According to Andrei Tarkovsky, Bresson is "perhaps the only artist in cinema, who achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand".
Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "Bresson is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music.".
Did not direct his first feature film until he was 42 years old.
Andrei Tarkovsky held Bresson in very high regard, noting him and Ingmar Bergman as his two favorite filmmakers.
In his development of auteur theory, François Truffaut lists Bresson among the few directors to whom the term "auteur" can genuinely be applied.
Bresson's actors were required to repeat multiple takes of each scene until all semblances of 'performance' were stripped away, leaving a stark effect that registers as both subtle and raw.
In a career that spanned fifty years, Bresson made only 13 feature-length films.
His early artistic focus was to separate the language of cinema from that of the theater, which often relies heavily upon the actor's performance to drive the work.
Has influenced a number of other filmmakers, including Andrei Tarkovsky, Michael Haneke, Jim Jarmusch, the Dardenne brothers, Aki Kaurismäki, and Paul Schrader.
Biography in: John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume One,
1890-1945". Pages 55-63. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company,
1987.