Béla Tarr, Paul Schrader, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, R. W. Fassbinder, Andrei Tarkovsky…Robert Bresson's style and principles have inspired a variety of filmmakers with very different preoccupations. Three auteurs, however, seem particularly indebted to Bresson while also having been inventive with his influence: Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel and Monte Hellman. Which aspects of Bresson's work shaped them in particular? How is it possible for a body of work with such dogmatic foundations to enrich styles where Christianity is unimportant (and if it is, then only as iconography, as in Garrel's case)? What does a copy say about its source?

From euphoric reuse (Eustache) to formal extension (Garrel) or even radical deepening (Hellman), Bressonian exigency, a lively source for contemporary cinema, is very much at work in the realm of quotation.

Living with Mouchette (Bresson Revised by Eustache’s My Little Loves)

In France, Bresson's main inheritor is incontestably Jean Eustache. La maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore, 1973) represents a secular continuation of Bresson worthy of its model. The work with spatial fragmentation and black and white cinematography that affirms everything has an abstract dimension, the ethical conduct of the characters, the ostensible characteristics of gesture: These kinds of visual and narrative properties immediately recall the auteur behind Pickpocket (1959). And yet, Eustache proves himself most Bressonian when he approaches a problem already addressed by Bresson and comes up with the opposite solution. “A film by Bresson,” said Eustache, “feels longer than reality.” For example, Pickpocket's fragmentary description of the manual gestures of theft only makes sense in relation to theft's imperceptible nature: By objectively slowing down the action, Bresson highlights its instantaneousness, turning it into an event. To produce the same effect of transforming concrete time into a symbolic temporality, The Mother and the Whore adopts the opposite solution: the sequence shot. The scrupulous recording in static sequence shots of a growing emotion (i.e., Bernadette Lafont's tears as she listens to the love song) transforms time into duration and the materiality of the shot into a formal event. “Retouching the real with the real.”

If The Mother and the Whore constitutes a response to Bressonian ethics, Mes petites amoureueses (My Little Loves, 1974) is their violent riposte, a nearly situationist détournement.