Les Anges du péché

Prof. Burnett speaks at the TIFF Lightbox

Prof. Burnett's invited talk helped to launch "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson," a TIFF retrospective of the French auteur's feature film career.

The TIFF retrospective "The Poetry of Precision: The Films of Robert Bresson, which began on February 27 and ends on March 20, marks the 30th anniversary of TIFF Cinematheque.

On February 29, Prof. Colin Burnett, a featured speaker for the series, delivered a lecture entitled, "Robert Bresson, the Early Career," before a screening of Bresson's debut feature, Les anges du péché  (The Angels of Sin, 1943).

The lecture offered insight into Bresson’s career experiences leading up to his first feature, including his short comedic film Affaires publiques, his flirtation with Surrealism, and his publicity work for Coco Chanel.

Burnett argued that Bresson's central ambition throughout his film career was to hasten cinema’s demise, and create conditions for the birth of new art form, which he called “le cinématographe” (writing-in-movement). Bresson hoped to see cinema, a medium of grand spectacle, replaced with a more intimate form of expression for artists.

Burnett showed that Bresson’s commitment to cinema’s demise came from his experimentation with media other than the movies. A multimedia artist prior to the making of Les anges du péché, Bresson plied his trade as a lithographer and a commercial photographer in 1927--1932, before launching his own film production firm,  Arc-Films, in 1934, which was intended to produce avant-garde comedies.

Most of Bresson's early career experiences were in the realms of commercial or publicity art. Yet these fields of art-making allowed Bresson to dabble widely—to become a touche-à-tout, a jack of all trades, absorb a range of influences, and gain exposure to numerous professional environments and artistic markets.

These media, Burnett claimed, gave Bresson a taste for intimate art-making prior to his move to cinema--intimate forms that eventually allowed him to perceive the limits of, and to pit his art against, cinema as a medium.

This lecture was based on Burnett's 2017 book, The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market, available here.