French director, sometimes called "a philosopher with a camera." Robert Bresson's central themes were religious. He produced thirteen features and one short film. Most of his films were adaptations of literary works from such writers as Diderot, Dostoevsky, Bernanos, and Tolstoy. The American director Paul Schrader has described Bresson as "the most important spiritual artist" and Jean Cocteau said, "Bresson is 'apart' in this terrible trade."

"My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water." (in Notes on Cinematography, 1975)

Robert Bresson was born at Bromont-Lamothe, the son of Léon Bresson, an army officer, and Marie-Élisabeth Bresson. Little is known of Bresson's early life and the year of his birth, 1901 or 1907 varies depending on the source. Following his death in 1999, obituaries in the press reported that he was born in 1901. His filmmaking career spanned forty years, from 1943 to 1983.

The family moved several times during Bresson's childhood. He was educated at Lycée Lakanal à Sceaux, Paris, where he excelled in Latin, Greek, and philosophy. After graduating Bresson turned to painting, but there is no record of him having partcipated in exhibitions. In 1926 he married Leidia van der Zee.

Bresson studied philosophy at university and was a photographer and painter before starting his career in the celluloid world. According to Jean Aurenche (La suite à l'écrain: Entretiens avec Anne et Alain Riou, 1993), Bresson worked as a cinematographer in commercial films between 1931 and 1934.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Bresson was employed as a photographer by Thomas et Gibbs and Coco Chanel, who provided him with a studio. Bresson took photos for Chanel catalogues. A perfectionist to the core, Bresson was slow to complete projects and eventually left his job due to overwhelming stress. Bresson has said that he smoke and drank a good deal of alcohol.

In the mid-1930s, he worked as a scriptwriter on comedies. Bresson's writer credits include C'Était un Musicien (1933), Les Jumeaux de Brighton (1936), and Courier Sud (1937), which was based on Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novel. He was also René Clair's assistant on the uncompleted Air Pur.

Les Affaires publiques (1934), Bresson's first film, was made to serve as a "filter" to precede the main feature. Its casting included the "girls" of the Folies Bergères, circus clowns, and comedians. The production was funded by Roland Penrose, a British patron and a member of the Surrealists. Long thought to be lost, the burlesque was found again in 1988.

At the beginning of World War II, Bresson was imprisoned by the Germans for over a year (1940-41). This experience gave material to his commercially most successful film, Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé (1956, A Man Escaped). Bresson's first feature, Les Anges du péché (1943), was made possible by the support of the former Surrealists Roland Tual, who produced it and Denise Tual, who signed on to star in it. The screenplay was written by Bresson, Father Raymond Leopold Bruckberger and Jean Giraudoux.

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945, The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne) was based on an episode in Denis Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste et son maître (written 1773). Jean Cocteau is credited for writing the dialogue. In the following films, Bresson did not hire another writer to work on the scrip, except for Procés de Jeanne d'Arc (1962). However, Pierre Champion's contribution is uncredited.

The story of revenge of a woman on her former lover was transposed into a modern period. It also had inspired D.W. Griffith's Lady of the Pavements (1928), one of the director's least successful films. Bresson's plot revolves around one line, Hélène's vengeful "Je me vengerai" (I'll have my revenge).
During the shooting of the film (May 1944 - February 1945), Bresson battled with Maria Casarès, who was cast  in the role of Hélène. A distinguished tragic actress, she was reluctant to act without any emotions, impassively.

Georges Charensol criticized Bresson's approach in his book Renaissance du cinéma français (1946) as "a cold debauchery" and "an intellectualism stripped of any reference to average humanity." (The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market by Colin Burnett, 2017, p. 111) Because of the poor critical and commercial reception, Les Dames brought financial ruin to its producer, Films Raoul Ploquin.   

In 1947, Bresson went to Rome to work on a screenplay of the life of St Ignatius Loyola, but the production was never realized. Many of Bresson's films employ Catholic imagery. Susan Sontag, among others, characterized his style as "spiritual;" Paul Schrader used the term "transcendeltal" – in general, Bresson's austere style was associated with Jansenism. The director himself said that he believed "in a spiritual domain" only through the concrete. "If that means being materialist, I think that's what I am more and more." (Rivette: Texts and Interviews, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum, 1977, p. 6) In an interview by the American director Paul Schrader he stated that he would "rather be a Jansenist than Jesuit." ('Robert Bresson, Possibly,' by Paul Schrader, in The Films of Robert Bresson, edited by Bert Cardullo, 2009, p. 158)  

