"... if you don’t show a succession of things exactly as they are in life, people stop understanding. Pornography has brought that to the cinema, that you must see everything. So the public is now conditioned to films where you show everything. It is terrible, I can’t work anymore. If I can’t make people guess, if I am obliged to show everything, it doesn’t interest me to work."

- Robert Bresson interviewed by Paul Schrader (1)

In the above comment Bresson offers a definition of pornography that touches upon issues central to his singular method of filmmaking. He defines pornography in terms of seeing. The desire to see everything is equated with obscenity, and Bresson comments to Paul Schrader a little further on in the same interview: "....when you see too much, it is not mysterious anymore" (2). In his films Bresson is concerned to convey intact the mystery that lies thrown about the most casual and ordinary details of life. And if he approaches this mystery in a religious way, he nevertheless gives it an unorthodox tonality -- for him it is the mystery of a Presence that could be called God, but which he seems to prefer to position as ultimately inxplicable. It is the feeling of God rather than the thought of God, or in less religious terminology, it is the feeling that everything, especially the most ordinary things, are always accompanied by a dimension or depth of being that escapes explanation. For Bresson, seeing becomes pornographic when it creates the illusion that we can and have seen everything. Such an illusion destroys the mystery of being by transforming it into a deadened material object. In opposition to this pornography of seeing, Bresson’s seeing, and therefore Bresson’s filmmaking, is always suggestive of an emotional, and ultimately spiritual reality that extends beyond the visible image. Bresson wants to both show and suggest. This dual aim, however, creates a peculiar contradiction in Bresson’s films: he wants to show and he refuses to show. His films present clear concrete events and realities but, simultaneously, they refuse to release a clear concrete meaning. This disjunction between clarity of vision and opaqueness of meaning is, at least for me, one of the characteristic marks of Bresson’s films. His films present a realistic but resistant surface, (not only of images but equally of sounds), a surface that I always find myself trying to penetrate.

The connection between pornography, seeing, and meaning is particularly pertinent to Bresson’s Mouchette. This pertinence is quite complex and needs to be carefully teased apart thread by thread. In the first place, Mouchette like all of Bresson’s films, has been so extensively commented upon that it is difficult to really see it. "It is very difficult to see things" Bresson tells Schrader. "So many times you go walking in the street, you look at things, but you don’t see them." Then Bresson says something far more interesting and unusual, "If you see the look in a man’s eyes and at the same time see the reason why he is looking as he is, you are not touched [my italics]" (3). That is, if you see the "reason why he is looking", then your understanding interferes with the pure act of seeing and sets limits to your emotional response: you see what you think you know, not what is actually there, and you respond on the basis of your knowledge and not on the basis of your seeing. In relation to Mouchette the difficulty of seeing is augmented by a now conventional tendency to view Bresson’s films in terms of suffering and redemption, as a movement through an environment dominated by socialized corruption, stupidity and cruelty to a cathartic spiritualized release. That such meanings can be well justified by analyzing structures right across Bresson’s oeuvre in no way solves the problem of someone who really wants to see Mouchette. In order to see there seems to be no remedy except to ignore such interpretations and look at the film as though you were a total idiot (after some short time I achieved this ideal). And this was not, in fact, as unusual an activity as it sounds. It was my same old activity of trying to penetrate to the meanings beyond the resistant surface of Bresson’s films. I found myself asking over and over: who is Mouchette? In one sense, she is the film. So, who is Mouchette? An adolescent girl, rebellious, living without hope. But here language betrays us, (as it must always betray the critic who attempts the translation of film into words). Mouchette does not live without hope. She is perhaps the only character we are shown that cannot live without hope. Her mother is the opposite. From the very beginning she is without hope: a "stone" in her chest is pulling her down. Except for a brief scene shown before the opening credits, we only ever see her in one light: lying helpless in bed. She is dying and she dies. Mouchette takes care of her. She comes home after school and kneels by her bedside. This kneeling has religious overtones with a characteristic Bressonian inflection: the mystery of death hovers about her, and Mouchette knows it. In contrast to her mother, who truly has nothing, Mouchette has herself. What she doesn’t have is a world in which that self can grow. There are tragic elements here, but Bresson does not give us a tragedy. He gives us a simple statement about Mouchette that sums-up her dreams and the impossibility of her dreams. And it is her awareness of the impossibility of their realization, (ours too), that constitutes the true sadness of her life, (and by implication, the true sadness of our own lives). But in that conceptual constellation of pornography, seeing, and meaning I have, so far, only talked about the link between seeing and meaning. It is necessary to cycle back and explore the link between pornography and meaning in Mouchette, because the Bressonian mystery does not only come to Mouchette in the presence of death, but equally and also, in the presence of sex.

