Time Out of Joint:

Movie Art: Une Femme Douce (Czech 1970)

Here is another masterpiece from the golden age of Czech cinema posters and winner of the 1973 Cannes International Film Festival Grand Prix for the Best Poster. It was created by the Czech artist Olga Poláčková-Vyleťalová for Robert Bresson's A Gentle Woman (1969). The Czech title itself adds yet another layer of beauty and meaning . . . Něžná or Tenderly.

Bresson's first color film, A Gentle Woman—adapted from the Dostoevsky short story A Gentle Creature—tells the heartbreaking story, in flashback, of Elle, the beautiful but smothered and disaffected wife of a Parisian pawnbroker. Told in the classic ascetic and expressionless style of Bresson with non-professional actors (includig the sad and beautiful Dominique Sanda), A Gentle Woman confounds attempts at communication and diversion. The film sutures the viewer into the perpetual state of Elle's ennui and growing sense of isolation and discontent.

The poster alone is a work of art: Magritte meets late-sixties ad art. It manages to simultaneously capture the moods of objectification and hiddenness; elegance and suffocation; radiance and impending doom. Moreover, the image does not simply attempt to "sell" the movie, but rather to convey the idea, the abstraction, of the film's tragic protagonist. This attests to Bresson's film being something more than a thing to be consumed; rather, it is an idea to be contemplated, a world to be experienced. 

The time is out of joint ...

Movie Art: Au Hasard Balthazar (France / U.S. 1966)

"Everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished [...] because this film is really the world in an hour and a half." —Jean Luc Goddard

This new and ongoing series of posts will begin to reflect on the beauty and power of cinema posters as both aesthetic advertising tools and as another dimension in the reading of a film's meaning.

Upon seeing this 1966 poster for Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, I was particularly taken aback  by how contemporary analysis of Bresson's film about the painful journey of Marie has been overshadowed by the parable of Balthazar—and worse, the idea that Balthazar is a kind of saint or Christ figure. And, whilst I am no Bresson scholar by any leap of imagination, perhaps this hermeneutic arises because of (a) the spiritualized mystique surrounding Bresson, (b) the American affect towards European cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century, and—more practically— (c) Balthazar's story's having a complete arc whilst Marie's fate is left open to the burdensome possibility of future living.

 

Case in point, two more contemporary DVD covers highlight Balthazar the donkey rather than Marie the accursed soujernor. If we reflect on the uncomfortably voyuristic and ultimately exploitative picture of a shamed young girl, however, it is clear that Bresson's intent is to tell Marie's tale. The donkey, Balthazar, is to be seen as being in service to Marie's tale—despite the film's name. It is the tale of the trials and travails of a girl becoming a woman in a cruel world, seeking to maintain her dignity and hope for both liberation and redemption.

Bresson tells Marie's story with grace and gravity by making the donkey Balthazar the object of wrath. His suffering is her suffering . . . not the other way around. And like the magi, his namesake, he is there to bear witness to Marie's divine suffering. He is both wandering magi and lowly livestock whose sole purpose and existence is to bear witness to the humble suffering of the divine in human form. Balthazar is there to show us the full extent of worldly cruelty on beautiful and nobel creatures such as the gentle Marie. That we see the donkey suffer cruelty as well should horrify us all the more at seeing Marie's suffering because what happens merely outwardly to the beast is happening inwardly to the soul of the human. Keeping all of this in mind is how we can connect to what Goddard (the French socialist materialist) observed about Bresson's film: that to see it is to see "the world in an hour and a half."

 

 

Movie Art: Andrei Rublev (Czech 1987)

 

" . . . as wax melts before the fire . . ."