On David Fincher & Robert Bresson

i was watching this transcendental sequence from Pickpocket yesterday, when my thoughts began drifting to the contemporary filmmakers who Robert Bresson may have influenced… sticking with the subject of thievery, i immediately thought of Johnnie To’s Sparrow, which explores the ritualistic grace of pilfering by exploding it, turning lifts into 5-minute operas of movement and gesture. but the modern maestro to whom i kept returning is David Fincher… the protagonists of his more recent films (namely Zodiac and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) strive to self-actualize through action, losing themselves in ritual in order to achieve some stripe of purity. it’s action, action, action, action, action…. characters always doing, and then re-doing, as if the means are all that matter. 

actually, i think the parallels are probably less evident between their respective works than they are between Bresson’s films, and Fincher’s filmmaking. Fincher, with his 100+ takes of the smallest actions, almost seems determined to reduce (elevate?) his actors into a Bressonian state of purity, smothering the artifice out of their actions until they know longer really know why they’re doing something, only that it must be done. 

this is just a half-formed thought that you’re watching take some ungainly sort of shape in real-time, but for all of Fincher’s visual excess, i think Bresson may be the filmmaker with whom he most implicitly connects. someone should ask him about this, sometime (Fincher, not Bresson), at the very least it’d be a neat way to reframe the “you did how many takes!?” question.

• Tags
• FILM
• Pickpocket
• Robert Bresson
• David Fincher