THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977)
![]()
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
6:45 PM
Sunday 04 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:30 PM
Sunday 11 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 95 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maubla
Director: Robert Bresson
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
6:45 PM
Sunday 04 May
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
6:30 PM
Sunday 11 May
Rating: Unclassified 18+
Duration: 95 minutes
Country: France
Language: French with English subtitles
Cast: Antoine Monnier, Tina Irissari, Henri de Maubla
Director: Robert Bresson
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
4K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“The Devil Probably expresses the malaise of our time more profoundly and more magnificently than any work of art in any medium.” – Andrew Sarris
Bresson’s penultimate film is perhaps his most pronounced declaration of a crisis of meaning in the modern world. Shrouded in nihilism and striking satire, the film focuses on twenty-something Charles (Antoine Monnier) who apathetically rejects participating in the various rhetoric and action circulating amongst Parisian youth, from movements against the environmental crisis to Catholic reformism. It is the inner conflict between the countless despair-inducing issues and the desire for meaning, which he seeks through casual physical intimacy, that renders Charles an archetypal Bressonian protagonist. In this case it is inaction that is his ascetic devotion.
Formally meticulous, The Devil, Probably is a rewarding and haunting watch for its rhythmic depiction of daily life as an existential threat. Banned by the French Government on release for those under the age of eighteen from fear of an impressionable youth, this restoration comes to Australian screens at a time where the film seems eerily relevant to the political concerns of today.
“By far the most punk movie ever made.” - Richard Hell
“This film will be more important than all the rubbish which is now considered important but which never really goes deep enough…The questions Bresson asks will never be unimportant.” – Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Introduced by Megan Nash at Ritz Cinemas and by Thomas M. Wright at Lido Cinemas
“The Devil Probably expresses the malaise of our time more profoundly and more magnificently than any work of art in any medium.” – Andrew Sarris
Bresson’s penultimate film is perhaps his most pronounced declaration of a crisis of meaning in the modern world. Shrouded in nihilism and striking satire, the film focuses on twenty-something Charles (Antoine Monnier) who apathetically rejects participating in the various rhetoric and action circulating amongst Parisian youth, from movements against the environmental crisis to Catholic reformism. It is the inner conflict between the countless despair-inducing issues and the desire for meaning, which he seeks through casual physical intimacy, that renders Charles an archetypal Bressonian protagonist. In this case it is inaction that is his ascetic devotion.
Formally meticulous, The Devil, Probably is a rewarding and haunting watch for its rhythmic depiction of daily life as an existential threat. Banned by the French Government on release for those under the age of eighteen from fear of an impressionable youth, this restoration comes to Australian screens at a time where the film seems eerily relevant to the political concerns of today.
“By far the most punk movie ever made.” - Richard Hell
“This film will be more important than all the rubbish which is now considered important but which never really goes deep enough…The questions Bresson asks will never be unimportant.” – Rainer Werner Fassbinder
Introduced by Megan Nash at Ritz Cinemas and by Thomas M. Wright at Lido Cinemas
FILM NOTES
By Janice Tong
By Janice Tong
Janice Tong is a cinephile who has a special love for French cinema.
Edited by Anne Rutherford.
Edited by Anne Rutherford.
ROBERT BRESSON
The spirit of Bresson arrives before Robert Bresson – the French auteur, who preferred the use of ‘models’ (his term for non-actors) rather than professional actors – and certainly, before Bresson the man. This spirit comes in the form of an adjective, “Bressonian”, which has come to describe the grand cineaste’s cinematographic signature; the dissection of an image into segments; a close-up of a hand, an eye, feet, legs or lips that produces a pared- back nakedness to his frames; a refrained use of sound, with a strict avoidance of non-diegetic music [music that comes from the fictional world]; and the favouring of “insignificant” images juxtaposed to tell a different story to the main narrative. His cinematographic “writing” is emotional rather than psychological or intellectual, spiritual rather than religious, austere rather than elaborate, so as to invent and reinvent on the spot rather than to formulate a cinema for an audience. [Bresson referred to his cinema as cinematography, likened to a form of writing rather than filmic].
When we come to regard Bresson the man, his life also comes to us in a fragmentary manner: a composite image that nonetheless refuses to yield a full picture, perhaps because the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. There’s an elasticity to the events that constituted his life, and this included his birth date, which has variously been cited as 25 September 1901 or 1907, though most sources have been corrected to 1901 following his death on 18 December 1999 at the age of 98. This discrepancy was known to have been a deliberate ruse on Bresson’s part to secure insurance more easily.
