Table Of ContentMichael Haneke
Selected Writings & interviews
Terror and Utopia of Form
Robert Bresson’s
Au hasard Balthazar
Michael Haneke
“Must we, therefore, eat from the tree of knowledge once more, to fall back into the
state of innocence?”
“Most certainly, that is the last chapter of the history of the world.” (Heinrich von
Kleist, On the Puppet Theatre)
The first film I can – dimly – remember going to see was Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet.
Since the film was shot in 1948, I must have been at least six years old. Of course
I saw the film again several times, so I cannot exactly separate what I experienced
that first time, and what I remember from later viewings. But I precisely remember
the theater, already gloomy with its dark paneling, growing darker as the screening
began, the majestic lifting of the curtain, and the gloomy images of the castle of
Elsinore surrounded by surging waves, accompanied by similarly gloomy music.
I also remember that my grandmother, who was with me in the theater that
day, told me years later that she was forced to leave with me after less than five
minutes, because I was screaming in fright at those gloomy images and sounds.
Soon after – it must have been the same year, as I had not yet started school
– I spent three months in Denmark for “recreation” as part of an aid program
for children from countries that had lost the war. It was the first time I was away
from home for an extended period, and I was miserable. In an effort to cheer
me up, my Danish foster parents took me to the movies. It was a murky, rainy,
late fall day, cold and cheerless, and the film, the title and plot of which I’ve
forgotten, took place in the jungle and savannah of Africa. Here, too, I can
exactly remember the long, narrow, gloomy theater with doors along the side that
openend directly on to the street. The film comprised a number of traveling shots,
obviously filmed from inside a jeep, before which fled antelopes, rhinoceroses, and
other creatures I’d never seen before. I, too, was seated in that car, captivated with
astonishment and joy.
Finally the film came to an end and the lights went on, the doors were opened
to the twilit streets, outside rain was pouring down, the noise of traffic filled
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the theater, and the moviegoers opened their umbrellas and stepped out of the
theater. But I was in a state of shock: I could not understand how I, who scant
seconds before had been in Africa in the sun amidst the animals, had been trans-
ported back so quickly. How could the theater, which for me had been like a car
I was traveling in, have driven back – and especially so quickly – to northern, cold
Copenhagen?
When I think about the directness and intensity of these first two movie
memories, I am always reminded of those remote tribes to whom, shortly after
being “discovered” – that is, shortly after their initial confrontation with so-called
civilization – films were shown with a screen and projector set up in the middle
of the jungle. According to the projectionists’ accounts, the savages fled in panic,
and could barely be calmed down. When they asked the reason for this reaction,
they learned after a long, terrified silence, that for the natives, the framing of the
images was a real mutilation of the people shown in the film, who they perceived
as actually being there: For them, the close-up of a head was really the talking,
moving, amputated head of a person who was physically present, and who, given
such dismembering, should have long been dead!
The knowledge of those magical living images, with their power to evoke
horror and delight equally, has, in a world that accustoms even infants to the
constant presence of virtual reality in their living-room television set, largely fallen
into oblivion. (The question remains, to what extent magical fright, to which adults
have long become oblivious, can still hold sway over the children’s room when
night falls.) I had grown up in a world in which television did not – yet – exist,
and in which for the child, and, in subsequent years, for the youth, visiting one
of our small town’s three cinemas was always a rare, unusual, and thus precious
experience. I don’t know to what extent this experience can be conveyed at all to
those who were born more recently and have grown up in a world unthinkable
without the constant presence of competing floods of images.
Years later, during my last year in senior high school, I saw Tony Richardson’s
screen adaptation of Fielding’s Tom Jones. The film relates the eventful story of
an orphan boy growing to maturity in eighteenth-century England; it was fast-
paced and directed with wit, and it succeeded in its efforts to make the viewer
into an accomplice of its fun-loving [sinnenfreudig] hero. Suddenly, perhaps a third
of the way into the film, in the middle of a breathtaking chase sequence, the
protagonist stopped in his tracks, looked into the camera (that is, at ME!), and,
before resuming his flight from his pursuers, commented on the difficulty of his
predicament, thereby making me aware of mine.
