Bresson x 2:
on some motifs in Une femme douce (1969) and Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971)
on some motifs in Une femme douce (1969) and Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (1971)
The evident similarities and discernible differences between their credit sequences immediately invite us to read these two films together, comparatively. This post will look mainly at the topography of each, but in appendix are presented several other areas where it is clear that the second film is positioning itself in relation to the first (art, bodies, books, cars, clothing, colours, forms and patterns, mises-en-abyme, music...).
mapping Une femme douce
The credits of Une femme douce play over a sequence of three shots of Paris by night: the first starts on the Rue de la Pépinière, just before the Gare Saint Lazare, tracking forward past the station (without showing it) and on to the Rue Saint Lazare; the second shot continues along the Rue Saint Lazare, and the third starts on the Boulevard des Capucines by the Grand Café and stops after passing the Paramount cinema (now the Gaumont Opéra).
This sequence has very little in common with the rest of the film. There aren't any other tracking shots of this kind and locations are not revisited - when the couple go to the cinema it is not to the one shown here but the Paramount Elysées, on the Rue du Colisée, 8e:
This sequence has very little in common with the rest of the film. There aren't any other tracking shots of this kind and locations are not revisited - when the couple go to the cinema it is not to the one shown here but the Paramount Elysées, on the Rue du Colisée, 8e:
The other night-time exteriors are of the street outside their home:
And a street near the Bois de Boulogne where the husband finds his wife in another man's car:
All other exteriors are day-time.
Luc meets the woman outside the Centre Jean Sarrailh, a facility for University of Paris students near Port Royal, 5e, previously seen in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est finie (1966):
Luc meets the woman outside the Centre Jean Sarrailh, a facility for University of Paris students near Port Royal, 5e, previously seen in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est finie (1966):
He takes her to the Zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, also in the 5e:
They return to the Jardin des Plantes after they are married to visit the collection of skeletons in the paleontology section of the museum. They visit two other museums, the Louvre (1e), seen only from inside, and the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Avenue de New York (16e):
Suspicious that she has gone somewhere with a man, Luc looks for her in the Brasserie Lipp, the La Hune bookshop and the Deux Magots café, all on the Boulevard Saint Germain, 6e:
Luc goes to the Rue du Faubourg Saint Antoine to buy a bed, and to the Avenue des Champs Elysées to buy travel tickets:
Alongside all of these labelled or recognisable places are a few presented as anonymous, such as where she lived before marrying Luc:
An excursion takes them via a motorway to an anonymous patch of countryside:
The principal location of the film is of course the building in which is Luc's shop and their apartment. The exterior of the building is shown and there are views across the street:
In an interview Bresson had strongly implied that he had used a shop on the Rue de Rome, near the Gare Saint Lazare. This idea is supported by the scene where Luc leaves the apartment and is then on the place de l'Europe, overlooking the railway lines going into Saint Lazare:
But the shop and apartment are in fact are nowhere near the Rue de Rome. They are not even in Paris.
Here follows a digression about how I found the location.
I spent a great deal of time looking for it, chiefly following the clue of the blue buses that go past the shop - I had thought that all buses in Paris were green:
I spent a great deal of time looking for it, chiefly following the clue of the blue buses that go past the shop - I had thought that all buses in Paris were green:
The history of Paris buses is very well-documented on the Internet - I am indebted to the website of the AMTUIR, l'Association pour le musée des transports urbains, interurbains et ruraux', especially this page. Between 1960 and 1964 there was a scheme to alleviate traffic in Paris using smaller-sized blue buses, the 'petits bleus'. The scheme was abandoned and the blue buses were transferred to the bus routes 46 and 82. I followed closely the itinerary of those buses in the hope of finding the shop, but with no luck. It then struck me that the bus does not look particularly small, and I compared it with photographs of the small blue buses:
The headlamps didn't match, so I didn't think the blue bus in Une femme douce coud be a 'petit bleu'. For confirmation, I consulted that greatest of all film research tools, the Internet Movie Cars Database:
The specialists here had determined that the bus was in fact a 1950s Renault. A certain 'sixcyl' added the information that this blue bus was in service in Versailles, but it was 'fsebus' who supplied the information I had been really looking for: 'La scéne est prise rue des Réservoirs, entre la rue de la Paroisse et le Bd de la Reine. Dans ce cas, c'est un bus de la ligne B, vers le Chesnay.'
