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| Robert Bresson: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé / A Man Escaped (FR 1956). Everything is made possible by a safety pin. |
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| Robert Bresson: Un condamné à mort s'est échappé / A Man Escaped (FR 1956). Prison de Montluc, Lyon, "Cette histoire est véritable, je la donne comme elle est, sans ornements." Robert Bresson. From the opening credits. My screenshot. |
Un condamné à mort s’est échappé ou Le vent souffle où il veut
Kuolemaantuomittu on karannut / En dödsdömd har rymt / Ein zum Tode Verurteilter ist entflohen.
FR 1956. PC: Société Nouvelle des Établissements Gaumont – Nouvelle Édition de Films. P: Alain Poiré, Jean Thuillier.
D+SC: Robert Bresson – adaptation du récit autobiographique d'André Devigny. DP: Léonce-Henry Burel - 35 mm - 1,37:1 - b&w. PD: Pierre Charbonnier. S: Pierre-André Bertrand. ED: Raymond Lamy. Advisor: André Devigny. [Assistant: Louis Malle (n.c.).]
Soundtrack: W. A. Mozart: Grosse Messe in c-Moll, First Part "Kyrie" (KV 427, unfinished 1782).
C: François Leterrier (le lieutenant Fontaine), Charles LeClainche (François Jost), Maurice Beerblock (Blanchet), Roland Monod (le pasteur Deleyris), Jacques Ertaud (Orsini), Jean-Paul Delhumeau (Hebrard), Roger Treherne (Terry).
Loc: Prison Montluc (le réfectoire, les douches, la cellule 107, les cours de promenade). - Le 3e arrondissement de Lyon. - Le Rhône.
Studio: Studios de Saint-Maurice (Val-de-Marne).
Language: French - with some German.
101 min
French premiere: 11 Nov 1956.
German premiere: 1957 VEB Progress Film Vertrieb. 1961 West Germany.
Helsinki premiere: 1 April 1960 Adlon, Broadway, distributor: Eurooppalainen Filmi Oy (Aito Mäkinen).
Gaumont dvd: 2010.
Gaumont restoration: 2018.
Symposiumi Elokuva ja psyyke 15: toivottomuus ja toivo / [Film and Psyche Symposium 15: Hope and Hopelessness], screening followed by a lecture by Antti Alanen.
Viewed at Kino Regina, Central Library Oodi, Helsinki, 22 March 2025
[Jésus répondit:] "Si un homme ne naît de nouveau, il ne peut entrer dans le royaume de Dieu. [...] Le vent souffle où il veut, et tu en entends le bruit; mais tu ne sais d'où il vient, ni où il va. Il en est ainsi de tout homme qui est né de l'Esprit." Jean 3:5, Louis Segond Bible
"The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes" (Jesus and Nicodemus) John 3:5
"Der Wind weht, wo er will, und du hörst sein Sausen wohl; aber du weißt nicht, woher er kommt und wohin er fährt". Johannes 3:8
"Tuuli puhaltaa, missä tahtoo, ja sinä kuulet sen huminan, mutta et tiedä, mistä se tulee ja minne se menee." Johannes 3:8
AA: TALKING POINTS AFTER THE SCREENING.
Robert Bresson's Un condamné à mort s'est échappé is a true story based on the memoirs of André Devigny, a hero of the French Resistance.
From Devigny's memoirs, Bresson crafted a lean and vigorous screenplay. Distributed by Gaumont, the result became Bresson's most popular film, and it has maintained its universal appeal. Although there is a single protagonist, he is a disciplined member of a movement. In his pursuit, he is supported by a community of fellow prisoners in many ways and at every stage.
Also unusually for Bresson, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé is a genre movie that satisfies the genre expectations of the general audience, a movie that obeys the conventions of classical narrative and a film with a happy end. It is a suspense thriller in which reversals of fortune and last minute turning points are original and effective.
But Bresson's suspense is of a special kind. The outcome is already declared in the title. What electrifies us is something beyond, the battle of the spirit against crushing circumstances.
In Journal d'un curé de campagne and Un condamné à mort s'est échappé Bresson established his unique style. His three films of the 1950s (also including Pickpocket) were based on the idea of the diary. The voice of the narrator conveys the inner world of the protagonist. There are no actors. Instead there are non-professional performers called "models". The films chart their spiritual journey towards grace. The camera registers physical reality with devotion. Everyday objects gain weight.
The approach is elliptic. Bresson shows what others leave out and disregards what others would highlight. He is a master of action cinema (the prison escape, the world of pickpockets), but action is not an end in itself. Bresson is an exceptional director of the look, unique in the art of the point-of-view.
Un condamné à mort s'est échappé was Bresson's first film without a score. The only soundtrack selection is "Kyrie", the first part of the Great Mass in C Minor by W. A. Mozart. It is heard in the beginning and the end, and in repeated scenes where prisoners empty latrine buckets. The lowest business is conducted to the highest music.
Bresson did not consider himself a film director in the ordinary sense of the word. He was interested in le cinématographe. The cinematograph is related to music and painting, not theatre. It is a new way of écriture, writing in moving images. Its material is reality in the raw. In this, Bresson's aesthetics is close to Bazin and Kracauer. It is an art of mechanical reproduction but most crucially, something far beyond. The art of the cinematograph is pre-written, photographically crafted and carefully edited.
Four films - Journal d'un curé de campagne, Un condamné à mort s'est échappé, Pickpocket, Jeanne d'Arc - are about grace. The rest of Bresson's films are about a world without grace.
Starting with Journal d'un curé de campagne, Bresson no longer cast actors. Instead, he cast what he called models - non-professional performers. The models were required to avoid psychology, emotional engagement and identification. They were asked to perform without emphasis and recite dialogue as in a line reading.
