Robert Bresson Quotes

In the NUDE, all that is not beautiful is obscene.

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

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

Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.

Be the first to see what you see as you see it.

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

The most ordinary word, when put into place, suddenly acquires brilliance. That is the brilliance with which your images must shine.

Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.

Films can only be made by by-passing the will of those who appear in them, using not what they do, but what they are.

Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

To create is not to deform or invent persons and things. It is to tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are.

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best – that is inspiration.

My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

The eye solicited alone makes the ear impatient, the ear solicited alone makes the eye impatient. Use these impatiences. Power of the cinematographer who appeals to the two senses in a governable way. Against the tactics of speed, of noise, set tactics of slowness, of silence.

Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.

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

Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.

When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.