The shock of recognition of this moment was in every way equal to the terror
of my childhood movie experiences: Naturally I had long since grasped that the
movies were not real, naturally I had long since distanced myself physically and
probably mentally by ironic observations from the unnerving immediacy of a thriller’s
virtuality, but never before this shocking discovery of my constant complicity with
film protagonists had I experienced the dizzying immediacy that separates fiction
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and reality; never before had I physically experienced to what extent I and my
fellow humans – that is, the audience – were largely victims and not partners
of those whom we paid to “entertain” us. Of course, I knew what the power of
living images could achieve when put in the service of ideologies, but this know-
ledge was little more than abstract and, like anything abstract, merely prevented
direct experience.
Weeks later I remembered those initial moviegoing experiences, whose over-
whelming effect, whose fright and joy I had long since repressed. I had looked
behind the mirror and began to see the cinema with different eyes, to distrust
those storytellers who pretended to render unbroken reality. Nonetheless, my hunger
for stories was not sated – I wasn’t sure what I was looking for in the movies. It
was no doubt a form of film art that still offered the experience of being directly
touched, the wonderful enchantment of the films of my childhood, but which did
not thereby turn me into the helpless victim of the story being told and its teller.
That I, in 1967, while already a university student, was able to see Bresson’s
film at all – if it screened publicly, it did so to no publicity – I owe to a film course
at our university that gave students the opportunity to become familiar with some
of the films that, as uncommercial “artworks,” were very unlikely to reach our
theaters. The film crashed into our seminar like a UFO fallen from a distant planet
and divided us into fanatic supporters and fierce opponents: Provocative, foreign,
and surprising, the film broke with all the golden rules of mainstream cinema on
both sides of the wide ocean, as well as with those of so-called European “art
film,” and was at the same time uncannily perfect in its absolute unity of content
and form. I grasped only later that this perfection had its own story of matura-
tion behind it, when I had the opportunity to see Bresson’s previous films. None-
theless, and despite the masterpieces that came after it, AuhasardBalthazarremains
for me the most precious of all cinematic jewels. No other film has ever made
my heart and my head spin like this one. What was, what is so special about it?
What does the film tell? [Was erzählt der Film?] Balthazar is a donkey. The film
tells the story of his life, his suffering, and his death. And it tells – in fragments –
the story of those who cross Balthazar’s path.
The beginning: The screen still dark, before the fade-in of the first image, the
tinkling of the bells of a herd of sheep. Then the first shot. Close-up, the baby
donkey drinks from between its mother’s legs; in the background we sense the
herd of sheep more than we see it; only their bells are heard ringing softly and
serenely. Then a child’s skinny arm wraps itself around the animal’s neck, tugs it
away from its mother, the camera pans along and we see the little girl tenderly
hugging the donkey, a boy about the same age also bending over and patting
it, and between them, in the background, a man. They are all dressed lightly, it
is summer. “Can we have him? Please, Daddy!” “What do you want him for?”
Long shot: The children are running beside their father, who is pulling the little
donkey behind him down into the valley from the mountain pasture. The sheep’s
bells have fallen silent.
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Close-up: With a small pitcher one of the children pours water over the
donkey’s head and says, “Balthazar. I baptise you in the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
The ending: Balthazar carries the loot of a pair of smugglers – they are going
over the border in the mountains. It’s night. Suddenly the “Don’t move!” of a
border guard. The smugglers run back the way they came. As we hear shots,
the camera lingers on Balthazar’s face, then he, too, takes off, downhill, in the
direction where his masters, who tormented him constantly, have just fled.
