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.

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?

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.

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.

[...] Anne and Martin attempt to hide their love, romancing only on clandestine field trips. This conflict is reflected in the decor: the parsonage is claustrophobic and chiaroscuric; the fields are bucolic and well-lit. [...]

The late Gothic cathedral is the reductio ad absurdum of the Scholastic method with its sic and non, its internal contradictions eternally interlocked: saints and gargoyles, Pantocrators and crucified Christs, oblique lines of force and verticals and horizontals. The lines of tension often clash randomly, lacking focus or climax; Gothic art furnished a dramatic space but not a dramatic focus to which all characters and lines were inevitably drawn. Worringer found in Gothic statuary a microcosm of the Gothic style: the face was often naturalistic, the robe abstract. The body, wrapped in stiff robes, represented the order of Byzantium; the face, often empathic, cried out the humanism of Florence. The inherent contradiction of Gothic life drove the abstract line into near chaos. The impulse of the Gothic man toward true knowledge, Worringer wrote, “being denied its natural satisfaction, thus exhausts itself in wild fantasies. . . . Everything becomes weird and fantastic.”31 The final solution of Gothic architecture was one of self-negation: instead of defining space, it attacked it; instead of creating order on earth, it thrust instability into the heavens.

At times Dreyer’s tension even bursts out of the frame. In a well-known composition from The Passion of Joan of Arc, a guard, partially hidden by the left vertical frame line, is tugging at Joan’s arm while Joan herself is struggling to pull herself outside of the right vertical frame line. The frame line seems an arbitrary restriction on a tension which is on the verge of flying apart. The effect is similar to that which one experiences standing in the nave of a Gothic cathedral as the lines of force explode from the ceiling driving straight through the aisles, through the walls, and out into the flying buttresses. The frame or the nave, the movie or the cathedral themselves, are artistic restrictions upon a reality which by itself would disintegrate.

In his study of the Holy in art, Gerardus van der Leeuw traces the history of the major arts from their origins in religious practice to the present secularized state. At its beginnings each art form was one with religion but throughout the centuries progressively suffered a “breakup of unity.” The ceremonial religious dance evolved into the sacer ludus, the sacer ludus subsequently subdivided into bourgeois drama and liturgy, the liturgy in its progressional turn became popularized; throughout history the constant trend of art is from the sacred to the profane. The Renaissance, with its emphasis on naturalness and individual effort, usually takes the rap for the “breakup of unity,” but van der Leeuw points out that this trend goes as far back as “the great heretic Akhenaten” who gave Egypt’s gods the sculptural faces of his family.4 Only rarely in the history of art, van der Leeuw contends, have talented artists been able to resist the trend toward secularization and return to the religious origins of art.

Van der Leeuw does not discuss cinema in his study. It is quite crucially the only major art form which does not fit into his schema. Motion pictures were not born in religious practice, but instead are the totally profane offspring of capitalism and technology. If a religious artist in cinema attempts to go back to his origins, he will find only entrepreneurs and technocrats.** When the Holy tries to enter into the cinema, the intrinsically profane art, there are bound to be some unusual consequences—consequences which van der Leeuw did not anticipate.

Each overview, whether monistic like van der Leeuw’s or dualistic like Bazin’s, holds that the spiritual quality in art suffered its decline at the expense of “realism,” the duplication of either external or internal reality. Art has always been excited by the challenge of realism: the bison came off the walls and became sculptures, the sculptures became photographs, the photographs moved. Eventually the artist, in his desire to imitate life, attempted to reproduce physical existence itself, not like the Greeks just to portray the highest sensual form. Victor Frankenstein’s mad dream was a Gothic extension of a dream shared by many artists of his age: to artificially recreate human life and its external surroundings. The urge to duplicate the external world was accompanied by an urge to duplicate the internal world. The romantic artist scrutinized and dutifully recorded his own feelings; he was accountable to no other reality than his own. The myth of the “artist personality” came into full bloom, resulting in both the psychological picturesque and impression, romantic verse and the psychological novel. Sypher has noted the similarities in nineteenth-century realism and romanticism; the romantic work of art, though verging on total fantasy, was only realism turned outside in.6