"The buzz has already spread throughout Paris:" "A unique film, Au hasard Balthazar, is coming to the theaters." "That's the buzz, even mentioned one evening on French public television." "Because we feel something's been transformed in the art of cinema," "Roland Darbois and I decided to devote this show to Robert Bresson's film." "And we're not the only ones who feel this way." "We're happy to welcome on our show the opinions - or more precisely, the feelings - of film directors as different from Bresson as Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard and François Reichenbach, and an author as unique as Ms. Marguerite Duras." "Mr. Jean-Luc Godard." "I'm a film addict, absolutely crazy about cinema, so I tend to exaggerate, but I'd compare Pascal's Discourse on the Passion of Love to this film." "The film affected me in the same way as Pascal's writings on passion." "Mr. Louis Malle." "It seems to me that cinema has finally entered a certain zone that it had previously barely touched." "That's not completely true." "The greatest films had touched it." "Ms. Marguerite Duras." "I think Bresson has brought something extremely new to cinema today, which is thought." "It wasn't immediately apparent." "I was overwhelmed by the drama, yet I couldn't quite put my finger on what I was seeing." "It's Bresson in dialogue with himself." "That's what's great about this film." "If I wanted to characterize Bresson," "I said once in an interview that to me he's a Grand Inquisitor, someone who, despite the risk or violence involved, penetrates to the very depths of a human being." "And as inquisitors go, he's less dangerous than political or religious inquisitors because his tool is cinema, and since cinema is concerned with life and mankind, it is, by definition, humanistic." "Therefore, Bresson has the opportunity, and the incredible privilege, of being both an inquisitor and a humanist." "This is very apparent in Balthazar, which is a film with a dreadful vision of the world and the evil in it, but at the same time, we experience it with a kind of Christian mildness that I find extraordinary." "Mr. François Reichenbach." "I've always liked the tone of Bresson's films, but this time I was even more moved, because there were even fewer words than usual." "So each word came as a shock, but that shock was just as it had to be." "First and foremost, I'm a musician, so I loved this film as a musician." "I loved its silence, which made the sound stand out, which helped the music, and the music let the words speak." "I think it's a film that should be seen by people who usually only see films by Chaplin or Jacques Tati, people who go to the movies once a year." "My grandfather was like that." "He'd never go, or he'd see a film by Chaplin or Tati." "This film is the world." "In 90 or 100 minutes, we see the world from childhood to death and everything in between." "I think it's absolutely incredible." "Bresson's never gone further in terms of minimalism and shunning effects." "You could say the film is far ahead of its time." "You could also say it's timeless." "In any case, it's essential." "Essential to Bresson and for Bresson." "What had previously only been expressed through poetry and literature," "Bresson has expressed through cinema." "We could say that cinema before him was a parasite." "It lived off the other arts." "With him, film comes into its own." "It stands alone." "Of all the films I've seen, this one most resembles solitary, and thus true, creation," "Of all the films I've seen since I began going to the movies." "The title comes from my desire to give the donkey a Biblical name." "So I named him after one of the Three Wise Men." "The title itself is the motto of the nobles of Baux... who claimed to be heirs of the Mage Balthazar." "Their motto was "Au Hasard Balthazar."" "I like the rhyme in the title, and I like the way it fits the subject exactly." "Au hasard Balthazar is about our anxieties and desires... when faced with a living creature" "who's completely humble, completely holy, and happens to be a donkey:" "Balthazar." "It's pride, greed, the need to inflict suffering, lust," "in the measure found in each of the various owners at whose hands he suffers and finally dies." "This character... resembles the Tramp in Chaplin's early films, but it's still an animal, a donkey, an animal that evokes eroticism yet at the same time evokes spirituality or Christian mysticism, because the donkey is of such importance in the Old and New Testaments," "as well as all our ancient Roman churches." "Balthazar is also about two lines that converge, lines that sometimes run parallel and sometimes cross." "The first line:" "In a donkey's life, we see the same stages as in a man's:" "A childhood of tender caresses, adult years spent in work, for both man and donkey." "A little later, the time of talent and genius, and finally, the stage of mysticism that precedes death." "The other line is the donkey at the mercy of his different owners, who represent the various vices... that bring about Balthazar's