Finding God in Ordinary Life
Often called the patron saint of film, Robert Bresson treated film as a serious, almost sacred form of art. Instead of “cinema,” Bresson preferred the term “cinematography,” as we would use “photography” instead of “photos” — or worse, “pics.” He believed that cinema, especially bad cinema, was “filmed theatre;” cinematography is “filming interior movement.”
Bresson’s intention was “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 philosophy, or by drama.”
In seeking to portray that “heart of the heart,” Bresson once said, “I want to make people who see the film feel the presence of God in ordinary life.”