Little is known about his childhood, except that he was born in a town in central France (could be Bromont-Lamothe, or Puy-de-Dôme) to a military family, or, at least his father was known to have been a military man. He studied Greek, Latin and philosophy and his aspirations to become a painter brought him to Paris, where he met and married his first wife, Leidia van der Zee, in 1926. Bresson was also an accomplished pianist and worked as a photographer on commercial projects for Coco Chanel in the 1930s. Although his first marriage ended in divorce, his second wife, Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch, stayed with him until his death and guarded his legacy.
True to his own background, Bresson firmly believed that aspiring filmmakers should study music, painting and poetry rather than attend film school. Bresson had a small output of fourteen films over the course of fifty years in his working life as a director, but a career in which he held total creative control over every aspect of his films. His book, Notes sur le cinématographe (Notes on the Cinematograph, 1975, henceforth NoC), comprises entries that can be read as reflective aphorisms, but really the book serves as the guiding philosophy that Bresson used as the foundation for his cinematographic writing. He wanted to establish a totally new artform that must distinguish itself from cinema, the latter regarded by him as being more like a recording of theatrical acting, which belonged to the realm of mimicry, staging and external gestures. Cinematography, on the other hand, is a ‘new way of writing, therefore of feeling.’ (1)’
His focus on film began in the early 1930s, when he provided dialogue for a number of films, including C'était un musicien (Maurice Gleine and Friedrich Zelnik, 1933) and Les jumeaux de Brighton (The Brighton Twins, Claude Heyman, 1936). His first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs, 1934), was made with funding from art historian Roland Penrose. This surreal comedy was deemed lost until the Cinémathèque Française discovered a sole extant print in 1987, which was subsequently screened at the National Theatre in London.
In 1939 Bresson joined the French army but was captured by German forces in June of 1940 and spent time (various reports cited nine, ten or even eighteen months) as a prisoner of war. Sent to a labour camp, Bresson worked in a forest before escaping. It was said that his own experience as a POW inspired his 1956 film, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (A Man Escaped), though the story itself was based on André Devigny, who was imprisoned at Montluc (where the film was shot) during the German occupation. This film also marked the first time that he replaced a conventional musical score with short segments from the solemn classical work, Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, K. 427.
After his earliest films, Bresson worked only with inexperienced performers, or non-actors, his ‘models’ who were ‘all face.’ Bresson searched for a specific type of beauty in his characters – a beauty that is disconnected from all meaning. His models were not required to act but to reveal their ‘pure essence’ to the camera. For Martin LaSalle, who played Michel in Pickpocket (1959), his time with Bresson left him in what he described as a ‘state of grace’ for ten to fifteen years after the film. (2) While he went on to study acting (only very few of Bresson’s models, notably Anne Wiazemsky and Dominique Sanda went on to have a career in acting), both he and his co-star, Marika Green, talked about the transformative experience of ‘letting go’ during the filming process. (3) For them, this was not about giving over to the character, but abandoning themselves fully to Bresson (NoC p.14).
There was a scene where LaSalle had to do more than forty takes. Bresson never once instructed him to do anything differently, but only to ‘do it again.’ This method of repetition Bresson favoured allowed the models to reach a certain ‘automatism’ where a shift happened: a ‘movement from the exterior to the interior.’ For this scene, the repetition built up a certain tension that could then be perceived naturally in the body, in the voice or the eyes of LaSalle.
Following Pickpocket (loosely based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), Bresson returned to Dostoevsky several times throughout his career, in Une femme douce (A Gentle Creature, 1969), his first colour film, and again in Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), adapted from the short story, White Nights. His interest in Dostoevsky (and literature in general) came later in life. For Bresson, Dostoevsky’s writings held special meaning, as they are dense, complex stories that are ‘purely inward, with currents and counter-currents like those of the sea’ (NoC p. 124). This nature of the writing suited Bresson’s cinematographic philosophy.
Bresson’s two greatest pieces of work, Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) were made in quick succession. Despite the ultimate demise of the protagonists in these two films, Bresson maintained that they were not pessimistic world views but, rather, a view that offered a clear response to the world at large. The metaphysical paths chosen by his protagonists were in fact chemins noirs – hidden or only partially visible paths that led either to ruin or redemption.