suffering and death." "Another concern I had while making this film was that the central character, who wasn't always present but was always the main story line, glimpsed only from time to time and yet still the subject, was the donkey." "It had to be clear that the donkey was the main story, the main character." "To achieve this, all the events that didn't happen in his presence or that he only glimpsed move away from him." "It's hard to say where the other characters came from." "They just came to me." "I can't really explain them." "I saw them." "Then they were drawn in like portraits." "I can't explain them the way a novelist could." "To me, it's essentially a film about pride." "What drives absolutely all the characters is pride." "A kind of haughtiness about their condition and their fellow men and even about the world, about what they are." "This pride, if you really look at the people around you - isn't it essentially a good and useful thing?" "If we weren't proud of ourselves, what would become of us?" "This humanity that you find so bleak " "I don't see that it's any less lovable than a humanity that's less dark." "Get out!" "Right now!" "I'm telling you!" "Marie is " "At the beginning of the film, she's a little girl... and at the end, she's still a little girl." "She's someone who'll never grow up, who'll never be capable of making a choice... or acting out of careful consideration." "She acts completely out of instinct." "She gets pushed around." "She's either submitting to her father or to Gérard." "In my opinion, she's doomed from the start due to her total passivity." "Does she submit to Gérard or does she choose him?" "I think she submits to him." "I think." "But she gives her consent in the car scene." "She gives her consent from the start, I think." "From their first meeting." "So, in a way she chooses him." "For Gérard," "Marie is from a different world than the one he knows." "He doesn't quite understand her - in fact, not at all." "But he desires her in order, I think, to destroy her." "He desires her because she's relatively pure and fresh, and he'd really like to be able to destroy that, because I think it's something he finds unbearable." "He's not touched by her." "No, because I don't think he's sensitive enough to be touched by her." "He's too dumb." "I don't think either one loves the other." "It's love that finds its niche, but it's sensual love." "The scene is about sensuality." "I won't say "eroticism," because the term's been overused to the point of becoming meaningless." "To me, the scene is more about sensuality than love." "It's spring, birds are singing." "It's only by chance - responsible for so much in our lives - that this young man is at her side and causes something to stir in her." "Sensual love is born at that moment." "Maybe she believes this love is specifically for Gérard, but it could easily be for someone else." "Was that scene written in detail in the script, or was it improvised in filming?" "No, it was on paper, but there's a world of difference between writing it and filming it." "To me, the most important part of a film is its rhythm." "Everything is expressed by the rhythm." "Without rhythm, there's nothing." "There's nothing without form either, but there's nothing without rhythm." "To me, it's about taking two characters, and their attitudes, and finding their connection." "But everything you say happens didn't happen during filming but during editing." "It's the editing that creates these things, that brings them forth." "The camera simply records." "It's precise, and, fortunately, unbiased." "The camera is extremely precise." "The drama is created in the cutting room." "When images are juxtaposed and sound is added, that's when "love blossoms."" "There is something quite troubling, dark, and ambiguous about Marie's relationship with Balthazar." "It's love without a clearly defined object." "Adolescents can be in love with something very vague, very undefined." "Love must have an object." "The object of her love isn't the donkey." "The donkey's just an intermediary." "That's what I think." "I think it's a display of tenderness... perhaps even love." "After all, it's common to decorate an animal we love with flowers." "But not in the middle of the night." "Why not, if you're awake?" "The difficulty is that all art is both abstract and suggestive at the same time." "You can't show everything." "If you do, it's no longer art." "Art lies in suggestion." "The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things." "Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that's impossible." "So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them." "We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a constant state of anticipation." "This goes back to what I said earlier about showing the cause after the effect." "We must let the mystery remain." "Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen." "The effects of things must always be shown before their cause, like in real life." "We're unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness." "We see the effects and only later discover the cause." "It's so ugly here." "This is a place to die in." "With no regrets." "Who mentioned dying?" "Me." "Don't you believe in anything?" "I believe in what I own." "I love money." "I hate death." "You'll die like everyone else." "I'll bury them all." "You're old." "Not as old as all that." "You're not handsome." "Let me eat, you old scrooge." "I'm starving." "They say you hide gold coins and cash in your shoes." "What good does it do you?" "Here, take it." "You're rich but you don't have electricity." "We have nothing left." "Not even the house and yard are ours." "Papa gave the creditors his last cent." "That's what happens when you place honor above everything." "He's spent his life creating obligations for himself." "What for?" "Not one in ten believes he's innocent." "Do I have any obligations?" "I'm free, obliged only to do what serves my interests and can bring me a profit - and a handsome profit at that." "Life's nothing but a fairground, a marketplace where even your word is unnecessary." "A bank note will do." "Paying people frees you from any obligations." "Better still, get them to work for nothing." "Not everyone sees things my way." "You quickly learn you can do as you like and still command respect." "It just takes nerve and flair." "Keep it." "It's not money I need, but a friend." "Yes, a friend." "A friend who can tell me how to run away." "I've always wanted to." "Run away?" "Run away." "Marie hides in that man's house because it's her final refuge." "She's become clever and skillful and cunning enough to titillate him so he'll let her sleep in the hay." "As for the rest, she goes further because she's now fairly experienced." "All the same, afterwards, she treats him with utter contempt." "What happens between them that night?" "Certain extremely contradictory currents in which the girl's fundamental honesty ultimately prevails." "At first she accepts the money, because she really needs it." "Or maybe she's thinking of giving it to her father, who's penniless after being swindled by the miser." "But after hearing the miser's cynical speech, which makes her very sad, she realizes money isn't everything he claims it is, and she returns it." "That's her moment of greatness." "As to what happens afterwards, your guess is as good as mine." "I don't know... if she spends the night with the miser or simply spends the night in a chair waiting for daylight." "Weren't you moved by Marie when she came to see you?" "Didn't she make you drop your defenses and nastiness?" "At one moment, certainly." "Certainly there's the temptation to be humane... before love makes you lustful and leads to " "Besides, concerning this crucial moment... we have no idea what will happen or what should happen." "Let's take it even further:" ""We don't know what happened."" "The following day, when the parents visit the merchant and he says, "She was here an hour ago,"" "the viewer doesn't know exactly what happened." "And I find it quite remarkable that Robert Bresson didn't dwell on it." "Who is Marie for you?" "I wouldn't say Marie is representative of modern women." "I think... she's what she seems to be in the film, someone very sensitive who's been waylaid yet still remains very pure." "He's in despair." "Comfort him." "From Diary of a Country Priest up until Balthazar," "God is explicitly present." "God the Redeemer is there." "Balthazar gives me the impression of a world without God, a world uninterested in God." "Firstly, I don't think that just speaking of God or saying the word "God"... indicates his presence." "If I use a filmmaker's tools to represent... a human being, by which I mean someone with a soul, not just a jiggling puppet, if the human is present, so is the divine." "Pronouncing the name of God isn't what makes him present." "No, but to my knowledge, this is your first film where a character- Marie's father- rejects God." "If he rejects God, then God exists, and therefore God is present." "But suddenly God is no longer good." "He's not involved with mankind, which you've never said until now." "I don't share your impression that God is absent from the film, for the reasons I've just given." "What role do words have in a film like yours?" "I think words should say everything an image can't." "Before having characters speak, we should examine everything they could express with their eyes, above all, with body language, certain kinds of interaction... certain ways of behaving." "Words should only be used when we need to delve deeper into the heart of things." "In short, ideas must be expressed on film using appropriate images and sounds, and dialogue should only be used as a last resort." "I don't like talking about technique." "I don't feel I have one." "It's more an obsession I have with flattening out images." "I have good reason to." "I believe - rather, I'm certain - that without transformation, there is no art, and without transforming the image, there is no cinema." "If the image remains isolated