The first android was a woman. In Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s novel L’Ève Future (1886), a fictionalised Thomas Edison attempts to help his friend Lord Ewald overcome heartbreak by animating a mechanical female doll. The novel updates the Pygmalion myth with fin-de-siècle anxieties around science and spiritualism as well as the rise of feminism, as Edison dissects and reassembles the female body to create an uncanny and idealised double of Ewald’s unrequited love. The novel’s imagining of Edison – who is able to produce the spiritual through the mechanical, the metaphysical from the physical, and life from death – proleptically figures his emergence as the ‘father of the cinema’ nine years later. For film theorist Annette Michelson, the novel prefigures the sexual power dynamics of the cinematic reanimation process: Edison’s tinkering with the doll is mirrored by the filmmaker’s literal ‘cutting’ and rearranging of the female body for male spectatorial gratification. Edison perhaps found his heir in Robert Bresson, whose quest to reveal the spiritual through the material depended on the figure of the female automaton. A machine made in imitation of a human, the idea of the automaton was central to Bresson’s attempt to theorise and create a type of non-expressive performer distinct from the theatrical actor. Critics and theorists have largely overlooked the fact that the performers whose expressivity Bresson sought to reduce were for the most part women, instead seeing the automaton’s psychological opacity as a turn away from the pandering psychologism of Hollywood. Most influential in this vein is the work of Gilles Deleuze and its subsequent elaboration by Jacques Rancière, both of whom make laborious attempts to find emancipatory potential in the Bressonian automaton. Yet if we remember that the automaton is female, Bresson’s influential filmography – a staple of the critical and academic canon – raises just as many uncomfortable questions as Villier’s seemingly outdated science fiction novel. In Bresson’s most despairing film, Mouchette (1967), the Pygmalion fantasy as the ancient desire to produce a living woman out of inert matter resurfaces as the modern desire to reduce a living woman to a machine.
The film, adapted from Georges Bernanos’s novel of the same name, follows the tragic story of the titular character (Nadine Nortier), a young girl living in a provincial French village. Mouchette is bullied by her alcoholic father at home and by her classmates at school, all the while taking care of her dying mother and infant brother. Other characters include a poacher, Arsène (Jean-Claude Guilbert), and a gamekeeper, Mathieu (Jean Vimenet), who compete in their pursuit of wild game, as well as for the affections of the local bartender Luisa (Marine Trichet). Mouchette becomes ensnared in their rivalry when, after getting lost in the woods during a storm, she witnesses what appears to be Arsène murdering Mathieu. Arsène keeps her under his watch for the night before eventually raping her. Mouchette’s mother dies soon after, and after a series of unfulfilling, suspicion-laden encounters with a shopkeeper (Raymonde Chabrun), Mathieu, and an old woman (Suzanne Huguenin), Mouchette rolls down a hill and drowns herself in the river. Describing this scenario, Bresson stated: “Mouchette offers evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations.” But this grandiose justification seems more like an alibi. By portraying his film as something like a quasi-documentary, reflecting the ills of ‘society’, Bresson concealed the fact that it was his own screenplay that heaped such gratuitous suffering on his young female protagonist.
