Diary of a Country Priest

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

Casting the non-professional Claude Laydu, Bresson coaxed a performance of extraordinary inwardness, the young priest's voice-over reading from his journal as the images hold steady on hands, faces and the grey light of the parish. The director pares away everything conventional drama relies upon — incidental music, emphatic acting, narrative momentum — until what remains is a study of the soul under pressure. He famously called his cast "models" rather than actors, drilling them until expression gave way to something plainer and truer.

The film was a revelation to the critics of the period, André Bazin chief among them, and a direct influence on Paul Schrader, who drew on it for his Taxi Driver screenplay and his book on transcendental style in cinema. Demanding and austere yet quietly overwhelming, it remains the definitive statement of Bresson's belief that the camera could record not merely behaviour but something close to the movement of grace itself — a faith expressed through pure form.