a man escaped, by robert bresson

For the last few weeks, Film Club has been interested in movies that present strategies—some successful, some not—for weathering the forces of cultural oppression.

At a certain point, when a film has amassed a sufficiently complicated set of interrelated strategies, I think we can officially say that it is actually depicting a scheme. We have good reason to perk up here: the development of a scheme is a great narrative device, and, in the hands of a competent filmmaker, a deeply satisfying one. Think of films like Rififi, Man on Wire, and Oceans 11: very different films, but each one is built around a scheme, and as their schemes unfold they each yield similiar pleasures.

To this list we could add this week's pick, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1959). The plot is simplicity itself. A police liutenant in occupied France is imprisoned by Germans. He intends to escape. That's pretty much it. He is planning this escape literally every second we see him on screen, starting when he's being driven to the prison. Before we even see his face we see him trying to figure out if he can get out of the car and make a run for it:

It's not the most successful attempt:

So, OK. He chalks this up to "if at first you don't succeed" and carries on. The next attempt, made from within the belly of the prison, is going to have to be more complicated than a simple jump-and-run. But that's OK: the more complicated the scheme is, the more enjoyable it is to see enacted.

This hinges, of course, on a filmmaker who is willing to visually represent the details as they unfold. To his enormous credit, Bresson lavishes loving attention on these details. There are passages in this film that are practically like an Instructables video on How To Break Out of Jail:

Part of the reason that Bresson can spend so much narrative time on examining these details is that he rigorously strips out any element of the narrative that doesn't have to do directly with the protagonist and the plan. It's not hard to imagine a less assured filmmaker building in a villainous German character, as a way of establishing their threat level: Bresson just takes it as a given and moves on. A less assured filmmaker would likely show us the other prisoners being executed: Bresson just relies on word-of-mouth, and the occasional sound of machine-gun fire.

This may sound like its short on visceral thrill, and, it's true that we're not dealing with Oz here. But Bresson has a different goal in mind: he wants to put us in the head of our protagonist, to impress upon us the "thrill" of the smallest details. Bresson is right that, to a prisoner, something subtle like approaching footfalls or the quickest glimpse of a weapon can hold enormous menace:

...and he is right that, to a prisoner, the smallest utilitarian object can convey enormous advantages:

...can be, in fact, a source of hope and courage:

This goes all the way down, in Bresson's conception, to finding a splinter of wood that is the correct size for one's purposes:

When we begin to discuss the ways in which the quotidian can be charged with enormous meaning, we begin to move out of the realm of filmmaking, and into the realm of spiritual or mystical belief. (Bresson himself has been quoted as saying "The supernatural is only the real rendered more precise; real things seen close up.") His religious belief has been amply discussed elsewhere, and it's really beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will say that by the point in the film where one character refers to incarceration as a way of moving into a state of "grace," I'm prepared to believe it. (Especially impressive: the film has invested this observation with the weight of truth through craft, rather than through the easy application of sloppy sentimentality.) This film makes a great introduction to Bresson; I hope to watch more of his films in the future.

Next week: Film Club member Tiffanny E. writes "I wanted to explore more the idea of being imprisioned but avoid actual jails ... so I am picking The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Stay tuned~

cool hand luke, by stuart rosenberg

or, "strategies against architecture"

Picking up on a visual reference in last week's pick, 25th Hour, Skunkcabbage and I moved on this week to Cool Hand Luke (1967).

I wrote last week that 25th Hour is concerned with Impartial Law and its inherent abuses; Cool Hand Luke announces similar concern with its very opening shot:

The parking meter functions here as the perfect picture of Ultimate Impartiality, a kind of clockwork judge literally incapable of concern with ambiguity or context. And the very next thing we see is Paul Newman's Lucas Jackson wandering down the street, calm, determined, and drunk, slicing the tops off of those parking meters:

Needless to say, the episode doesn't end well:

This scene is the primary dramatic unit of Cool Hand Luke in microcosm: Luke, the charismatic rebel, engages in some gesture of resistance, which results in Authority moving on to the next level of punitive force, which in turn sets the stage for more resistance, beginning the cycle anew.

Luke's acts of resistance—along with the acts he uses to ingratiate himself with his fellow prisoners—are frequently anarchic and playful, situating him firmly in the American Trickster tradition, somewhere between Huck Finn and Bugs Bunny. Unfortunately, dudes like this guy here on the left aren't exactly Elmer Fudd:

That's the guard referred to by the prisoners as the Man With No Eyes, who functions even more memorably than the parking meters as an icon of cold impassivity, so much so that James Cameron cribbed the mirrorshades look for the T-1000 in Terminator II (1991). (In the interest of fairness, I should note also that Cool Hand Luke director Stuart Rosenberg has himself cribbed it from the equally impassive Eyeless Cop who pulls over Janet Leigh in Psycho (1960).)

In any case, he and the other "bosses" aren't simple rubes, so Luke's attempts at clever subversion, although symbolic successes, often result in violence being visited upon him. Any time you start emphasizing the vulnerability of a male hero's body, you're only half a step away from dusting off the old Christ metaphor, and Cool Hand Luke fully indulges this impulse in some man-interrogates-God sequences and some pretty shameless shots:

That said, it's also worth noting that Luke demonstrates a detachment from his own schemes that's more Buddhist than Judeo-Christian: he plans none of them in advance, and he consistently downplays any praise that comes his way afterwards. So that's Luke in a nutshell: part Huck Finn, part Bugs Bunny, part Jesus Christ, part Buddha. It's no wonder that he's taken on something of the status of folk hero by the end of the film. (It's also no wonder that Paul Newman's easy charisma and charm here gave him star power that lasted him a generation.)

The film's thematic richness provided me with a lot of possible avenues to pursue—penal institutions, vulnerable bodies, male camraderie, martyrdom: you could follow it up with anything from Down By Law to 300. But ultimately it's the theme of the "charismatic outsider" that carries the day, so next week we'll be watching Rebel Without A Cause (1955).

Skunkcabbage's write-up is here.