Customer Reviews

A Man Escaped [VHS]

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the first Bresson film I ever saw and it stunned me. Since then, I have seen most of his other films and each one is remarkable, though a few stand out: Diary of a Country Priest, Au Hazard Balthaaar, Pickpocket, L'Argent. Still, this film is unique in that it retains the austere, minimalist and ultimately spiritual style of the others, and at the same time is a gripping thriller.

You might say of this film -- though Bressonian purists might hate me for saying this -- that Bresson uses his anti-Hollywood style to outdo Hollywood style. What I mean is: Bresson is known for revealing only what is absolutely essential, a gesture, an item, two hands engaged in an activity, feet walking. This has the effect of encouraging the viewer to pay attention, but also, because it forces no specific interpretation upon these items, encouraging the viewer to participate in the unfolding of events, and become more than merely a spectator. Hollywood style tends also to eliminate much of what is inessential, but to a much different end: to eliminate moments where the viewer might be distracted and think about something other than the film; the aim is to replace thought with the action on the screen, rather than to stimulate thought. In the case of this film, however, where the subject matter is a prison breakout (standard Hollywood fare) the minimalist style employed by Bresson is able to achieve both a high degree of tension, and a high level of involvement. From the moment the prisoner is in the prison, nothing is shown except what is relevant to the single-minded focus of the prisoner: to escape. In that sense, it is not at the end that the man escapes (as already announced in the title of the film), but from the very beginning he is escaped in the sense that he never accepts the status of imprisonment. The film is able to show this without ever having him discuss the matter with anyone. Remarkable.

This is one of cinema's great achievements, a testament of the combination of elements (subject, visual style, photographic image, movement, sound, background music, character, montage) are perfectly blended into a unique experience. The New Yorker print, however, is the worst copy of this film (16mm, 35mm, television screenings) I have ever seen. This was a copy with a lack of contrast, extra noise on the track, looking like a dub. If only there was a decent attempt to attain anything better would have begun to do the film justice. As it is, enjoy what you're stuck with but know there's something better out there.

Burt Shapiro

One of the finest films I've ever seen, painted with a spare but rich brush this is truly a masterpiece. The subtitle of this film is "Where the wind listeth" taken from the biblical passage concerning a man being born again. This seems to get lost in some reviews of this gem, but I think it is its underlying theme, redemption and grace.

I've never seen a film that truly kept me so involved and on the edge of my chair. Bresson lets this story tell itself from the beginning as you watch the main character's hands and feel his hesitation and his desperation. A man so fully human and yet touched and guided by an amazing grace that takes him step by step and leaves him free in the truest sense of the word.

What is the lesson from this film? Was it just the true story about how "a man escaped" from a Nazi prison? No, it is a film about human endurance in the face of great adversity.It shows how one man's determination can surmount seemingly impossible odds. Bresson depicts this in a minimalistic manner that uses small events to heighten the dramatic tension. As all of his movies, this one will linger, long after seeing it, in your memory.

Robert Bressons unique way of using sound in this film, helps making it one of the most suspenseful films I've ever seen. I can recommend it to anyone who wants something more than "just another film".

This film is absolutely wonderful but when examined closer, it is merely a simple film and that is the main power. In what it is trying to express, a man who attempts to escape from a Gestapo prison camp, it relates to the existential values at the time. I have never seen a more crisp telling of a drama told in straight forward narrative and easy dialog. What is at the basis of this fabulous Bresson film is man's determinism in the face of imprisonment. Truly recommended.

(...)

(...)

It seems strange to me that Robert Bresson referred to himself as a "Christian atheist", because God is very much present in this film. A
Man Escaped is based on the true story of André Devigny, a member of the French Resistance who managed to break out of prison just
hours before he was to be executed by the Germans. The movie begins with the prisoner, here called Fontaine, being driven to jail. The
men beside him are cuffed, but he is not. He tries to get away when the car stops but is recaptured and beaten about the head.

