with an interest in early film theory and visual culture within a French context and

beyond.
ANNE BERKE
Yale University
2011, Anne Berke
Robert Bresson: a passion for film
TONY PIPOLO
Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2010
xii407 pp., illus., notes, filmography, index, $40.00/25.50 (paper), $90.00/
57.00 (cloth)
How much of a directors essencebiography, psychology and so onmight one
locate in his or her films? In studying the work of a French master, this is precisely the
question posed by Pipolo, a practising psychoanalyst and film professor. To some
extent, the equation of director and film, film and director, is one implicit to all auteur
studies. Yet Pipolo inverts a familiar trajectory, asking not how an understanding of a
director might explain the workings of their films, but how a body of films might
explain the workings of their director. In doing so, he proposes an intriguing
historiographyan aesthetic biography (p. 2)applied in this instance to a director
whom Jean-Luc Godard once described (in Cahiers du cine ma) as the French cinema,
as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel, as Mozart is German music, and whom
Pipolo proclaims as perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean
Renoir (p. 1).
Before proceeding, it is worth pausing to outline Bressons uvre, not only to bask
by associationa sort of cine-osmosisin the splendour of an immaculate body of
work, but also because the chronology of Bressons 13 features over a 40-year period
provides the structure for Pipolos book, which considers the accumulation of themes
and their expression in Les Anges du pe che (1943), Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945),
Journal dun cure de campagne (1951), Un Condamne a` mort sest e chappe (1956), Pickpocket
(1959), Proce `s de Jeanne dArc (1962), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette (1967),
Une Femme douce (1969), Quatre nuits dun re veur (1971), Lancelot du Lac (1974),
Le Diable probablement (1977) and LArgent (1983). These are films defined by their
visions of faith and its absence, works that are concerned, above all, as Pipolo puts it,
with questions of good and evil, the existence of God, the relationship between body
and soul, and that between personal and social morality (p. 6). These preoccupations,
like those of all auteurs, articulate a distinctive philosophy or way of seeing
the worldhere, the Bressoniancommunicated via a recurring set of formal and
stylistic tropes, which for Bresson included the use of non-professional actors
(or models, as he described them), sparse dialogue, and an overall asceticism.
Unusually, in approaching these films, Pipolo brings the analysts couch
to the cinema. Where Paul Schrader famously wrote of transcendental style
(in Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer [1972]), and Bresson offered his own
seminal reflections on the art of cinema (in Notes sur le cine matographe [1975, translated
444 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N
in 1986 as Notes on the Cinematographer]), Pipolo provides a psycho-biographical
approach to understanding Bressons films, and through them the director. Using the
tenets and tools of psychoanalysis, Bressons films are mined for externalised traces
of the film-makers inner life. To study his films is to study the person (p. 2), Pipolo
argues, a notion that could also inform the work of idiosyncratic directors beyond
Bresson.
To give but a few examples of this distinctive melding: Joan of Arc is read as a
proxy for Bresson, in that she embodies the human figure not just as a noble creation,
fictional or nonfictional, but as the projection of the filmmakers elusive idealized self
(p. 176); Quatre nuits dun re veur, through its dreamer Jacques, represents not only a
melancholy commentary on the lonely life of the protagonist but a mirror of the life
and art of its creator, both reflective and reflexive (p. 279); in Le Diable probablement,
likewise, existentialist Charles, in his conviction that the world is plagued with the
detritus of materialism and its mindless pursuits . . . seems to be Bressons spokesman
(p. 326), whose choice to die is also a reflection, however mediated, of the artist
(p. 327). In the latter example, Pipolos predilection for psychoanalysis reaches its
mother lode, as scenes of therapywherein Charles discusses his rationale for
suicidemeet a real-life psychoanalyst discussing the ins and outs of the methods of
Bressons fictional doctor, to apply in turn a psychoanalytic reading of Bresson through
his characters and their aesthetic rendering.