Interestingly, Anne Wiazemsky was hired for Au hasard Balthazar for her naturally “blank” voice. This neutral starting point allowed the rest to be imagined. Bresson also deliberately made himself “blank”: ‘I make a point of forgetting, the night before a shoot, [so that the creative process is spontaneous because] nothing would ever come from preparing everything in advance.’ (4) This same ideology allowed Bresson to ‘arrive at a non-historical truth by using historical words when he used the actual transcripts from the trial for his film, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962) (NoC, p. 128). This relatively short film with a running time of sixty-four minutes delivers a portrait of Joan through her own words. Bresson found that, ‘[i]n responding to the judges, without touching a pen, Joan became a writer. She wrote a book, a pure masterpiece of our literature. This book is a portrait, the only portrait we have of her' (Bresson on Bresson, p. 88).
It is this Joan, refigured in the modern day, whose story draws the most striking parallel to The Devil, Probably. Bresson’s Joan was what he wanted for the youth of today. He admired her for her ‘magnificent insolence’ that came with her youthfulness, as well as her lack of prudence, her purity and also her failure. These qualities were perhaps what he also looked for in his models.
Shortly after the release of The Trial of Joan of Arc, Bresson began work on a film based on the Book of Genesis, with backing from Dino de Laurentiis, but had to abandon this project twice – once in the ‘60s and the second time at the end of his career – and this work remained unfinished at the time of his death.
Bresson’s last film, L'argent (Money, 1981), was based on Leo Tolstoy’s short story titled The False Note, and won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival (alongside Andrei Tarkovsky for Nostalghia), where he famously refused to say anything on stage.
Bresson has often been presented as a cantankerous recluse who shunned the media (though a collection of interviews in the book, Bresson on Bresson, shows a remarkable generosity with his time). His elusiveness and the contradictory information about him only serve to bring about a new interpretation of Bresson each time; we just have to be open to approaching him through his writings (cinematographic and otherwise). He said: ‘In a film, what you need is the man. A look caught unexpectedly can be sublime.’ (5)
When we come to regard Bresson the man, his life also comes to us in a fragmentary manner: a composite image that nonetheless refuses to yield a full picture, perhaps because the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. There’s an elasticity to the events that constituted his life, and this included his birth date, which has variously been cited as 25 September 1901 or 1907, though most sources have been corrected to 1901 following his death on 18 December 1999 at the age of 98. This discrepancy was known to have been a deliberate ruse on Bresson’s part to secure insurance more easily.
Little is known about his childhood, except that he was born in a town in central France (could be Bromont-Lamothe, or Puy-de-Dôme) to a military family, or, at least his father was known to have been a military man. He studied Greek, Latin and philosophy and his aspirations to become a painter brought him to Paris, where he met and married his first wife, Leidia van der Zee, in 1926. Bresson was also an accomplished pianist and worked as a photographer on commercial projects for Coco Chanel in the 1930s. Although his first marriage ended in divorce, his second wife, Marie-Madeleine van der Mersch, stayed with him until his death and guarded his legacy.
True to his own background, Bresson firmly believed that aspiring filmmakers should study music, painting and poetry rather than attend film school. Bresson had a small output of fourteen films over the course of fifty years in his working life as a director, but a career in which he held total creative control over every aspect of his films. His book, Notes sur le cinématographe (Notes on the Cinematograph, 1975, henceforth NoC), comprises entries that can be read as reflective aphorisms, but really the book serves as the guiding philosophy that Bresson used as the foundation for his cinematographic writing. He wanted to establish a totally new artform that must distinguish itself from cinema, the latter regarded by him as being more like a recording of theatrical acting, which belonged to the realm of mimicry, staging and external gestures. Cinematography, on the other hand, is a ‘new way of writing, therefore of feeling.’ (1)’
His focus on film began in the early 1930s, when he provided dialogue for a number of films, including C'était un musicien (Maurice Gleine and Friedrich Zelnik, 1933) and Les jumeaux de Brighton (The Brighton Twins, Claude Heyman, 1936). His first short film, Les affaires publiques (Public Affairs, 1934), was made with funding from art historian Roland Penrose. This surreal comedy was deemed lost until the Cinémathèque Française discovered a sole extant print in 1987, which was subsequently screened at the National Theatre in London.