In prison, Fontaine nearly succumbs to despair, fearful that his fellow Resistance fighters will be rounded up too, but then a stranger
intervenes, a prisoner exercising in the courtyard who promises to get a note to them. Relieved of this concern, Fontaine once again sets
his mind to escape. While other men remain bound either physically or mentally, Fontaine develops a detailed plan of escape and
arduously sets about implementing it.

Bresson presents Fontaine's machinations in painstaking detail. He also confines most of the film to Fontaine's cell, so the viewer too
feels like a captive. Seemingly forgotten by the Germans, Fontaine delays his escape attempt. He believes that two people will be
required to make the attempt work, but is unable to convince anyone else to join him. He is himself afraid to take the leap of faith that it
requires, seemingly waiting for a sign that he should go ahead. The sign comes quite suddenly in the form of his death sentence, his
crimes not forgotten after all.

But now, just when everything seems to have fallen into place, another prisoner is placed in the cell with Fontaine, a very young man
whom he has every reason to distrust as a stool pigeon, planted at the last minute by the Germans. His execution scheduled for the next
day, Fontaine has but two choices : kill the boy or include him in the escape. Once again Fontaine has thrust upon him a matter of faith.

His resolution to this problem and the ensuing escape are exciting stuff. The very sparseness of the film and the way Bresson strips it of
emotion, makes the action, as he intended, speak for itself, and it speaks volumes. But there are also big ideas at work here, the most
refreshing of which, particularly coming from a Frenchman in the 1950s, is that faith and hope matter and that we can take some control
of events through our own actions. The most famous image of the French intellectuals' view of life is the example of Sisyphus, as per
Albert Camus. Sisyphus, a Titan sentenced to eternal punishment for rebelling against the Gods, has to push a boulder up a hill all day,
and at the end of the day, just as he arrives at the top, it rolls back down again. Bresson's film is perhaps best understood as a refutation
of this fatalistic and futile worldview; A Man Escaped suggests that indeed we can escape the fates, can create our own destinies, if only
we have faith and make the effort. The impetus remains with us, even if the ultimate outcome remains in the hands of "The Spirit".

GRADE : A+

`The wind bloweth where it listeth.' God will only save us if we give him a hand, thus says the Resistance fighter who has been condemned to death. He has luck on his side and the fates for the narrowest of margins. He has other prisoners aware he is about to make a break and they both urge him to go or to take caution. Un Condamne a mort s'est echappe, is the film as art form reduced to its purest elements, based as it is on the true story of Andre Devigny,who was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Nazis during the 2nd World War.Imprisonned in a spare cell at the Lyons Fortress of Montluc he watches everything closely and plans meticulously, making pencil notes and obtaining spoons to act as chisels and clothing and mattress material to make ropes, and bending metal from his light surround into hooks. He taps on his cell wall to communicate with a neighbouring prisoner who thinks he hasn't a hope but gives his blessing. He also has found a contact in the prison yard to get letters out to his family.

Fontaine(Leterrier), impassive and inscrutable , has total command of the 3 by 2 metre space he inhabits, with the eyes of a vigilant bird and we get an image of his hands chipping, banging, bending,platting. Our vision is limited to what he can see-a small part of the prison yard, the outer corridor and downstairs in the yard when the men empty their pots and have a wash in the communal wash-house daily. We also only hear what he hears, the approaching foot-steps or the noises of men being taken from their cell to their execution in the yard.Bursts of machine-gun fire.Orsini, in the cell opposite escapes too early and is soon executed.The innate hope and humanity of the prisoners surfaces as they struggle for meaning beyond their captivity. This is a thrilling tale of courage and faith transcending physical limits through iron purpose and sensitivity soft as a feather and a final liberation with a moving denouement to the accompaninment of Mozart's sublime Mass in C Minor.

