Event Details
“On one side, thick walls, bars, soldiers, weapons. On the other, one lone man, unarmed, doomed from the start.”
In minimalist Robert Bresson’s 1956 film, a French Resistance fighter attempts escape from a German military prison against impossible odds. While the title of the film seems to say it all, it belies the film’s gripping tension and near-silent sequences of harrowing engineering feats, unbelievable patience, and human resilience, all performed with placid determination by François Leterrier as he embodies lieutenant Fontaine, a proxy for André Devigny, whose life Bresson loosely adapted for the screen from his 1956 memoir.
Academy Museum film programming generously funded by the Richard Roth Foundation.
1956 | 101 min. | France | Black-and-White | French, German | Not Rated | 35mm
DIRECTED/WRITTEN BY: Robert Bresson
WITH: François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock, Roland Monod