Robert Bresson Quotes

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

Rid myself of the accumulated errors and untruths. Get to know my resources, make sure of them.

Practice the precept: find without seeking

One recognizes the true by its efficacy, by its power.

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

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.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think most of our gestures, and even our words, are automatic. If your hand is on your knee, you didn't put it there. Montaigne wrote a wonderful chapter on this, about our hands that go where we don't tell them to go. Our hands are autonomous. Our gestures, our limbs, are practically autonomous. They're not under our command. That's cinema. What cinema is not is thinking out a gesture, thinking out words. We don't think of what we're going to say. The words come even as we think, and perhaps even make us think. In this regard, theater is unrealistic and unnatural. What I attempt with my films is to touch what's real. Perhaps I'm obsessed with reality.

Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.

Empty the pond to get the fish.

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.

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 onto a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.

Let nothing be changed and all be different.

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

The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.

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.

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

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.

Create expectations to fulfil them.

Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.

Unbalance so as to re-balance.

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

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.

People are charming because they aren't aware of their charm.

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.

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