In 1939 Bresson joined the French army but was captured by German forces in June of 1940 and spent time (various reports cited nine, ten or even eighteen months) as a prisoner of war. Sent to a labour camp, Bresson worked in a forest before escaping. It was said that his own experience as a POW inspired his 1956 film, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé (A Man Escaped), though the story itself was based on André Devigny, who was imprisoned at Montluc (where the film was shot) during the German occupation. This film also marked the first time that he replaced a conventional musical score with short segments from the solemn classical work, Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, K. 427.
After his earliest films, Bresson worked only with inexperienced performers, or non-actors, his ‘models’ who were ‘all face.’ Bresson searched for a specific type of beauty in his characters – a beauty that is disconnected from all meaning. His models were not required to act but to reveal their ‘pure essence’ to the camera. For Martin LaSalle, who played Michel in Pickpocket (1959), his time with Bresson left him in what he described as a ‘state of grace’ for ten to fifteen years after the film. (2) While he went on to study acting (only very few of Bresson’s models, notably Anne Wiazemsky and Dominique Sanda went on to have a career in acting), both he and his co-star, Marika Green, talked about the transformative experience of ‘letting go’ during the filming process. (3) For them, this was not about giving over to the character, but abandoning themselves fully to Bresson (NoC p.14).
There was a scene where LaSalle had to do more than forty takes. Bresson never once instructed him to do anything differently, but only to ‘do it again.’ This method of repetition Bresson favoured allowed the models to reach a certain ‘automatism’ where a shift happened: a ‘movement from the exterior to the interior.’ For this scene, the repetition built up a certain tension that could then be perceived naturally in the body, in the voice or the eyes of LaSalle.
Following Pickpocket (loosely based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), Bresson returned to Dostoevsky several times throughout his career, in Une femme douce (A Gentle Creature, 1969), his first colour film, and again in Quatre nuits d'un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971), adapted from the short story, White Nights. His interest in Dostoevsky (and literature in general) came later in life. For Bresson, Dostoevsky’s writings held special meaning, as they are dense, complex stories that are ‘purely inward, with currents and counter-currents like those of the sea’ (NoC p. 124). This nature of the writing suited Bresson’s cinematographic philosophy.
Bresson’s two greatest pieces of work, Au hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) were made in quick succession. Despite the ultimate demise of the protagonists in these two films, Bresson maintained that they were not pessimistic world views but, rather, a view that offered a clear response to the world at large. The metaphysical paths chosen by his protagonists were in fact chemins noirs – hidden or only partially visible paths that led either to ruin or redemption.
Interestingly, Anne Wiazemsky was hired for Au hasard Balthazar for her naturally “blank” voice. This neutral starting point allowed the rest to be imagined. Bresson also deliberately made himself “blank”: ‘I make a point of forgetting, the night before a shoot, [so that the creative process is spontaneous because] nothing would ever come from preparing everything in advance.’ (4) This same ideology allowed Bresson to ‘arrive at a non-historical truth by using historical words when he used the actual transcripts from the trial for his film, Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (The Trial of Joan of Arc, 1962) (NoC, p. 128). This relatively short film with a running time of sixty-four minutes delivers a portrait of Joan through her own words. Bresson found that, ‘[i]n responding to the judges, without touching a pen, Joan became a writer. She wrote a book, a pure masterpiece of our literature. This book is a portrait, the only portrait we have of her' (Bresson on Bresson, p. 88).
It is this Joan, refigured in the modern day, whose story draws the most striking parallel to The Devil, Probably. Bresson’s Joan was what he wanted for the youth of today. He admired her for her ‘magnificent insolence’ that came with her youthfulness, as well as her lack of prudence, her purity and also her failure. These qualities were perhaps what he also looked for in his models.
Shortly after the release of The Trial of Joan of Arc, Bresson began work on a film based on the Book of Genesis, with backing from Dino de Laurentiis, but had to abandon this project twice – once in the ‘60s and the second time at the end of his career – and this work remained unfinished at the time of his death.
Bresson’s last film, L'argent (Money, 1981), was based on Leo Tolstoy’s short story titled The False Note, and won the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival (alongside Andrei Tarkovsky for Nostalghia), where he famously refused to say anything on stage.
