Customer Reviews

Notes on the Cinematographer (Green Integer)

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If you want a step by step, how to make film book, you're better off browsing the bookstore at your local film school.

If you are a novice filmmaker, and you want to make art with film or video, and you want a guidebook on how to THINK and FEEL about your chosen art form, this is a must.

Bresson inspired the French New Wave filmmakers, and in my opinion was one of the few directors this world has seen who actually considered the particular reality of the moving image and created a set of principles to guide his choices as a director based on the medium itself, and not on any inherited traditional technique. One of the primary divisions in film theory is whether you believe film to be an extension of theatre or something entirely different.

For Bresson theatre is a more intellectual, mind based experience, whereas film is an EXPERIENTIAL art form. Bresson was highly interest in TRUTH over the APPEARANCE of truth. For Bresson the camera and audio recorder capture the essence of a thing, and therefore he cautions against using actors, and sets, and instead suggests people being themselves and shooting on actual locations.

This book is actually a collection of notes that Bresson wrote to himself over the course of his career. It is a wonderful look into the mind of an artist. In this book I have found a kindred spirit, whose insights into the nature of film and film production are distilled down to their essential forms. What kind of Truth does the camera capture, what elements go in the mise-en-scene which add or distort that truth, how do you illicit the inner truth of the actor (model) while still maintaining the requirements of the plot and script?

There are two books which have, for me, opened up the truest possibilities of film as an artform. These books are: "Notes on the Cinematographer" by Bresson, and "Sculpting in Time" by Tarkovsky. These books are a must read for anyone interested in exploring the true potential of film as an art form.

Also, this book goes in and out of print fairly regularly, so you should buy it whenever you see it being sold. Its relatively inexpensive, but contains a wealth of knowledge. It makes a great gift for someone interested in film or video as an art form.

There is no better guide to the process and experience of making a film. Though its epigrammatic style makes it at first seem abstract, Notes on the Cinematographer is essentially a step-by-step handbook on what to do (and more so, what not to do) with actors and a movie camera. The title is so unintentionally misleading as to the subject of the work, which contains not a single line on lighting or photography ('cinematographer' is Bresson's rhetorical name for 'film-maker') that I believe it has obscured what would otherwise be a justly renown (and more readily-available) classic text on filmmaking.

This book stands also as an intriguing commentary on Bresson's films, on which is it is difficult to say anything adequate.

While Bresson's short, minimalist notes were written about and for film, they apply to all creative endeavors. So much of the artistic process is about knowing what to leave out, when to stop, what notes not to play, what colors not to use, what words to take out. Bresson, with an amazing economy of words, dazzles repeatedly. Poetic, profound, wise (and often arrogant), Bresson's collection is more than a treatise on the "cinematograph" as he calls film. It is a lesson in making, and even a lesson in living. To be read slowly said an earlier reviewer...How about to be read repeatedly and daily, genuine words of wisdom. yb

"Notes on the Cinematographer" is a tidy, Zen-like summation of the special aesthetic Bresson brought to film. 'Cinema' to him was simply filmed theater. He wanted movies to do something more, to create a new language of images that could express a character's inner states and moods (I think this goal, more than anything, explains why he's so often labeled a 'spiritual' director). Bresson wanted faces, not actors; events, not scenes; "BEING instead of SEEMING." To this end he insisted on amateurs over trained actors, noises over music, slowness and close-ups over speed and pans. Cinematography as Bresson explains it here is a unique form of writing. His efforts to make an essentially mechanical & visual medium parallel the inwardness of the written word has to be one of the strangest and most fascinating projects in the history of film. Not surprisingly, he writes beautifully, and these aphoristic koans, surrounded by all that empty white space, are as haunting as anything he captured on film. A tiny masterpiece.

As I write this review, Amazon shows the book as out of print, with used copies running from $25-300.

YOU CAN BUY THIS BOOK DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHER (greeninteger.com) FOR ONLY $10! Don't sucker in to these jacked up prices. The marketplace sellers are trying to rip you off.

That aside, this is a wonderful, expressionistic mini-tome with haiku-like meditations on cinema as perplexing visual art. Highly recommended (but only if you get it for a reasonable price).

The random, notebook quality of this book is what gives it a certain charm. It's quite like Bresson's films: full of hints, suggestions. The notes are study in how a director thinks through the problems facing him. The scrapbook quality of it shows a mind with firm beliefs, yet always searching. Reveals that the artistic life is a work in progress.

Bresson's book is an extraordinary piece of film litterature. Seemingly consisting of random notes, it actually contains a very deep and original vision of the essence of cinema as the author understands it. The book is written in the same minimal style Bresson directs his films. Nothing is explained. This is a book to be read slowly.

Among 20th Century film makers, names like Renoir, Tarkovsky, Bergman, Welles and Bresson carry a special cachet. Cinephiles revere them as demi-gods and speak of their filmographies with hushed reverence.

Bresson was a master of composition--I remember watching "Diary of a Country Priest" (1951) and being awestruck by how every frame of the film encapsulated the young priest's suffering and isolation. No camera tricks, no flimflammery, just the unerring eye (and ear) of a director, an AUTEUR at the very peak of his form.

NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPHER is a marvel, one of the most beautiful books related to cinema ever written. In a series of short, koan-like statements, Robert Bresson explores how one captures truth and authenticity on film. Bresson abhorred artifice and preferred to work with amateur or unknown actors (he referred to them as "models") rather than the "stars" of the day. To the end of his life, he persisted in seeking out authentic moments, human encounters, attempting, as he puts it, "To translate the invisible wind by the water it sculpts in passing".

Indispensable. Every young film maker should own a copy of this modest, priceless volume.

Robert Bresson (not the great photographer Cartier-Bresson) is like one of the best wines, wasted on non-connoisseurs.

If you have already appreciated his films (start with "Pickpocket" and "A Man Escaped"), these aphorisms - the notes he took around his work - will resonate deeply.

Any creative person having to figure out how images and sounds function will benefit greatly. This is not the realm of answers but of questions, and for some, this will feel like the purest oxygen to fill our lungs.

I have taught filmmaking for the past 30 years, and this tiny book still shines with my students.

Not what I expected. This book is more philosophical, than literal. I like it, but it's like reading a lot of proverbs, you cannot absorb it all, only the few that strike you at that moment.