André Bazin had a major role in turning Bresson's art into a cause célèbre. In his articles published in the journal L'écran français Bazin made the difference between the new avant-garde of Bresson and its dependence on narrative and the old avant-garde of Germaine Dulac and Hans Richter: "One must know how to distinguish between innovations whose commercial failures were accidentall and a matter of historical contingence from those that radically betray cinema's popular calling." (The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market by Colin Burnett, 2017, pp. 74-74)

Bresson's widely acclaimed films in the 1950s, Diary of a Country Priest (1950), adapted from Georges Bernanos's novel, A Man Escaped, and Pickpocket (1959), formed a trilogy, which dealt with the themes of transgression, redemption and grace. In Diary of a Country Priest Bresson used an introspective off-camera voice, taken verbatim from the priest's diary. The last words of the dying priest, played by a young Swiss actor, Claude Laydy, are "Tout est grâce" (everything is grace).

Before the shooting started, Laydy lived for the a time in a monastery. Generally Bresson avoided professional actors, and preferred the silence and inaccessibility of his characters. "To find a kinship between image, sound and silence," Bresson summed his dictum. (Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson, translated by Jonathan Griffin, 1986, p. 48) The film was shown at the twelfth annual Venice International Film Festival in 1951, but Kurosawa's Rashmon won the Grand Prize, Bresson was awarded the Golden Lion.

When the New Wave directors and theoreticians attacked the studio look of French films and stodgy adaptations of literary works, they also noted Bresson's opposition to mainstream cinema. In the spring of 1955, François Truffaut published an article, in which he denounced nearly the entire old guard of French film-makers, except nine real "auteurs": Alexandre Astruc, Jacques Becker, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Abel Gance, Roger Leenhardt, Max Ophüls, Jean Renoir, and Jacques Tati.

For A Man Escaped Bresson received the Best Director Award at Cannes Festival. Its story was based on an autobiographical account by André Devigny, a Frech Resistance member, who was arrested by the Gestapo but who managed to escape from the Montluc prison in Lyon. Devigny also served as a technical adviser; scenes were shot in his actual cell. Bresson focused on the meticulous planning of the escape, which becomes a metaphor for spiritual struggle. Mozart's Mass in C minor is played cathartically at the end of the film. The effective sound effects – especially the silence beneath the sound, the director's aesthetic trade mark – have a signification of their own.

By the time of making Pickpocked, Bresson was approaching 60; he had directed five films. This picture portrayed a young outsider, Michel, played by the Uruguayan non-professional actor Martin LaSalle. Michel finds his purpose in stealing: a theft is a spiritual ceremony performed by his hands. Michel's transgression is the theme of the film. At the end, put behind bars (his faith is obviously not something that the society can accept), the woman he loves kisses his hand. Bresson made LaSalle to repeat a scene over and over until he performed like a robot. "Your models, he wrote in Notes sur le Cinématographie (1975, Notes on the Cinematographer), referring to his actors, "will get used to gestures they have repeated twenty times. The words they have learned with their lips will find, without their minds taking part in this, the inflections and the lilt proper to their true natures. A way of recovering the automatism of real life." (Notes on the Cinematographer by Robert Bresson, translated by Jonathan Griffin, 1986, p. 59)

Procés de Jeanne d'Arc, which has thematic connections with Pickpocket, received in 1962 the Special Jury Prize at Cannes Festival. Joan was played by Florence Carrez. "Bresson has experimented with the limit of unexpressive. There is no acting at all; she simply reads the lines." (A Susan Sontag Reader, introduction by Elizabeth Hardwick, 1983, p. 128) The film was based on the minutes of Joan's last trial.

In the 1960s Bresson was involved in Dino de Laurentiis' project The Bible (1966) – his section would have been 'The Creation.' According to Bernardo Bertolucci, Bresson wanted that the actors speak only Hebrew and Aramaic and there would be no animals in Noah's ark. (Robert Bresson, luultavasti by Lauri Timonen, 2023, p. 44) The popular epic was eventually directed by John Huston. Au Hasard, Balthazar (1966) can be called a Gnostic work. Gnostics believe that the material world was created by an inferior, malign God, and is thus full of ignorance and cruelty. The central character of Balthazar is a donkey, whose suffering ends in death amid a flock of sheep.

Pessimism marked also Bresson's second Bernanos adaptation, Mouchette (1967), about a young girl who is raped. Eventually she decides to kill herself. Marvin Zeman has claimed in his essay 'The Suicide of Robert Bresson' (Cinema, Vol. 6, No. 3, Spring 1971), that during this period Bresson was obsessed with suicidal thoughts. 

