silver nitrate notes

Diary of a Country Priest and the Discipline of Refusal

27 jun 2020

Robert Bresson (1901-1999) made Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne, 1951) from a 1936 novel by Georges Bernanos. It is the first film in which Bresson's mature style is fully visible. Everything he would do for the next thirty-five years is already present here: the non-professional actors (he called them "models"), the refusal of performance, the voiceover that runs parallel to but does not coincide with the image, the sound design that heightens small noises (a door, a footstep, a page turning).

The cinematographer was Léonce-Henri Burel (1892-1977), a veteran French cinematographer who had photographed Abel Gance's Napoléon (1927) and who, in 1950, took a job with Bresson that most French cinematographers of Burel's reputation would have considered a step down in prestige. Burel photographed five Bresson films over the next fifteen years.

What Burel does in Diary of a Country Priest is subtract. The sets are sparsely furnished. The camera is usually at conversational distance. The lighting is available-looking, almost entirely from practical sources (window, lamp, firelight). The priest (Claude Laydu) is photographed almost always from the same middle distance. Bresson did not want expressive close-ups. Burel gave him shots that refuse expressiveness. The priest's face, which is the film's central image, is available to the audience but does not announce what it is thinking.

The voiceover is drawn from the priest's diary, which we see him writing throughout the film. The voiceover often narrates events we are also watching. A scene in which the priest visits the Countess, for example, is accompanied by the priest's diary entry about that same visit. The voiceover is sometimes ahead of the image, sometimes behind, sometimes simultaneous. The effect, over the 116 minutes of the film, is that the priest's interior life and his visible life do not align in the audience's mind.

The final sequence is famous. The priest dies of stomach cancer in the apartment of a defrocked priest in Lille. The last words are read in voiceover by the priest's friend, describing the moment of the death. We see a Cross. Then black. Bresson and Burel refuse to show us the death itself. The austerity is the point.

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sources
[1] Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematograph. Urizen, 1977.
[2] Quandt, James (ed.). Robert Bresson. Toronto International Film Festival, 1998.
[3] Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. University of California Press, 1972.
[4] Sontag, Susan. "Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson," in Against Interpretation, 1966.