Final Essay: Robert Bresson’s Dictum & Film Analysis of “A Man Escaped”
Introduction
The modern film-viewer may anticipate feeling abashed, or risk feeling bored when scrutinizing an old, black-and-white movie that lacks an action package. However, Robert Bresson’s film made in 1956, A Man Escaped, offers a compelling example of filmmaking skills which captivate the attention of its audience. One of Director Robert Bresson’s favorite dictums asserts that “What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear” (“Notes on Sound”). Control of narrative space, and command of sound perspective strategies in the film demonstrate an exercise of the filmmaker’s philosophy. The film analysis herein, of A Man Escaped, hopes to posit a mediation from three respects of strategic use of onscreen/off-screen space, first-person restricted narration, and the importance of materializing sound indices. By the time of his initial film, Bresson “had been labeled as a religious director” (“Quintessential Bresson”). Ultimately, the final outcome of Robert Bresson’s craftsmanship in A Man Escaped, reflects a masterful use of austerity, symbolism, and depth of meaningfulness in storytelling.
Undoubtedly, Robert Bresson’s dictum is profound and lends to the creation of depth coupled with simplicity in filmmaking. To review the dictum at stake for analysis, the saying bears repeating: “What is for the eye must not duplicate what is for the ear.” It seems the filmmaker is seeking to streamline an unembellished story depiction, on the screen, minus the importation of an artificial feel. In other words, Bresson does not wish to mix the unique qualities of sound and sight. He recognizes the power of each perspective. In this manner, a demonstration may be noted in the opening scene, wherein the intended escapee in in a close-up shot, slowly moving his hand – in virtual silence – towards the interior of the car’s rear door handle. The framing endures a slow pan, retaining a close-up shot at a steady pace, revealing our protagonist’s facial expression in trying to maintain a casual countenance. This scene exemplifies a pure focus on the eyes, and represents how overcrowding the viewers’ senses with both sight and sound somehow renders the film’s mise-en-scene less impactful. Occurring in Nazi-occupied France, the story uses sight and sound separately in powerful displays of intervals, thus reflecting how the eye ‘must not duplicate’ whatever is meant for the ear. David Bordwell noted, “Throughout the film, sound has many important functions,” and at points Bresson allows sound to “dominate the image” (“Functions of Film Sound”). Yet, frames solely designed to engage the eye are never neglected. Thus, the interplay of sight and sound, according to the dictum, does not allow one to overshadow the other – but rather artfully allow the enhancement of one to the other.
Conciliatory Analysis of Onscreen/Off-screen Strategy
Brilliantly, even in the opening scene wherein the main character, Fontaine, played by François Leterrier, seated snuggly shoulder-to-shoulder with another prisoner, the viewer finds himself straining to ‘see’ outside the parameters of the frame. No prominent sounds interfere at this point, giving the audience a psychological wherewithal to absorb the context. Close-up shot of the driver’s hand shifting the automobile’s gear, and key in the ignition, give a sense of the immediacy of the situation. Fontaine’s eye light up, anticipating the perfect moment to jump out of the car. The viewer wants to see what he sees. The silence of any human voice remains, until after Fontaine flees and is captured. Intervention of guards’ barking, stern voices come from off-screen, utilizing a strategy of space organized to leverage sound devices to withhold the obvious.
At this point, one knows the setting is one of captured prisoners in an early 1940s wartime detention camp in France. One need not see the guards off-screen, while they are heard. Film critic Tony Pipolo, specializing in Bresson films, observed, commented that some 1990s-viewers of A Man Escaped “still resist Bresson for the very qualities that define his uniqueness” (Pipolo 22). In other words, in the same journal article, Pipolo noted how these latecomer viewers failed to appreciate on what Bresson offers, “than on what he withholds” (Pipolo 22). Uncompromising in the onscreen/off-screen strategy of setting the spectatorship space, Bresson seems to use the technique to mock easy cures of society’s ills. Pipolo detected a symbolism Bresson employed, as affirming “a rather global, apolitical pessimism,” when the protagonist hires “someone to kill him in a gesture of protest against society” (Pipolo 23). In one brilliant usage of off-screen cinematographic craftsmanship, Bresson shows Fontaine leaning against a wall, listening the sounds of a guard’s footsteps roaming back-and-forth off-screen. Fontaine is convinced he must kill the guard, as the strategy imposes knowledge of what is occurring as the voiceover narrative explains “where the guard is moving and mentioning how hard his own heart is beating” (Bordwell 295). You really feel like holding your breath at this point in the film, and at the least can hardly stand to remove attention from watching, at this moment.