Curiously, Bresson started to film in colour relatively late, from Une femme douce (1969) onward. It was adapted from Dostoevsky's short story 'A Gentle Creature' (1876). In the story a husband tries to understand the suicide of his wife – she has thrown herself off a balcony. Bresson's sympathies are on the woman's side.

Again, in Le Diable probablement (1977, The Devil Probably), the main character, a bipolar young man named Charles, commits suicide, although his friend, a heroin addict, pulls the trigger of the revolver, not once but twice. Bresson wrote the original screenplay. Some French newspapers suggested that he incited youths to suicide. Michel d'Ornado, minister of culture and environment, hastily announced that the film would be banned to those under eighteen, and then decided against the ban. Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971, Four Nights of a Dreamer) drew from Dostoevsky's 'White Nights' (1848), earlier adapted to the screen by Luchino Visconti in 1957.

Lancelot du lac (1974, Lancelot of the Lake) had been Bresson's pet project for decades. At one point, Jacques Tati toyed with the idea of financing it, which reputedly cost $1 million. Bresson's Camelot consisted of amateur actors, some tents, and an old castle wall. The knights were surrounded by metal from top to toe, which restricted their gestures. As a result, the rattle of armour was an essential part of the soundtrack. The painter Luc Simon (Lancelot) and Laure Condominas (Queen Guinevere), the daughter of the American poet, played the leading roles.

Furious because Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore and Marco Ferreri's Blow-Out, not his picture, had been chosen to represent France at the Cannes Festival in 1974, Bresson declared that the competition has sunk deep into mediocrity and error. Upon being offered the International Critics' Prize, he turned it down with the remark: "I don't want prestige, I want money and only the Palme d'Or attracts money." (Robert Bresson by Keith Reader, 2000, p. 116)

Bresson's aphoristic, 138-page Notes sur le Cinématographie, published by Gallimard, was a collection of his ideas on filmmaking. Some notes were written between 1950 and 1958, before the emergence of the "French New Wave" in cinema.  "My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper," Bresson stated, "is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water." (Notes on Cinematography, translated by Jonathan Griffin, 1977)

Bresson had a town house in Paris on the Ile Saint-Louis, but he spent also much time in his country home in Eure-et-Loir near Chartres. In 1968 Bresson was elected President d'honneur de la Societé des realisateurs de films. At the 1983 Cannes Festival, he shared with Tarkovsky's Nostalgia the Grand Prix de Création for L'Argent, loosely based Leo Tolstoy's novella 'The Forged Coupon' (1904).

It was the director's final work, and as with his other projects, Bresson had had financial difficulties. With the help of the Minister of Culture Jack Lang the film was saved. However, gossips surrounded the production because Lang's daughter Caroline Lang acted in the principal female role. At Cannes Bresson's picture divided the audience and critics. The British director Alan Parker (1944-2020) dismissed it as "the work of an old man. It's unbearably boring." (Chronicle of the Cinema, editor in chief, Robyn Karney, 1995, p. 730)

Robert Bresson died on December 18, 1999. He was buried privately. Numerous obituaries were published all around the world. Paul Schrader, a great admirer of the French director, lamented: "Bresson has seemed like God himself, distant, beyond communication. Now, like God, Bresson is dead." (The Bressonians: French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship by Codruţa Morari, 2017, p. 23) Bresson was married twice. In the early 1990s, he married Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch, who had been his assistant director from Quatre nuits d'un rêveur.

Bresson has deeply influenced among others the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, who shares Bresson's plain, unadorned manner and his principle of essentialism or minimalism – basically a reaction against theatricality and "dramatical" acting. The dialogue is subdued, reflecting the calculated minimalism of the script. One can find much deadpan humor in Kaurismäki's dialogue.

Bresson made a distinction between the concepts of cinema, which employs methods of theatre (actors, directors, etc.), and for him the artistically more important cinematography, in which the camera is used to create. "Cinematography: a new way of writing, therefore of feeling," Bresson summarized.  (Notes on Cinematography, translated by Jonathan Griffin, 1977)

From Diary of a Country Priest, Bresson started to rely on unknown or non-professional actors and natural locations. Bresson called his actors as "models" and like dummies in a shop window, he wanted them to express as little as possible. But he did not go as far as Alfred Hitchcock, who said, that "all actors should be treated like cattle." Dominique Sanda, a former Vogue model, become a real star after her appearance in Une femme douce.

