Excerpts from Robert Bresson's ' Notes On Cinematography'

'Master precision. Be a precision instrument myself.'

'Metteur-en-scene, director. The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.'

'No actors. (No directing of actors). No parts. (No learning of parts). No staging. But the use of working models, taken from life. BEING(models) instead of SEEMING(actors).'

'Movement from the exterior to the interior. (Actors: movement from the interior to the exterior.) The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them. Between them and me: telepathic exchanges, divination.'

Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create.

'CINEMATOGRAPHY' IS A WRITING WITH IMAGES IN MOVEMENT AND WITH SOUNDS.'

'Nothing rings more false in a film than that natural tone of the theater copying life and traced over studied sentiments.'

'No possible relations between an actor and a tree. The two belong to different worlds. (A stage tree simulates a real tree.)'

'No marriage of theater and cinematography without both being exterminated.'

'Cinematographic film, where expression is obtained by relations of images and of sounds, and not by a mimicry done with gestures and intonations of voice (whether actors' or non-actors'). One that does not analyze or explain. That recomposes.'

'Cinematographic film, where the images, like the words in a dictionary, have no power and value except through their position and relation.'

'On the choice of models. 6 His voice draws for me his mouth, his eyes, his face, makes for me his complete portrait, outer and inner, better than if he were in front of me. The best deciphering got by the ear alone.'

'To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks.'

'Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks. (The reason why we get the color of a person's eyes wrong?)'

'On two deaths and three births. My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.'

'A model. Enclosed in his mysterious appearance. He has brought home to him all of him that was outside. He is there, behind that forehead, those cheeks.'

'To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.'

'Radically suppress intentions in your models.'

'To your models: ``Don't think what you're saying, don't think what you're doing.`` And also: ``Don't think about what you say, don't think about what you do.'

'You will guide your models according to your rules, with them letting you act in them, and you letting them act in you.'

'Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance.'

'Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.'

'No music as accompaniment, support or reinforcement. No music at all.'

'The noises must become music.'

'You shall call a fine film the one that makes you think highly of cinematography.'

'Models automatically inspired, inventive.'

'CINEMA draws on a common fund. The cinematographer is making a voyage of discovery on an unknown planet.'

'Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.'

'A sigh, a silence, a word, a sentence, a din, a hand, the whole of your model, his face, in repose, in movement, in profile, full face, an immense view, a restricted space.... Each thing exactly in its place: your only resources.'

'A flood of words does a film no harm. A matter of kind, not quantity.'

'It would not be ridiculous to say to your models: ``I am inventing you as you are.'

'The insensible bond connecting your images which are furthest apart and most different is your vision.'

'Cinematography: new way of writing, therefore of feeling.'

'Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.'

'Forms that resemble ideas. Treat them as actual ideas.'

'NEITHER DIRECTOR NOR SCENARIO-WRITER. FORGET YOU ARE MAKING A FILM.'

'Sudden rise of my film when I improvise, fall when I execute.'

'X's film. Two wicked eyes, trying to be good; a bitter mouth made for silence, which never stops talking and contradicting the words as soon as said: Star-system in which men and women have a factual existence (as phantoms).'

'Of lighting. Things made more visible not by more light, but by the fresh angle at which I see them.'

'Model. Over his features thoughts or feelings not materially expressed, rendered visible by intercommunication and interaction of two or several other images.'

'A single word, a single movement that is not right or is merely in the wrong place gets in the way of all the rest.'

'An actor needs to get out of himself in order to see himself in the other person. YOUR MODELS, ONCE OUTSIDE THEMSELVES, WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET IN AGAIN.'

'CINEMA films controlled by intelligence, going no further.'

'Model. His pure essence.'

'The exchanges that are produced between images and images, sounds and sounds, images and sounds, give the people and objects in your films their cinematographic life and, by a subtle phenomenon, unify your composition.'

'Return the past to the present. Magic of the present.'

