Robert Bresson Quotes

Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.

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

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

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.

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best - that is inspiration.

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

Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Ten properties of an object, according to Leonardo: light and dark, color and substance, form and position, distance and nearness, movement and stillness.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing.

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.

Be the first to see what you see as you see it.

For me, film-making is combining images and sounds of real things in an order that makes them effective. What I disapprove of is photographing things that are not real. Sets and actors are not real.

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

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

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.

Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible.

Practice the precept: find without seeking

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

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

Prefer what intuition whispers in your ear to what you have done and redone ten times in your head.

The true is inimitable, the false untransformable.

It is in its pure form that an art hits hard.

Master Precision. Be a precision instrument myself.

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

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

Empty the pond to get the fish.

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

A too-expected image (cliché) will never seem right, even if it is.

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

Provoke the unexpected. Expect it.

The crude real will not by itself yield truth.

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

Unbalance so as to re-balance.

Let nothing be changed and all be different.

Catch instants. Spontaneity, freshness.

Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration.

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.