Diary of a Country Priest

Adapted from Georges Bernanos's novel, Diary of a Country Priest (1951) is the film in which Robert Bresson arrived at the stripped-down style that made him one of cinema's most singular artists. It won the Louis Delluc Prize and an award at Venice, and it set out a method Bresson would go on refining, with monastic discipline, for the rest of his life.

He cast the non-professional Claude Laydu and drew from him a performance of extraordinary inwardness: the young priest's voice-over reads from his journal while the images hold steady on hands, faces and the grey light of the parish. Bresson strips out what conventional drama depends on, from incidental music to emphatic acting and narrative momentum, until what is left is a study of a soul under pressure. He called his performers "models", never actors, and drilled them until expression gave way to something plainer and truer.

Critics of the period, André Bazin chief among them, saw it as a revelation, and it fed directly into the work of Paul Schrader, who drew on it for his Taxi Driver screenplay and for his book on transcendental style in cinema. It is demanding and austere, and it is also overwhelming. Nowhere did Bresson state more plainly his belief that a camera could record behaviour and, beyond it, something close to the movement of grace, a faith he expressed through form alone.