The exact address is 19 Rue des Réservoirs, Versailles. There is an inscription on the building commemorating the birth there in 1805 of the canal-builder Ferdinand de Lesseps.
When Luc goes looking for her on the Boulevard Saint Germain, the implication is that she hasn't gone far from their home, so the location in Versailles is passing for somewhere in Paris's 6th arrondissement.
A 2001 article by Philippe Azoury mentions that the apartment used for the film was that of Swiss artist Olivier Mosset, at 31 Rue de l'Echaudé, 6e. From the little we see of the apartment's balcony railings, I'd say they don't match those of the building above, so a hybrid of interior and exterior seems entirely feasible.
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The narrative topography of Une femme douce is loosely centred on the fifth and sixth arrondissements, but overall the film is somewhat detached from a sense of place. This contrasts strikingly with Quatre nuits d'un rêveur, fixedly centred on one central Paris location:
mapping Quatre nuits d'un rêveur
The opening shot of Quatre nuits invites us to read closely the topography of the film to come. The map suggests some of the options available to the hitchhiker, but when a driver asks him where he is going he simply gestures as if he doesn't know or care:
This rural preamble contrasts with the rest of the film, fixed almost entirely in the centre of Paris, though central Paris is also contrasted with the city's edge, where Jacques was hitchhiking. Saint Cloud, a suburb west of Paris, was undergoing radical transformation at the time of filming. Looking in one direction, at the bridge over the Seine between Saint Cloud and Boulogne, we see cranes and scaffolded old buildings about to be demolished:
In the other direction is a set of new buildings under construction, the Bureaux de la Colline de Saint Cloud:
The flyover carrying the Autoroute de Normandie, the A13, had not yet been built:
Though this kind of transformation was happening within Paris itself at the time, what we see of Paris in the rest of the film is mostly the old, unchanging city, centred on the paradoxically named oldest bridge over the Seine, the Pont-Neuf:
The first encounter of Jacques and Marthe on the bridge comes after Jacques is dropped off on the Boulevard Saint Germain, near the Drugstore:
From the bridge they head north, as Jacques accompanies Marthe to her door. This then sets up each as located on a different rive of the Seine. For Jacques, when his story is told, his rive gauchisme is made explicit:
When Marthe starts to tell her story she gives no address because (she says) Jacques already knows it, though for us the film provides too few clues to locate it easily. On the way to her home she passes a pharmacy with a street name visible but illegible, and the entrance to her building is not shown in enough detail. There is one view from a window in her apartment that doesn't help identify the location: |
That pharmacy is at the junction of the Rue de Longchamp and the Rue de la Faisanderie, 16e, and I think the entrance to her apartment building is very close to that. This makes the topographical opposition of Marthe and Jacques one of types of district, rather than just a Right Bank/Left Bank opposition. I got the hint to go looking in the 16th for the pharmacy from Jean-Pierre Oudart's topographically inflected critique of the film's ideological premises and projections. It's true that Oudart had conflated rather than distinguished the terms of this topographical opposition ('un milieu intellectuel 6e-16e arrondissements'), as an effect of the 'exteriorisation of the plot "in" a social outside that is contemporary with the filmmaker and the spectator and connoted as privileged site of the ideological contradictions exposed by the fiction':
Overall, Jacques's story is presented through a more easily readable topography than Marthe's. When he arrives at or leaves his flat we see the vicinity of the Rue Antoine Dubois very clearly, whereas when Marthe returns home the vicinity is dark and out of focus. Jacques tells how he fixated on women in the street, and the illustration of these instances is loaded with topographical detail. Here he is on the Boulevard Saint Germain, firstly looking into a boutique at no. 167 and then another at no. 197:
This is his territory. In his last meeting with her, Jacques buys Marthe an Orangina at the tabac above, just before buying her a red scarf at the Drugstore, which is where we first saw him in Paris at the beginning of the film:
Jacques isn't confined to the Left Bank: his fixations on women take him outside of his home ground. Here I think he is in a banlieue west of Paris - the green poster is for a production of Pirandello's Tonight We Improvise at the Théâtre de l'Ouest Parisien, in Boulogne-Billancourt:
In this instance he is in the 16e arrondissement, in front of a 1950s apartment building on the Avenue Paul Doumer:
Here, even before he has met her, he is in Marthe's territory. He returns to the vicinity when he walks her home from the Pont-Neuf (if her building is indeed near the pharmacy on the Rue de la Faisanderie), and again when he agrees to her request that he take a letter to friends of her former lover, who could then pass it on to him. If for Jacques to render this service is distressing, since he is himself in love with Marthe, for us the experience is disorienting. The address on the letter he is to deliver is just about legible - 99 Rue Spontini, 16e:
The first thing we see of his journey is a 22 bus, destination Porte de Saint Cloud, passing the Mayfair Cinéma at 90 Avenue Paul Doumer:
We then have several shots of him on the bus, with glimpses of unlocalisably blurred background through the windows:
At the end of which he gets off the bus at Trocadéro:
Trocadéro is a stop on the 22 bus route:
But the bus we saw earlier passed Trocadéro before getting onto the Avenue Paul Doumer, so Jacques has somehow gone backwards in his journey. In the shot following his getting off the bus he walks past a high-class grocery shop, turns a corner, checks the address on the envelope (i.e. 99 Rue Spontini) and looks up at the number above a door:
The shop he passes is a branch of Hédiard, at 70 Avenue Paul Doumer, so back westwards along the bus route. The shop's red canopy can be seen to the right in the opening of the shot showing the bus on this street (right).