Bresson wanted to create a pure cinema undiluted by the trappings of theatre and literature. The figure of the ‘model’, a nonprofessional actor who gives their presence to the film automatically rather than expressively, was perhaps the most essential component of this vision. By eschewing any overt dramatic styling by the model, Bresson ensured the spectator would be affected by his editing rather than their performance. As Jonathan Rosenbaum writes: “For Bresson, the willed expressiveness of actors, appropriate and necessary to theater, competes with the expressiveness of sounds and images that are under the control of a filmmaker.”1 Although Bresson’s virtuosity as an editor is undeniable, this attitude also reveals an essentially competitive and hostile relationship with the model. Critics like Rosenbaum view this process as a modernist innovation, but Bresson’s own account of automatism in Notes on the Cinematograph is remarkably conservative. Here he favours an already-existing world, and sees theatrical modes of expression as corrupting it. Unlike Marxist theorists such as Viktor Shklovsky, who advocated for art’s ability to represent the world freed from capitalism’s deadening routines of habit and automatism, Bresson’s vision of the cinema preserves this submission: “Nine-tenths of our movements obey habit and automatism. It is anti-nature to subordinate them to will and to thought”.2 In this sense Bresson could not be further from Brecht, although they have often been compared. His films make no movement toward greater lucidity, but rather enshrine a certain warped view of naturalism: “Model. Thrown into the physical action, his voice, starting from even syllables, takes on automatically the inflexions and modulations proper to his true nature.”3 A model’s “true nature”, for Bresson, is to react to situations that always precede and exceed them; any questioning of or resistance to the societal structures that enclose them would be “anti-nature”. In a documentary about the making of Mouchette, Bresson reveals that his ideal reactive, unthinking model is female: “What I find interesting is thrusting a child, a young girl, into a situation that’s terribly mean, even nasty, and seeing how she reacts.”4
This sadism is largely ignored in academic studies of Bresson’s automatism. The most influential of these is Gilles Deleuze’s analysis in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which, tellingly, doesn’t directly cite any of Bresson’s own writings on the automaton. Highlighting the fragmented, elliptical nature of Bresson’s films, and the filmmaker’s use of models, Deleuze argues Bresson constructs a radically de-figurated narrative space. Yet Deleuze conceives of the automaton, whose physical presence is so important for the effectiveness of Bresson’s films, as a purely mental being. He describes the automaton as “pure, as bereft of ideas as of feelings, reduced to the automatism of segmented daily gestures, but endowed with autonomy”.5 Nowhere does he elaborate on how this supposed autonomy arises. The question of the active auteur and the passive model, however, is central for Jacques Rancière. He acknowledges the predatory element of Bresson’s scenarios that Deleuze ignores, writing that “[a] Bresson film is always the mise-en-scène of a trap and a hunt”.6 Examining the figure of the model, he asks: “Doesn’t this reproduce, once more, the old tyranny of intentional form impressing itself on passive matter? This question underlies Deleuze’s whole analysis of Bresson.”7 However, after raising this intriguing question, his argument takes a surprising turn:
The model is to behave like an automaton and to reproduce in a uniform tone the lines taught by the auteur. But there the logic of the automaton capsizes: the model’s mechanical, unconscious reproduction of the lines and gestures dictated by the director infuses them with its own interior truth, invests them with a truth that it is not cognizant of.8
Rancière thus preserves Deleuze’s most unsubstantiated claim: that the automaton’s submission paradoxically produces a strange form of agency or autonomy. Yet Rancière, unlike Deleuze, attempts to elaborate how this process occurs. He argues that the physical presence of Nortier is set at an oblique angle to the narrative movement of signification. Through her monotone delivery of dialogue and flattened affect, Mouchette’s psychological motivation is withheld from the audience. Rancière finds emancipatory potential in this strategy, claiming that it arrests a process, typical of Hollywood films, that insists on psychological identification with characters. However, the “opacity” Rancière prizes is always “constructed by the director”, and not Nortier herself.9 This notion of bodily passivity as resistance is taken to extreme lengths when Rancière discusses Mouchette’s suicide, as he argues that Mouchette “escapes” through her own death.10 Rancière’s understanding of Bresson always hinges on this unstable point – that the model turns away from communication and signification. But turning away from the audience could equally be regarded as yet another form of submission to the director. Rancière’s celebration of the opaque over the legible sidesteps a more jarring dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity. Bresson’s models do not become opaque as much as they become objects, and this objectification makes them all the more legible.