'An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.'

'Images. Like the modulations in music.'

'When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.'

'To your models: ``One must not act either somebody else or oneself. One must not act anybody.'

'The persons and the objects in your film must walk at the same pace, as companions.'

'Your camera passes through faces, provided no mimicry (intentional or not intentional) gets in between. Cinematographic films made of inner movements which are seen.'

'To your models: ``Speak as if you were speaking to yourselves.`` MONOLOGUE INSTEAD OF DIALOGUE.'

'Choose your models well, so they lead you where you want to go.'

'Models. Their way of being the people of your film is by being themselves, by remaining what they are. (Even in contradiction with what you had imagined.'

'Music. It isolates your film from the life of your film (musical delectation). It is a powerful modifier and even destroyer of the real, like alcohol or dope.'

'It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.'

'Your film is beginning when your secret wishes pass into your models.'

'An actor used in a film as on the stage, outside himself, is not there. His image is empty.'

'Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.'

'Image. Reflection and reflector, accumulator and conductor.'

'Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images, and photography.'

'Shooting. Agony of making sure not to let slip any part of what I merely glimpse, of what I perhaps do not yet see and shall only later be able to see.'

'Shooting. You will not know till much later if your film is worth the mountain range of efforts it is costing you.'

'The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a certain march of non-dramatic elements.'

'Your film is not made for a stroll with the eyes, bu t for going right into, for being totally absorbed in.'

'Expression through compression. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages.'

'Failure of CINEMA. Ludicrous disproportion between immense possibilities and the result: the Star-system.'

'One does not create by adding, but by taking away. To develop is another matter. (Not to spread out.)'

'Empty the pond to get the fish.'

'Against actors' assurance, set the charm of models who do not know what they are.'

'To an actor, the camera is the eye of the public.'

'It is not a matter of acting ``simple`` or of acting ``inward`` but of not acting at all.'

'Cinematography films: emotional, not representational.'

'From the clash and sequence of images and sounds, a harmony of relationships must be born.'

'What our eyes and ears require is not the realistic persona but the real person.'

'Films whose slowness and silences are indistinguishable from the slowness and silences of the audience are ruled out.'

'CINEMA, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.'

'Model. Has become automatic, protected against any thought.'

'Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.'

'The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last cent into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.'

'The public does not know what it wants. Impose on it your decisions, your delights.'

'Proust says that Dostoevsky is original in composition above all. It is an extraordinarily complex and close-meshed whole, purely inward, with currents and counter-currents like those of the sea, a thing that is found also in Proust (in other ways so different) and whose equivalent would go well with a film.'

'I have dreamed of my film making itself as it goes along under my gaze, like a painter's eternally fresh canvas.'

'Bach at the organ, admired by a pupil, answered: ``It's a matter of striking the notes at exactly the right moment.``

'These horrible days - when shooting film disgusts me, when I am exhausted, powerless in the face of so many obstacles - are part of my method of work.'

'Be precise in the form, not always in the substance (if you can).'

'It is what I do not get to know of F and G (models) that makes them so interesting to me.'

'Ideas gathered from reading will always be bookish ideas. Go to the persons and objects directly.'

'Have a painter's eye. The painter creates by looking.'

'Subject, technique, actors' style go by fashion. Result, a sort of prototype, which one film every two or three years changes for a new one.'

'Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.'

'In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.'

'Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness.'

'The number of films that are patched up with music! People flood a film with music. They are preventing us from seeing that there is nothing in those images.'

'Let nothing be changed and all be different.'

'What is - face to face with the real - this intermediary work of the imagination?'

'DIVINATION - how can one not associate that name with the two sublime machines I use for my work? Camera and tape recorder, carry me far away from the intelligence which complicates everything.'

Tarkovsky describes Bresson as ``perhaps the only artist in cinema, who achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand.``
J.L Godard also looked back at Bresson with high admiration (``Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music.``