The onscreen/off-screen device and motif, compressed into liberal usage of separated interplays of visages purely designed for eyes or ears, Bresson consistently depicts events happening within the compound with this strategy. One familiar set of scenes in which Bresson uses this onscreen/off-screen method is when Fontaine is speaking through the bars of his cell window to his cell neighbor. You never see the cellmate’s face, or even his neighbor’s barred cell window. The voice of the cell-neighbor is heard off-screen, yet never seen onscreen in the same shot. Also, retracting to the opening scene of the film when Fontaine is seated in the moving vehicle, presumably hauled away to prison-camp, Bresson moderates the onscreen/off-screen strategy wonderfully using match on action. Cutting from the driver’s keys-in-ignition, back to Fontaine’s face, and so forth allows a smooth montage, which retain consistency in the balancing of each frame in A Man Escaped. One would daresay that despite the factor that the film is in French, anyone could view it and be equally captivated by its tale.
While it is true that the camera placement is fairly close to the characters, yet the viewer is not informed so much by their outer-appearance, as impressed upon by each of their internalized emotions, which helps drive the story. Other off-screen devices display in the form of gunshots, running feet, and as the guard’s footsteps descend the interior staircase, with Fontaine’s ears close to the door listening from his cell. The strategy this effect affords, for example, engages the viewer in a way which would otherwise not be as intense if Bresson over-stimulated the audience with “what is for the eye” by mixing with what is meant for the ear. Bordwell keenly draws an analytic observation of how Bresson captures medium-close-up shot interactions between other prisoners, wherein at first the faucet is seen onscreen when they are washing up (Bordwell 296). Yet, as these conversations between fellow prisoners in the wash-up area progress throughout the film, the sound of the water is present off-screen. Beyond the technical conciliatory strategic use of space, in the onscreen/off-screen mediation is the symbolical use of defiance. Bordwell suggested, and identified, Fontaine’s habit of tapping on the walls with his handcuffs to initially communicate with an adjoining prison cell, is a motif “associated with defiance of the prison rules” (Bordwell 296). Even given the presence of a religious Christian pastor, who had been captured. Perhaps a most appealing approach in making the film, is the director’s use of the first-person perspective of restricted narration.
First-Person Restricted Narration
A Man Escaped is so enriched with varied kaleidoscopic layers of unspoken meanings, with converge, that the power of the first-person narration may be taken for granted. Devoid of actually being consciously aware, the film’s viewer only learns of what is happening in the situation as the protagonist, Fontaine, learns about things. This subtly powerful feat in filmmaking skill, can perhaps be compared on some level to the intensely felt undertones of Hitchcockian fashion, building in psychological involvement for the audience, washing over viewers in potent waves of suspense. Nevertheless, Director Robert Bresson chooses to integrate characters’ speech with a healthy dose of commentary via Fontaine’s narrative. For example, Bordwell points out that Fontaine’s narration “has several functions,” one key purpose of which helping to “clarify the action, since certain temporal cues suggest how long Fontaine spends in prison” (Bordwell 293). We learn of Fontaine’s inner thoughts, especially shortly after arriving at the prison, and having been beaten to a bloody mess, the first-person narrative voice states “I’d have preferred a quick death,” and another shot when he is wiping blood off his face, “I tried to clean up” (Bordwell 293). Furthermore, the narration is used to highlight the fate, or state of others outside his cell.
For example, different times and spaces are referred to with the narration voice. We, as viewers, learn that Fontaine has concerns and obtains information of events and situations outside the plight of himself, being stuck in his own prison cell. Fontaine’s narrative, first-person voice tells us – of another prisoner – that “Terry was an exception; he was allowed to see his daughter. I learned this later,” thus demonstrating that “Again we are aware that the meeting we see on the screen occurred at a point in the past” (Bordwell 294). This kind of time-marker renders continuity of the story, and its important details, in the viewer’s mind. Other internal experiences of the protagonist are captured, letting the audience know how the character feels. Immediately following being thrown into his cell, after arriving, the narration says “I could feel I was being watched,” and “I didn’t dare move” (“A Man Escaped”). Although a close-up of the guard putting handcuffs on Fontaine is clearly highlighted in the frame, we never see the guard’s face – thus, he is not humanized. The narrative never personalizes the guards as interpersonal beings, feeling humans, or any such individualization. Rather they become representative symbols of the injustice of society’s system.
In this same scene, another important point which the film student, or analytical critic, must recognize is that the power of the narration couples with the schematic strategy of the onscreen/off-screen intervention. At the time of the aforementioned narrative conversation within himself, Fontaine’s environment inside his prison cell is quiet. No other sound motifs, confused or mixed with other ‘sights’ (in keeping with the eye not duplicating what is meant for the ear), are allowed. Given this style of the narrative’s seamless integration with the overall strategy, permits the ‘voice’ of the internal first-person narrative to become a focal point of intense interest, during the course of the story. Wondering why he has not been shot, particularly since angering his captors by trying to initially run from the car, lulls our main character to sleep. The next morning, in silence from any onscreen or off-screen action, the narrative voice declares that he ‘instinctively’ feigned weakness upon being forcibly awakened by the guards.
