, because it is
important to stay alive to bear the soul's countenance down
into the streets, their traffic, its endless movement.
Here, a young priest, shaken, prays
to give false solace to the dying.
A girl, too young, casually prepares to drown.
Why are these forsaken, too long in anguish?
Why does the tree bear leaves, the water bear downward
into the Earth?
This is the law, the rest, a commentary.
She takes off her clothes, folding them.
He enters a room.
Though nothing can be done, they are not resigned.