“The Unknown Planet”: Robert Bresson’s Ecstatic Cinema

Tycjan Gołuński

Abstract

Author applies the hermeneutic method in trying to describe and understand Bresson’s work and vision of cinema. He was inspired to choose this method of interpretation by the variety of interpretative tropes found in Bresson’s work and often contradictory allegorical, symbolic and philosophical readings of his work. The starting point for analysis is the fact that it is impossible to capture the meaning of Bresson’s work semantically nor verbally. It is essential to consider it together with Bresson’s writings on the choice and perfection of the artistic medium, as well as crystallization of one’s style. In general the most important element of this style is the negation of the importance of the role of acting, for the sake of models shaped according to precise, technical instructions from the director - separated from the storyline, fragmentary and nonlinear and directing our attention to the internal life of the character, and welding together the picture with the music, the silence with sound, both in the literary sense, as well as by analogy, with the use of visual equivalent of rhythm and musical mood. Gołuński points to the characteristic quality of Bresson’s films, their ability to condense and fragment, their unusual ellipsis, which have nothing to do with the idea of “the world represented”.