A number of writers have attempted to capture Robert Bressons style as well as his substance with such terms as minimalist, austere, "ascetic," elliptical, autonomous, pure, even gentle." Most famously, Paul Schrader once called Bressons films transcendental, while Susan Sontag described them as spiritual. Both these critics thus extended in anglicized form a tendency that had early been dominant in Bresson criticism in France: the attempt, made by such Catholic writers as Andr Bazin, Henri Agel, Roger Leenhardt, and Amde ...
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A number of writers have attempted to capture Robert Bressons style as well as his substance with such terms as minimalist, austere, "ascetic," elliptical, autonomous, pure, even gentle." Most famously, Paul Schrader once called Bressons films transcendental, while Susan Sontag described them as spiritual. Both these critics thus extended in anglicized form a tendency that had early been dominant in Bresson criticism in France: the attempt, made by such Catholic writers as Andr Bazin, Henri Agel, Roger Leenhardt, and Amde Ayfre, to understand Bresson's work in religious terms, seeing his camera as a kind of god and the material world as (paradoxically) a thing of the spirit. That attempt, in Sontags essay, led to the introduction of Bresson to the New York-based avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s, whose filmssuch as Richard Serras Hand Catching Lead (1968), for oneshow the influence of the French directors severe, reductivist style. Jean-Luc Godard, of course, needed no such critical introduction to Robert Bresson, for, in his iconoclasm and integrity, in his rejection of the Gallic Cinma du Papa as well as in his embrace of film as an independent art, Bresson was one of the heroes of the young directors who constituted the French New Wave in the early 1960s. So much so that Godard was moved to say in Cahiers du cinma in 1957 that Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." The result is that Bresson has undeniably influenced a slew of contemporary European filmmakers, including Chantal Akerman, Olivier Assayas, Laurent Cantet, Alain Cavalier, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Claire Denis, Jacques Doillon, Bruno Dumont, Michael Haneke, Benot Jacquot
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