EddieLarkin wrote: Fri Oct 24, 2025 11:07 amThat is what I expect a commentary to be like, something aimed at an already knowledgeable film literate audience, with the definite aim of educating the audience via the commentators own analysis, thoughts and conclusions. You aren't going to ever get this by just brushing up on each actor's profile.
Well, you're not going to get this by
only doing that, but it seems wilfully perverse to ignore a film's contributors - especially since a commentary typically involves 15,000 words plus, so you have plenty of space.
I mean, in my recent commentary for
Une Femme douce, I start from the assumption that anyone buying Radiance's disc will already be well aware of who Robert Bresson is and the kind of films that he made, so I don't include any kind of beginners' guide to his methods, or much in the way of biographical info, apart from potentially unfamiliar stuff such as Bresson's flirtation with Surrealism in the 1930s. But even then, I try to tie it into something scene-specific, for instance:
There’s a fascinating chapter on Une Femme Douce in Brian David Price’s 2011 book Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics that amongst other things identifies where the pawnshop is by piecing together tiny scraps of information – we can glimpse the Brasserie Lipp and the café Les Deux Magots in the 6th arrondissement, suggesting that the pawnshop is in the Saint-Germain-des-prés area. But what’s just as interesting is that those two cafés were among the regular haunts of the Surrealists in the 1920s and the Left Bank intellectuals at the turn of the 1950s – Bresson was very much included in the latter group and Colin Burnett also points out that while he was never a member of the Surrealist Group, during the time that he worked in advertising and fashion photography in the 1930s Bresson was certainly a Surrealist fellow traveller, forming a particularly close relationship with the English Surrealist Sir Roland Penrose, who funded some of Bresson’s earliest artistic efforts, including the 1934 short film Affaires Publiques. So Bresson would have been very familiar not only with the area but also those specific cafés – which by the late 1960s had become, according to Price, spaces that no longer connote intellectual culture but the reification of that culture.
Similarly, while I obviously bring up Dominique Sanda's subsequent career (again, it would have been perverse not to have done so), I don't offer a potted overview - in fact, I'm pretty sure I don't mention any of her films beyond
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and
The Conformist, which made her a star mere months after Bresson's film was released.
However, I'd argue that it would have been remiss of me not to mention that the doctor is played by experimental novelist Claude Ollier, and then give a rather more detailed biographical sketch than I did with Sanda (since it's a reasonable assumption that listeners wouldn't be familiar with Ollier's work - he was part of the
nouveau roman movement alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet), and similarly talk about the relationship between Bresson and his producer Mag Bodard, who made her name with
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a phenomenally risky venture that was only her second film, and whose success underwrote similarly adventurous projects, including three of Bresson's - indeed, it was Jacques Demy (who worshipped Bresson) who brought them together in the first place.
I think the crucial thing is to be constantly aware of whether or not such details are used to enhance the commentary or whether they're mere padding. In which respect, I recall deleting a paragraph about Mag Bodard that included Agnès Varda's vivid visual description of her - I think I cut it at quite a late stage, and it wouldn't have done any harm to have left it in, but in looking over the transcript I presumably cut it because something scene-specific was coming up that I had to prioritise. (The way I work is that I often record the non-scene-specific stuff first, but it often doesn't find its final resting place until a very late stage, when it often needs trimming.)
Come to think of it, there is one filmography recitation - in contrast to Bresson's usual approach with his "
modèles", the nurse is played by veteran bit-part player Dorothée Blanck, who appeared in a similar capacity in a rather impressive number of 1950s and 1960s classics; I don't mention all of them as you can easily look them up yourself, but I do mention "Jean Renoir’s
French Cancan, Jean-Luc Godard’s
Une Femme est une Femme, Agnes Varda’s
Cléo from 5 to 7, and above all multiple films by Varda’s husband Jacques Demy, including all the famous ones." Although in that particular case I was conscious of the fact that this was a highly unusual approach for this particular commentary, given that the
modèles generally had no screen careers to speak of!