Bresson has often been presented as a cantankerous recluse who shunned the media (though a collection of interviews in the book, Bresson on Bresson, shows a remarkable generosity with his time). His elusiveness and the contradictory information about him only serve to bring about a new interpretation of Bresson each time; we just have to be open to approaching him through his writings (cinematographic and otherwise). He said: ‘In a film, what you need is the man. A look caught unexpectedly can be sublime.’ (5)
THE FILM
Opening scene: It is already night, and we are on the banks of a river… is it the River Styx? The water is black as ink. A ferry, faintly dotted with lights approaches from the left. It crosses under a bridge, à côté [close by], to arrive somewhere off screen. At that moment, we realise the shore on which we are standing is the ferry’s destination, and by association we are already in the world of the dead, waiting for the souls this ferry will disembark.
The Devil, Probably is only the second Bresson film made with an original script, Au hasard Balthazar being the first, and it was the second last film he made. It follows the story of Charles, a disenchanted university student, and his search for meaning in life through intellectual pursuit, radical politics, sex, drugs, religion and psychoanalysis. He finally decides that suicide is the only mode of response for one situated in the catastrophe that is the modern world. This world is not particularly immoral but contains all there is to bear: music and meaningless words, beauty and abject cruelty, intensity of spirit and destruction in the name of advancement. These contradictions all coalesce into the everyday, where non-action can also contribute to the pleasure of despair. This is an epoch when progress (commercial, industrial, mechanical) triumphs above all. But the arrival of Charles is both too early and too late; the revolution has passed, it is never going to happen.
Bresson said that this film was his lucid response to the contemporary world, where he wanted to pose a primordial question, that of existence. The question ‘to be or not to be’ is, for him, most essential to mankind: what we are prepared to do in the face of it all – deforestation, industrial pollution, red tide phenomenon, senseless manipulation of a capitalist society that drives fervent desires towards consumption and waste. In an interview for L’Express, Bresson said he needed to register his resistance to everything around him, saying that he had felt the presence of the devil twice in his life. The interviewer never asked him when the first time was (BoB, p. 263).
When the film debuted at the 1977 Berlinale, Rainer Werner Fassbinder threatened to exit the jury unless the film won an award, which it did – the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize. The film was banned for under 18s in France at the time of its theatrical release, because the censorship board feared that it might provoke a spate of teenage suicides (observers from the industry thought the ban was more to do with the film’s interpretation of societal impacts that led to drug addiction and delinquency in youths). Bresson said he was initially tormented by the thought that the film might traumatise young people, then held fast to his conviction that their ‘youthful spirit would triumph.’ His faith in the youth of his time remained true to the way he admired the courage of Joan of Arc.
There is a prevailing beauty, a fleeting sense of the enigmatic that the young possess, despite themselves. And Bresson always sought beauty above all else. Take for instance, Antoine Monnier who played Charles: he has an androgynous allure like that of an angel. Bresson’s models were always at the cusp of adulthood, before the development of their psyche. Antoine was only fifteen at the time of the shoot. Interestingly, he was the grandson of Henri Matisse, and his mother, Jackie Matisse Monnier was also the stepdaughter of Marcel Duchamp, and her godfather was Joan Miró. Not all Bresson’s models were from such a background. For this film, Bresson saw sixty or more young men, and was going to cast Nicolas Deguy (who ended up playing Valentin) in the role of Charles, before he found Antoine. Antoine was chosen for the very purpose of having the “real” (his background, social status) seep in, though Bresson maintained that, from a casting point of view, ‘it is the voice that mattered most (BoB, p. 264). For Bresson, his cinematographic writing is there to capture the moment when ‘the words they have learned with their lips will find, without their minds taking part in this, the inflections and the lilt proper to their true natures,’ (NoC, p. 69), because ‘they are capable of being divinely “themselves”’ (BoB, p. 77). Hence, they are cast once, and never again (by Bresson, at least).
Bresson favoured the auditory sense, which he said is much more creative: upon hearing the sound of the whistle of a train, we can conjure up an entire station, its smell and the hustle and bustle of people, as well as imagining, all at once, the journey ahead. In The Devil, Probably, the soundscape is always too loud, rendering any debate circumspect; every little thing is clamouring to be heard over the din of the other. In the end, there is only abstraction. Take the meeting of the activist group, held in a church at the same time an organ is being tuned: the two voices become counterpoints to each other only to be nullified by a third sound, that of a vacuum cleaner.
Through the noise, there are moments of unforgettable clarity found in music: the Monteverdi piece, Ego dormio (I slept but my heart was awake), played on a portable record player in the church at night. And later still, when Charles is strolling towards Père-Lachaise cemetery, a snatch of music is heard from an open window by the street. He is momentarily distracted by its startling presence, a purity that is all heart: Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major K. 488, the adagio movement.
