Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction: Filming Russian Classics—Challenges and Opportunities
- 1 Across the Russian Border
- 2 Dostoevskii's “White Nights”: The Dreamer Goes Abroad
- 3 On Not Showing Dostoevskii's Work: Robert Bresson's Pickpocket
- 4 Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket
- 5 The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly
- 6 “A Vicious Circle”: Karen Shakhnazarov's Ward no. 6
- 7 A Slap in the Face of American Taste: Transporting He Who Gets Slapped to American Audiences
- 8 Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod) Poruchik Kizhe
- 9 Chasing the Wealth: The Americanization of Il'f and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs
- 10 Fassbinder's Nabokov—From Text to Action: Repressed Homosexuality, Provocative Jewishness, and Anti-German Sentiment
- 11 “The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost)”: The Fate of Vasilii Aksenov's Cult Novel A Starry Ticket on Paper and on Screen
- Conclusion: Passport Control—Departing on a Cinematic Journey
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
3 - On Not Showing Dostoevskii's Work: Robert Bresson's Pickpocket
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on the Contributors
- Introduction: Filming Russian Classics—Challenges and Opportunities
- 1 Across the Russian Border
- 2 Dostoevskii's “White Nights”: The Dreamer Goes Abroad
- 3 On Not Showing Dostoevskii's Work: Robert Bresson's Pickpocket
- 4 Stealing the Scene: Crime as Confession in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket
- 5 The Eye-deology of Trauma: Killing Anna Karenina Softly
- 6 “A Vicious Circle”: Karen Shakhnazarov's Ward no. 6
- 7 A Slap in the Face of American Taste: Transporting He Who Gets Slapped to American Audiences
- 8 Against Adaptation? The Strange Case of (Pod) Poruchik Kizhe
- 9 Chasing the Wealth: The Americanization of Il'f and Petrov's The Twelve Chairs
- 10 Fassbinder's Nabokov—From Text to Action: Repressed Homosexuality, Provocative Jewishness, and Anti-German Sentiment
- 11 “The Soviet Abroad (That We Lost)”: The Fate of Vasilii Aksenov's Cult Novel A Starry Ticket on Paper and on Screen
- Conclusion: Passport Control—Departing on a Cinematic Journey
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.
How does French filmmaker Robert Bresson, who minimizes affect and expressivity on the screen and rejects psychological realism in filmmaking, connect with the Russian novelist Fedor Dostoevskii, a master of psychology whose works burst with emotional turmoil and scandal? The question is an important one because underlying these obvious stylistic differences are ideational ties with Dostoevskii that are vital to Bresson's films. Allen Thiher observes that “[i]n nearly all his works, […] Bresson's narrative turns in one way or another on isolation and humiliation, on estrangement and the impossibility of a desired community.” It is precisely these quintessentially Dostoevskian concerns, and not the intense, complex narratives in which they are embedded, that draw the French filmmaker to engage with the Russian novelist in his films. Significantly, Bresson is determined not to reproduce the stories that Dostoevskii tells in his own quest for understanding. Nor does the filmmaker wish to create innovative cultural recontextualizations of these stories by moving them out of nineteenth-century Russia to situate them in his own time. Rather, he engages with Dostoevskii in an ideational sphere, positioning the existential questions that famously preoccupy the Russian novelist at the core of the newly created worlds of his films.
The way in which Bresson connects with Dostoevskii's thinking emerges directly from his emphatically articulated desire to distinguish his own art form from literature to which, as he felt, film had subjugated itself. Bresson's resolve to revitalize cinema works hand in hand with his concentration on Dostoevskii's thinking, which he privileges over the action habitually featured in film. As he connects with Dostoevskii, Bresson is intent on doing so in uniquely cinematic terms and at a level considerably deeper than that of conventional film adaptations. The cultural borders between Dostoevskii's nineteenth-century Russia and Bresson's mid-twentieth-century France fall away before the two artists’ shared concerns about the human condition. How Bresson negotiates the boundaries between their media, respecting their unique, distinguishing features as he activates the cohesion of his own thinking with Dostoevskii's, is the subject of this chapter.
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- Border CrossingRussian Literature into Film, pp. 64 - 84Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016