The greatest movies never made: Robert Bresson’s ‘Genesis’
Status can only get a filmmaker so far in cinema, as Robert Bresson repeatedly discovered when his attempts to realise passion project Genesis continued to fall on deaf ears.
An indication of Bresson’s position in the history of celluloid can best be conveyed by the directors who held him in the highest regard and named him as both an influence and inspiration. Jean-Luc Godard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, Abbas Kiarostami, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Werner Herzog are just some of them, all of whom rank as titans of the medium.
Famed for his minimalistic approach and regular invocation of spirituality, salvation, and redemption, it made perfect sense within the context of his career that Bresson long harboured ambitions of going biblical in a literal sense. However, his dream to adapt the first book of the Old Testament couldn’t get in front of cameras despite coming close on a number of occasions.
It seems antithetical to his favoured approach of forsaking scale and grandeur in favour of intimacy, but Bresson was thinking as big as it gets. In the 1960s, the auteur first began developing his idea for a feature that would have spanned from the very creation of the universe itself right through to the construction of the Tower of Babel.
Shortly after the release of 1962’s The Trial of Joan of Arc, Dino de Laurentiis boarded the project and agreed to back Genesis, but Bresson’s ambition ended up getting the better of him. Ironically, for a filmmaker who stripped cinema back to its barest essence in order to explore the deepest reaches of his characters, themes, and motifs, it was the logistics of what would have comfortably been his most epic undertaking that thwarted him.
The titular section of the Bible features not only the snakes present in the story of Adam and Eve but the travails of Noah’s Ark. That would have meant enlisting a cavalcade of animals to follow orders on-screen, something that flew in the face of his established approach. Not that he was ready to abandon all hope, though, even if it was another three decades before he circled back around to Genesis.
In the early 1980s, Bresson picked up his passion project once again after securing pre-production funding, and he was adamant that it was going to happen this time. He couldn’t have made than any clearer in an interview with Michael Ciment, where he hinted that he could have cameras rolling on Genesis by 1984 if everything went to plan, which of course it did not.
“I want to do it so badly,” he admitted. “I’ll rush at it the way one rushes into the ocean. We’ll see what happens.” Bresson described it as being “a long film, for television and spoken in Ancient Hebrew, which is a beautiful language, with bits of Aramaic,” and he was evidently hoping that it would be the perfect swansong to his career following 1983’s L’Argent.
Sadly, it didn’t come to pass in what was a blow for cinema at large. After all, Bresson using all of the aesthetic and thematic tools that had first led him to greatness and applying them to a story embedded in every fibre of his being as a devout Christian could have been the perfect denouement to a legendary career, but it wasn’t to be.
