In the scant clear-headed work days allotted between Christmas and the turnover of the New Year, I spent my time renewing an old intimacy with Robert Bresson’s filmography. In the course of this most welcome homework, I discovered an excellent 1970 interview with the maître, conducted by one Charles Thomas Samuels, whose perspicacity and probing is enough to make a lesser interviewer greenly envious. Of particular interest was Bresson’s answer to a question about the suicide of Mouchette, the titular protagonist embodied by Nadine Nortier in his 1967 film adaptation of Georges Bernanos’s novel:
“Samuels: Obviously, you must show Mouchette’s suicide because that is the conclusion of Bernanos’s novel, but as a Christian how do you feel about it? You seem to celebrate suicide—the blast of the Magnificat at her death—but isn’t this heretical?
Bresson: Yes, but I confess that more and more suicide loses its sinfulness to me. Killing oneself can be courageous; not killing oneself, because you wish to lose nothing, even the worst that life has to offer, can also be courageous. Since I live near the Seine, I have seen many people jump into the river in front of my windows. It’s remarkable that more don’t do it. There are so many reasons for suicide, good and bad. I believe that the church has become less rigorous against it. Sometimes it is inevitable, and not always because of madness. To be aware of a certain emptiness can make life impossible.”
The interview took place shortly after the release of 1969’s Une Femme Douce, which begins in the wake of a suicide jump. Of the four films that Bresson would yet make, three of them dealt explicitly with the subject of suicide (Four Nights of a Dreamer, The Devil, Probably, L’Argent). As early as Spring, 1971, writer Marvin Zeman could write with assurance of Bresson’s evident death-drive, as reflected in the filmmaker’s recent work (“The Suicide of Robert Bresson,” Cinema magazine).
Obviously self-slaughter was something of an idée fixe for Bresson, but he persevered to be (by some accounts) 99 years old, called home by the hand of God, not his own. If we can merely speculate as to if this most secretive of artist’s frequent returns to the subject of suicide were a form of creative therapy, it is certain that in their headlong confrontation of despair, they have been succor to those who have considered once or twice or a thousand times taking a dive off this mortal coil.
Well! Last week the year turned over, and I, along with billions of others, found myself still very much alive, having refrained from pulling a Greg Louganis off the Brooklyn Bridge. Other than my annual stiff dose of Bresson, how did I do it? Why, thanks to my…
FAVORITE THINGS OF 2011
-I’ll not bore you further with another Top 5/10/20 Films list—I’ve already dispatched about a dozen of them, inattentively compiled via slips of paper drawn from a hat, to various outlets—but I do feel compelled to say a few words for Hugo. As I’ve not had an opportunity elsewhere to opine on Martin Scorsese’s latest, we’ll let it stand in for all that was best in movies this year.
I saw Hugo in the early evening on 12/30 at Cleveland’s palatial Valley View Cinemark. Having been led by the trailer to expect an elaborately production-designed slapstick comedy, along the order of Mouse Hunt, featuring Sasha Baron Cohen tumbling into one wedding cake after another, I instead walked out having been entirely leveled by Hugo’s sense of enchantment and emotional lucidity (When was the last time a movie used close-ups specifically as close-ups with such grace, such care, such feeling?) An appropriately wide-eyed movie about recapturing a lost sense of wonder—also the subject, in part, of the rightly-celebrated Tree of Life—here achieved by evoking the infancy of a medium that is now widely suspected to be in its dotage. It remains to be seen if Scorsese’s example will act as an agent of regeneration—I write this with Eastman-Kodak teetering on the brink of Chapter 11—but it’s at least vindicating to see Chloë Grace-Moretz, the beautiful child previously abused by cynical trash like Let Me In and Kick-Ass, given a role that uses her emotional transparency for good. A beautiful illustration of a point I clumsily attempted to make in my 6th column, for it shows film specifically, and aesthetics generally, as the domain of orphans, and a means whereby “family” can be found. Hugo, however, is the work of someone who knows precisely what he wants to say, and how to go about saying it.
-Purple prose discovery of the year: “Most people start their day with breakfast. At five-thirty on that sad morning in 1932, I began mine with tears.” –Miss Carlotta Monti, W.C. Fields’s mistress
-Blouse- “Into Black”
Ill bassline.
-How, you may ask, do I sustain my own “sense of wonder”? I should like to take this opportunity to thank the many institutions that have assisted in this worthy task: Brother’s (Omaha). Beachland Ballroom (Cleveland). The Call Box Lounge (Brooklyn). Century Bar (Dayton). La Cita (LA). Cole’s (LA). The Crown and Goose (London). Footsie’s (LA). The Happy Dog (Cleveland). Harefield Road (Brooklyn). The HMS Bounty (LA). Jimmy’s Corner (Manhattan). The Lock Inn (Brooklyn). The Mount (York, UK). Matt Torrey’s (Brooklyn). Northside Tavern (Cincinnati). Ontario (Brooklyn). Palace (Brooklyn). Petrossian (Manhattan). Prosperity Social Club (Cleveland). Red Lion (LA). The Rusty Bucket (Bexley, OH). The Soccer Tavern (Brooklyn). Subway Bar (Manhattan). Tuty’s Inn (Fairborn, OH). Yorkshire Terrier (York). Blessed be the barkeeps.
Particular note should go to the The Victoria on 28 North Hill Road in Highgate, North London, whose Sundays are given over to a traditional, quite authentic sing-a-long of the wartime vintage—this is a sheet music, no microphone, live-piano affair—which I was privileged to witness. One of the regulars, I was apprised, was a fellow named Ram John Holder, who apparently played “Porkpie” on the Channel 4 series Desmond’s, and who sang a quite warming “What a Wonderful World.” Towards the end of the evening, a seventysomething dude with a ponytail the color of yellow snow, tricked out in costume jewelry gold, told me that I resembled “a young Rod Stewart” (This is not at all true.) Best of all was one young woman’s rendition of Eponine’s “On My Own” from Les Misérables, a performance that will, I think, remain with me until my deathbed (hopefully in my 99th year), and which I cannot wait to hear rendered by Taylor Swift in 2012.
Well, that about rounds up everything that made that last shitshow twelvemonth livable. But if the posters papering the subway showing the scintillating Katherine Heigl gone brunette and “kinky” in One For the Money are any indicator, this next orbital cycle is gonna be a good one! See you at the movieshows, America!
Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to The Village Voice film section, Sight & Sound Magazine, and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.