Bresson loved actors in the theatre, but he did not want to cast them in films. The models were carefully selected. Dominique Sanda* testifies that they were precious treasures for Bresson. He approached them as if taming them and merging with them in an instinctive intercourse that had nothing to do with directing an actor. "I wanted to bring out the soul and the presence of something noble that is omnipresent everywhere and that is God". He quoted Robert Bernanos: "There is no kingdom of the living, no kingdom of the dead, there is only the kingdom of God and we are all inside". (From Dominique Sanda's foreword to Lauri Timonen's Robert Bresson, luultavasti [Robert Bresson, Probably], 900 p., 2023).
We have devoted one of our Film and Psyche symposia to the Diderotian Paradox of the Actor. According to Diderot, the performer who experiences a genuine emotion is not as effective as the professional who performs the emotion by purely technical means. The Bressonian model is something else again, but perhaps there is an affinity with the Kuleshov experiment. To enable that, the model must have a special inner quality. What is needed is not impersonation but presence.
It is fascinating to register that Bresson filmed Dostoevsky three times - and was the opposite of psychological storytelling. In Bresson's films, there is no unconscious from a psychoanalytical point of view. Death drive (including justified suicide) is a leading theme, but Bresson has no interest in das Es.
The performances of Bresson's models are deeply sensitive, touching and memorable. I argue that even for Bresson, it is about the unconscious - but in a sense contrary to psychoanalysis.
What is art? We are a secret to ourselves and to each other. Our life is a detective novel, and we are looking for solutions to the mysteries of "who am I?" and "what is life?" Even when we think we know the answer, there is always something more, something bigger, something deeper.
Bresson is interested in the secret in us that is related to our spiritual essence.
A performer who attempts to engage in a character with psychological means, muddles the water and prevents from seeing clearly. In the process, she also muddles the act of the co-performers.
A performer whose presence is bare from affectation, conveys something that is true, something of which even she is not conscious. Nor is Bresson.
There is an affinity with the documentary school of Robert Flaherty who was intested in a human being so fully immersed on what she is doing that she forgets to pretend. When we renounce self-consciousness, we reveal something that fascinates Bresson. It is not necessarily something private, but rather something universal.
Susan Sontag found in Bresson's cinema a "spiritual style" and Paul Schrader a "transcendental style". In Bresson's account of a material world, Sontag found a spiritual dimension. In Bresson's focus on immanence, Schrader discovered transcendence.
In the beginning, the models look ordinary, and the way they are lit has nothing to do with glamour photography. But during their ordeal, the characters start to emanate an inner light. There is an affinity with transfiguration. A subtle shine emerges on their faces and in their eyes. Even if they are burned at the stake, their spirit is eternal.
(Robert Bresson made two films about military heroes. André Devigny became a brigadier general, grande officier de la Légion d'honneur and a Compagnon de la Libération. Jeanne d'Arc lifted the spirit of the French army to a momentous victory at Orléans and became the patron saint of France. In death she became immortal.)
The working title of Un condamné à mort s'est échappé was "Who helps himself" as in "God helps him who helps himself". Bresson was devoted to the theme of grace - grace and predestination - and the paradox of the free will. I am out of my depth in matters of theology. These questions were highly present on the French intellectual scene at the time, for instance in the writings of Simone Weil. Among major film critics, André Bazin, Henri Agel and Amédée Ayfre discussed them. Bresson's cinema is all about them, and his engrossing film leads us to reflect on these great mysteries.
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No film-maker is more eloquent with hands. Bresson films them like thinking organs. (Incidentally, in Finnish, "käsi/hand" is the root for "käsittää/conceive", "käsite/concept", "käsitys/conception" and "käsitteellinen/conceptual".) Focusing on hands, Bresson makes thought visible.
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André Devigny (1916-1999), a hero of the French Résistance, retired as a général de brigade of the French Army.
During the occupation Devigny was a commander of a resistance network in the Lyon region. He was arrested and sent to the high security Montluc prison. There he was tortured by Klaus Barbie and his men.
He made a series of attempts to escape until he succeeded together with a fellow prisoner and fled to Switzerland.
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Klaus Barbie, "the butcher of Lyon", is the subject of Marcel Ophuls's Hôtel Terminus : la vie et les temps de Klaus Barbie (US 1988). After the war, the US Army Counterintelligence Corps smuggled Barbie to Bolivia, where he advised military dictatorships (he was crucial in eliminating Che Guevara), also working for the West German foreign intelligence agency Bundesnachrichtendienst. When military dictatorship was abolished in Bolivia in 1983, Barbie was delivered to France to stand trial. By then, death penalty had been abolished.
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* Dominique Sanda was not an actor when Bresson cast her, but she became one after Une femme douce. She was the sole model of Bresson's who was an actual model: a mannequin and a beauty queen.
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Robert Bresson is the only major film director of his caliber of which no biography has been published.
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The cinematographer is the maestro Léonce-Henri Burel (1892-1977) whose filmography consists of 145 titles made between 1914 and 1971, among them many of the greatest classics of French cinema. He was the regular cinematographer of Abel Gance, shooting for example the three hugitives J'accuse, La Roue and Napoléon. From Journal d'un cure de campagne (1951) till Jeanne d'Arc (1962) Burel shot all Bresson's films. He brought to them something of the great secret of the silent cinema: the stark power of framing, the art of the close-up, the human presence, the mise-en-scène, the dynamic camera angle. There is an assured touch, a sense of urgency, an impact like these views have been branded on film.
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This was my first experience of Un condamné à mort s'est échappé on digital in a cinema. The visual quality of the Gaumont DCP looked fine to me. The Finnish subtitles were not of the highest order. I saw and reviewed the Gaumont dvd release in 2010. A digital restoration was released in 2018.
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