Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780195319798)

Perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form's grammatical and expressive possibilities. In thirteen features over a forty-year career, he held to an uncompromising moral vision and aesthetic rigor that remain unmatched. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is the first comprehensive study to give equal attention to the films, their literary sources, and psycho-biographical aspects of the work. Concentrating on the films' cinematographic, imagistic, narrative, and thematic structures, Pipolo provides a nuanced analysis of each film-including nearly 100 illustrations-elucidating Bresson's unique style as it evolved from the impassioned Les Anges du p馗he to such disconsolate meditations on the world as The Devil Probably and L'Argent. Special attention is also given to psychosexual aspects of the films that are usually neglected. Bresson has long needed a thoroughgoing treatment by a critic worthy to the task: he gets it here. From it emerges a provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist whose moral engagement and devotion to the craft of filmmaking are without equal.

Author: Tony Pipolo
ISBN-10: 0195319796
ISBN-13: 9780195319798
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Language: English
Published: 01/19/2010
Pages: 407
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2009 pg. 68
Choice 07/01/2010