Daylight. Balthazar is standing quietly between the pine trees on the moun-
tain. Close-up: his shoulder – blood is seeping from a bullet wound. He begins
to move, wanders out from under the sheltering trees, into the pristine alpine
pastures, still burdened with the smugglers’ loot on his shoulders. The bells of a
herd. We see sheep approaching, black sheepdogs jump around them, barking,
the bells ringing. A shepherd. Individual dogs. Then the herd stands around Balthazar,
we can barely make him out through all the sheep surrounding him, we hear the
bells from up close. The black dogs. The sheep begin to move off, slowly reveal-
ing the donkey, who is now sitting on the ground. Again the dogs. Then the
sheep have retreated into the background – Balthazar in the foreground. The music
comes in – the deeply sad [tot-traurig] andantino from Schubert’s A major sonata,
which has accompanied Balthazar’s life story through the film, offering pity and
at the same time consolation. Slowly, very slowly, Balthazar’s head sinks. Then,
completely filling the frame, only the herd – it is in motion – leads us back to
Balthazar, who is lying there, stretched out on the grassy pasture, not moving
anymore. The music stops. Only the sound of the bells. The sheep wander off
into the background, disappearing into the mountain landscape. In the fore-
ground: Balthazar is dead. The bells become softer. The end.
In between lies a life that, in its sad simplicity, stands for those of millions,
a life of small pleasures and great efforts, banal, unsensational, and because of its
depressing ordinariness, apparently unsuitable for exploitation on the silver screen.
In fact, the film is not about anyone, and thus about everyone – a donkey has no
psychology, only a destiny.
The title is the precise reflection of the film’s intention: “By chance, for instance,
Balthazar.” It could be anyone else, you or I. Bresson chose the name, he says, for
its alliteration. That sounds arbitrary, like a platitude, but is actually just the opposite.
Bresson’s “model” theory, his rigorous rejection of professional actors in favor
of aptly chosen amateurs, has often been discussed and still more often criticized
–it is also what prevented his films’ financial success. Here, in Balthazar, the motive
for this theory shapes up most clearly and coherently: The screen “hero” is not
a character who invites us to identify with him, who experiences emotions for us
that we are allowed to feel vicariously. Instead, he is a projection screen, a blank
sheet of paper, whose sole task is to be filled with the viewers’ thoughts and feel-
ings. The donkey does not pretend to be sad or to suffer when life is hard on him
–it is not he who cries, it is us, for an icon of imposed forbearance, precisely because
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he is not like an actor peddling his ability to exteriorize emotion. The animal
Balthazar, along with the knights in the director’s later Lancelot du lac, locked
up in their clattering suits of armor to the point of being unrecognizable, are
Bresson’s most convincing “models” simply because they are by definition unable
to pretend.
Not that Bresson’s “model” concept has always worked well. Amateurs can
be cast just as inappropriately as actors. (The otherwise wonderful Procès de
Jeanne d’Arc, for example, suffers from its protagonist’s lack of charisma.) That
notwithstanding, the “non-acting” of his always painstakingly, even lovingly
chosen amateurs, the monotony of their manner of talking and moving, their
presence – reduced to mere existence – was and is a liberating experience (far more
than the casual “naturalness” of the young actors in the cerebral fireworks and
intellectual jokes of his younger colleague Godard); it gave back to the people
in front of the camera their dignity: No one had to pretend anymore to make
visible emotions that, because acted, could only be a lie anyway. It had always
struck me as obscene to watch an actor portray, with dramatic fury, someone
suffering or dying – it robbed those who were truly suffering and dying of their
last possession: the truth. And it robbed the viewers of this professional repro-
duction of their most precious possession as viewers: their imagination. They were
forced into the humiliating perspective of a voyeur at the keyhole who has no
choice but to feel what is being felt before him and think what is being thought.
Cinema has missed out on the opportunity it has, new in comparison with
literature, to represent reality as a total sensory impression, to develop forms that
maintain and even for the first time enable the necessary dialog between a work
of art and its recipient. The lie that pretense is reality has become the trademark
of cinema – one of the most profitable in the annals of industry.
One senses in Balthazar, as in all of Bresson’s films, its author’s almost phy-
sical aversion to any type of lie, especially to any form of aesthetic pretense. This
passionate aversion appears to be the driving force behind his entire oeuvre. It
leads to a purity of narrative means unique in the history of cinema.
