Robert Bresson Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

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.

Robert Bresson
Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen.

Robert Bresson
When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best – that is inspiration.

Robert Bresson
Hostility to art is also hostility to the new, to the unforeseen.

Robert Bresson
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.

Robert Bresson
When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more towards the within, the eye towards the outer.

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

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

Robert Bresson
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.

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

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

Robert Bresson
The point is not to direct someone, but to direct oneself.

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

Robert Bresson
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.

Robert Bresson
Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

Robert Bresson
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.

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

Robert Bresson
The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.

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

Robert Bresson
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.

Robert Bresson