One condemned to dead is escaped

One condemned to dead is escaped is a film of Robert Bresson, left in 1956.

Data sheet

Scenario: Robert Bresson and Andre Devigny
Realization: Robert Bresson
Production: Gaumont (France), New Film Editions (France)
Producing: Alain Poiré, Jean Thuillier
Assembly: Raymond Lamy
Photography: Leonce-Henri Burel
Music: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
decoration Chief: Coal Pierre
Assistant realization: Jacques Ballanche and Michel Clement
Sound: Pierre-Andre Bertrand, Joseph Abjean and Guy Rophé

Distribution

François Leterrier: Lieutenant Fontaine
Charles Clainche: François Jost
Maurice Beerblock: Strainer
Roland Monod: Pasteur
Jacques Ertaud: Orsini
Jean Paul Delhumeau: Hébrard

Synopsis

The intrigue is based on the Memories of André Devigny. In 1943, resistant (Fountain) is arrested by the Germans and is imprisoned to the prison of Montluc in Lyon. It puts all works to escape, imagines a plan, and arrives about it through courage and of work to get the instruments of them. But right before his escape, one assigns to his cell another prisoner (a young boy). Fountain hesitates to remove it, and finally takes it along with him. Their escape (night) is long and dubious, but the two prisoners finally manage to find freedom.

Rewards

Price of the Setting in scene to the Cannes festival in 1957

Analyzes

General character of film

This film (turned in black and white) proclamation well taste of Bresson for the austerity and the rigor:

very great saving in means: unity of place (except the first and the last scene, and a short exit of the prisoner, all occurs in the prison; some places only are shown by it: cell, staircase, court of walk); few characters;
visual examination: the decorations are extremely simple, just as the plans used.
short and intense dialogs generally.
rather important use of the repetition of the same scenes and the same sounds.

In addition, the dramatic situation is certain tragic : the main characters await their death in a rigorous reclusion (and the film is rate/rhythm by the noise of several executions of prisoners, and Fountain knows as his/her comrades that their turn will come). But the general message of film seems rather anti-tragedy and optimist: the success of the escape from Fountain, which must very little randomly, can be read like a magnification of the individual human will.

However, this film with the characteristic to be organized around a very traditional wire dramatic (preparation of the escape from Fountain), which makes it more accessible than from other works of Bresson. One condemned to dead is escaped a present thus resemblance of surface to films raising like the escape: here also, it is initially a practical problem and material which is represented (by which means of escaping?), and all the concrete details of the preparations are shown (disassembling of the door out of wooden, manufacture of a cord and hooks, location of the places, etc). But the great specificity of film of Bresson is to insist on the moral and spiritual stakes of this escape: the important thing in the preparations of Fountain, it is the force of will that it implements, the practical intelligence which it deploys, the hope that it manages to maintain. The character of Fountain, however, is not represented like a hero or a saint (its determination to escape made that it plans to remove Jost, and keep silent a German sentinel). The religious problems are explicitly indicated by the presence of Pasteur and a priest among the prisoners, and by the frequent discussions which with them Fontaine (during one of them has, Pasteur recopies for him a passage of the Gospel according to Midsummer's Day, the maintenance with Jesus and Nicodème (Jean, 3,3-8), which gives to film its subtitle " The wind blows where it veut").

Use of the sounds

The majority of the action takes seat in a rather quiet prison, and where a certain number of noises are thus detached. Bresson makes an important esthetic use of it. It is the case in particular during the long scene of the escape, rythmée by a certain number of external noises (bells of a close church, passage of trains, whistles of engine).

The band makes in addition an important use of the Kyrie of the Grande mass of Mozart in C minor (and not of sound Requiem , as that is sometimes written faultily):

the introduction is accompanied by all the first part of this Kyrie;
at the time of several scenes, Bresson briefly uses the principal sentence of this introduction, in the tonality initial of C minor, or transposed in minor ground, or in major E flat (the passage to the major Mode being rich direction);
finally the last scene is accompanied by all the last part of the Kyrie (major E flat, then return to the principal tonality).

This musical sentence thus plays a part of leitmotiv in film.

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