silver nitrate notes

A Man Escaped and the Cell Door

15 jul 2021

Bresson followed Diary of a Country Priest with a war film, A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, 1956), adapted from a memoir by André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance who had been imprisoned by the Gestapo at Fort Montluc in Lyon in 1943 and who had escaped the night before his scheduled execution. Bresson, himself a former prisoner of war, knew the material.

The cinematographer was again Burel. What the two of them did is make a film about a prison escape in which almost nothing happens on screen beyond the methodical preparation of escape materials. The protagonist Fontaine (François Leterrier, a non-professional) spends the film scraping a cell door with a sharpened spoon, unravelling a wire mattress, braiding rope. The camera watches these tasks at close range, without commentary. The film is a tutorial in its own narrative.

Burel's lighting is always motivated. Cell interiors are lit by a single high window. Corridor sequences are lit by overhead bulbs. The courtyard where Fontaine exercises is flat daylight. Nothing is stylised. Fontaine's face is photographed in the same available light as the cell door he is working on. The film refuses visual hierarchy.

The sound design is the technical triumph. Bresson uses the sound of tools scraping wood, of rope being wound, of distant footsteps, of trains passing outside the prison, with a precision that the image does not attempt. The audience comes to know the prison by its sounds: the squeak of a guard's shoes on the third step of a staircase, the click of a particular lock, the whistle of a train that passes at 2:15 AM. When Fontaine finally escapes, the escape is navigated by the audience through sound. We know where the guards are because we hear them before Fontaine sees them.

The film's title in French ends with the words "ou Le Vent Souffle où il Veut" (or, The wind blows where it will), a line from the Gospel of John. The English title leaves this out, which is a shame. The theological frame matters. Fontaine's escape is not just an action-film escape. It is Bresson's argument that grace, when it arrives, arrives through the disciplined work of the body on the cell door.

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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] Devigny, André. A Man Escaped. Hamish Hamilton, 1957.
[4] Reader, Keith. Robert Bresson. Manchester UP, 2000.