The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook (Anthem Art and Culture)

‘The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook’ spans Bresson’s entire career, with interviews and essays addressing the great auteur’s oeuvre from every artistic angle. The interviews presented here—by such noted cineastes as Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Schrader, and David Thomson—elicited authorial comment from an auteur not known for his garrulousness, and they are either as aesthetically inclusive or as journalistically pointed as possible. For their part, the essays in this volume are by such luminous figures as André Bazin, Susan Sontag, and François Truffaut. Each interview is followed either by an essay on the film discussed in the interview, an essay on Bresson’s work by the interviewer himself, or an essayistic overview of Bresson’s career when the preceding interview itself is survey-like.  In this way the book ‘bounces’ the essays and interviews off one another so as to stimulate a kind of semi-continuous critical conversation about the films, their maker, and the interviewers themselves. The result is something that may be as good as criticism itself: enlightened authorial comment.