A Man Escaped

(Un condamné à mort s’est échappé)

  • Lecture
featuring

François Leterrier, Charles Le Clainche, Maurice Beerblock,

Also screens (without lecture) in our Robert Bresson retrospective

A Man Escaped is pure film existentialism. From a newspaper account by a Resistance leader who escaped from a Nazi prison in Lyon just hours before he was to be executed, Bresson created a film in which the drama is all internal. Minimizing the drama of prison life, paradoxically he maximizes its intensity, concentrating on his character Fontaine’s solitude, and on prison relationships in which a tap on the wall, a whisper in the washroom, are bridges to another’s soul. For the rest, he emphasizes the material preparation for escape—the spoon Fontaine must steal, then shape into a cutting tool; the labor involved in taking apart his door. Set to Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, this is a genuinely moving encounter with limits, and the need to transcend them. It is a true action film.

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Screenwriter
  • Robert Bresson
Based On
  • the account of André Devigny

Cinematographer
  • Léonce-Henri Burel
Language
  • French
  • English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 35mm
  • 97 mins
Source
  • Janus Films/Criterion Collection