Richard Hell reports from Philadelphia

From : Richard Hell
To : robert-bresson.com
Date : Sat, 8 Nov 2003 21:19:06 -0500
Subject : The Devil in Philadelphia

Last night, Friday, November 7, I introduced a screening of Bresson's Le Diable, Probablement (1977) for Michael Chaikin's most thoughtfully compiled film program at International House in Philadelphia. It was the third time I've introduced the film at various venues in the past year. I seem to have made myself a sideline occupation of the movie recently--I've published a few articles about it too. Last night was interesting because I kind of fell apart in the course of my talk. I lost track of what I was saying! Dark forces of self-consciousness overtook me. It was like the bus scene in Devil: things started wheeling out of control, randomly breaking loose, and a painful chaos preceded the crunch to a halt. As I told the audience, after a prolonged groping for words, I've actually always wanted to have a nervous breakdown on stage. I didn't quite achieve that, but I got as close as I ever hope to without actually dropping my pants or something. But what the hell, it was all predestined. The worst part, and which I could barely restrain myself from leaping up during the film's projection to point out, was that I forgot to even mention Bresson's rejection of "actor" for "model"... I hated that because I think it was a crowd without too much previous exposure and I would have liked to prepare them for the acting style. It always seems to me that the expressionless performances (which can also read as "grim") of the people in Bresson are what make it hardest for people to get started with him. People are so used to relying on signals from the actors for the energy and import of a movie. But the good news is that the audience was large and they sat still for the film. They seemed affected by it. When introducing it I do my best to account for Bresson's methods, but I also set the movie up anecdotally in a way that might be offensive to the purist, namely by describing my identification with its main character. The notices of the screenings sometimes quote me as calling it, "The most 'punk' film ever made." Bresson isn't usually thought of as a topical director but that film did literally originate in headlines (the story was suggested by a newspaper account of a youth's suicide), and, as presumptuous and self-centered, not to mention irrelevant, as it might seem as information about the film, I was astonished to the point of nausea when I first saw it and recognized my 1977 (though in that year Bresson was seventy-six years old and may well have never heard of "punk"); not being a film scholar, that's the side-bar material I use to justify my intro. (One could also say that Bresson's stripped-down approach and supreme value of honesty are something he has in common with the best of that music era. But I don't mean to put too much weight on the "punk"-Bresson thing. He has more in common with Cezanne.) Anyway, the movie looked, or I could say, "sounded," better than ever this time--the seventh, I think, I've seen/heard it this year. The sound did especially hit me last night, all of it of course originating in the action, horrifyingly, heartwrenchingly, exhilaratingly: from the relentless mechanical clicking footsteps and machine street traffic, to the hideous interrupting organ-tuning chords in the cathedral, to the blaring car-horns after the bus collision, to the static crashing explosion-waves of nuclear testing on the video monitor, to the horrendous buzzing and whining and crunching of the sawn-down trees, to the moment of Mozart overheard through the open window on the way to the cemetery. Like so many things in Bresson, this way of conceiving sound is a means of filmmaking not only extraordinarily refined by him but almost exclusive to him among directors.

Later, Richard