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All the events of Bresson's film are contained within Georges Bernanos's novel. Rereading the novel, one can see the shape of Bresson's narrative in bold relief: the action is suddenly filled out with the wealth of detail, its essentially Bressonian dryness thoroughly irrigated. Every development, every nuance is given a firm psychological basis. By remaining utterly faithful to the book, Bresson added nothing to Bernanos. It's what he subtracted that counted. He left himself with nothing more than a skeleton and then gave himself the task of animating it, a task to which he brought the depth and gravity of his cinematic genius. In his now classic article, Bazin wrote: "Its dialectic of fidelity and invention brings us back in the final analysis to a dialectic between cinema and literature. It's no longer a matter of translation, however faithful or intelligent it might be, still less of being freely inspired, with loving respect, with a view to a film that duplicates the work, but of building upon the novel through cinema, a work of a secondary order. A film not at all comparable to the novel, or "worthy" of it, but a new aesthetic entity as if the novel were multiplied by cinema." Bazin concluded his article by stating that the film was not "better" than the novel, but "more" - these words appear in quotes in the article itself. So to end up with this "more," Bresson began by adding the "less." To begin with, he cut all of the many lunch and dinner scenes in which the relationship between the Priest of Ambricourt and the count and his family unfolds. He also excised all the early setups for certain characters who become important late in the narrative, particularly Dufrety. In a way, it's these excisions that push the narrative towards the essential, which is the conflict between human suffering and mystical abstraction. The Priest of Ambricourt's road to death becomes a path to the Cross, minus only the crowds and the persecutors. His agony is neither symbolic nor comforting, but a Christ-like sacrifice hidden from view, an unknown holocaust.
Diary of a Country Priest is a film about imprisonment. As he carries out the duties of his ministry, the Priest tries to act...