Robert Bresson > Quotes

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.”
― Robert Bresson

“Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

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

“Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“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.”
― Robert Bresson

“Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.”
― Robert Bresson

“Be the first to see what you see as you see it.”
― Robert Bresson

“When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration.”
― Robert Bresson

“Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create”
― Robert Bresson , Notes on the Cinematographer

“be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Practice the precept: find without seeking”
― Robert Bresson

“The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them.”
― Robert Bresson

“Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.”
― Robert Bresson

“Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing”
― Robert Bresson

“It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.”
― Robert Bresson

“I'd rather people feel a film before understanding it.”
― Robert Bresson

“Unbalance so as to re-balance.”
― Robert Bresson

“Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“The greater the success, the closer it verges on failure.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

“Create expectations to fulfil them.”
― Robert Bresson

“Empty the pond to get the fish.”
― Robert Bresson

“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.”
― Robert Bresson

“Let nothing be changed and all be different.”
― Robert Bresson

“You bore me”
― Robert Bresson

“The crude real will not by itself yield truth.”
― Robert Bresson

“One recognizes the true by its efficacy, by its power.”
― Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer