Although Annette Michelson's above quote traces the genealogy of postwar American avant-garde film, I argue in this study that many of the same avant-garde and disciplinary influences are evident in Robert Bresson's late films. If Michelson's comment addresses the lack of serious and sustained inquiry into the artistic lineage of the American avant-garde, then this study suggests parallel missed opportunities in examining Bresson's late color work. While many Bresson studies focus on his use of literary texts, his talent at adaptation, or his reliance on such Christian themes as punishment and salvation, this study instead investigates Bresson's work from a finearts perspective. I explore connections to sculpture and performance art, Bresson's interest in gallery and museum space, the turn to long-established painterly themes and motifs, the parallels to postwar gestural and abstract art, and his affiliation with the avant-garde, especially the movements of Surrealism, Constructivism, and Minimalism. My claim is that a very different view of Bresson emerges by approaching his work through other visual arts traditions and practices. At the heart of this comparison between cinema and the visual arts is Bresson’s—and the Bresson scholar’s—understanding of the relationship between cinema and history, a connection that I explore in this introduction through three interconnected topics: the method and approach of film archeology; the way avant-garde influences emerge in Bresson's work, with a focus on Surrealism and Constructivism; and Bresson’s predilection for tropes of automatism and the new.

Georges Didi-Huberman and the Anachronistic Tradition

Images certainly have a history; but what they are, the movement proper to them, their specific power, all that appears only as a symptom—a malaise, a more or less violent denial, a suspension—in history.

This study questions the widely accepted narrative story of Robert Bresson as director. Colin Burnett's recent study, The Invention of Robert Bresson (2017) pursues much the same goal by deconstructing the view of Bresson as an “isolated recluse”, as part of the way he has been mystified as auteur, largely based on critics who have “compil[ed] an inventory of arbitrarily periodized clusters of facts and rumors”.