Late Bresson and the Visual Arts

Raymond Watkins currently teaches at the Pennsylvania State University. He received his Ph.D. in comparative literature and cinema from The University of Iowa, and has published in Cinema Journal, Studies in French Cinema, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

• Introduction Bresson in Color: Reinventing History through Avant-Garde Experiment Part 1: Classical and Post-War Painting Chapter 1 Bresson's Debt to Painting: Iconography, Lighting, Color, and Framing Practices Chapter 2 The Turn to Post-War Abstraction: Action Painting, L'Art Informel, and Le Nouveau Réalisme Part 2: Avant-Garde Experiment Chapter 3 Bresson's Flirtation with Surrealism: Sexual Desire, Masochism, and Abjection Chapter 4 The Design and Pattern of the Whole: Constructivist Painting and Theatre Chapter 5 Between Constructivism and Minimalism: Bresson's Ambivalence Toward the Modern Bibliography Index

"Watkins's approach refreshingly expands the scope of Bressonian scholarship ... Late Bresson and the Visual Arts sheds light on a part of the filmmaker’s career that has often been unjustly neglected, by way of commendable, high-level visual and intertextual analysis." - Marco Grosoli, H-France Review, Volume 20 (2020) "In his excellent book on Late Bresson and the Visual Arts (Amsterdam University Press 2018), Raymond Watkins argues that a blue-painted door evokes the work of Yves Klein. ... Watkins discusses the centrality of Schöffer's Lux 1 piece in the art museum sequence of Une femme douce = I fully concur with Watkins's reading." - Roland-François Lack, University College London, The Cine-Tourist