This book looks at the largely neglected colour films of French film director Robert Bresson (1901--99) that can teach us about cinema's distinctive ability to draw on painting, photography, sculpture, and the plastic arts in general.

Published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, this is the first major publication to make full use of the extensive holdings of the Fondation Cartier-Bresson, including thousands of prints and a vast resource of documents relating to the photographer's life and work.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is renowned for capturing the humour, spontaneity and universality of life in his photographs. This volume traces his artistic progression from his earliest works right up to the present, and includes images from France in the late 1920s and Mexico and Spain in the early 1930s. Compartative images by photographers such as Daguerre and Atget are included, and a selection of Cartier-Bresson's paintings and drawings are shown alongside his more famous photographs. The author analyzes his most famous images and discusses the various philosophies that inform his work, notably Zen and Surrealism.

This book examines the connections between film and Christianity, considering how films express and depict Christian faith and spirituality and provide experiences associated with it. The notion of movement as immobility (from Simone Weil) is employed to describe film and its images in motion. Its movements can reconnect us with the movements of the world, those motions in which a mysterious sense of order, what Weil calls "immobility," arises. Film is understood as a privileged form to access inscrutable spiritual (in)visibilities that can be linked with Christian concepts and practices. The chapters in Exploring Film and Christianity offer new studies of famous directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson combined with analyses of recent notable films, including Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Organized around the productive topics of theory, expression, depiction and experience, this volume is a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary research on film and Christianity.

Perhaps the most highly regarded French filmmaker after Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson created a new kind of cinema through meticulous refinement of the form's grammatical and expressive possibilities. In thirteen features over a forty-year career, he held to an uncompromising moral vision and aesthetic rigor that remain unmatched. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film is the first comprehensive study to give equal attention to the films, their literary sources, and psycho-biographical aspects of the work. Concentrating on the films' cinematographic, imagistic, narrative, and thematic structures, Pipolo provides a nuanced analysis of each film-including nearly 100 illustrations-elucidating Bresson's unique style as it evolved from the impassioned Les Anges du péche to such disconsolate meditations on the world as The Devil Probably and L'Argent. Special attention is also given to psychosexual aspects of the films that are usually neglected. Bresson has long needed a thoroughgoing treatment by a critic worthy to the task: he gets it here. From it emerges a provocative portrait of an extraordinary artist whose moral engagement and devotion to the craft of filmmaking are without equal.

Challenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901–1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinéma, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.

With a new introduction, acclaimed director and screenwriter Paul Schrader revisits and updates his contemplation of slow cinema over the past fifty years. Unlike the style of psychological realism, which dominates film, the transcendental style expresses a spiritual state by means of austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness, and editing that avoids editorial comment. This seminal text analyzes the film style of three great directors—Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer—and posits a common dramatic language used by these artists from divergent cultures. The new edition updates Schrader’s theoretical framework and extends his theory to the works of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Theo Angelopoulos (Greece), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), among others. This key work by one of our most searching directors and writers is widely cited and used in film and art classes. With evocative prose and nimble associations, Schrader consistently urges readers and viewers alike to keep exploring the world of the art film.