I'm a great admirer of Bresson's films. I appreciate his simplicity, and his refusal to churn out "professional" films that have little substance or artistic merit. His "Diary of a Country Priest" is one of the best films of the twentieth century.

But it seems to me that his "A Man Escaped" is flawed. The film is a pretty straightforward cinematic parallel to a memoir published after WWII of the imprisonment and escape of a French resistance fighter. In putting the story on film, Bresson uses a voice-over that reads portions of the text while showing scenes in which the actors perform what's being read. The upshot is that the effect is slightly pedantic--not enough to make the movie a bust, but just enough to be noticeable, thereby rupturing the film's flow. The viewer doesn't need to hear the main character tell you that he's filing down his dinner spoon so that he can make a chisel out of it while he's filing down his dinner spoon to make a chisel out of it. There's a strange redundancy here for a director well-known for his minimalist approach.

On the other hand, the cinematography in this, as in most of Bresson's films, is excellent. It's also the case that the actors, all of whom were nonprofessional, are quite good. So "A Man Escaped" deserves three and a half--and maybe a full four--stars.

I first saw "A Man Escaped" in my Introduction to Cinema Studies course during my freshman year at college. It immediately became one of the greatest films I had ever seen. Over time, my feeling on it has evolved to the point that it is now one of my favorite films as well. The story is told in a sparse, visually narrow style that forces the viewer to imagine as well as simply watch. The prison is never seen as a whole; we are only shown pieces of it--a wall, a doorway, and so on. The German prison guards are more often only heard as footsteps coming to Fontaine's cell door. Rarely do we venture outside of Fontaine's cell once he is imprisoned, and when we do, it is usually to the same place, where he washes himself with the other prisoners. With the exception of the end, the plot of the movie revolves entirely around Fontaine's plan and exeuction of an escape. The magic of the film is that Bresson makes these minutiae indescribably watchable; we are invested in Fontaine's every action through the whole of the film, and we watch with anticipation as he grows closer to his goal with each passing month, day, minute. "A Man Escaped" is a beautifully rendered work of cinema, and it will appeal to everyone who wishes to do more than while away the time seeing a simple 'movie'.

As to the New Yorker DVD listed here, I'm afraid it is severly lacking in quality. The print used is dirty and dark, and the transfer itself suffers from a poor PAL to NTSC conversion that results in 'combing' and 'ghosting' (For those not technically inclined, this basically means that the film runs faster than an American film, but the difference in speed was not properly accounted for, causing a sort of blurriness in some scenes). There are also no special features, save for a few trailers for other Bresson films. As of the date of this review, the New Yorker disc is $26.99, and in my opinion that is simply too much to pay for a DVD that is this mediocre.

My suggestion is this:

A company in the UK called Artificial Eye has just released a new DVD of "A Man Escaped" this April. The picture quality is greatly improved and, because the UK uses the same PAL encoding system, there was no need for a conversion, which eliminates the combing and interlacing problems found on the New Yorker disc. Besides that, there is also a wonderful Dutch documentary (with English subtitles) called "The Road to Bresson" which is almost an hour long and features interviews with Andrei Tarkovsky, Louis Malle, and Paul Schrader amongst others. There is also footage of the notoriously camera-shy director accepting his award for Best Director (for "L'Argent") at the 1983 Cannes film festival. Finally, the documentary includes a delightful surprise at the end which I will not ruin here. On Amazon.co.uk the AE DVD is priced at £11.98, which is actually cheaper than the New Yorker with the current conversion rate. The disc is coded for Region 2 in the UK, so it will not work on a TV or DVD player in the USA unless both the TV and DVD player have multi-region capability and you have a PAL to NTSC converter box. However, the disc can be viewed on any PC by using any of a series of free media players widely available on the internet that circumvent region coding.

In short, if you value this film as much as I do, and want some value for your money, then skip this disappointment from New Yorker and pick up the Artificial Eye release instead.