A Man Escaped

Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé) won Best Director at Cannes 1957. The screenplay comes from a memoir by André Devigny, a French Resistance fighter who really did escape from Lyon's Fort Montluc prison in 1943. Bresson, a former prisoner of war himself, used Devigny as technical consultant on the film and shot in the actual prison.

Lieutenant Fontaine (François Leterrier, a non-professional actor) is condemned to death by the Gestapo and sets about preparing his escape from a single cell: he bends a spoon into a chisel, works loose the wooden panels of his door, plaits bedsheets and blankets into ropes. Bresson directed Leterrier and the rest of the cast as what he called models, not actors, drained of theatrical inflection and performing without expressivity, and his camera watches hands, doors and locks far more than faces. The Mozart C-minor Mass returns three times across the film, the only emotional acknowledgement Bresson allows himself.

It is the most rigorously realised work of Bresson's mature period, and the place to start with him. Tarkovsky, the Dardenne brothers, Béla Tarr and Pedro Costa have all named Bresson as foundational. Cahiers du cinéma put it at the top of its 1957 list, it has held its place in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll since, and Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film takes it as one of three central case studies for what he called the spiritual style.