Film Stills |=| The Μeaning of Hands | Robert Bresson, 1943-1983
“Another thing I was aware of was that nearly all gestures, all of our ways of talking, are mechanical.
It’s true. You put your hand like this. Look. There are two pages in Montaigne about the way our
hands go where we don’t want them to go. He’s a writer who isn’t really difficult. You can always
read a page or two and find something. Theatre consists of well controlled gestures and words.
Cinema must be something different—not controlled. It must be the equivalent of life, like any art,
but certainly not copied or simulated.”
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Robert Bresson
(from a conversation the director had with Ronald Hayman, published in The Transatlantic
Review No. 46/7, Summer 1973 (London) and transcribed for Doug Cummings for www.robert-bresson.com)
A work of archival criticism that forgoes the language of rigour for that of rapture…
here are hands – votive, tender, purloining, trembling – that make me want to raise
my own hands in gratitude to this mysterious poet.”
Sukhdev Sandhu, Sight & Sound (best films of 2014)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-En99_TTCpw
The Sounds of Agnès Varda
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