Yet, lest Pipolos emphasis (and mine in turn) on his applied practice risks
narrowing appeal for the prospective reader, it is worth noting that there is much in
the book that belongs to more traditional methods of film studies. Aware of the
potential risks of his approach, Pipolo offers an auto-defence, acknowledging the need
to avoid hair-splitting arguments over the subtleties and theoretical fine points
of psychoanalytic technique, which would take us far afield of Bressons own
predispositions (p. 324). Indeed, in charting these predispositions, there are
countless passages of more conventional, though no less worthwhile, textual analysis,
that is, close reference to the aesthetic workings of individual films, with discussion of
style and technique, as they relate to broader thematic concerns. Issues of adaptation
are also brought to the fore, with Pipolo exploringin the forensics of similarity
and differencethe various sources for Bressons films. Typically, these are novels
and novellas, namely those of Georges Bernanos and Denis Diderot, from France, and
Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, from Russia. Elsewhere, sources are more
dispersed, including texts such as the Gospel of St. Matthew and the court transcripts
of the trial of Joan of Arcnot to mention Pipolos discussion of films with shared
sources, including Pier Paolo Pasolinis portrayal of Matthew in Il vangelo secondo
Matteo (1964) and Carl Theodor Dreyers vision of Joan in La Passion de Jeanne
dArc (1928).
In reflecting on Bressons own passion and the existential challenge that his
films pose (p. 359), Pipolo does not refrain from pinning his colours to the mast,
and there are times when his writing verges on the evangelical. For example, faced
with the sense of despair, loss of faith, and abandonment of hope witnessed in mid- to
late-career films such as Mouchette, Une Femme douce, and Le Diable probablementall
of which depict suicide of one kind or anotherPipolo maintains to the very end that
a spiritual reading can be wrested even from Bressons bleakest works (p. 354).
B O O K R E V I E W S 445
Ultimately, whether or not one agrees with this reading, or the methodology
that Pipolo employs, one cannot deny the rigour and devotion with which he
approaches his subject. Befitting a director such as Bresson, Pipolo is no dilettante,
and he succeeds in the not inconsiderable task of creating a worthy study of the life
and work of a film-maker of enduring depth and profundity. In his impassioned
writing, Pipolo arrives at his own notes on the cinematographer.
ANDREW UTTERSON
Canterbury Christ Church University
2011, Andrew Utterson
Darkly Perfect World: colonial adventure, postmodernism, and
American noir
STANLEY ORR
Columbus, OH, Ohio University Press, 2010
ix248 pp., bibliography and index, $49.95 (hardcover)
Stanley Orr begins his examination of American noir by discussing a photograph used
in an ad campaign for GLAD trash bags in 1995. The photo, by famed photographer
Annie Liebovitz, featured noir icon, Robert Mitchum in a trench coat standing in a
rain-drenched alley amidst a pile of bagged garbage. Ties Are Out, Flaps Are In was
the tagline that advertised a plastic trash bag that used flaps rather than twist-ties to
fasten the bag. As Orr observes, the photo could represent either the apotheosis
of noir through its incorporation into mainstream culture, or the commodification of
an aesthetic and philosophical position that long enjoyed an antagonistic relationship
with the mass-cultural mainstream (p. 2). Both positions are examined in Darkly
Perfect World, which offers a critique of noir epistemology in literature and film.
Orrs trajectory of noir begins with Late-Victorian adventure literature, which he
sees as an early host-genre for American noir. These colonial adventure tales,
represented by such authors as Joseph Conrad and Louis Becke, reflect and reinscribe
profound anxieties within the western cultural imagination, doubts not only about the
failure of the colonial enterprise but also about the integrity of the metropolis (p. 5).
The colonial discourse concerning encounters with the exotic, and the fragmentation
of identity into the polarization of western self and colonial other, provides the
framework for noirs exploration of identity in the modern and postmodern world.
The author uses the term (borrowed from literary theorist Terry Eagleton)
authenticating alienation to describe the noir protagonists dilemma in the hard-
boiled literature of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, as well as the film noirs
of Josef Von Sternberg and Orson Welles. According to Orr, the noir ethos
transforms a metro-colonial identity crisis into an unlikely guarantor of identity:
savage otherness creates a protective enclosure of alienated, authenticated subjectivity
(pp. 78). This protective enclosure of authenticated alienation is best exemplified by
the trench coata wardrobe staple of such hard-boiled icons as Humphrey Bogart and
Robert Mitchum.
Though the comparison to primarily British colonial literature may seem tenuous
at first, Orrs keen analysis of the hard-boiled writings of Dashiell Hammett and
446 H I S T O R I C A L J O U R N A L O F F I L M , R A D I O A N D T E L E V I S I O N
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Copyright of Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television is the property of Routledge and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.