These are our brief encounters with the spiritual, transcending the everyday. It can be said that Bresson’s films are not sensual, but sensory, and appeal not only to our sense of sight, but especially to our auditory sense, and through sound, synaesthetically too – for you can feel the chilliness in the air in the end sequence.
All this brings to mind what Marguerite Duras said of Bresson: Bresson brought something extremely new to cinema today – thought, or thinking. This, however, is not immediately apparent, because you are overwhelmed by the drama on screen, and yet, you can’t quite put a finger on what you’re seeing … until later. (6)
Notes
1. Notes on the Cinematographer, Green Integer Books, Los Angeles, 1997, p38, henceforth NoC. From his interview in the documentary, The Models of Pickpocket (Babette Mangolte, 2003).
2. From his interview in The Models of Pickpocket (Babette Mangolte, 2003).
3. Marika Green, in Mangolte.
4. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983, New York Review Books, NY, 2013.p. 282, henceforth BoB.
5. Magnolte, as above.
6.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa84HOBlUXA&list=PLxd16Q2NHtV0909bRqi9UqvMwlj5DB0P9&index=3
The Devil, Probably is only the second Bresson film made with an original script, Au hasard Balthazar being the first, and it was the second last film he made. It follows the story of Charles, a disenchanted university student, and his search for meaning in life through intellectual pursuit, radical politics, sex, drugs, religion and psychoanalysis. He finally decides that suicide is the only mode of response for one situated in the catastrophe that is the modern world. This world is not particularly immoral but contains all there is to bear: music and meaningless words, beauty and abject cruelty, intensity of spirit and destruction in the name of advancement. These contradictions all coalesce into the everyday, where non-action can also contribute to the pleasure of despair. This is an epoch when progress (commercial, industrial, mechanical) triumphs above all. But the arrival of Charles is both too early and too late; the revolution has passed, it is never going to happen.
Bresson said that this film was his lucid response to the contemporary world, where he wanted to pose a primordial question, that of existence. The question ‘to be or not to be’ is, for him, most essential to mankind: what we are prepared to do in the face of it all – deforestation, industrial pollution, red tide phenomenon, senseless manipulation of a capitalist society that drives fervent desires towards consumption and waste. In an interview for L’Express, Bresson said he needed to register his resistance to everything around him, saying that he had felt the presence of the devil twice in his life. The interviewer never asked him when the first time was (BoB, p. 263).
When the film debuted at the 1977 Berlinale, Rainer Werner Fassbinder threatened to exit the jury unless the film won an award, which it did – the Silver Bear Special Jury Prize. The film was banned for under 18s in France at the time of its theatrical release, because the censorship board feared that it might provoke a spate of teenage suicides (observers from the industry thought the ban was more to do with the film’s interpretation of societal impacts that led to drug addiction and delinquency in youths). Bresson said he was initially tormented by the thought that the film might traumatise young people, then held fast to his conviction that their ‘youthful spirit would triumph.’ His faith in the youth of his time remained true to the way he admired the courage of Joan of Arc.
There is a prevailing beauty, a fleeting sense of the enigmatic that the young possess, despite themselves. And Bresson always sought beauty above all else. Take for instance, Antoine Monnier who played Charles: he has an androgynous allure like that of an angel. Bresson’s models were always at the cusp of adulthood, before the development of their psyche. Antoine was only fifteen at the time of the shoot. Interestingly, he was the grandson of Henri Matisse, and his mother, Jackie Matisse Monnier was also the stepdaughter of Marcel Duchamp, and her godfather was Joan Miró. Not all Bresson’s models were from such a background. For this film, Bresson saw sixty or more young men, and was going to cast Nicolas Deguy (who ended up playing Valentin) in the role of Charles, before he found Antoine. Antoine was chosen for the very purpose of having the “real” (his background, social status) seep in, though Bresson maintained that, from a casting point of view, ‘it is the voice that mattered most (BoB, p. 264). For Bresson, his cinematographic writing is there to capture the moment when ‘the words they have learned with their lips will find, without their minds taking part in this, the inflections and the lilt proper to their true natures,’ (NoC, p. 69), because ‘they are capable of being divinely “themselves”’ (BoB, p. 77). Hence, they are cast once, and never again (by Bresson, at least).
