roam_roam 's review for:

Notes on the Cinematograph by Robert Bresson

4.0

inspiring reflective slow-paced

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“Someone who can work with the minimum can work with the most. One who can with the most cannot, inevitably, with the minimum.” -p.23

“An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.” -p.34

“To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased.” -p.34

“Dig into your sensation. Look at what there is within. Don't analyse it with words. Translate it into sister images, into equivalent sounds. The clearer it is, the more your style affirms itself. (Style: all that is not technique.)” -p.35

“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.” -p.36

“The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way.

Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.” -p.37

“Simultaneous precision and imprecision of music. A thousand possible, unforeseeable sensations.” -p.40

“Your film will have the beauty, or the sadness, or what have you, that one finds in a town, in a countryside, in a house, and not the beauty, sadness, etc. that one finds in the photograph of a town, a countryside, or a house.” -p.42

“The sight of movement gives happiness: horse, athlete, bird.” -p.44

“Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort.” -p.46

“Give more resemblance in order to obtain more difference. Uniform and unity of life bring out the nature and character of soldiers. Standing at attention, the immobility of them all shows up the individual signs of each.” -p.47

“To have discernment (precision in perception).” -p.48

“The true is not encrusted in the living persons and real objects you use. It is an air of truth that their images take on when you set them together in a certain order. Vice versa, the air of truth their images take on when you set them together in a certain order confers on these persons and objects a reality.” -p.49

“The eye (in general) superficial, the ear profound and inventive. A locomotive's whistle imprints in us a whole railroad station.” -p.49

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.” -p.50

“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.” -p.53

“To move people not with images likely to move us, but with relations of images that render them both alive and moving.” -p.54

“Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.” -p.55

“Slow films in which everyone is galloping and gesticulating; swift films in which people hardly stir.” -p.55

“Model. The spark caught in his eye's pupil gives significance to his whole person.” -p.56

“‘A town or countryside at a distance is a town, a countryside; but as one ap-proaches, those are houses, trees, tiles, leaves, grasses, ants, ants' legs, to infinity.’" (Pascal) -p.57

“The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a certain march of non-dramatic elements.” -p.58

“Expression through compression. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages.” -p.59

“An ice-cold commentary can warm, by contrast, tepid dialogues in a film. Phenomenon analogous to that of hot and cold in painting.” -p.60

“Silence, musical by an effect of resonance. The last syllable of the last word, or the last noise, like a held note.” -p.61

“A cry, a noise. Their resonance makes us guess at a house, a forest, a plain, a mountain; their rebound indicates to us the distances.” -p.62

“It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears.” -p.62

“Several takes of the same thing, like a painter who does several pictures or drawings of the same subject and, each fresh time, progresses towards rightness.” -p.65

“Your camera catches not only physical movements that are inapprehensible by pencil, brush or pen, but also certain states of soul recognizable by indices which it alone can reveal.” -p.66

“It is profitable that what you find should not be what you were expecting. Intrigued, excited by the unexpected.” -p.69

“The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.” -p.70

“Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, colour and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.” -p.74

“The people I pass in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées appear to me like marble figures moved forward by springs. But let their eyes meet mine, and at once these walking and gazing statues become human.” -p.74

“It is from being constrained to a mechanical regularity, it is from a mechanism that emotion will be born. To understand this, think of certain great pianists.” -p.79

“Precision of aim lays one open to hesitations. Debussy: ‘I've spent a week deciding on one chord rather than another.’" -p.81

“It is useless and silly to work specially for a public. I cannot try what I am making, at the moment of making it, except on myself. Besides, all that matters is to make well.” -p.82

“Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.” -p.82

“Every movement reveals us (Montaigne). But it only reveals us if it is automatic (not commanded, not willed).” -p.83

“Montesquieu says, about humour, that ‘its difficulty consists in making you find in the thing a new feeling which nevertheless comes from the thing.’” -p.87