A Man Escaped

The second half of today's pairing points the opposite way. Ford's camera keeps pushing outward, to the horizon; Bresson's keeps drawing inward, to a window, a door, the edge of a spoon. The second pentad of Frost's Descent is ending and the leaves are down — a season of subtraction. Bresson spent his career subtracting: no professional actors, no score, no explanation of motive. A Man Escaped, from that same year of 1956, is the most radical of those reductions, and the only time he won Best Director at Cannes.

1943 年，里昂。一个年轻的抵抗运动成员被德军逮捕，关进蒙吕克监狱，罪名足够让他被枪决。影片把他叫作方丹。他瘦，安静，进牢房后做的第一件事不是想办法申诉，而是开始观察：墙的厚度、门板的层数、放风的时间、看守换班的间隔。 他有一把勺子、一块床板、一双眼睛，和大量无法打发的时间。他把这些东西拆开、重新组合，变成一个计划。 布列松几乎不让你看到暴力。你听到的是走廊里的脚步、钥匙串的响动、远处被带走的人。整部电影的重心不在「能不能出去」，而在「一个人如何在等待死亡的时候，仍然保持精确」。

At Cannes in 1957 Bresson won Best Director for it, and Sight & Sound's 2012 critics' poll placed it 69th of all time. It adapts the memoir of André Devigny, who escaped Montluc prison in Lyon in 1943 and wrote the account after the war. Bresson himself was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940 and held in a POW camp for over a year, which gave him first-hand knowledge of time under confinement. Technically it is the textbook on off-screen sound. Bresson insisted that what matters should not be shown but should happen outside the frame, with sound making you believe it is there. There is almost no score; the only music is Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, and it surfaces at a handful of precise moments. He also refused professional actors, calling them models and asking them not to express or perform emotion but simply to perform actions. The result is that Fontaine does not look like a hero; he looks like a man at work. That is the point: the escape is restored to the status of a craft.