Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson spent five decades proving that less could mean everything. Born in 1901, he developed an ascetic method that rejected the conventions of commercial filmmaking: he cast non-professionals he called "models," cut scenes to their barest gestures, and let silence do the work of orchestras. The approach yielded A Man Escaped in 1956, Pickpocket in 1959, and Au hasard Balthazar in 1966 - all ranked among the 100 greatest films ever made. His stories tilted toward tragedy, but the austerity gave them a strange, merciless beauty. Jean-Luc Godard called him the French cinema itself, the way Dostoevsky was the Russian novel. He made his final film, L'Argent, in 1983 and died in Paris sixteen years later, having built a body of work that redefined what the medium could say when it stopped trying to dazzle.