Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945)

Les Dames du bois de Boulogne is a modern update inspired by a part of Diderot's late eighteenth-century work Jacques le Fataliste et son maître, in which Hélène (Maria Casarès) fails to get revenge on her lover Jean (Paul Bernard) for no longer being interested in her. In Hélène's place will come cabaret dancer – a part-time prostitute – Agnès (Élina Labourdette).

Hélène starts her plan by paying off the debts of Agnès and her mother Madame D. (Lucienne Bogaert) and sets them up in an apartment in Port-Royal, then arranges a meeting in the Bois de Boulogne, at the side of the Grande Cascade. And Jean falls for Hélène's plan by falling for Agnès. But, on marrying Agnès, he doesn't flinch on being triumphantly told by Hélène that he's married a tramp. Times change.

Robert Bresson's Affaires publiques (1934)

In Keith Reader's book Robert Bresson (2000), he mentions that Jean Sémolué, in Bresson ou l'acte pur des métamorphoses (1993), calls Bresson's first feature Les Anges du péché 'Bresson avant Bresson'. In recognition of this quotation, Reader's first chapter is called 'Bresson Before Bresson', in which he mainly covers the first two features Les Anges du péché and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, after very briefly saying a few words about the oddity which is Affaires publiques (which didn't initially have a definite article).

Affaires publiques is set in the imaginary République de Crogandie with the Chancelier (the Moldavian clown Béby) inaugurating several ceremonies and Marcel Dalio playing four parts. Reader mentions Chaplin and Keaton as influences, although certainly Max Linder was a major influence on Chaplin himself. Included in the short are dancing girls, a plane crash, arsonist firemen, a yawning statue which sends the audience to sleep, and a bottle of champagne which refuses to break in the launching of a ship.

This is all so contrary to what we have come to know as Bressionian austerity, but then what would we expect from 'Bresson avant Bresson'? Sémolué also (on the surface slightly paradoxically) added that the earliest Bresson was already Bresson, in other words that – much like the plane – Bresson was ready to take off.

Robert Bresson's Lancelot du lac | Lancelot of the Lake (1984)

Lancelot du lac is far removed from the heroic medieval knight stories which audiences are used to, and as an audience used to the austerity of Bresson might expect, this is far from the exciting, violent films in this genre. Violent it certainly is, although only on a superficial level. Rather, it's a tale of knights returning to Arthur's Camelot after a rout, and being unsuccessful in finding the Grail (as if it existed). Furthermore, there's rebellion in Camelot itself, where Mordred (Patrick Bernard) is plotting against Lancelot (Luc Simon) and friends, partly (or as an excuse for) the sexual relations Lancelot has had with King Arthur's wife Guenièvre (Laura Duke Condominas). Internal fighting leads to destruction of all concerned. This apparent Bressonian anomaly isn't as strange as it may seem.

Robert Bresson's Quatre Nuits d'un rêveur | Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971)

This is loosely based on Dostoevsky's White Nights. Quatre Nuits d'un rêveur doesn't have any obvious religious references as there are in some of his other films, although the male protagonist Jacques almost treats (mainly in private) Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten) as a god-like being. We first see Jacques hitch-hiking into the countryside to make somersaults in the grass, although in the evening he's back in Paris and sees what appears to be a suicidal young woman along the quai.

Jacques having prevented her from jumping, the two sit on steps and tell each other about themselves. Jacques is an artist in constant search for the right woman, whereas Marthe has already met the man of her dreams, the unnamed Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, whom she's known as a lodger in the flat she shares with her mother. He's had to leave for the States but promised he'll return a year from then, telling her where to meet him at a particular time exactly one year from then. But he didn't meet her.

Jacques escorts her home and they agree to meet, same time same place, the next night. This continues, and in spite of Jacques acting as a go-between, giving a letter written by Marthe to her lover's friends, he doesn't turn up. Meanwhile, in the day (between painting) Jacques is recording his love for Marthe on tape, the last recording just being a repeated 'Marthe' over and over. On the fourth night of meeting Marthe he confesses his love for her, she realises that her former lover didn't deserve her love, and they become lovers.

Er, well not physically, and spiritually only for a few minutes: Jacques buys her a scarf, they continue walking, Marthe sees her former lover, runs up and kisses him, goes back to Jacques and kisses him as a friend, and then returns to the unnamed lover. Time for Jacques to return home and back to his paintings the next day.

Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967)

Bresson adapted this film from Georges Bernanos's Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette. Peasant girl Mouchette (Nadine Nortier) has an extremely hard time with her life as an adolescent: her mother (Marie Cardinal) is very ill in bed, her father (Paul Hébert) is an alcoholic, she also has a baby to look after, her teacher bullies her, and her school companions aren't companions at all and ignore her. It's hardly surprising that she hides away from them, although she doesn't help that she throws clods of earth at them from her hiding place. And she has no chance in the love stakes either: even when a young guy appears to be flirting with her on the dodgems her father reins her in.

