Bresson, 8/19.

Tomorrow, New York's Film Forum screens Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped and Pickpocket, about which the New Yorker's David Denby writes, "our responses bypass the usual affective mechanics of identification and empathy, settling instead on the contemplation of a soul in isolation."

"Even by director Robert Bresson's exacting, idiosyncratic standards, his 1974 Lancelot du Lac is a peculiar film," writes Glenn Kenny in the Auteurs' Notebook. "[W]hat the film builds to is a fragmented, unforgettable battle scene that, combined with the narrative elisions and 'unestablished' spaces that preceded it, perhaps represents the apotheosis of what Kristin Thompson calls Bresson's 'sparse parametric' style. And a coda that's a thoroughly pessimistic as anything in film, or any other art for that matter."

Acquarello: "Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, White Nights, Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer may also be seen as a paradigm for José Luis Guerín's In the City of Sylvia, capturing the romanticism of longing, the voyeurism inherent in an artist's gaze, and the creation of idealized memory."

Posted by dwhudson at August 19, 2008 3:09 AM