Robert
Bresson's film, Diary of a Country Priest (1951), was a
milestone in post war cinematographic language history. It is about a
common priest that arrives to Ambricourt - a little countryside
village in France – to attend his first parish. Rejected by the
hostile local population, he gets into a faith crisis that is
reported through his dairy entries.
Diary
of a Country Priest represents the notion of imprisonment or
isolated life without talking directly about prison or prisoners. In
the film, the state of confinement is not related only to a limited
space, but it is related to the way that the filmmaker plays with the
categories of both space and time. In order to make it clear,
Frédéric Bonnaud wrote (Film Comment, 1999) about the visual
and sound devices used by Bresson to embody cinematographically the
priest's anguish and solitude. The most important of Bonnaud remarks
on this perspective - creating a state of confinement - is when he
refers to Bresson's strategy of the shot that never shows too much;
this means the shot that shows “between” inside and outside, or
the shot in which the less environment that is shown, the more it
resonates. “ Standing in front of his presbytery, the priest
watches a wagon go by. But the viewer only hears the sound of horses’
hooves, accompanied by an anonymous whistling. The
social reality of the town engulfs the priest and his own universe.
As the film goes on, it becomes a constant, murmuring stream, running
through his day-to-day existence. Ubiquitous and constant, persistent
and unchanging, it doesn’t need to be shown: its evocation through
sound is enough. It’s a veritable
prison.”
When Bonnaud says that
the priest becomes “just a dark blotch” on the white and smoky
landscape, he is talking about Bresson's ability to turn real scenes
into designed geometric forms. Those strategies are part of Bresson's
minimal and serial aesthetic that permeate all his cinematographic
oeuvre