However, the doorway round the corner from the shop is a number 18, not 14, so the film has, across the cut, gone to some other doorway. |
A following shot shows him coming into the building, through a door that does not match the one next to the shop on Avenue Paul Doumer. Whether it corresponds to the building numbered 14 I can only know when I find the door.
Either by coincidence or design, we can see beyond the door through which Jacques enters that there is a red car parked on the street, and in the shot showing the shop (which is not next to this door) there is a red car parked on the street:
Either by coincidence or design, we can see beyond the door through which Jacques enters that there is a red car parked on the street, and in the shot showing the shop (which is not next to this door) there is a red car parked on the street:
I don't see Bresson being fussed about that kind of matching, especially when he is here confecting an imaginary seiziémiste site out of disparate parts, so I think it is a coincidence.
The number 14 is clearly not the number 99 on the envelope; this numerical disparity is a correlative signifier of the disorientation Jacques experiences when fixated on a woman. We continue to share in that disorientation when Jacques returns to this place ten minutes later in the film. On leaving he is in the next shot on the Rue de Passy at La Muette, still on the 22 bus route but a stop on from where he has just been:
Of course in the ellipsis across the cut he can simply have walked that distance, but the sense that he is disoriented is intensified across the next cut, when the object of his gaze is shown to be a shop door with emblazoned on it the name Marthe:
This is not, I think, a real shop called Marthe but a further Bressonian confection related to Jacques's fixation, matched four shots later when from the Pont des Arts he sees a passing barge bearing the same name:
We were prepared for this intensification when, on the bus, he played back his tape recording of himself saying 'Marthe., Marthe...'.
When he sees the barge he is back on home ground, and the film's topography is once more clearly defined and coherent - preceding shots show him walking past the rive gauche booksellers and a sign saying Quai de Conti. |
However, the barge of his delusion suggests that he may no longer be at ease, topographically. From the Pont des Arts he goes (I think) to the gardens behind Notre Dame - on the Ile de la Cité, neither rive droite nor rive gauche - and sits alone amid couples embracing, before getting out his microphone to record the sound of pigeons:
The last of the four nights begins, like the others, on the Pont Neuf, with Marthe's eventual declaration of love for Jacques seeming to dispel his anxiety. From the bridge their itinerary is logical, along the Quai de Conti down the Rue Dauphine, then to the tabac at 169 Boulevard Saint-Germain, then back to the Drugstore at no. 149:
Both Jacques and Marthe can be read in relation to the places they occupy, and that can also be said of Marthe's unnamed lover. Whereas Jacques wanders around Paris in pursuit of women, or goes on topographically unfeasible journeys at Marthe's behest, a woman (i.e. Marthe) comes to the lodger-lover from no further than the room next door. At most, he has to run up and down the stairs of the building when she is in the lift and doesn't respond when he asks her out:
The night he is to leave for the U.S., he says goodbye to Marthe on the Pont-Neuf, promising to be there again exactly a year later, effectively imposing on her, and so by extension Jacques, a fixation on a single specific place, whereas he becomes defined as being anywhere but there. His departure from that Orly is rendered in just two shots, one of luggage on a travelator, the other of a man's legs on an escalator:
The non-place Orly is reduced to these minimal, somewhat derisory instances of its function as travel hub. Place is present only in the names of destinations (Grenoble, Nice). For instances of Orly as cine-architectural spectacle, see the final section of the post here.