Several times during the Schrader interview, Bresson expresses the opinion that young people are not only "fragile, sensitive" (4) but that they "need something to live" (5). It’s a simple enough thought but one which allows us to focus on Mouchette in a fresh light. Mouchette too ‘needs something’. I think it is something quite simple and everyday: she needs someone to make love to her and to show her genuine warmth and affection. It is not human redemption or the trumpets of the Last Judgment or spiritual rebirth that she needs. It is something that belongs to the senses and the heart. And it is because Mouchette cannot find this genuine physical and emotional love in real life, cannot find this life in life, that she goes to find it in death. Her suicide is one of those complicated meanings in a Bresson film: her death is not a simple denial of life, it is a refusal to accept the emptiness of the world around her, and in a very real sense, it is the assertion of her own self-value and self-truth. Mouchette’s need, the need around which the whole films pivots, is inherently sexual. I did not see it at first, but sex inhabits the heart of this film. I will not harp on the more obvious scenes that establish its presence, (her schoolmates perfuming themselves and being picked up by young boys on their motorbikes after school; the two boys who expose themselves when she passes; her flirting with the young man at the fair; the way she is squeezing the water from her stocking when Arsène finds her in the woods, etc), but I do want to look at how Bresson’s clarity of vision and opacity of meaning combine to imbue key scenes in the film with the simultaneous revelation and concealment of sexual meaning.

