Rating: 
Summary: Towards a Poetics of Film
Review: There is no better guide to the process and experience of making a film. Though its epigrammatic style makes it at first seem abstract, Notes on the Cinematographer is essentially a step-by-step handbook on what to do (and more so, what not to do) with actors and a movie camera. The title is so unintentionally misleading as to the subject of the work, which contains not a single line on lighting or photography ('cinematographer' is Bresson's rhetorical name for 'film-maker') that I believe it has obscured what would otherwise be a justly renown (and more readily-available) classic text on filmmaking. This book stands also as an intriguing commentary on Bresson's films, on which is it is difficult to say anything adequate.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for all involved in creation
Review: While Bresson's short, minimalist notes were written about and for film, they apply to all creative endeavors. So much of the artistic process is about knowing what to leave out, when to stop, what notes not to play, what colors not to use, what words to take out. Bresson, with an amazing economy of words, dazzles repeatedly. Poetic, profound, wise (and often arrogant), Bresson's collection is more than a treatise on the "cinematograph" as he calls film. It is a lesson in making, and even a lesson in living. To be read slowly said an earlier reviewer...How about to be read repeatedly and daily, genuine words of wisdom. yb
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