Bresson favoured the auditory sense, which he said is much more creative: upon hearing the sound of the whistle of a train, we can conjure up an entire station, its smell and the hustle and bustle of people, as well as imagining, all at once, the journey ahead. In The Devil, Probably, the soundscape is always too loud, rendering any debate circumspect; every little thing is clamouring to be heard over the din of the other. In the end, there is only abstraction. Take the meeting of the activist group, held in a church at the same time an organ is being tuned: the two voices become counterpoints to each other only to be nullified by a third sound, that of a vacuum cleaner.
Through the noise, there are moments of unforgettable clarity found in music: the Monteverdi piece, Ego dormio (I slept but my heart was awake), played on a portable record player in the church at night. And later still, when Charles is strolling towards Père-Lachaise cemetery, a snatch of music is heard from an open window by the street. He is momentarily distracted by its startling presence, a purity that is all heart: Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A major K. 488, the adagio movement.
These are our brief encounters with the spiritual, transcending the everyday. It can be said that Bresson’s films are not sensual, but sensory, and appeal not only to our sense of sight, but especially to our auditory sense, and through sound, synaesthetically too – for you can feel the chilliness in the air in the end sequence.
All this brings to mind what Marguerite Duras said of Bresson: Bresson brought something extremely new to cinema today – thought, or thinking. This, however, is not immediately apparent, because you are overwhelmed by the drama on screen, and yet, you can’t quite put a finger on what you’re seeing … until later. (6)
Notes
1. Notes on the Cinematographer, Green Integer Books, Los Angeles, 1997, p38, henceforth NoC. From his interview in the documentary, The Models of Pickpocket (Babette Mangolte, 2003).
2. From his interview in The Models of Pickpocket (Babette Mangolte, 2003).
3. Marika Green, in Mangolte.
4. Bresson on Bresson: Interviews 1943-1983, New York Review Books, NY, 2013.p. 282, henceforth BoB.
5. Magnolte, as above.
6.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa84HOBlUXA&list=PLxd16Q2NHtV0909bRqi9UqvMwlj5DB0P9&index=3
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Gaumont, France
Le diable probablement (The Devil, Probably) was newly restored and remastered in 4K in 2024 by Gaumont. The image calibration has been validated by the film's copyright holder, Madame Mylene Bresson, and Gaumont’s technical director Monsieur André Labbouz.
Director: Robert Bresson; Production Companies: Sunchild Productions, G.M.F.; Producers: Michel Chanderli, Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, Daniel Toscan du Plantier; Executive Producer: Marc Maurette; Script: Robert Bresson; Photography: Pasqualino De Santis; Editor: Germaine Lamy; Production Design: Eric Simon; Costume Design: Jackie Budin; Music: Philippe Sarde.
Cast: Antoine Monnier (Charles), Tina Irissari (Alberte), Henri De Maublanc (Michel), Laetitia Carcano (Edwige), Nicolas Deguy (Valentin), Régis Hanrion (Dr. Mime, psychoanalyst), Geoffroy Gaussen (Libraire), Roger Honorat (Commissaire), Marie Rivière (Student, uncredited).
France | 1977 | 95 mins | Colour | French with English subtitles | UC 18+ Please note: this film contains a scene of archival footage of violence against animals
Le diable probablement (The Devil, Probably) was newly restored and remastered in 4K in 2024 by Gaumont. The image calibration has been validated by the film's copyright holder, Madame Mylene Bresson, and Gaumont’s technical director Monsieur André Labbouz.
Director: Robert Bresson; Production Companies: Sunchild Productions, G.M.F.; Producers: Michel Chanderli, Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, Daniel Toscan du Plantier; Executive Producer: Marc Maurette; Script: Robert Bresson; Photography: Pasqualino De Santis; Editor: Germaine Lamy; Production Design: Eric Simon; Costume Design: Jackie Budin; Music: Philippe Sarde.
Cast: Antoine Monnier (Charles), Tina Irissari (Alberte), Henri De Maublanc (Michel), Laetitia Carcano (Edwige), Nicolas Deguy (Valentin), Régis Hanrion (Dr. Mime, psychoanalyst), Geoffroy Gaussen (Libraire), Roger Honorat (Commissaire), Marie Rivière (Student, uncredited).
France | 1977 | 95 mins | Colour | French with English subtitles | UC 18+ Please note: this film contains a scene of archival footage of violence against animals