A Man Escaped
1956, directed by Robert Bresson
A Man Escaped begins and ends with escapes, each coinciding with a sort of train – a tram in the opening attempt and an unseen steam locomotive at the end. The first escape fails while the second succeeds, but the difference between the two trains is more revealing. One is visible, solid, earthbound, physical, a barrier to traffic, but the other manifests itself solely through its whistle and a cloud of steam that envelops Fontaine and Jost as they walk away from the Nazi prison. We’re meant to feel that one is material and the other is spirit.
It’s appropriate that the immaterial train at the end heralds the joy of freedom. The locomotive’s whistle had already appeared at key moments in Fontaine’s progress, and when Mozart’s chorus bursts forth for the last time to celebrate the escape, the white cloud of steam forms a heavenly image. The train works emotionally, but it also confirms what’s been happening all along. Fontaine’s preparation for escape has been a spiritual journey – not in today’s weak and overused sense of the word “spiritual” but a real uplifting of the spirit that accords precisely with the message of Christ, although the film’s logic works equally well for believers and non-believers alike.
There’s apparently some debate as to whether Bresson was an atheist or a devout Catholic, and the ambiguity in his personal beliefs corresponds to an ambiguity in his films. In a sense it doesn’t matter whether Bresson’s spirituality is rooted in actual religious belief or not, because it works either way, as an expression of faith or as a practical guide to living. In fact, by drawing out the practical side of Christ’s teaching Bresson pays respect to the idea of faith as something more than magical thinking or blind acceptance of received doctrine. His films are set in a relentlessly material world of things and bodies, physical actions and earthly desires, but in the end Bresson is no materialist. Each of his films in its own way prefers the spiritual (love, social bonds, grace, or, in A Man Escaped, a particular idea of freedom) to the material, and it’s up to the viewer to take his idea of spirit metaphorically or literally.
It’s no secret that A Man Escaped is a commentary on the third chapter of the Gospel of John, which the film quotes near its midpoint and also in its secondary title, The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth. The biblical chapter describes a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus that revolves around Jesus’ admonition to be “born again” as a condition for entry into the Kingdom of God. The words puzzle the Pharisee, but Jesus tells him that this second birth is spiritual in contrast to the original birth of the flesh. The ambition of Bresson’s film is nothing less than to illustrate this spiritual rebirth in concrete terms that should be legible to anyone.
The French title is a little bit more direct about the movie’s purpose. It translates as A Man Condemned to Death Escaped, stressing a point that few viewers will miss anyway, but which has particular relevance to the story’s biblical illustration. Fontaine is condemned to die, just as any human being in traditional Christian theology – or for that matter in the natural order of things – is born under a death sentence. Biology tells us of the organism’s inevitable death, and religion tells us of the spiritual death that follows an unredeemed life. Fontaine’s example shows what it would mean, in any case, to escape from this death sentence.
The key to Fontaine’s escape is ingrained in the movie like DNA, because it’s almost everywhere we look. He spends most of his captivity transforming material objects, putting them to higher uses. A safety pin is meant to clasp two ends of cloth together, but he uses it to separate – that is, to open his handcuffs. A spoon is intended for eating, but he uses it to chisel the wood in his cell door. He uses paper to fill the gaps in the door, and a pencil to disguise the crack in the frame. His shoe becomes a hammer, putting the remaining wires back in his bed frame, and his razor blade slices cloth into strips for rope. He turns his clothing, mattress cover, blanket, and bed wires into strong cables that will enable his escape, and his lantern door frame is transformed into hooks. Even his latrine bucket gets put to a higher end, furtively disposing of the broken glass from his lantern door. Again and again mundane objects are called to a higher purpose, each playing a role in a greater task than its manufacturers ever would have expected.
All these small signs of transformation point to the greater transformation that answers Nicodemus’s question, how a man can be born again. Like all the objects whose purpose he redirects, Fontaine himself is called and redirected to a higher purpose. We’re given only enough of his back story to gather that he belongs to the French Resistance, like Bresson himself had. His freedom is not merely a means of self-preservation but rather a condition for an urgent task greater than himself. The life of a prisoner however, like the lives of so many who don’t make good use of their freedom, is reduced to a problem of survival. Fontaine’s efforts transform his imprisoned existence, elevating his own purpose as much as he elevates the purpose of a spoon or a blanket. In the process, not only does he change himself – he also transforms a cruel, corrupt, and unjust world. Each transformation – whether it’s a safety pin, a condemned prisoner, or the world itself – lifts up something crude and meaningless (or “sinful” in religious terms), giving it a higher (or “holy”) purpose. For that matter, Bresson himself remakes the vulgar medium of film, calling it too to a higher end.
The music in A Man Escaped is excerpted from Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor, which fits the idea of turning a movie into something holy. The story itself reflects a musical setting of the Catholic mass:
- Kyrie – The first scenes in the prison when Fontaine is beaten and left helpless;
- Gloria – Fontaine’s long preparations for escape, giving glory to God by transforming the objects in his cell;
- Agnus Dei – Fontaine hears from his neighbor Blanchet that Orsini died so he could live, reflecting Christ’s sacrifice for mankind;
- Credo – Instead of killing his new cellmate, Fontaine requires Jost to assent to the escape, thus joining him in an act of faith;
- Sanctus – The joyful ending when Fontaine’s life is finally made holy.
The film is thus likened to a mass, presumably with the hope that a cinema audience would participate in something greater than they had intended. Everything in A Man Escaped is generated by the idea of uplifting, and it’s essential that the escape at the end remakes and improves on the escape attempt at the beginning – not merely because it succeeds, nor because of the greater efforts put into it, creating instead of seizing an opportunity – but because Fontaine has to bring someone with him. Fontaine has plenty of reason to be suspicious of Jost, but by bringing him along he validates his escape, risking his life for another person. The idea of being “born again” is not some kind of self-help; a spiritual rebirth must be an escape from the prison of the self.
All of this may sound like a religious message, especially considering the vehemence with which strains of modern Protestantism have appropriated the phrase “born again”, but Bresson carefully leaves it open to a secular reading. There is nothing sacrilegious in that; after all, a few lines later in his dialogue with Nicodemus, Jesus says, “If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?” Whatever Bresson’s private faith may have been, even though he was always more concerned with the immaterial, he recognized that it was enough for him to speak of “earthly things”. From an earthly point of view, Fontaine’s example shows how we can escape the death sentence of our biological bodies – not by living forever, but by raising life to a higher purpose which gives meaning to our brief lives. It sounds like a kind of existentialism, and it certainly addresses an existential question… but Bresson’s argument with Existentialist philosophy would come in his next film.
CONNECTIONS:
Earth – Parallels between the film and a Christian mass
L’Atalante – Steam as a material image of the spiritual
Pickpocket – Objects put to unintended use; story of redemption
Andrei Rublev – Idea that great works arise from a vulgar origin
Cries and Whispers – Answer to the problem of how to face death
Stalker – Bracketed by two trains, one coinciding with a material event and the other with something immaterial
The Martian – Plot about a man’s escape; practical guide for living combined with a message of higher importance