Not counting the 'Rue Spontini' address where Jacques takes a letter from Marthe so that it can be passed to him, the lover is associated with two other places in the film, though his association with the first is only tangential. He gives to Marthe and her mother an invitation to a gala performance of a fictitious film, Amour tu nous tiens:
The screening is supposed to be at 'Le Méliès, Champs Elysées'. There was no cinema of that name on the Champs Elysées. (The closest thing would be the Royal-Haussmann-Méliès, Rue Chauchat.)
The last place with which the lodger-lover is associated is where he finally meets Marthe again - not at the agreed place, the Pont-Neuf, nor at Marthe's home, where he might reasonably be expected to seek her out, but by chance on the Boulevard Saint Germain:
Jacques has brought Marthe here, onto his territory, only to lose her to his rival. The end of this shot, showing the crowd beyond which Marthe and her lover have disappeared, brings to an end the film's topographical deployments:
(For some of the discussion below I am indebted to the research of Luíza Beatriz Alvim - for details see the list references at the end of this post.)
mises-en-abyme x2
Both Une femme douce and Quatre nuits d'un rêveur feature scenes at the cinema, readable as mises-en-abyme of Bresson's own practice as filmmaker. In the first the woman and Luc see a real film, Michel Deville's Benjamin ou les mémoires d'un puceau (1968). In an interview Bresson explained this choice: 'With Benjamin, it was about showing the projection of a film - any film - in a cinema. My producers, Parc Film and Paramount, were also the producers of Benjamin. That made things easier. The libertinism of Benjamin wasn’t unrelated to the sensuality in A Gentle Woman.' The two films share producer Mag Bodard, cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet and composer Jean Wiener - and all three had worked on Bresson's films Mouchette and Au hasard Balthazar.
We see the exterior of the cinema, the Paramount Elysées, the foyer and the auditorium:
In the foyer there is a notice of the film actually playing at this cinema at this time, Barbarella, with Jane Fonda. However incongruous is the appearance in Bresson's film of Deville's Benjamin, the impact of an extract from Roger Vadim's Barbarella would have been something else entirely.
The cinema scene in Quatre nuits, as I have said, is set in a non-existent cinema called Le Méliès, represented only by fragments of interior (of a real cinema interior, I would say):
This un-Bressonian place is called 'Le Méliès' perhaps because it is a place of ridiculous confection. The sequence includes the film-within-the-film, a derisory parody of a shootout between gangsters, but before that we see what I think is the strangest shot in any Bresson film. A dragoon in the cinema foyer is photographed by paparazzi as he looks first to his right, then left, then right and left again:
Amour tu nous tiens shows Patrick Jouané (a regular actor for Guy Gilles) as the gangster killed in a shootout. The film comes across as ridiculous, at least when framed by its Bressonian antithesis, but it has points in common with moments of Une femme douce.
The fake blood on the floor in Amour tu nous tiens recalls the fake blood on the pavement in Une femme douce:
The gun that kills the gangster recalls the gun the woman points at her husband:
The wound on Patrick Jouané's forehead is similar to the wound on Dominique Sanda's forehead:
Most tellingly, perhaps, as he is dying the gangster holds up a photograph of a woman, and she has on her forehead a blood stain that matches his wound and, hence, recalls the wound of the woman in Une femme douce:
The woman in Une femme douce is often seen with books:
Four of these are presented in more detail:
I don't know what the anatomy book is; the art book is Cichy Bodo's Les Chefs d'oeuvre du nu: cent beautés féminines chantées par la couleur (1958); the passage from Hamlet is in Yves Bonnefoy's 1962 translation; she reads aloud from Stuart Smith's A l'étude des oiseaux (1953).
