Paris - The great French film-maker, Robert Bresson, whose death at 98 was announced yesterday, was one of the most influential and uncompromising film-makers in cinema history, writes Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent. So distinctive was his work that he was one of the very few film-makers, along with Hitchcock and Fellini, whose names were used as descriptive adjectives.
Bressonian cinema indicated an ascetic style of film-making and was marked by profundity and humanity, as evinced in his body of work. That amounted to just 13 films in over 50 years. He was born in the village of Bromont-Lamothe in southern France in 1901 and worked as a painter before discovering cinema. He made his first short film in 1934, was conscripted five years later and made an accomplished feature film debut with Les Anges du Peche in 1943.
The brilliant 1959 Pickpocket was the inspiration for Paul Schrader's US film, American Gigolo. Bresson was in his seventies when he made his two final films, both of which commented acutely on contemporary youthful malaises - The Devil, Probably in 1977, and his final masterpiece, L'Argent, in 1983.