While reading the description of the beginning and end of the film, for a reader
unfamiliar with Bresson’s films, the impression may creep in of “poetry,” affected
beauty, pretentious stylization. There is none of that in the film: Documentary
simplicity in framing, an almost manic rejection of “beautiful,” that is, pleasing
images (as were occasionally to be found in his earliest films, and as are dominat-
ing today’s art cinema, as well as American A pictures and TV advertising) – indeed,
one could venture to say that Bresson invented the “dirty” image in the field of
art cinema. Alongside the ever palpable desire to show things as clearly and simply
as possible, an infallible instinct saves him from the danger of sterile stylization;
for all the precision of their framing, his pictures always give the impression of
being frayed, open and ready for when reality breaks the rules. Herein lies the
source, I think, of his well-known conflicts with his cameramen, such as De Santis,
all famous for the “beauty” of their images.
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Precision rather than beauty – each shot shows only what is absolutely essential,
each sequence has been compressed to its most concise form and briefest duration
possible. Even so, the length of the shots and cuts are – even for the period when
the film was made (1965) – unusually calm. Never do pauses create room for sen-
timentality, in its simplicity everything gives the impression of having developed
naturally and, while being in the service of a rigorous aesthetic concept, is never
the victim of the latter. Bresson reportedly intended to personify the seven deadly
sins in his characters – but against a declaration such as this can be placed a
sentence from his Notes sur le cinématographe: “Hide the ideas, but in such a
way that they can be found. The most important will be the best hidden.” And
at another spot he writes, “production of emotion obtained by resistance to
emotion.” And: “Emotion will emerge from a mechanics, from the compulsion
towards a mechanical regularity.” In support, he cites the pianism of Lipatti: “A
great pianist, not a virtuoso (one like Lipatti) relentlessly hits the notes the same
way: half-notes, the same duration, the same intensity; fourth-notes, eighth-notes,
sixteenth-notes, etc., idem. He doesn’t pound the emotion into the keys. He waits
for it. It comes and takes over his fingers, the piano, him, the concert hall.”
What does this mean for the film? One example: The village teacher, who has
been dealt a rough blow both through his own pride (is it the embodiment of
hubris?) and through the malice of others, dies, still young, without having been
ill (from a broken heart?). How is this being told? The teacher’s wife shows the
priest into the house. When opening the door to the teacher’s room, she says:
“He is full of despair, perhaps you can help him.” The priest goes through the
door into the room. The teacher in his bed turns toward the wall. The priest
doesn’t know what to say. Then he sees the teacher’s table with the Bible, goes
to get it and, sitting down and opening it, says: “One must have forgiveness. For
everyone. You will be forgiven a lot because you suffer so much.” The teacher,
turned away: “I suffer less than you think.” The priest leafs through the Bible,
finds something, reads it to the teacher: “The Lord does not forsake forever and
when he sends us woes he is compassionate in his divine mercy. He does not like
to humiliate mankind nor does he enjoy making them suffer.” The teacher’s wife
had stopped at the partly open door, now she turns away, steps in front of the
house, sits on the bench at the door, says: “My Lord, please do not take him away
from me, too. Leave him for me. You know how painful my life will otherwise
be.” Knocks on the inside of the window. The wife looks. The hand behind the
window disappears gradually. The wife gets up, goes inside. She enters the teacher’s
room, the camera follows her to his bed. Standing up, her torso blocks the view
onto his upper body. We only see his hands. As he lies on his back, they lie still
on both sides of his body. The woman kneels down, folds the man’s hands. Offscreen
the priest’s voice: “Ego te absolvo peccatis tuis.” His hand comes into the frame,
blesses the deceased. “In nomine patri et filii et spiritus sancti.” The woman leans
forward to kiss her husband’s hands. Quick dissolve. The woman is sitting in the
garden next to a tree. We see her from behind. She has put her face into her hands.