Dialogue is kept to a minimum here, and anyway of course we have the Bressonian trademark of non-actors, and words and faces without expressions. This is filmed in Vaucluse, often in a café where the server automatically serves a wine or gin to a customer, the customer drinks, the glass is filled several times, payment is made, the customer leaves: frequently without a word by anyone. Her mother's last words are to stay away from drunkards: not an easy thing to do, as she's already discovered.

Lost in the forest when the drunken poacher Arsène (Jean-Claude Guilbert) finds her, he wrongly believes he's killed Mathieu and wants to use her as an alibi. She agrees and is initially very impressed with his friendliness, although he later rapes her. After her mother's death a shopkeeper calls her a slut, an elderly woman gives her a funeral dress and a shroud, but she uses these to roll down a slope three times, the third of which brings success when she finishes in the river. Again, Mouchette's torments have been interpreted as stations of the cross.

Robert Bresson's Au hazard Balthazar (1966)

On the face of it this is a film about the life and death of a donkey called Balthazar near the Pyrenees, from the time it's young and searching for its mother's teat to its death in a field surrounded by sheep. In between these two extremes we have other extremes: the young Marie loving it in idyllic scenes, and the older Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) meeting it on various occasions; its life as carrying bread for a baker and being ill-treated by the baker's delivery youth Gérard (François Lafarge), who is no more than a heartless thug; and Bathazar being used by a miller (Pierre Klossowski) with a whip to make the animal turn the stones faster.

But, of course, there's more here than that, as the name of one of the magi – Balthazar – should suggest. The mule is a spiritual, indeed Christ-like figure, as borne out by the many religious allusions: the young Marie baptising it, the stations of the cross, the seven deadly sins, its 'crucifixion', the flock looking over its death, and so on.

At about ninety minutes, a great deal is packed into this film: a murder, a doomed love affair with the leader of the gang (Gérard with Marie), a lost-suffering and finally unconsumated lover of Marie (Jacques (played by Walter Green)), Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert) the down-and-out alcoholic suspected of murder, Marie sort of prostituting herself and later being beaten up by the gang of thugs, and a number of other events.

All this is in Bresson's austere black and white style, with expressionless lines from non-actors, a lack of artifice, and a truly wonderful film all round.

Robert Bresson's Une femme douce | A Gentle Woman (1969)

Une femme douce is based on Dostoevski's short story 'Krotkaya' ('A Meek Creature' (1876)). 'J. S.', in his article 'Doute et certitude: « Une femme douce » in Esprit (Nouvelle Serie 386  (11) (November 1969)) quotes from Nathalie Sarraute's Le Planétarium (1959): 'On n'a pas encore découvert ce langage qui pourrait exprimer d'un seul coup ce qu'on perçoit en un clin d'oeil : tout un être et ses myriades de petits mouvements, surpris dans quelques mot, un rire, un geste' ('We haven't yet discovered the language to immediately express what we can see in the blink of an eye: a whole being and his/her multitudinous tiny movements, caught in a few words, a laugh, a gesture.'). This is what Robert Bresson tries to convey in his films.

Une femme douce is Bresson's ninth film, and his first in (admittedly subdued) colour. It begins in a somewhat un-Bressonian manner in that there is the noise of Paris at night, the rush of traffic, and so on. This rush, this crazy traffic movement is repeated on the few occasions that the television set is switched on in this film, but otherwise it's pure Bresson: little movement, little speech, few emotions revealed.

The generally poker-faced movements of the protagonists – Elle (Dominique Sanda) and Lui (Guy Frangin) – betray virtually no emotions and the viewer is forced to guess their psychology through the opaqueness. Right from the beginning we learn that the wife has killed herself by jumping from the flat balcony, her shawl floating slowly downwards as if in some kind of symbolic fashion.

Lui is then left to tell the story in linear fashion, or rather his own inevitably biased story as he pieces things together, revealing a tale of excuses, missed moments in which he could possibly have saved the relationship, but perhaps above all displaying a tale feminists could easily attack him for.

On one occasion Elle accuses Lui of using her as a kind of sales proposition: so the viewer assumes, poor female student orphan with virtually no money pawning her treasures to a pawnbroker who makes his money from exploiting the poor. And the man is attracted to her, takes pity on her, and asks her to marry him, which she accepts. And apparently willingly, as (in her largely taciturn way) she initially seems to enjoy the sex.

But jealousy barges in, and Lui is alarmed (to the point of taking a gun with him) by Elle's attentions towards another man, but maybe he's overreacting. Is he overreacting when he leaves the revolver within easy reach as he pretends to be sleeping? Why does he risk his life, as he knows that Elle is pointing a gun a blank range at his face?

And although she doesn't shoot he arranges a separate single bed for her, still leaving the revolver out, but she falls ill briefly, recovers, bursts into spontaneous tears and after he leaves in the morning to his pawnbroking job downstairs she just throws herself out the window. Back to the beginning, and it could be that the feminist and/or Marxist takes are red herrings.