Bresson made few films; his art was too personal, too concentrated to attract producers worried about their profit margins. But, because he never followed fashions, his films now look more modern than those of any of his contemporaries. They are intense and moving stories of pride and endurance, love and grace. Bresson painted before directing, and once remarked that "painting taught me to make not beautiful images, but necessary ones." A fitting description of films so precisely judged that every shot is essential.

His first films, made with professional actors in the mainstream of the industry, are still fully personal works, and arguably the finest French films of the forties. Les Anges du Péché and Les Dames de Bois de Boulogne both describe the obsessive desire of a woman to dominate another human being. The motive in one is spiritual, in the other sexual; one ends tragically, the other joyfully. But both are alike in their cinematic perfection and profound compassion.

After that, Bresson went his own way. From the time of Diary of a Country Priest onwards, he used amateur actors, whose performances were made as understated as possible, like Greek tragic masks concealing intense emotions. His images rejected the superfluous, showing only the detail needed to convey his meaning. The films from this period are dark but jubilant, as Bresson's Christian optimism steers his characters through their trials to a final release. A Man Escaped depicts the escape attempt of a Gestapo prisoner; it is the most moving, gripping and exhilarating film that I have ever seen. Pickpocket is a brilliant paraphrase of Crime and Punishment where the scenes of theft show all Bresson's skill in editing. Both end in a saving revelation of love.

The tender comedy of Four Nights of a Dreamer notwithstanding, his later films grew darker. Religious optimism was replaced by desolation in Mouchette and Au Hasard, Balthasar: tales of unlightened suffering, which find no release but death. The central figure in one is a child, in one an animal, but the films are companion pieces: both probe the experiences of an innocent in a guilty world, and both reveal the surrounding spectacle of human cruelty through concentration on individual pain. The same implacable bleakness was visible in L'Argent, a shattering fable about the corrupting power of money, his last film, and one of his greatest. Even in Lancelot du Lac, his retelling of Arthurian legend, the Fall of the Round Table seems part of the inevitable order of things; though the central tournament is one of his most gripping set pieces.

Yet somehow, miraculously, however bleak their subject matter, these films are never depressing. Rather, they are exhilarating, such is their creator's cinematic mastery and humanity. Perhaps it is simply a matter of the precision of Bresson's observation; one recalls Godard's comment on Au Hasard, Balthasar, that "Whoever sees this film is going to be absolutely astonished, because this film really is the whole world in an hour and a half". Others have called it grace, and one doesn't need to be a believing Christian to understand what they mean. If faith can no longer save us, the supreme compassion of a great artist may.

Alex Jacoby