This revelation and concealment of sexual meaning manifests itself most notably in the rape of Mouchette by M. Arsène. Bresson carefully builds up to this scene, carefully chooses what we will see and what we will not see. We might start with Mouchette caught in a storm and found my M. Arsène in the woods. (Bresson’s visualization of the storm complete with a sudden downpour that passes leaving the distant moon illuminating a dark sky from behind ragged and broken wind-driven clouds is a moment that is all Romanticist restlessness, emotion, and mystery -- a gesture that suggests that Mouchette’s suffering is not just a function of her social isolation, but equally of her inner yearning for ‘romance’, in every sense of that word.) When Arsène finds Mouchette she is putting on a stocking that she had just taken off to squeeze dry of water. There is an implicit sexual threat here, a sense that Mouchette is at the mercy of this man, but it is a threat that Bresson lets pass. It seems that Arsène is content simply to offer his help. Later, when Mouchette is drying herself in Arsène’s makeshift hide in the woods, Bresson allows sexuality to surface again when Arsène asks, "Anyone see you". Again, Bresson lets the threat pass. Later that night in his home M. Arsène confesses to Mouchette that he has killed Mathieu the gamekeeper. And we see Mouchette, for the first time opening up to another person: she puts her hand on Arsène and says he can trust her. Her sense of closeness to him becomes explicit when she says that she hates "them' -- "them" being the rest of the villagers. When Arsène has an attack of epilepsy she kneels beside him, holds him in her arms, actually cradles him. (The mother image here is very strong and makes us aware that Mouchette’s adolescence not only positions her on the brink of awakening sexuality, but that folded within and beneath her sexual need is a potentiality and desire for motherhood. In fact, while Mouchette’s mother is dying at home, Mouchette performs all the functions of a mother: she cooks, cares for the family, and is the only person we ever see changing or feeding the baby. There is a lot more we could say about this adolescent-girl-mother-image in general, and in particular about the identification of Mouchette with her mother which we see not only in the fact that Mouchette acts out the mother’s role, but also in a felt equivalence between the mother’s slow dying and the slow extinguishing of Mouchette’s own inner life-flame. It is not insignificant that when the mother dies Mouchette’s ability to dream her dream of sexual and emotional love dies too. But we should get back to Arsène’s hut.) Mouchette smiles briefly, but clearly, as she looks down at Arsène. Then she sings to him. (The song is one that she refused to sing in class, "Have faith in hope ... in three days Colombus told them..." Now she sings it here as she cradles Arsène, as if here -- acting out the role that she needs and that she dreams of -- she can hope.) She smiles queitly again. And again. Arsène gets up. Mouchette is still kneeling, (still in the presence of the Bressonian silence and mystery). (I have tried to follow all this in some detail because in this build-up to Mouchette’s rape, Bresson establishes a number of complicated and contradictory meanings: he establishes Mouchette’s sexuality and suggests Arsène’s sexual threat only to conceal them both; he suggests Mouchette’s fragility and Arsène’s power only to invert their meanings when Mouchette cradles Arsène; and as we shall see, he establishes their solidarity only to shatter it. Or does he?) Mouchette picks up her schoolbag. When she goes to leave, Arsène won’t let her pass. His whole demeanour seems to change. He threatens to kill her if she tells anyone about his confession concerning Mathieu. (From the initial trust Arsène showed in confessing to this suspicion, the distance could not be greater. Or more sudden.) He moves closer, extends his arm, and slowly he puts his hand around her. Mouchette is startled and pushes him away. She runs. Crouches under a table. He overturns the table. She runs and falls on her back by the fire. (This fire, blazing away as it is, is an image any Romanticist would be proud to own as a means of expressing the blaze of sexual feeling. But whose sexual feeling is it: Mouchette’s or Arsène’s? This question, which may seem perverse now, will become clear before long.) Arsène throws himself on top of her. Mouchette flays her arms. We see her resist. But then Bresson lets us see something surprising, lets us see her arms embrace Arsène’s back. Her fingers open and then press into his back in a gesture that suggests either pleasure or the release of some deep pent-up emotion. Here we have arrived at a point of maximum tension between Bresson’s clarity of vision and opacity of meaning. And it’s an opacity Bresson never fully dispels. We are in no doubt as to the fact that Arsène has raped Mouchette, but we are never clear whether she views her rape as ‘rape’. It is true that she returns home later that night clearly upset, her face wet with tears. Later, when she wakes, it is still wet with tears. But although we see her tears, we cannot construe them unambiguously. And we cannot do this because Bresson does not allow us to. The first thing Mouchette does when she returns home from Arsène’s is to warm up the baby’s milk. She wipes a tear and picks up the baby. For the first time in the entire film, her shirt is open so that we see the flesh of the top of her left breast as if she is about to breastfeed the baby. Later, when she explains to her mother that she was caught in the cyclone, her mother queries, "What cyclone are you talking about?" And Mouchette replies, "It was a cyclone ... wasn’t it a cyclone?" This uncertainty as to the meaning of the storm struck me at first as almost surreal, as something out of phase with the rest of the film. Another case of Bressonian opacity that commands us to see. Was it a cyclone? (And it was Arsène who told Mouchette, "Listen to the cyclone".) Or was it just ‘rain’ as Mathieu construes it later when he too challenges her claim that she was caught in the cyclone. The meaning of ‘cyclone’ and the meaning of ‘rain’ stand in the same relation to each other as ‘extraordinary’ stands in relation to ‘ordinary’. Was it then something extraordinary or something ordinary that happened that night? Did Mouchette feel something full of the confusion and meaning of her own desiring dreams? Did she listen to a cyclone? The fact is, Bresson suggests but does not let us see. We see that she wants to tell her mother what happened, but we never learn exactly what she was going to say. After her mother’s death we see how the villager’s alternately show Mouchette sympathy and suspicion. The storekeeper who offers her coffee and croissants catches sight of a scratch above her breast where her shirt is open and calls her a "slut". Mouchette clutches her shirt and walks out, defiant. When Mathieu (whom she thought had been killed by Arsène) calls Mouchette into his kitchen to ask her some questions, his wife takes a piece of straw from Mouchette’s hair and makes no secret of what she suspects. It is Mouchette’s rebellious outburst, however, that is most surprising. "M. Arsène is my lover, ask him your questions." Another moment of maximum opacity. We saw Arsène rape her, but what did we see? What did Mouchette feel?