For further reading: Robert Bresson, luultavasti by Lauri Timonen (2023); Believing in Film: Christianity and Classic European Cinema by Mark Le Fanu (2019); The Bressonians: French Cinema and the Culture of Authorship by Codruţa Morari (2017); The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market by Colin Burnett (2017); Robert Bresson (Revised) by James Quandt (2012); Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics by Brian Price (2011); Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film by Tony Pipolo (2010); The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook, edited by Bert Cardullo (2009); Bresson and Others: Spiritual Style in the Cinema, edited by Bert Cardullo (2009); Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film by Joseph E. Cunneen (2003); Robert Bresson by Keith Reader (2000); Robert Bresson, ed. by James Quandt (1998); Fragments: Bresson's Film Style by Lindley Hanlon (1986); Robert Bresson by Philippe Arnaud (1986); Robert Bresson: la passion de cinématographe by Michel Estève (1983); Robert Bresson: A Guide to References and Resources by Jane Sloan (1983); 'Desperation and Meditation' by Dudley Andrew, in Modern European Fimmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. by Andrew S. Horton and Joan Magretta (1981); Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer by Paul Schrader (1972); 'The Suicide of Robert Bresson' by Marvin Zeman, in Cinema, Vol. 6/3 (1971); The Films of Robert Bresson, ed. by Ian Cameron (1969); 'Interview with Jean-Luc Godard and M. Delahaye,' in Cahiers du Cinema in English, February (1967); 'Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson' by Susan Sontag, in Seventh Art, Summer (1964)

Films and non-fiction:

• C'était un musicien, 1933 (dialogue; dir. Maurice Gleize, Frederic Zelnik)
• Les Affaires publiques, 1934 (short film; starring Beby, Andrée Servilanges and Marcel Dalio)
• Les jumeaux de Brighton, 1936 (screenplay, with Georges Friedlad; dir. Claude Heyman, starring Raimu, Suzy Prim and Michel Simon)
• Les Anges du péché / The Angels of Sin / Synnin enkelit , 1943 (starring Renée Faure, Jany Holt and Sylvie)
• Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne / The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne / Naisen kosto, 1945 (based on Diderot's Jacques Le Fataliste; starring Paul Bernard, María Casares and Elina Labourdette)
• Journal d'un curé de campagne / Diary of a Country Priest / Papin päiväkirja, 1950 (from the novel by Georges Bernanos; starring Claude Laydu, Nicole Ladmiral and Jean Riveyre)
• Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé / A Man Escaped / Kuolemaantuomittu on karannut, 1956 (starring François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche and Maurice Beerblock)
• Pickpocket / Pickpocket / Liikkuvat kädet, 1959 (inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; starring Martin LaSalle, Marika Green and Jean Pélégri)
• Procès de Jeanne d'Arc / The Trial of Joan of Arc / Jeanne d'Arc, 1962 (starring Florence Delay, Jean-Claude Fourneau and Roger Honorat)
• Au Hasard, Balthazar / Balthazar / Balthazar, 1966 (starring Anne Wiazemsky, Walter Green and François Lafarge)
• Mouchette / Mouchette / Mouchette - raiskattu, 1967 (from the novel by Georges Bernanos; starring Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert and Marie Cardinal)
• Une Femme douce / A Gentle Creature / Suloinen nainen, 1969  (based on Dostoevsky's story A Gentle Creature; starring Dominique Sanda, Guy Frangin and Jeanne Lobre)
• Quatre nuits d'un rêveur / Four Nights of a Dreamer / Neljä yötä Pariisissa, 1971 (based on Dostoevsky's White Nights; starring Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forêts and Maurice Monnoyer)
• Lancelot du lac / Lancelot of the Lake / Pyöreän pöydän ritarit, 1974  (based on Arthurian legends; starring Luc Simon, Laura Duke Condominas and Humbert Balsan)
• Notes sur le Cinématographie, 1975 (non-fiction) - Notes on Cinematography (translated by Jonathan Griffin, 1977) / Notes on the Cinematographer (translated by Jonathan Griffin, with an introduction by J. M. G. Le Clezio, 1986)
• Le Diable probablement / The Devil Probably / Paholainen luultavasti, 1977 (starring Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari and Henri de Maublanc)
• L'Argent / Money / L'argent - raha, 1983 (loosely based on Leo Tolstoy's story The False Note / The Forged Coupon; starring Christian Patey, Sylvie Van den Elsen and Michel Briguet)
• Procès de Jeanne d'Arc, 2002 (Scénario du cinéma; Mercure de France)
  
• Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983, 2016 (non-fiction) (edited by Myléne Bresson; translated by Anna Moschovakis)