(Nearly) random excerpts from Robert Bresson’s Notes On Cinematography (1977):

 

  • Cinematography, the art, with images, of representing nothing.
  • Make visible what, without you, might never have been seen.
  • Shooting. No part of the unexpected which is not secretly expected by you.
  • Many people are needed in order to make a film, but only one who makes, unmakes, remakes his images and sounds, returning at every second to the initial impression or sensation which brought these to birth and is incomprehensible to the other people.
  • Economy: Racine (to his son Louis): I know your handwriting well enough, without your having to sign your name.
  • Respect man’s nature without wishing it more palpable than it is.
  • Actor. The to-and-fro of the character in front of his nature forces the public to look for talent on his face, instead of the enigma peculiar to each living creature.
  • To defeat the false powers of photography.
  • Two persons, looking each other in the eye, see not their eyes but their looks. (The reason why we get the color of a person’s eyes wrong?)
  • From the beings and things of nature, washed clean of all art and especially of the art of drama, you will make an art.
  • X demonstrates a great stupidity when he says that to touch the masses there is no need of art.
  • Not to shoot a film in order to illustrate a thesis, or to display men and women confined to their external aspect, but to discover the matter they are made of. To attain that “heart of the heart” which does not let itself be caught either by poetry, or by philosophy or by drama.
  • Empty the pond to get the fish.
  • Don’t run after poetry. It penetrates unaided through the joins (ellipses).
  • Your film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism), but in the ineffable that they will emanate.
  • Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion.
  • The CINEMA did not start from zero. Everything to be called into question.