The idea that embodied experience can resist narrative signification has been influential among commentators on the film. It is tempting to see a lack of psychological motivation and foregrounding of the body as a radical freedom from narrative meaning. Yet approaches like these ignore the fact that in Mouchette the body is Bresson’s instrument. Although Joseph Mai points out the questionable logic of Rancière’s “suicide as escape”, he too preserves the idea that the body and signification are opposed to one another. He describes Mouchette’s harmony with the natural world, primarily liquids, as she finds fluid identities that exceed the limits of Bresson’s screenplay. He even argues that the 18-year-old Nortier’s “sexualized” body disrupts the child character of Mouchette. While these disruptions may be unbelievable in narrative terms, they are not inexplicable or non-signifying – they always point back to Bresson imposing his desires on the performer. There is no room for contingency; every element of mise-en-scene is a carefully arranged product of Bresson’s desire. Whatever harmony Mouchette finds in her surroundings is therefore no sign of autonomy. Indeed, Bresson’s control is so totalising that even the natural world appears to behave in accordance with the wishes of the director. The complicity of nature in Mouchette’s domination is demonstrated in the centrepiece sequence of the film in which Mouchette gets lost in the woods during a storm. The sequence begins when Mouchette, crouching by the road, throws mud at the girls getting on the back of the boys’ motorbikes. On one level, it seems as if the feral Mouchette is rejecting the automated social world of the village, the motorbikes whisking the girls away towards lives of drudgery and housework. However, Bresson does not simply oppose the natural world to the automated world of culture; the former is just as mechanical and routine as the latter. Within the span of a minute, a downpour begins to drench Mouchette, as if the storm was produced on a Hollywood soundstage. Throughout the film, affect and physical sensations are stripped of their volatility and mechanised: after Mouchette is slapped by her father at the fairground and by her teacher at school, tears immediately appear running down her cheeks, as if on cue, in the next shot. Water, in the film, is both life-denying and life-giving. Bresson’s vision of the cosmos is exemplified in the figure of the storm itself – it is both a necessary part of a meteorological cycle and a traumatic instigator of Mouchette’s rape. Mouchette’s drowning in the river is not an eruption or escape out of the suffocating narrative, but is instead its culmination. In fact, it is prefigured by Arsène and Mathieu’s altercation by the river, a struggle typical of the masculine rivalry and economic competition that sustain the social life of the village. When Arsène tells Mouchette that he and Mathieu “rolled into the river”, he foreshadows her own fate. As the river is a site where the social relations in the film are naturalised, it is fitting that Mouchette will disappear into its depths, while the two men achieve mutual recognition. After their struggle, they sit on the banks of the river and reach a strange truce, laughing together. Beneath their feet is a visual rhyme that again highlights the role of liquids in the film: a flask sitting next to the game-trap. Sustenance and death are only apparently opposed – these two objects are manifestations of the same intertwined process of power. Life is sustained through captivity.
Only the men are able to live this paradox to its fullest: it is the male body that shatters its boundaries, able to bleed and become bruised. Arsène’s epileptic seizure, with spittle flying out of his mouth, is an ecstatic prefiguration of his rape of Mouchette. Conversely, the next morning a shopkeeper calls Mouchette a “slut” after noticing bruises on her chest. In both cases, the characters are imprisoned within their unruly bodies. The difference is that Arsène’s body expands and asserts itself even as he suffers, while Mouchette’s body marks her as a criminal, retaining the traces of trauma, guilt and shame. This episode also points to the degree to which the female body is monitored and surveilled in the film, something which becomes even more explicit in the scene in which Arsène happens upon Mouchette huddled in the woods. We see Mouchette pulling on a wet stocking as Bresson’s camera tilts down her bare leg. Immediately after, Arsène’s flashlight reverses this motion upward, in effect becoming a surrogate for Bresson the filmmaker. The beam of light recalls the shot of the full moon that serves as a transition from the brawl scene to this one, emphasising both the omniscient power of the hunter-director as well as the mechanisation of the natural world. Holding the flashlight, Arsène barks: “What are you doing here?” The question is repeatedly hurled at Mouchette, in various iterations, by men throughout the film. These altercations make me think of Louis Althusser’s influential concept of interpellation, a process by which subjects are produced through recognition by an authoritative Other. Althusser writes:
I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’11
Althusser even gives this process a cinematic dimension when he references “the ‘actors’ in this mise en scène [setting] of interpellation”.12 Similar forces are at play in Arsène’s production of Mouchette as a dominated subject. In the cabin, he fashions an alibi for her to tell the police, and he also tells her: “Don’t go home to your father without your clog”. Later Mathieu performs his occupation as gendarme when he stands and “cross-examines” Mouchette, sitting dejectedly, about her night in the woods. Her refusal to comply with his questioning is not an inscrutable withdrawal from narrative, as Rancière claims, but rather an understanding that Mathieu is not a meaningful alternative to Arsène. They are both representatives of the same interpellating police power, the flask and the game-trap, two sides of the same coin.