on-screen, just as it was filmed, if it doesn't change when juxtaposed with other images, there is no transformation, and it isn't cinema." "To achieve that " "Images bearing the mark of the dramatic arts can't be transformed because they're marked by that seal." "Like a table made out of wood that's already been carved once." "The table will be shaped by those carvings." "You must use images free from all art, especially the dramatic arts, so they can be transformed through contact with other images and sound." "The great difficulty in cinema " "I say "cinema" to distinguish it from "movies."" "By "movies" I mean conventional ones, which to me are just filmed plays." "The director has the actors perform a play, and he films it." "To me, cinema is something entirely different." "It's an independent art born of the juxtaposition of image with image, image with sound, and sound with sound." "This is true creation, not reproduction." "When you film actors performing a play, the camera reproduces the scene, it doesn't create it." "I wonder if I'm making myself clear." " Yes, very clear." "In the theater, we ask actors to perform a piece, actors from stage or film or both." "We film them acting out this story." "To me, it's not the same thing." "It's about image and sound." "Images that are transformed when juxtaposed with others." "But the images must have a certain quality that might be called neutrality." "They mustn't have - and it's very difficult to avoid - too much dramatic meaning." "Their dramatic meaning should only come from their juxtaposition with other images." "That's what's extremely difficult:" "To know how this image should be shot, and from what angle, to allow it to interact with other images." "Mr. Ghislain Cloquet, cinematographer." "In working on this film, as technicians we had the chance to see that his method, which consists of using just one lens for an entire film, and what's more, one with a long focal length, a 50mm lens," "which is very restrictive and imposes very precise limits " "This ground rule, like all rules that last, produced absolutely unexpected and marvelous results." "It's similar to the surprise he says can occur with actors." "When you've worn them out, something magical happens." "What's striking about the use of the 50mm lens is that he actually doesn't plan his staging." "If he did, the camera with the 50mm lens would do its best to capture his framing." "Instead, he stages the scene by looking through the 50mm lens, and that gives him the answer, because it's his only option." "Out of this comes an editing style, a style of storytelling, that's very homogeneous and very fluid." "For example, for the cameraman " "I wasn't the cameraman on this film." "One of my crew was - but his work became extraordinarily constant and extremely consistent." "To the degree that theater is an external and decorative art - which is not at all an insult in my mind - to that same degree, the aim, the goal of cinema " "I specifically say "cinema" and not "movies,"" "referring to the art of cinema, if it exists - is about interiorization, intimacy, isolation." "In other words, the innermost depths." "Farewell, my poor, dear friend." "Doomed to spend all your days watching the same fools go by." "Farewell, old pal." "And you, my friend." "To me, cinema is... the art of having each thing in its place." "In this it resembles all other arts." "Like the anecdote about Johann Sebastian Bach playing for a student." "The student gushes with admiration, but Bach says, "There's nothing to admire." "You just have to hit the note at the right time, and the organ does the rest."" "The sound isn't realistic in your films." "You don't use sound effects, but you exaggerate the sound." "You lower the volume of dialogue and exaggerate the noise of objects." "Sometimes I reduce the volume." "Other times I do the opposite and exaggerate their importance." "It depends on what I feel intuitively and how the film is unfolding." "Another thing." "You ask your actors to express themselves through body language." "Yet you also restrict those very elements." "We're back to talking about technique again, or rather my obsession with mechanical behavior." "I think most of our gestures, and even our words, are automatic." "If your hand is on your knee, you didn't put it there." "Montaigne wrote a wonderful chapter on this, about our hands that go where we don't tell them to go." "Our hands are autonomous." "Our gestures, our limbs, are practically autonomous." "They're not under our command." "That's cinema." "What cinema is not is thinking out a gesture, thinking out words." "We don't think of what we're going to say." "The words come even as we think, and perhaps even make us think." "In this regard, theater is unrealistic and unnatural." "What I attempt with my films is to touch what's real." "Perhaps I'm obsessed with reality." "Something else." "You transform your characters into your desired form rather than letting them evolve in their own way." "It's a strange combination, a combination of them and