Reflections on Bresson 2: Doors
April 2009
Dozens of doors, gates, drawers etc are opened and closed in L’Argent: I counted about eighty, roughly one a minute. This is Bressonian grammar for ‘and then’, a key element of his syntax of film. He likes to tell stories as a sequence of main clauses, e.g. ‘X did this. Then Y said that. Next, Z happened.’ (This style is used in the Bible: try Genesis.) This is called paratactic narrative, to be distinguished from syntactic narrative which mixes subordinate clauses with the main clauses in order to expand or qualify what is being said: try Cicero or Proust or many modern novels.
L'Argent: on the left Norbert enters his father's study at the very beginning; on the right, very near the end, Yvon uses the axe to break open the door into the old woman's house
This sequencing of events in Bresson, made sharper still by his stripping away of superfluous backgrounds, conversation and dead time, gives his films terrific narrative impetus. So doors are used to mark crucial stages in the story, but more than that, the shot of the hand on the door expresses a character using his or her own free will. For example, in A Man Escaped, Fontaine’s labourious dismantling of the door to his cell stands for the sustained effort of will he needs to make in order to escape. By contrast, the simple opening of the door by Norbert in L’Argent in order to ask his father for money to pay his debts reveals by the end of the film how such a trivial act can precipitate a horrifying concatenation of trouble: ‘A leads to B, which leads to C . . . which leads to Z.’ The image of the axe in close-up stands in for Yvon's horrifically violent intentions.
I think Bresson is saying that the sin of murder in the end is different in degree, but not in kind to the sin of petty greed at the beginning.