Robert Bresson's Heirs: Bruno Dumont, Philippe Grandrieux, and French Cinema of Sensation (original) (raw)

2016, Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Some of the most exciting recent criticism on French cinema has concentrated on what has been variously termed "cinema of horror," "cinema of the abject," "cin ema du corps," "the new French extremity," "cinema of transgression," or "cinema of sensation," among other titles. In contrast to James Quandt's negative evaluation of such works as morally irresponsible and littered with gratuitous effects, a host of subsequent critics have found such films to fit into historically important philosophical, literary, and cultural traditions in France. 1 Such nihilistic and disturbing films have been shown to provide valuable insights into contemporary French politics, society, and culture. 2 In the only book-length study of this tendency as it has emerged in France, Martine Beugnet turns to a wide range of phenomenological theories of the body. 3 Her work sets the stage for my own claims, since in France Robert Bresson's films have long been seen to belong to an embodied filmmaking style, as established by Andr e Bazin in "Le Journal d'un cur e de campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson" (1951), Am ed ee Ayfre in "The Universe of Robert Bresson" (1963), Jean-Luc Godard's reflections on similarities between Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Bresson in "Le testament de Balthazar" (1966), and Vincent Amiel's discussion of Bresson's unique use of the human body in Le Corps au cin ema: Keaton, Bresson, Cassavetes (1998). 4 One goal of this study is to bring the established French view of Bresson as an embodied filmmaker to bear on Anglo-American Bresson criticism. Asbjørn Grønstad extends the cinema of sensation beyond the borders of France to include a wide range of European films made during the 2000s, and similarly characterized by transgressive work that contains intentionally unpleasant or "unwatchable" moments. He observes that this network of contemporary directors borrow themes and styles from older models, especially the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, and Michaelangelo Antonioni: The tropes of aimlessness, displacement, and drift that formed such a pregnant motif in the international art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s are all being recuperated in the post-millennial