A Man Escaped

Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (Un condamné à mort s'est échappé) won Best Director at Cannes 1957 and sits permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll. The screenplay was adapted from a memoir by André Devigny, a French Resistance fighter who actually had escaped from Lyon's Fort Montluc prison in 1943; Bresson, himself a former prisoner of war, 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 methodically prepares his escape from a single cell — bending a spoon into a chisel, removing his door's wooden panels, plaiting bedsheets and blankets into ropes. Bresson directed Leterrier and the rest of his cast as what he called models rather than actors: drained of theatrical inflection, performing without expressivity, the camera attending to hands, doors and locks rather than faces. The Mozart C-minor Mass returns three times across the film and operates as the only emotional acknowledgement Bresson permits himself.

The film is widely regarded as the most rigorously realised work in Bresson's mature mode, and the entry point into his filmography. Tarkovsky, the Dardenne brothers, Béla Tarr and Pedro Costa have all named Bresson as foundational; Cahiers du cinéma placed it at the top of its 1957 list, and the film has held its position in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll since. Schrader's Transcendental Style in Film takes it as one of three central case studies for what he called the spiritual style.