me, a transfer of energy between us." "It's a kind of mixture... obtained, not from my direction or staging, but from a kind of divination, a shared assent, a kind of friendship in all matters." "It absolutely does not come from directing the actors or from staging things." ""Staging" is an apt expression." "It shows that today's movies - once again, I emphasize the difference between movies and cinema - today's movies are filmed plays." "I apologize for repeating it yet again." "You don't consider yourself a director?" "Not at all." "Not even a cinephile." "What's Robert Bresson's profession?" "Someone once said I'm one "who imposes order."" "I prefer that to "director" like on a stage, because I don't see a stage anywhere." "In that case, why don't you ever let your actors improvise?" "They improvise, but not in the way you think." "By that I mean" "I like the mind to be completely uninvolved in what's happening." "We keep repeating lines, 50 times if necessary, until the mind no longer intervenes in the dialogue or gestures." "Once things become automatic, the actor is thrown into the action of the film, and completely unexpected things happen that are a hundred times more real than theatrical acting where the actor has memorized his lines, thinking out his every line and gesture." "There's no way it will seem real." "Using this method, do your actors sometimes do unexpected things?" "All the time." "That's the improvisation I speak of." "We can't imitate life." "We have to find a way to reproduce it without imitating it." "If we imitate life, it's not real." "It's fake." "I think using a mechanism like this can lead to something lifelike, and even real." "Did the donkey cause any problems?" "The donkey was a big problem, because I didn't want a performing donkey." "Even while writing the film," "I was very wary of using a trained donkey." "Ladies and gentlemen, we're honored to introduce the greatest mind of our century!" "Will someone give me a three-digit number?" "772." "834." "Now a number between 2 and 9." "Now our mathematician will calculate." "I didn't want it to be professional." "The circus scene... where the donkey does math tricks was shot much later than the rest to give the trainer time to train the donkey to do math." "I waited two months to film that scene and then add it to the rest, so that the donkey would be completely free of training, free of any artificiality." "But this created a situation where the donkey never did what we expected." "It seems to me what you ask of your performers resembles a psychiatric exercise called "psychodrama,"" "which people have often attempted to transform into art." "You put them in a situation and ask them to test their inner limits." "What interests me is not what they show but what they conceal." "And you manage to film what they conceal?" "Thanks to that extraordinary device, the miraculous machine called a camera." "As a matter of fact, what surprises me is that such an incredible device, capable of recording what our eye cannot, or more precisely, what our mind does not," "is only used to show us tricks and falsehoods." "That's what surprises me." "Do you believe professional acting contributes to these tricks and falsehoods?" "After all, ever since Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, you no longer use professional actors." "Of course, because it's difficult, and even impossible, to change an actor's nature." "There's something Chateaubriand said about 17th-century poets that goes something like," ""They don't lack naturalness." "They lack Nature."" "In the theater, being natural is a learned skill based on carefully studied feelings." "Life is life." "That's what we're striving for." "That's our raw material." "In cinema, the raw material isn't the actor, it's the person." "Without putting anyone on the spot," "I'd like you to name some actors who are natural." "For example, in France, Michel Simon." "He's very natural." "Yes, but once again, you'll make me go too far..." "Please do." "And speak my mind about acting." "Acting is simply projection." "An actor projects himself into the character he's imagined, and at the same time, he's watching himself." "In a film... it's the same thing." "If an actor projects himself elsewhere, what's left?" "Nothing." "The character is hollow." "You can often see it in close-ups." "The actor is absent, absent even from his own image." "When you hire people who aren't actors, who haven't been distorted and who watch themselves less, are the results more real?" "The great talent, and the greatest difficulty - isn't it what we commonly call "charm" in daily life?" "People are charming because they aren't aware of their charm." "That's what I'm looking for:" "True charm." "That's what cinema needs." "That's why cinema - though I'm neither psychologist nor analyst - can delve so deeply into psychology and psychoanalysis." "I don't know if it's true, but I've heard you don't give your performers the entire script." "They don't know the story they're to be thrown into." "That's not