We hold quite a number of books illustrated by the German-American illustrator and wood engraver Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990), fourteen of which include original wood engravings. Today we present his engravings from the 1986 Limited Editions Club production of French author Georges Bernanos‘s Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne), printed by the Heritage Press in an edition of 1000 copies signed by the artist. The blocks were printed separately at Wild Carrot Letterpress on Cartiere Enrico Magnani paper. This was one of the last major commissions of Eichenberg’s very long career before he died of complications from Parkinson's disease in 1990. Our copy is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff.
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Claude Laydu and Jean Danet in Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson, 1951)
Cast: Claude Laydu, Jean Riveyre, Adrien Borel, Rachel Bérandt, Nicole Maurey, Nicole Ladmiral, Martine Lemaire, Antoine Balpêtré, Jean Danet, Léon Arvel. Screenplay: Robert Bresson, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Léonce-Henri Burel. Art direction: Pierre Charbonnier. Film editing: Paulette Robert. Music: Jean-Jacques Grünenwald.
The still above, of the young priest (Claude Laydu) happily accepting a ride on the back of a motorcycle from Olivier (Jean Danet) is not meant to be representative of the film as a whole. Quite the contrary, Olivier is a cousin of Chantal (Nicole Ladmiral), who, along with the rest of her family, has caused the priest much pain. Olivier is a soldier in the Foreign Legion, a character whose life is about as far from the priest's tormented spirituality as possible. The scene is a brief, liberated one, suggesting a world of potential other than that of the spiritual and physical suffering the priest has known in his assignment to the bleak and hostile parish of Ambricourt. The priest returns to his suffering after his motorcycle ride: He learns that he has terminal stomach cancer and dies in a slovenly apartment watched over by a former fellow seminarian, Fabregars (Léon Arvel), who is living with his mistress. As ascetic as the young priest has striven to be, he has to come to terms with a world that seems irrevocably fallen, even to the point of taking the last, absolving blessing from the lapsed Fabregars. Of all the celebrated masterworks of film, Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest may be the most uncompromising in making the case for cinema as an artistic medium on the same level as literature and music. In comparison, what is Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) but a rather blobby melodrama about the rise and fall of a newspaper tycoon? Even the best of Alfred Hitchcock's oeuvre is little more than crafty embroidery on the thriller genre. The highest-praised directors, from Ford, Hawks, and Kurosawa to Godard, Kubrick, and Scorsese, never seem to stray far from the themes and tropes of popular culture. Even a film like Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) falls back on sentiment as a way of engaging its audience. But Bresson strives for such a purity of character and narrative, down to the refusal to use well-known professional actors, and such a relentless intellectualizing, that you can't help comparing his film favorably to the great works of Flaubert or Dostoevsky. Having said that, I must admit that it's a work much easier to admire than to love, especially if, like me, you have no deep emotional or intellectual connection to religion -- or even an outright hostility to it. Does the suffering of the sickly young priest really result in the kind of transcendence the film posits? Are the questions of grace and redemption real, or merely the product of an ideology out of sync with actual human experience? What explains the hostility he encounters in the village he tries to serve: the work of the devil or just the bleakness of provincial existence? On the other hand, just asking those questions serves to point out how richly condensed is Bresson's drama of ideas. I love the movies I've alluded to above as somehow lacking in the intellectual seriousness of Bresson's film, but there's room in the pantheon for both kinds of film. Diary of a Country Priest remains for me one of film's great puzzles: What are we to make of the young priest's intellectualized faith? Is it a film for believers or for agnostics? In the end, these enigmas and ambiguities are integral to its greatness.