Notes on the Cinematographer

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Green Integer Books, an English-­language press based in Copenhagen, publishes small-format (4¼ x 6'') books that feel good in the hand. According to the press’s website (greeninteger.com), their list includes “Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural Histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.” Which may explain the slight tremolo of confusion I experienced while trying to decode Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer, a collection of cryptic aphorisms from the acclaimed director of Mouchette, Au Hasard Balthazar, and other modern classics of French cinema. At first reading, these notes are as impenetrable as  Zen koans: “Movement from the exterior to the interior”; “It is in its pure form that an art hits hard”; “Equality of all things. Cézanne painting with the same eye and the same soul a fruit dish, his son, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire.” Taken together, though, they provide a handy guide to the strict philosophical principles of the purest—and perhaps the most influential—of the French “new wave” filmmakers.