The invention of Robert Bresson: Style and taste in the French cultural marketplace for cinema, 1934--1959

This dissertation examines the role of taste culture in the development of the style and reputation of the French auteur, Robert Bresson (1901--1999). Although Bresson's films are his alone, influential members of the cultural press played a valuable role in sponsoring Bresson's cinema and firming up the skills and attitudes that Bresson drew upon as he refined his personal style. Several cinephilic discourses promoted specific ways of viewing and evaluating films, and facilitated "the invention of Robert Bresson"---his reputation as a filmmaker "apart" and his inventive process. Among these are discourses that define a new postwar French "avant-garde" in the alternative exhibition circuit and a risky "quality" cinema worthy of subsidy. The concepts of a narrative "avant-garde" and of "quality" inflected three additional aspects of taste that provided Bresson with raw materials for artistic problem-solving and self-differentiation in the marketplace: fidelity in literary adaptation. realism and cinematic rhythm.;This dissertation explores the implied reciprocal relation Bresson entered into with cinephiles like Andre Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Roger Leenhardt and others. Following an approach developed by the art historian Michael Baxandall, I argue that Bresson engaged these cinephiles in a barter of mental goods. His cinema created pleasurable experiences that, as my analysis of the paradigmatic interests of the period shows, cinephiles were primed to receive. A number of prominent tastemakers from the postwar era reciprocated, "compensating" Bresson with various forms of praise, with writing that contextualized and explicated his artistic commitments and works and with opportunities in the marketplace.;This study makes three contributions. First, while Bresson commentators often assume that he was a sui generis artist who expressed his unique personal vision through the medium of cinema, I locate the origins of this assumption in postwar taste and Bresson's operation within this context. Second, in order to locate the origins of this style and reputation, I reconstruct the paradigmatic interests of the cinephilic marketplace. Finally, this study proposes a model, based on Baxandall's approach, for examining authorial styles and reputations as grounded in a social relation within the cultural marketplace: the subtle reciprocity of auteur-minded directors and cinephiles.