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The whole sequence takes less than two and a half minutes. The lines are
spoken quickly and without emotion, the characters move with the monotony
of marionettes. No motions driven by emotion, no tear relieves the pent-up
sorrow. And yet, or precisely because of this do we as viewers sense the depth
of despair in all characters more strongly than in any melodrama that pulls our
heartstrings. All actions and events retain the polyvalence of real life – the author
never takes sides, the spectator is always called upon to use his own personal
judgment, free to choose, to find his own truth and interpretation. The priest’s
efforts to console find their counterpart in his insecurity and in the rigidification
of the rites and phrases at his disposal; the teacher’s despair stands in contrast to
his pride that has devolved into hubris, the wife’s fear to her passive suffering; and
vis-à-vis all the neediness and misery there is the indifference or non-existence of
a God who, when asked to grant life, imposes or permits death.
The polyvalence of plot and motifs creates distance. The often repeated charge
isthat Bresson makes it difficult for the viewer and that he prevents the possibil-
ity of identification, and that his films are cold, arrogantly elitist, and pessimistic.
With regard to the latter charge he responded to an interviewer: “You are
confusing pessimism with clarity,” and he went on to say: “Take Greek tragedy –
is that pessimism?”
I have a videotape of the awards ceremony from the 1983 Cannes Film Festival,
where the Golden Palm was awarded jointly to the then seventy-six-year-old Bresson
for his last film, L’Argent, and to Andrei Tarkovsky, for Nostalghia. As Bresson, called
up by Orson Welles, stepped on to the stage, a tumult broke out, a furious
acoustic battle between those booing and those acclaiming him; the audience was
asked for calm a number of times – only as Tarkovsky was invited on stage did
the storm of protest abate. (Himself an open admirer of Bresson, Tarkovsky may
not have been happy with this. What he had extolled about the films of his idol
was precisely their independence from audience tastes, for which Bresson was
now being booed before his eyes, while he, who had likewise been vilified as a
hermeticist, was being cheered.)
What, then, is so different about his way of using image and sound that
Bresson found it necessary to resurrect for himself a term that had fallen into
disuse, “cinematograph,” because he no longer found a common language and a
common meaning with that which is called and calls itself cinema?
A decade before Au hasard Balthazarwas made, Adorno wrote, in his essay “Form
and Content in the Contemporary Novel,” with regard to Kafka: “His novels, if
they still at all fall under that category, are prolegomena to a condition of the world
in which the contemplative attitude has become bloody mockery, because the
permanent threat of catastrophe no longer permits anyone to look on passively
or to tolerate the aesthetic result of such passivity.” And elsewhere, referring to
Dostoevsky: “No modern work of art worthy of the name that would not take
pleasure in the dissonant and the unbound. But inasmuch as such works of
art embody terror uncompromisingly and invest all the bliss of observation in
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the purity of such expression, they serve freedom, which mediocre works only
betray.”
The illusion that reality can be depicted in an artifact rather than being only
an agreement between the artist and his recipient had – since it had been ques-
tioned by Nietzsche – become obsolete at the very latest since the incommensur-
able horrors of the Nazi reign, the Holocaust and the world war for everyone who
sought to participate even somewhat consciously in this field of activity. The
verdict that no more poems could be written after Auschwitz demarcated the
horizon of consciousness of the survivors and future generations as much as
did the retraction of the Ninth Symphony together with all of Western culture in
Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.
In German-speaking countries, the perturbed inheritors of guilt seized with
wide eyes on the analysis of those words and signs that had turned out to be
so corruptible. But even beyond the German language the faith in a solid and
also stable relationship between art and its reception was dealt a blow at once
devastating and productive.
Only the cinema, the most expensive form of artificial communication and
the one most dependant on money, firmly withstood every reflective renewal. The
new subjects, positions, or putative findings were presented in the old, long com-
promised forms. And the supposed distinction between the most presumptuously
self-assured anaesthetizing schmaltz of right- as well as left-wing provenance and
the so-called “progressive art film” remained but a self-justifying farce of the artists
and actors who live off the film industry.
