A Film Canon

The greatest film about Christianity since The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, Diary Of A Country Priest presents faith as a profoundly deindividuating experience, alternately liberating and terrifying, and, to a certain extent, impossible, as evinced in the central paradox of the diary - an inescapable fragment of individuality - as well as the subsidiary paradox of its gradual segue into interior monologue and, eventually, prayer. In this way, faith becomes a synecdoche for those moments just before death, and prayer the mere means for hypothesising them, explaining why so many of the priest's recommendations feel like thinly veiled espousals of suicide, as well as, more generally, the futility that pervades his thoughts, deeds and words, and which is itself encapsulated in the fact of his having been born to an alcoholic mother, ensuring that his entire, short life has been spent in a morbid, queasy, amniotic medium; or, alternatively, has been little more than an extended preparation for death. As with The Women Of The Bois Du Boulogne, Bresson characterises this medium primarily in terms of a transcendent whiteness that increases as the film progresses, reducing everything to so many flickering silhouettes - especially the priest, who becomes little more than a grain, or smudge - and, in turn, subsuming them into the concluding silhouette of the crucifix. Not only does this render all the priest's actions continuous with Gethsemane, but it imbues him with an insignificance that goes beyond sensory co-ordinates, and so eludes any designation of invisibility or inaudibility, as evinced in Bresson's disorienting juxtaposition of sound and image, which gives the impression that something is perpetually happening outside the frame, or beyond those liminal spaces (gates, front yards, windows) that are the province of the action. This is all reinforced by Bresson's first real use of a 'model' in non-professional actor Claude Leydu, whose depictions of agony are ultimately subordinated to his profound monadicism, such that his whole sensorium becomes the mere echo of some deeper, spiritual apprehension.