Hello, my name's Justin the Clu, and I'm here today with Will Sloan.

And you're listening to The Important Cinema Club.

And today we're going to be talking about everyone's favorite exciting director, Robert Bresson.

You mean Robert Bresson.

Yeah, that's right, Robert Bresson, as we'll be calling him in this episode. This is one of the most intimidating topics we've ever done, I think. Really? More than like, I mean, we haven't done Antonioni or any of the other ones like that, like Tarkovsky. Well, consider a quote that Jay Hoberman wrote in 2012, I believe. Bluntly put, to not get Brasson is to not get the idea of motion pictures.

It's to have missed that train, the Lumiere Brothers filmed arriving at Leon Station 110 years ago.

Also, there are very few filmmakers who have been written about more and by more distinguished people than Brasson.

Susan Sontag, Andre Bazan, you know, among them.

And all of them talk about how his films are cinema just straight to the vein.

He's doing something that nobody else does.

And as he would talk about a lot throughout his career, he was trying to define what cinema,

or as he like to call it,

le cinematograph, could do, or should do, really.

There's a sense when you read about him that he's not merely a great director, but the

great director.

And when you read Hoberman's quote, it's almost like a challenge.

Like, if you don't get this, you pass, fail. And it's obviously

a willfully provocative quote because Brissons is also a very challenging director, you know,

right to the level of what do you expect cinema to be? Like he withhold, he famously withholds

so much of the things that, you know, people who love movies expect from movies.

But I think that when you say it like that, it's kind of frightening to people that want to watch his films.

Because like you said, oh man, if I don't get it, then I just don't get cinema.

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