Spotlight on Robert Bresson: A Man Escaped

Film Independent at LACMA presents two films by revered postwar French director Robert Bresson, both screening in brand new 35mm prints and available for the first time in fourteen years thanks to the TIFF Cinematheque.

Based on resistance leader André Devigny's account of his escape from the Nazi prison at Montluc in occupied Lyon and on Bresson's own memories of his eighteen-month confinement in a German P.O.W. camp during the war, A Man Escaped is among the most authentic and transcendent visions of life behind bars. Condemned to death and locked up in solitary confinement, Lieutenant François Leterrier carefully plots his breakout amid a flurry of chance (or miraculous?) incidences: a colleague’s failed escape, a surprise care package, and the arrival of a mysterious cell-mate. A work of taut suspense, A Man Escaped makes literal the common theme in the filmmaker’s work, as Susan Sontag has called it, "the meaning of confinement and liberty.”

“A completely pure experience, with absolutely nothing extraneous—it functions like a delicate and perfectly calibrated handmade machine . . . in Bresson you get a true dynamism generated by the most elemental relationships between image and sound.”—Martin Scorsese.

Bing Theater | New 35mm print!