Robert Bresson Quotations

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Model. Two mobile eyes in a mobile head, itself on a mobile body.

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

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

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

Let nothing be changed and all be different.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.

The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.

A too-expected image (cliché) will never seem right, even if it is.

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

Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.

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.

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

Cinematography, a military art. Prepare a film like a battle.

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.

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

Unbalance so as to re-balance.

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

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.

Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.

Empty the pond to get the fish.

Master Precision. Be a precision instrument myself.

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.

Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.

A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors and then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.

Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc...) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create

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

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.

The future of cinematography belongs to a new race of young solitaries who will shoot films by putting their last penny into it and not let themselves be taken in by the material routines of the trade.

Practice the precept: find without seeking

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.

The ear is profound, whereas the eye is frivolous, too easily satisfied. The ear is active, imaginative, whereas the eye is passive. When you hear a noise at night, instantly you imagine its cause. The sound of a train whistle conjures up the whole station. The eye can perceive only what is presented to it.