Fiction Into Film: Bresson's Une Femme Douce and Its Russian Source

Abstract

Robert Bresson attained his power through his method, which is less a thing literally to be described or expressed than an inner orientation enabling an outward quest. That quest, in Bresson's case, was to honor God's universe by using film to render the reality of that universe, and, through its reality, both the miracle of its creation and the mystery of its being. In this essay the author reconsiders Bresson's 1969 film Une Femme douce (A Gentle Creature), after the 1876 novella by Dostoyevsky, from the perspective of its spiritual style, which is consonant with the film's very adaptation method.