This apparatus of power also manifests itself at the level of the automaton’s body in the film’s most disturbing scene. As Arsène rapes Mouchette, her arms flail back and forth, and she looks like a malfunctioning robot. Eventually, she seems to acquiesce to the situation and embraces Arsène. Again, her resignation comes from an understanding of the inexorability of this narrative world – she knows that it is of no consequence whether one resists or gives in. When Mouchette leaves her clog stuck in the mud behind her, her loss of it anticipates the bodily fragmentation and violation she will suffer when she is later raped by Arsène. Yet Arsène also goes back to retrieve the clog for the sake of his alibi, violating Mouchette in another way through the production of a narrative and a seeming restitution of bodily integrity. As a director-surrogate, Arsène’s strategy is the same as Bresson’s. The pliability that Arsène demands from Mouchette mirrors Bresson’s own approach to his models through editing. He sought images of bodies that were deliberately flat and inexpressive, so that they would have more potential to produce new meaning through juxtaposition. This cleared the way for a type of ‘writing’, a word Bresson uses repeatedly throughout Notes, always emphasising his own editing as the only expressive tool appropriate to the film. This is the same auteurism as that of Arsène’s flashlight. Just as male power infuses visibility itself, Bresson’s controlled montage leaves no room for any independent contribution from his performers. The “freedom of the automaton” thus throws us back onto “the old tyranny of intentional form impressing itself on passive matter” that Rancière sought to move beyond.
This tyranny resurfaces in altered, perhaps even spiritual, form if automata are produced as well as repressed through power. While the actor operates within the gap between their physical being and their role, the automaton has none of this freedom. The automaton’s body is itself the role, trained by Bresson in order to produce being as he desires it. The freedom he believes in is that of purity through suffering, which is no freedom at all, and in no way compensates for the material sacrifices necessitated by his working method.13 It is on this point, the “freedom of the automaton”, that Rancière propounds Bresson’s philosophy most faithfully:
Mise en scène fabricates through repetition of words and movements a material automatism intended to awaken another: the unfabricated automaton, the inner automaton whose movements no one can programme and which, if deprived of all outlets, must behave in sole accordance with the truth of its being.14
What is this “inner automaton”, this “truth” of being, if not the soul? For Bresson, the ability to reveal the soul is an innate capacity of the camera: “Your camera catches not only physical movements that are inapprehensible by pencil, brush or pen, but also certain states of soul recognizable by indices which it alone can reveal.”15 For Foucault, too, the soul exists and has a reality. But this soul is part of the same process of power and subjection illustrated by the automaton:
It is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished – and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains, and corrects; over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized; over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision, and constraint.16
The soul is an imposition, the process by which the body becomes legible. Just as subjects were produced through a process of objectification, the soul is produced through bodily suffering. It is precisely because Mouchette is constantly punished that she generates narrative meaning and profundity for Bresson’s film. Mouchette is a victim of bullying and neglect as well as a subject to be trained in the practice of motherhood and domestic labour. She negates her own being in order to produce the being of her infant brother as the suffocating environment of the village must constantly be replicated and reproduced. In the classroom, Mouchette is punished for not singing and is forced to sing by her teacher, and expression becomes yet another form of constraint. If, following Bresson, the voice is the “soul made flesh”,17 we can see how it becomes another medium for Bresson’s disciplinary technique. The song Mouchette sings in the classroom is the same song she will later sing to Arsène as she cares for him during his seizure. As we have seen, this is not an instance of inscrutability so much as the training of a subjectivity. Through repeated automatic gestures, Mouchette enters an economy of suffering that gives birth to a soul. The spiritual ideals of Christian humility and purification through suffering thus take on the distinct inflection of uncompensated female labour. It is for this reason that Foucault can write that the soul is the “prison of the body”.18 As seen in Edison’s android, reanimation – whether spiritual or cinematic – is merely another form of constraint.