quite correct." "They have a script." "What they don't know is how they're doing on-screen." "Unlike what is commonly done in movies, on my films they aren't shown the previous day's rushes." "I never show them what they've done so they won't watch themselves on-screen as if in a mirror and try to correct themselves, as all actors do." "They think, "My nose is too far to the right." "Next time I'll face left." "That'll be better."" "You see what I mean." "How do you ask your performers to learn their lines?" "What input do they have as to dialogue?" "I ask them to learn their lines ignoring their meaning, as if they didn't have a meaning, as if the words were just syllables." "As if sentences weren't made of words but of syllables." "The meaning comes upon them unaware at the moment I described earlier, when I set them loose in the film." "They learn their lines in a foreign language, only receiving the translation at the moment they're set free." "Yes, if you like." "Do you use long takes to allow them to express themselves?" "To me, the substance of cinema isn't gestures and words." "It's the effect produced by these gestures and words." "So it's completely independent of me and even them." "It occurs completely without their knowledge." "It's what these gestures and words emit, what we read in their attitudes and faces." "Like Montaigne said," ""We're revealed in our gestures."" "Mr. Louis Malle." "Yes, indeed, I think if Balthazar were shot with professional actors, there'd be, I don't know," "something a bit off in the tone of the film." "The performers must be unknowns without any ties to acting." "What I find exceptional in Bresson's work, and especially in this film, is that it's cinema that has burnt all bridges with the theater." "It's a cinema of inner life." "We can associate it with many things:" "Music, painting, these kinds of things." "I think, most of all, it's the expression of thought." "In general, when filmmakers begin a film, they entrust the performers, professional actors, to express this thought." "These people use their techniques, their methods, their talent." "I'd say their talent is the problem." "It's bound to get in the way and prevent Bresson's thought from retaining all its purity." "It runs the risk of diverting it, influencing it, maybe even enriching it." "It's possible that performers might enrich a film, but it would still deform it." "Obviously, when he chooses to work with unknowns, he's shaping unformed clay." "Obviously, this allows him to keep his idea of the film intact." "I think in his case it's indisputable." "Let's talk about the script." "It's admirably constructed, but it's full of ellipses and question marks." "For example, at one point," "Gérard is summoned by the police." "Do you realize no one knows why he's been summoned?" "And neither do I." "I'm kidding." "But I want to eliminate all details of the back story." "If someone's summoned by the police, we'll see what happens." "But I think it's a good rule - though I think rules are made to be broken - to always show the effect before the cause." "The cause must be passionately desired so that the images, your film, grab the audience's interest." "This young man is summoned, and we don't know why." "We believe we do:" "Someone's been murdered." "But it doesn't matter who did it." "We think it was him, and then we see we're wrong." "We think it was the tramp, Arnold, but it wasn't him either." "It doesn't matter for the story." "Maybe they'll never know what happened." "Maybe it's wasn't a murder but just an accident." "But whether it was murder or accident has absolutely nothing to do with our story, and I always try categorically to eliminate whatever's not essential." "I think - perhaps I'm wrong - that the arts are on the decline." "They're dying, perhaps from too much freedom, perhaps due to their incredibly wide distribution, like everything today." "I think movies, radio and television are killing the arts." "But I also believe that, oddly enough, that it's precisely through cinema, radio and television that these arts will be reborn, perhaps in a completely different form." "The word "art" may no longer even mean what it does now." "But it seems to me there's hope." "I believe in cinema... as a completely new art" "that we really don't even yet quite grasp." "I believe in the muse of cinema." "Degas said," ""The muses don't speak to each other." "They dance together."" "Actually, I believe cinema is, or will soon be, a completely independent art and is not, as has been imagined, a synthesis of other arts." "It's an art completely apart and independent." "Do you think it will be limited by its beginnings as simple entertainment?" "It's very possible that movies, as opposed to cinema, will continue to exist." "There's no reason that movies as entertainment shouldn't continue." "But I firmly believe in cinema as a serious art." "Not as entertainment, but on the contrary, as a way of taking a deeper look at things, a kind of aid to mankind in delving deeper and discovering ourselves."