The Importance of Materializing Sound Indices
According to one source of expertise in understanding the function of materializing sound indices, this technique can move the film forward. The idea works like this. When an abundance of sound, as “materializing sound indices” are put forth in the various frames and shots, its usage can pull the scene together, “toward the material and concrete” (“Materializing Sound Indices”). The concept is simultaneously and fascinatingly obvious, yet interesting, too. Several instances of this use is demonstrated in the scenes Bresson creates closer to the second half of the film, when Fontaine is climbing up on the rooftop, slowly working his way toward freedom with young, cellmate Jost (played by Charles Le Clainche). The steps of the guards crunch periodically on the gravel, in mostly the off-screen space. The important clue, therefore, tells the audience that the intended-escapees need to be very careful, and proceed cautiously. According to FilmSound, the technique can be used to deliver either the concrete, with an abundance, or “lead to a perception of the characters and story as ethereal,” when coupled with scarcity (“Materializing Sound Indices”). As one may ascertain, then, from the ways in which materializing sound indices may build effects in film, can dramatize several tones of impact depending upon the scene or film.
Another key importance of materializing sound indices, in the film A Man Escaped, has to do with synchresis. Experts at FilmSound describe synchresis as “the forging between something one sees and something one hears - it is the mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time” (“Materializing Sound Indices”). From this perspective, you can easily tell how Bresson masterfully pays close attention to the use of sounds, as distinctly separated (in a controlled manner), from what the ‘eye’ is placed on the image. One extraordinary example, which is a favorite scene-series of this observer, is when Fontaine and Jost are making their way in the night air, towards the outer wall of the Nazi prison-camp. This most amazing series of the scenes, so pertaining, happened like thus. While creeping along, Jost and Fontaine periodically keep hearing an unidentified set of ‘squeaks’ off-screen. Nobody knows what they are caused by, including the film’s spectators. This mystery keeps all of ‘us’ wondering, the characters and the audience, with its intermittent dispersion of squeaks in the off-screen space. Eventually, it is discovered that the sound is coming from a rickety bicycle, being ridden around the compound – in a circular fashion – by of the German Nazi soldier guys (“A Man Escaped”). Therefore, Bresson has amply used the conceptual practice to implement his desired effects in his 1956-film.
Conclusion
The final outcome of Robert Bresson’s craftsmanship in A Man Escaped, undeniably reflects a masterful use of austerity, symbolism, and depth of meaningfulness in storytelling. An incredible facet of Robert Bresson’s filmmaking, also, is his ability to take audiences on a deeper, philosophical event. One critical film analyst stated, of the quality of Bresson’s work, that “Of all the filmmakers since cinema’s earliest days, Robert Bresson offers arguably the most profound exploration of the moral and ethical issues that animate contemporary theological discussions” (Vaux 521). For example, it was quite a stunning surprise to find a pastor as one of the characters, a prisoner, in A Man Escaped. But the way Bresson introduced him, was not in a religious way in which the answer to all their troubles meant a direction to cling to a hope for rescue. Bresson framed the story which infused the character, Fontaine, to take the initiative into his own hands, and be proactive in the situation of his escape.
At the end of the day, Robert Bresson is a filmmaking director to be reckoned with. It is vital to remember his words as advocating, “If equal, [sound and image] they damage or kill each other” (“Robert Bresson – Notes on Sound”). Watching A Man Escaped has truly been a treat. Its viewing should be more widespread, to thrill broader audiences.
Works Cited
Bresson, Robert. Notes on Sound. Film Sound.org, 1997. Web. 29 June 2016.
“Functions of Film Sound: A Man Escaped.” DavidBordwell.net. David Bordwell’s website on cinema, n.d. Web. 29 June 2016.
A Man Escaped. Dir. Robert Bresson. Perf., François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, and Maurice Beerblock. Gaumont, 1956. Film.
“Materializing Sound Indices.” Filmsound.org. FilmSound.org, n.d. Web. 30 June 2016.
Pipolo, Tony. “A Man Escaped: Quintessential Bresson.” The Criterion Collection. Criterion Collection Mag., 25 Mar. 2013. Web. 29 June 2016.
Pipolo, Tony. “Fire and Ice: The Films of Robert Bresson.” Cineaste 31.2 (2006): 22. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 29 June 2016.
Vaux, Sara Anson. “Divine Skepticism: The Films of Robert Bresson.” Christianity & Literature 53.4 (2004): 521-537. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 June 2016.
