Notes on Cinematography, Robert Bresson

My notes from Notes on Cinematography, which was Bresson's manifesto. Here cinematography refers to all aspects of a film, to filmmaking in general. It's a guide he made for himself, and I found it very succinct and insightful.

The major takeaway was the differentiation of the medium of cinema from that of theatre, which is one of re-creating and representing as opposed to creating impressions.

• An image must be transformed by contact with other images, as is a color by contact with other colors. A blue is not the same blue beside a green, a yellow, a red. No art without trans­formation.

• Respect man's nature without wishing it more palpable than it is. 

• Two types of film: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create

• The thing that matters is not what they show me but what they hide from me and, above all, what they do not suspect is in them. 

• Do not use two violins when one is enough.

• One recognises truth by its efficacy, its power.

• Let it be the feelings that bring about the events. Not the other way.

• Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.

• Because you do not have to imitate, like painters, sculptors, novelists, the appearance of persons and objects (machines do that for you), your creation or invention confines itself to the ties you knot between the various bits of reality caught. There is also the choice of the bits. Your flair decides. 

• Two simplicities. The bad: simplicity as starting-point, sought too soon. The good: simplicity as end-product, recompense for years of effort. 

• Corot: "One must not seek, one must wait"

• Communicate impressions, sensations. 

• Not beautiful photography, not beautiful images, but necessary images, and photography. 

• This is indispensable if one does not want to fall into REPRESENTATION. To see beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence.

• The real is not dramatic. Drama will be born of a certain march of non-dramatic elements. 

• One does not create by adding, but by taking away.

• It is with something clean and precise that you will force the attention of inattentive eyes and ears. 

• Create expectations to fulfil them. 

• A virtuoso makes us hear the music not as it is written, but as he feels it.

• Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. 

• Photography is descriptive, neat image confined to description. 

• Leonardo recommends (Notebooks) thinking hard of the end, thinking first and foremost of the end. The end is the screen, which is only a surface. Submit your film to the reality of the screen, as a painter submits his picture to the reality of the canvas itself and of the colors ap­ plied on it, the sculptor submits his figures to the reality of the marble or the bronze. 

• ECONOMY Racine (to his son Louis): I know your handwriting well enough, without your having to sign your name.

• Production of emotion determined by a resistance to emotion. 

About actors:

• Who said: "A single look lets loose a passion, a murder, a war”? To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks. 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?) 

• A model. Enclosed in his mysterious appearance. He has brought home to him all of him that was outside. He is there, behind that forehead, those cheeks. Radically suppress intentions in your models. 

• Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought. 

• What our eyes and ears require is not the realistic persona but the real person. 

• Do not try, and do not wish, to draw tears from the public with the tears of your models, but with this image rather than that one, this sound rather than that one, exactly in their place.

• The things one can express with the hand, with the head, with the shoulders! . . . How many useless and encumbering words then disappear! What economy! 

About Shooting:

• Shooting. Put oneself into a state of intense ig­norance and curiosity, and yet see things in ad­vance. 

• Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.*

• Shooting. No part of the unexpected which is not secretly expected by you. Dig deep where you are. Don't slip off elsewhere. Double, triple bottom to things. 

• shooting is not making something definitive, it is making preparations. 

• Make the objects look as if they want to be there. 

• Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod.

• In the Greek Catholic liturgy: "Be attentive!" 

About Sound and Music:

• Rhythmic value of a noise. Noise of a door opening and shutting, noise of footsteps, etc., for the sake of rhythm. 

• An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it. 

• To find a kinship between image, sound and silence. To give them an air of being glad to be together, of having chosen their place. Milton: Silence was pleased. 

• If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear. * One cannot be at the same time all eye and all ear. 

• The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinema­ tographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tac­tics of slowness, of silence. Your film will have the beauty, or the sadness, or what have you, that one finds in a town, in a countryside, in a house, and not the beauty, sadness, etc. that one finds in the photograph of a town, of a countryside, or a house. 

• Economy. Make known that we are in the same place by repetition of the same noises and the same sonority.