Challenging the prevailing notion among cinephiles that the auteur is an isolated genius interested primarily in individualism, Colin Burnett positions Robert Bresson as one whose life's work confronts the cultural forces that helped shape it. Regarded as one of film history's most elusive figures, Bresson (1901–1999) carried himself as an auteur long before cultural magazines, like the famed Cahiers du cinéma, advanced the term to describe such directors as Jacques Tati, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean-Luc Godard. In this groundbreaking study, Burnett combines biography with cultural history to uncover the roots of the auteur in the alternative cultural marketplace of midcentury France.
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French director Robert Bresson is celebrated among cinephiles for his distinctively spare films, and with this volume Burnett contributes considerably to the scholarship on this auteur. . . . Essential.
" - Choice
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Burnett offers us an important contribution to work on Bresson, which signicantly expands and complements existing, more tex trather-than-context-bound studies.
" - French Studies