Similarly, some of the books in Quatre nuits are identifiable, some are not:
When, on the first night, Marthe is preparing to commit suicide, she places her shoes next to a copy of Robert Sabatier's novel La Mort du Figuier (1962). In the first shot of the last sequence of the film, we see by Jacques's bed a copy of Picasso's 1944 play Le Désir attrapé par la queue:
music
The woman in Une femme douce plays records, switching from specially composed quasi-jazz music by Jean Wiener to classical pieces (Mozart and Purcell):
These switches are oddly disjointed and suggest a disjunction between the character and the music that accompanies her. The reverse could be said of Marthe in Quatre nuits. In a pivotal scene she turns on the radio and, as evocative music plays she examines her nakedness in the mirror, in almost dance-like fashion. That the music is played by the same ensemble heard and seen later in the film reinforces a sense of harmony between her character and the dominant music on the soundtrack:
This very beautiful music is performed by Brazilian-Angolan group Batuki. See the articles by Luíza Beatriz Alvim for more on the musical intertextualities of Bresson's films.
art
The figurative artworks in Une femme douce are chiefly nudes from a book (two by Manet and one by Puvis de Chavannes), a Watteau in the Louvre and an unidentified depiction of Eros and Psyche in the apartment. The abstract artworks are on display in the Musée National d'Art Moderne - a kinetic work by Nicolas Schöffer, one canvas by Georges Mathieu and three by Alfred Manessier:
Almost all of the artworks in Quatre nuits are figurative paintings, either finished or being worked on, by Jacques. All appear to represent women, all of whom are clothed:
Another artist calls on Jacques and argues for an art without figuration, showing him photographs of work by him (right). In his excellent book on Late Bresson and the Visual Arts (Amsterdam University Press 2018), Raymond Watkins argues that a blue-painted door evokes the work of Yves Klein. I'm not convinced that this is IKB, but I do think that the film's patches of colour and monochrome surfaces relate to the forms of art:
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clothing
The apartment in Une femme douce is full of varicoloured and patterned objects:
In contrast the man and the woman generally wear plain clothes with a limited range of shades:
The exceptions are the woman's kimono-like robe and the patterns on her blouse and shawl:
The bird motif on the robe connects to the skeletons of birds seen at the natural history museum and to the ornithological book from which she reads extracts:
In Quatre nuits, the colour-range of Jacques's apparel is even more limited:
This constrasts with the clothes that Jacques stares at in a boutique window, and with what is worn by most of the women who attract his attention:
It certainly contrasts with the range of colours and patterns favoured by Marthe:
An item of clothing connects the women in the two films. The shawl the woman in Une femme douce puts over her shoulders before falling to her death becomes, in the two shots that watch the shawl falling, a metonym for her suicide:
The scarf that Jacques buys Marthe in the Drugstore becomes a sign of finality when she disappears into the crowd with her lover and the last that Jacques sees of her is the red of the scarf:
I fully concur with Watkins's reading, and would add, taking up his emphasis on 'design and pattern', that the presence in Bresson's film of Schöffer's pattern-producing kinetico-chromatic apparatus is a challenge to the film itself as producer of cinematic patterns - remembering that this is Bresson's first film in colour. The film cannot genuinely compete with the spectacular visuality of Schöffer's work, and the rare moments where something analogous appears on screen, something colourful and animated, it looks a poor substitute:
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The colours of Une femme douce, when it is not looking at neon signs, traffic lights or kinetic art, are unremarkable, sometimes close to insipid:
There are recurring patterns in Une femme douce, at least two: a fixation on frames (windows, doorways, display cases):
and a heavily symbolic set of grids or grills:
In Quatre nuits d'un rêveur Bresson seems to take up the challenge set by Schöffer's Lux 1 and seek out combinations of the illuminated, the chromatic and the kinetic in the world registered by the camera, starting with the abstract patterns created by the out-of-focus lights in the credit sequence. The most obvious iteration of this motif are the changing traffic lights, but all of the night-time lights of the film come to seem drawn from this opening confection, even the moon:
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The moon, however, marks the end of the affair, since just at the moment when Jacques enjoins Marthe to look up, she leaves him for another man: its size and whiteness is a negation of those colours.