For the contents and crises of meaning of a shattered world, new forms had to
be found, on behalf of the financiers, that betrayed these contents by making them
fit for consumption – otherwise the films would not be made. Naturally such forms
were found. They were refined and compiled, and in the course of this process the
majority of those involved forgot why they had been undertaken in the first place.
A polemic oversimplification? I think this is required in order to express why
Bresson, this scandal-monger, was and is such a provocation in the world of
moving pictures. In order to be and to remain active in the feature film world (to
avoid the term “film business”), even those who saw through and despised the
rules of the game described above found themselves forced to subscribe to them,
even to place themselves in their service. To what extent they did so while con-
sciously distancing themselves from them, or were influenced unconsciously by
them, is visible in their attempts to playfully circumvent these rules of the game.
The strategies that film-producing countries of the so-called “free world” deployed
to circumvent the rules differed from those of totalitarian countries only through
their semantics. If individual works strayed from this unspoken agreement (which
had been restored due to economic pressure) – namely, that artistic inconsistency
was the result of exigencies – they were panned, shortened, reedited, castrated,
regarded as a faux-pas of their makers, relegated to the realm of the experimental
film (and thus no threat to the market), or at best half-heartedly tolerated by certain
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critics as exceptions that prove the rule. The most exciting and most truthful of
what international cinema has to offer can be found in this category of exceptions:
Pasolini’s Salò, Tarkovsky’s Serkalo, a few films by Ozu, Rossellini, Antonioni, and
Resnais, Kluge’s Artists, Straub’s Chronik, and a handful of others.
What happens in them? The films are as different as their authors and the
cultural circles from which they originated. What they have in common, and what
differentiates them from the great mass of film production, and even from other
films by the same author, is their successful unity of content and form. It
shatters the dubious consent between representer and represented, and, like the
optical torture chair in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, prevents us from closing our
eyes, and forces us to gaze in the mirror: What a sight! The horror! Spectators
accustomed to and luxuriously accommodated within the lies, leave the theater
aghast. Starved for a language capable of capturing the traces of life, and with
hearts and minds suddenly opened, the remaining spectators wait for a con-
tinuation of the stroke of luck that has unexpectedly taken place.
Few of the above-mentioned authors achieved more than once this unity of what
is depicted and how it is depicted. They found their way back to more easily
troddenpaths – the storm warnings of failure must be heeded, the fidelity of one’s
fans rewarded. And the bigger the following, the wider and more well-worn the
path. But it’s the builders of freeways who earn the most.
In such a context, Bresson’s continuity seems almost miraculous: After his two-
and-a-half tentative first steps, which already contain the thematic catalog of his
later works (a short, Les Affaires publiques, and his two first features, Les Anges du
péché and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne), his formal vocabulary is fully developed
with Le Journal d’un curé de campagne in 1950, and he remains unwaveringly com-
mitted to it for the duration of his output (another ten films in thirty-three years).
Of almost all the great auteurs it is said that in all their works they have always
made the same film over and over. Of none is this so accurate as of Bresson. To
be addicted to truth – indeed, this leaves no choice. “Do not think of your film
beyond the means that you have chosen for yourself,” he writes in his Notes.
And indeed, it is impossible to tell, while watching his films, if the means have
determined the content, or the other way around, they are so very much one and
the same. Their unity leaves no room for ideology or interpretation of the world,
commentary or consolation. Everything dissolves into pure relationality, and it is
up to the viewer to draw conclusions from the sum of the arrangements.
Reduction and omission become the magic keys to activating the viewer. In
this respect, it is precisely the hermetic aspects of Bresson’s oeuvre that seek to
make the spectator’s role easier: It takes him seriously.
What is omitted is the gesture of persuasion of models that invite emotional
identification.
What is omitted is the (all too) coherent meaning of the explanatory contexts
of psychology and sociology – as in our daily experience, chance and contradic-
tion of fragmentary splinters of action demand their rights and our attention.
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