Opacity surfaces again in the film’s final scene. We hear shooting. A church bell. Rabbits running through the long grass. Shots. A rabbit tumbles. Mouchette runs to it. Sound of a bell. She looks at the rabbit. Turns away. (The impossibility of living in a world whose stupidity and cruelty destroy everything natural, beautiful, is one way of seeing Mouchette’s response to the villagers’ shooting at rabbits, but I pass over it here as this way of seeing Bresson has been extensively mined.) Mouchette goes to the riverbank. Sound of a bell. Unfolds a dress she was given. Looks at the river. Rolls down to the bank holding the dress against her. In the mid-distance a tractor drives by. Mouchette’s face brightens. She runs a few steps. Waives at the man on the tractor. He looks at her for a moment, then turns away. She looks down, dejected. Sound of a bell. Slowly and deliberately she walks back to the river. Tries to roll into the river. Stops on a bush. While she walks back up the bank, Bresson holds on image of the bush and the water. Rolls. Rolls again. A splash. Bresson holds on image of the bush and the water. This final scene is very well-known. Many interpretations of Bresson see everything as flowing towards his films’ final scenes. It is not hard to justify this view, and the final scene of Mouchette is no exception. All the film’s previous scenes are defined by its meaning. It is not hard to see it as a moment of redemptive liberation that brings into painfully sharp focus the emptiness of the life of the village, an emptiness whose ubiquitousness positions suicide as Mouchette’s only exit. My interest in this scene, however, lies in the moment before we see Mouchette’s utter dejection. Who was the man on the tractor whose presence seemed to lift her spirits for a moment? Did she think he was Arsène? There is no other character who we as viewers have been introduced to that she would have felt any closeness towards. Just the opposite. With the exception of Arsène everyone else falls within the category of a despised ‘them’. From the distance the tractor driver’s shirt and cap suggest a resemblance to Arsène. So did Mouchette mistakenly think that he was Arsène? Was that the cause of her disappointment? We never know because Bresson does not allow us to see, and yet, it would be difficult to account for her sudden surprise, brightening, and then dejection on the basis of any other assumption. Perhaps this question was of no concern to Bresson. His interest in this scene may lie elsewhere. After all, Bresson tells Schrader, "I don’t want to show you anything especially. I want to make people feel life as I do: that life is life" (6). Bresson’s interest may be more concerned with the fact that this last flash of hope was an empty illusion, a final let-down that made Mouchette deeply aware that her need for sexual and emotional love could never find a place to exist in this world. It may well be this sense of emptiness and impossibility that Bresson wants us to feel, but the degree to which we can genuinely feel this depends upon the degree to which we can enter into the sexual desire that dreams at the core of Mouchette’s character, and this in turn commits us to seeing the meaning of the sexual link between Mouchette and Arsène.

Bresson does not let us see Mouchette’s death, but he gives us its presence. He gives us a living action -- Mouchette rolling over and over down a grassy riverbank -- that ends in silence and mystery. (Again, it is possible to ask here: did Mouchette die? We don’t see her drown, and although this enquiry could be said to run contrary to the film’s felt affective direction, Bresson himself has opened the door for such a question by making us believe that Mathieu was dead. Arsène even describes how he watched Mathieu’s blood pour into the stream where he lay face down, yet when Mathieu appears the next day we cannot see even a sign of any injury. Another Bressonian challenge to seeing that we will not take up here.) In opposition to a pornography of seeing that offers only a clarity that cascades into more and more graphic depictions of detail, Bresson wishes to give us a mode of seeing which is as sensitive to the way in which ordinary things and events reflect mystery as it is to the way in which they reflect light. Bresson’s images and events are surrounded by mystery. His sounds are surrounded by silence. In one sense life, death, sexual desire, and Mouchette are all equally surrounded by silence and mystery. (And it is our ability to make this equation that constitutes our recognition of Mouchette’s ‘self-truth’, that is to say, of her difference from everyone else in the film.) We can understand and appreciate this. We can understand it as a function of Bresson’s attempt to place seeing and feeling on a single continuum, to let one flow into the other. We can understand that Bresson, like other artists in film and in other fields before him and after him, has committed himself to suggestion. But the artistic medium does not always respond how the artist expects, even when the artist is a master. Before a film by Bresson, I think I will always experience the resistance of his surfaces, the opposition between his clarity of vision and his opacity of meaning. I think I will always find myself trying to penetrate through that surface, and I think the meanings will always wait a step or two just beyond my grasp.

Endnotes
(1) Paul Schrader, "Robert Bresson, Possibly", Film Comment (September-October 1977) p.30
(2) ibid. p.30
(3) ibid. p.29
(4) ibid. p.28
(5) ibid. p.29
(6) ibid. p.27

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