The coloured circles of the night are matched by the paintpots arranged around the canvas in Jacques studio, and by the patches of colour he puts onto the canvas. These too have their negation, the black circles made by the abstract artist:
The coloured circles of the night are matched by the paintpots arranged around the canvas in Jacques studio, and by the patches of colour he puts onto the canvas. These too have their negation, the black circles made by the abstract artist:
From the shots above it might seem that primary colours are the scheme deployed in the film, but the range overall is broader and more nuanced. For example, the successive colours when the traffic light changes are not primary but red, ochre and green. In the last shot of the film Jacques is in his studio between two ongoing paintings: one of them is red, blue and yellow but the other, the one he is working on as the film fades to black, is green and red on a white background. Premonitorily, even if logically, green, red and white are the paints on Jacques's hand when at the beginning of the film it is examined by Marthe:
Preceding this return to the studio, the final exterior sequences contrast shots dominated by red and blue and shots dominated by variations on yellow-ochre-orange, as in this shot-countershot exchange:
We get a clear idea of the schemes if we isolate the occurrences:
In these shots the two schemes are contrasted, but in others they are combined. The variations are not all systematic but they are organised, as the choice of passing extras dressed in these colours makes clear.
Among these instances of chromatic schemes there is an insert that foregrounds the practical a well as pictorial considerations determining colour choice. A street artist has chalked onto the pavement a purple circle, recalling that circles are part of a scheme in the film, and a message in purple that reads:
'I wanted to draw an apple tree or an orange tree but I have no more chalk. It's fine like that. We have to think of those who don't like fruit trees. The others can simply dream. In any case all this mustn't keep me from saying to you Thank You.'
Among these instances of chromatic schemes there is an insert that foregrounds the practical a well as pictorial considerations determining colour choice. A street artist has chalked onto the pavement a purple circle, recalling that circles are part of a scheme in the film, and a message in purple that reads:
'I wanted to draw an apple tree or an orange tree but I have no more chalk. It's fine like that. We have to think of those who don't like fruit trees. The others can simply dream. In any case all this mustn't keep me from saying to you Thank You.'
Variants of purple recur throughout the film, not least in two of Jacques's paintings:
Not all colours, shapes and patterns in Quatre nuits are part of a scheme; some are simply manifestations of in interest in the decorative, such as the angular patterns of this door, which appears in four shots:
When a similar object appears in the credit sequence of Bresson's next film it passes under a bridge and disappears from view, both making a connection between the two films and indicating the difference of the one from the other:
The different colour of the vedette's lights in the latter film is also both a call back to the former, where that colour was a motif, and an emphatic marker of difference.
cars in close-up
As the couple return from their countryside excursion in Une femme douce the camera fixes on the bonnet of Luc's Citroën ID as he's driving and almost collides with the Peugeot 404 in front; the two cars in close-up in Quatre nuits are a Rolls-Royce and a Peugeot 204:
Fragmentary close-ups of motor vehicles are a constant in Bresson; here are examples from Les Anges du péché (1942), Les Dames du bois de boulogne (1945), Le Journal d'un curé de campagne (1950), Pickpocket (1959), Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967), Le Diable probablement (1977) and L'Argent (1983):
The collision of two cars in Une femme douce is a memory of a collision at the end of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne:
Her own body is first displayed near the painting of Eros and Psyche, as if an analogy was being drawn between them:
And then her body is shown in fragmentary glimpses that, I think, turn away from analogy with the spectacle of bodies in art:
In Quatre nuits d'un rêveur the woman's body is constituted as spectacle for herself, seemingly, when she examines herself in a mirror, alone in her room:
But soon after she is shown being undressed by a man, whose agency is analogous to that of the film, which has already constituted her as spectacle by undressing her in the previous sequence:
The lodger, like Marthe, is naked as they hold each other, but his body is not displayed to us as was Marthe's, earlier. Later we see Jacques body as he emerges from the shower, but this too cannot really be called constituting the body as spectacle:
Bresson returns to the self-observing female nude in Lancelot du lac (1974):
And in Le Diable probablement we see better what Bresson can do with a male nude:
References
Luíza Beatriz Alvim, 'Between Genres and Styles in the films of Robert Bresson', Cinej Cinema Journal, 5.1 (2015), pp. 115-36
Luíza Beatriz Alvim, 'Robert Bresson em ritmo de batuque', Alceu, 16.31 (2015), pp.66-113
Robert Bresson, Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (New York: New York Review Books, 2016)
Raymond Watkins, Late Bresson andthe Visual Arts: Cinema, Painting and Avant-Garde Experiment (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018)
Luíza Beatriz Alvim, 'Robert Bresson em ritmo de batuque', Alceu, 16.31 (2015), pp.66-113
Robert Bresson, Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983 (New York: New York Review Books, 2016)
Raymond Watkins, Late Bresson andthe Visual Arts: Cinema, Painting and Avant-Garde Experiment (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018)