Just as Villier’s novel was a reaction against the shifting gender relations of the late 19th century, the same may be true of Bresson’s films of the mid-to-late 1960s. After making his name with relatively optimistic and redemptive male-centric films in the previous decade (encapsulated by the title A Man Escaped), he focused exclusively on female suffering and passivity in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Mouchette and Une Femme Douce (1969). Bresson’s misanthropic vision would become more politically corrosive in Le Diable Probablement (1977) and L’Argent (1983), yet it is his sixties films that encouraged and enabled subsequent generations of male filmmakers to capitalise on women’s suffering in the name of mannered artistic profundity. With ever-diminishing returns, filmmakers like Paul Schrader, Todd Solondz, Lars Von Trier, and most recently Yorgos Lanthimos have either explicitly or implicitly invoked Bresson’s influence to justify sadism and reify banal, stereotyped visions of gender and sexuality. It is worth wondering if a suspicion of performance is itself a way of controlling women, a reaction against the male anxiety induced by feminine masquerade. Bresson wants to destroy the performing woman and reveal the world “as it is”. Yet Mouchette demonstrates that a world formed and mastered by one man is as miserable as the industrially produced Hollywood dream is vapid. Bresson refuses possibility, indeterminacy, and surprise. An openness to chance would allow for collaborative performances and real freedom from pre-determined identity, rather than the abstract spiritual freedom of the automaton. Contemporaries like Jacques Rivette and Jean Renoir celebrated, and ceded control to, the improvisatory capacities of their female actors. Considered in this light, Bresson’s automatic programming of his models is a missed opportunity. Several of these women continued to act and write in spite of Bresson’s injunctions against their pursuing acting careers, most notably Anne Wiazemsky, Isabelle Weingarten, and Dominique Sanda. Their subsequent work confirms that the value of the model is not worth clinging on to so devoutly. If ‘A Woman Escaped’ is not a film we could expect Bresson to make, it is at least a life that some were able to live.
1 Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Last Filmmaker: Films by Robert Bresson’, Chicago Reader, Jan 1996, (Online) 2 Robert Bresson (Tr. Jonathan Griffin), Notes on the Cinematograph, New York Review of Books, 1986. p.34. 3 Ibid, p.40. 4 ‘Bresson (on the Set of Mouchette)’, YouTube 5 Gilles Deleuze (Tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta), Cinema 2: The Time-Image, University of Minnesota Press, 1989, p.174. 6 Jacques Rancière (tr. Emiliano Battista), Film Fables, Bloomsbury, 2016. p.13. 7 Ibid, p.120. 8 Ibid, p.120. 9 Jacques Rancière (Tr. John Howe), Intervals of Cinema, Verso, 2014. p.58. 10 Ibid, p.63. 11 Louis Althusser (tr. Andy Blunden), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1971. p.87. 12 Ibid, p.87.13 Bresson was notorious for the repetitive takes he demanded from his models. This repetition was one of his techniques to drain them of any psychological expression. When interviewed about working with Bresson, Jean Claude Gilbert responded that it was “mindless work… I don’t use my brain at all, assuming I have one”, requiring less of his intelligence than his day job as a mason. ‘Bresson (on the Set of Mouchette)’, YouTube 14 Jacques Rancière (tr. John Howe), Intervals of Cinema, Verso, 2014. p.55. 15 Bresson, p.45. 16 Ibid, p.176-177. 17 Bresson, p.64 18 Foucault, p.177.
Referenced:
Althusser, Louis. 1971. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Andy Blunden. Monthly Review Press.
Bresson, Robert. 1986. Notes on the Cinematograph. Translated by Jonathan Griffin. New York: New York Review of Books.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Docile Bodies.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.
Mai, Joseph. 2007. “New(er) stories”: Narration and de-figuration in Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967).” Studies in French Cinema 7 (1): 31-42.
Rancière, Jacques. 2016. Film Fables. Translated by Emiliano Battista. London: Bloomsbury.
—. 2014. The Intervals of Cinema. Translated by John Howe. New York: Verso Books
Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “The Last Filmmaker: Films by Robert Bresson.” Chicago Reader, Jan. 1996, https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/the-last-filmmaker/Content?oid=889533.
