A tracking shot is a moral judgment, Jean-Luc Godard once remarked, and so, for that matter, is any camera shot. Any possible shot—high angle, close-up, pan—conveys a certain attitude toward a character, a “screen” which simplifies and interprets the character. Camera angles and pictorial composition, like music, are extremely insidious screens; they can undermine a scene without the viewer’s being aware of it. A slow zoom-out or a vertical composition can substantially alter the meaning of the action within a scene.

In the everyday Bresson replaces the “screens” with a form. By drawing attention to itself, the everyday stylization annuls the viewer’s natural desire to participate vicariously in the action on screen. Everyday is not a case of making a viewer see life in a certain way, but rather preventing him from seeing it as he is accustomed to. The viewer desires to be “distracted” (in Bresson’s terms), and will go to great lengths to find a screen which will allow him to interpret the action in a conventional manner. The viewer does not want to confront the Wholly Other or a form which expresses it.

In the everyday Bresson uses contrapuntal sound not for editorializing, but to reinforce the cold reality. The soundtrack consists primarily of natural sounds: wheels creaking, birds chirping, wind howling.

Through the use of repeated action and pleonastic dialogue Bresson “doubles” (or even “triples”) the action, making a single event happen several times in different ways.

When the same thing starts happening two or three times concurrently the viewer knows he is beyond simple day-to-day realism and into the peculiar realism of Robert Bresson. The doubling does not double the viewer’s knowledge or emotional reaction; it only doubles his perception of the event. Consequently, there is a schizoid reaction: one, there is the sense of meticulous detail which is a part of the everyday, and two, because the detail is doubled there is an emotional queasiness, a growing suspicion of the seemingly “realistic” rationale behind the everyday. If it is “realism,” why is the action doubled, and if it isn’t realism, why this obsession with details?

After an unsuccessful catechism class the priest enters in his diary, “But why the hostility of these little ones. What have I done to them?”

In each case Bresson’s protagonists respond to a special call which has no natural place in their environment. It is incredible that Joan the prisoner should act in such a manner before a panel of judges: nothing in the everyday has prepared the viewer for Joan’s spiritual, self-mortifying actions. Each protagonist struggles to free himself from his everyday environment, to find a proper metaphor for his passion. This struggle leads Michel to prison, Fontaine to freedom, and the priest and Joan to martyrdom.

The viewer finds himself in a dilemma: the environment suggests documentary realism, yet the central character suggests spiritual passion. This dilemma produces an emotional strain: the viewer wants to empathize with Joan (as he would for any innocent person in agony), yet the everyday structure warns him that his feelings will be of no avail. Bresson seems acutely aware of this: “It seems to me that the emotion here, in this trial (and in this film), should come not so much from the agony and death of Joan as from the strange air that we breathe while she talks of her Voices, or the crown of the angel, just as she would talk of one of us or this glass carafe.” This “strange air” is the product of disparity: spiritual density within a factual world creates a sense of emotional weight within an unfeeling environment. As before, disparity suggests the need, but not the place, for emotions.

The decisive action forces the viewer into the confrontation with the Wholly Other he would normally avoid. He is faced with an explicably spiritual act within a cold environment, an act which now requests his participation and approval. Irony can no longer postpone his decision. It is a “miracle” which must be accepted or rejected.

The decisive action has a unique effect on the viewer, which may be hypothesized thus: the viewer’s feelings have been consistently shunned throughout the film (everyday), yet he still has “strange” undefined feelings (disparity). The decisive action then demands an emotional commitment which the viewer gives instinctively, naturally (he wants to share Hirayama’s tears, Michel’s love). But having given that commitment, the viewer must now do one of two things: he can reject his feelings and refuse to take the film seriously, or he can accommodate his thinking to his feelings. If he chooses the latter, he will, having been given no emotional constructs by the director, have constructed his own “screen.” He creates a translucent, mental screen through which he can cope with both his feelings and the film. This screen may be very simple. In the case of Pickpocket it could be that people such as Michel and Jeanne have spirits which have deep spiritual connections, and they need no earthly rationale for their love. In Diary of a Country Priest it could be that there is such a thing as the Holy Agony, and the tormented priest was its victim. Bresson uses the viewer’s own natural defenses, his protective mechanism, to cause him, of his own free will, to come to the identical decision Bresson had predetermined for him.

Stasis is the quiescent, frozen, or hieratic scene which succeeds the decisive action and closes the film

Whether that “something superior” is called “extraordinary currents,” “the invisible hand,” or “God,” it transcends immanent experience and may be called, if only for practical purposes, the Transcendent.

To some of Bresson’s critics, both admirers and detractors, he is not only the consummate stylist but also the consummate oddball: morbid, hermetic, eccentric, obsessed with theological dilemmas in an age of social action.

Intertwined with the abjuration of the body in Bresson’s films is the vexing problem of suicide: If the body enslaves the soul, why not destroy the body and be free?

Individual influence was, of course, discernible, but not peremptory; artists came and went, Byzantine iconography stayed.

The long forehead, the lean features, the closed lips, the blank stare, the frontal view, the flat light, the uncluttered background, the stationary camera, these identify Bresson’s protagonists as objects suitable for veneration. When Michel’s cold face stares into the camera in scene after scene in Pickpocket, Bresson is using his face—only one part of Bresson’s complex film-making—like a Byzantine face painted high on a temple wall. It can simultaneously evoke sense of distance (its imposing, hieratic quality) and a strange sensuousness (the hard-chiseled stern face amid a vast mosaic or environmental panorama). And when Bresson brings the rest of his film-making abilities to bear on that face, it takes its rightful place in the liturgy. Just before the priest collapses in fatigue on a barren hillock, almost enveloped by gray dusk and dark barren trees, there is a long shot in Bresson’s Country Priest which creates a composition familiar to Byzantine wall paintings, such as the Ascension mosaic at St. Sophia: an agonized, lonely, full figure set against an empty environment, his head hung to the left, wrapped in body-obscuring robes, about to succumb to the spiritual weight he must bear.