Bresson's color films share a number of characteristics with postwar French abstract artists in the way they similarly understand and approach the artistic process. These similarities are especially close given the way Bresson privileges the human body and sensory experience. Bresson constructs a film in much the way described by Maurice Merleau-Ponty for how an individual makes sense of the surrounding world: the image first arrives as a sensory experience that is subsequently organized into story. Bresson even describes the cinema screen as a material surface to cover like a painter’s canvas: “Submit your film to the reality of the screen, as a painter submits his painting to the reality of the canvas itself and the colors applied on it.” Despite productive points of contact between Bresson and an ascetic, Minimalist tradition that I explore in chapter five, I ultimately believe that the postwar flourishing of phenomenology exerts the most significant and sustained influence on Bresson. One purpose of this chapter is to argue that Bresson's view of painting cannot be divorced from a particular attitude toward and depiction of the body.

This chapter therefore has two intertwined foci: an examination of the relationship between painting and cinema through the lens of phenomenology, and a comparison of three Bresson films to three postwar French artistic movements. I explore Bresson's particular version of the lived body by looking at the way it emerges in Au hasard Balthazar and by discussing particular examples as they correspond to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings on painting.