The following notes on Four Nights of a Dreamer were written by Pate Duncan, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts at UW – Madison. A new 4K restoration of Four Nights of a Dreamer will screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, November 22. Showtime is 7 p.m. at 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Pate Duncan
Robert Bresson’s cinema has been famous for its almost religious asceticism in style, its weighty narratives of suffering and crisis, and its creative treatment of literary adaptations—especially in his use of voiceover as a functional equivalent for the first-person “I” in literary narration. These strategies would intensify in the French master’s later films, providing us with the extremely cynical (and, it goes without saying, breathtaking) three-film run of Lancelot du Lac (1974), The Devil, Probably (1977), and L’Argent (1983), Bresson’s final work. This period was preceded, however, by one of Bresson’s most sumptuous films: 1971’s Four Nights of a Dreamer. Loosely adapting Dostoyevsky’s short story, “White Nights,” the film follows a hopelessly romantic artist, Jacques (played by non-actor Guillame des Forêts, following Bresson’s preference to cast amateur “models”), and a woman on the verge of suicide, Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten, who would immediately go on to star in 1973’s landmark The Mother and The Whore). The two meet one night on Paris’s famous Pont-Neuf, where Jacques talks Marthe off of the bridge’s ledge. The two, united by their shared romantic longing, agree to meet over the course of the next few evenings. From there, the film is organized around the progression of each night and an intricate flashback structure, proceeding as the pair shares their histories with each other. This kind of romantic drama is rare within the filmmaker’s unsentimental oeuvre and has been notoriously difficult to view for contemporary audiences, a problem now ameliorated by a stunning 2024 restoration. Anticipating the nocturnal atmospheres of francophone films like Marie-Claude Treilhou’s Simone Barbès ou la virtue (1980), Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit (1982), and, most directly, Leos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge (1991), Four Nights of a Dreamer is a remarkable showcase in romance, Bresson-style: love and heartache as seen from a truncated, three-quarter view.
The film comes at a significant sea change in French film history. By this point, Bresson had already been considered a significant auteur in his own right, but he had to maintain his established status against the shakeups of the French New Wave, already having crest into a more mainstream form. At the same time, French film culture was still reeling from the shocks of May ‘68, the infamous student uprisings that even managed to put the Cannes Film Festival on pause for that year—though Bresson would not tackle that topic directly until The Devil, Probably in 1977. Despite these industrial shakeups, Bresson managed to finance Four Nights of a Dreamer through a combination of government support and, as Colin Burnett has shown, financing from independent producer Albina du Boisrouvray, already a patron for Orson Welles a few years prior.
Four Nights of a Dreamer is Bresson’s second color film, following Une Femme douce (1969). Bresson was notoriously hesitant to shoot films in color, in large part due to its potential to create disunity and fecundity in place of his preferred unity and sparsity. Bresson wrote: “Since the first rule of art is unity, color threatens you because its effects are too various.” As Burnett notes, Bresson had an interesting solution to this problem in his aesthetic scheme: “He elected to create uniformity by deriving a color scheme from the modèles’ skin tones.” This holds true for Four Nights of a Dreamer as well, which features a visual palette of sunny earth tones in the daytime exteriors, pop-art primaries in the interiors of Jacques’ art studio, and cool tones in the film’s extensive nighttime sequences. The film’s credit sequence emphasizes the latter color palette extensively, showing soft focus images of Parisian streets replete with bokeh: circles of light left out of focus. The prominence of nighttime sequences in the film—and the resulting reduction of mise-en-scène colors besides the foreground figures, background lights, and inky darkness of the nighttime streets—help Bresson restrict a color mise-en-scène’s potential excesses and unify his color palette.
This deviation, however, does not necessarily entail a complete change from Bresson’s steadily refining aesthetic of sparsity. Here, truncated close-ups of objects and body parts proliferate, images that avant-garde scholar P. Adams Sitney argues “disorient the direction of the narrative and reinforce the ambiguities of the film’s structures. When the viewer is disoriented, [they] pay more attention to the individual shot.” This approach still dominates in Bresson’s move to color, allowing him to restrict his shots to only those aspects that respect his color palette. In Four Nights, this disorienting approach remains paramount, extending to close-ups of Jacques’ tape recorder, the letters and books in Marthe’s apartment, or the kinds of alienated, three-quarter views of figures, even the boat that repeatedly passes on the Seine under the Pont-Neuf.
While cinematography allows for change and continuity on the image track for Bresson, sound offers an even more extensive space for transformation in Four Nights of a Dreamer. Prior films in Bresson’s catalogue feature minimal music, typically brief stingers of classical music around the beginning and end of the film. This minimalism emphasizes sound effects instead, fleshing out the materiality of Bresson’s cinematic worlds. Four Nights of a Dreamer, however, performs a more consistent deviation from Bresson’s typical soundtrack. Spaced throughout the film are a number of diegetic musical performances and radio broadcasts, ranging from the hippie folk rock of street performers to Brazilian musician Marku Ribas’ Groupe Batuki. While these realistic motivations preserve Bresson’s stylistic purity, they breathe both a playfulness and melancholy into the film’s diegesis, giving sentiment its place within Bresson’s spare aestheticism. These musical punctuations, like the motivic repetitions of boats passing, the procedural repetition and chapters of the film’s narrative structure, and the graphic abstraction provided by Bresson’s high and low angles of subjects in oblique views, all cohere towards Bresson’s distinct aesthetic unity.
As a result of these formal procedures, Jacques and Marthe’s contingent meeting occurs within a story world and aesthetic form organized around a kind of chaotic polyrhythm: patterns of repetition and variation govern the film from its narrative organization (four nights, each marked by nondiegetic titles; two stories, each told in flashbacks and also marked nondiegetically), its characters and characterization (Jacques seeks his true love; Marthe is waiting for hers), and its recurrent motifs (boats and music; repeated compositions of objects and bodies). That these pulsations fail to come together, to cohere into some unified rhythm, speaks to the importance of the concept for French philosophy in general and Bresson in particular, with Burnett arguing that rhythm, for Bresson, “was more than an essential feature of cinema and art. It was the creative principle that dynamizes a new art of writing in motion.” As paradoxically Bresson’s least viewable film in terms of exhibition and most accessible film in terms of narrative and theme, Four Nights of a Dreamer is a lively and moving lighter work, a salve before the final three downbeats of his late career.