If you’re like me at all (and who isn’t?), you’ve probably heard of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and you know he’s got something to do with filmmaking—but you are wholly unable to separate him from fellow Frenchmen Luc Besson (director of The Fifth Element and The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) and Robert Bresson (director of Au hasard Balthazar and L’argent)… both of whom, incidentally, directed films about Joan of Arc.

But I digress.

A good deal of my confusion stems from the fact that Cartier-Bresson was not primarily a filmmaker but a photographer who, at one time, apprenticed with Jean Renoir and worked with him on The Rules of the Game, among other works.  A student of English art and literature, he turned from painting to photography in the 1930s and over the decades became one of the most celebrated Western photojournalists, portraitists, and photographic artists.

So it’s not surprising that his name sounds terribly familiar, even if the details of his body of work are not.

Arthouse films and New Video have done us all a tremendous favor with the release of the Henri Cartier-Bresson: Collector’s Edition, a two-DVD set that also includes a 32-page booklet explaining his body of work as well as containing reproductions of many of his seminal images—several of which you will likely recognize.

Disc one contains the five films which Cartier-Bresson directed and co-directed.  The first three are medium-length World War II-period propaganda films, while the latter two are 1970s short art films commissioned by CBS.

Disc two is the real treasure here, a collection of documentaries about the photographer and his work.  As a relative neophyte, I started here and am glad I did.  If you buy or rent this set because you want to get to know more about Cartier-Bresson, I heartily recommend you start with Disc 2 as I did.  If you go through Disc 1 first, you may well wonder what the fuss is all about, as film was hardly the photographer’s milieu.

The first two films on Disc 1 are Victory of Life (1937) and Spain Will Live (1938), pro-Spanish Republican documentaries intended to highlight both the struggles of the beleaguered combatants and the heroics of their resistance as a means to move the French populace to their support.  Given that, as a photographer, Cartier-Bresson was so opposed to staged images, I was surprised to find that much of the footage in these ideological paeans was clearly contrived.  But in 21st-Century America, we are far, far removed from the unsettled world of the 1930s, when just about everyone had to be an ideologue just to survive.  The films are nonetheless interesting as documents of a particular place and time.

The Return (1945), while also a propaganda film made for the United States Army, demonstrates that Cartier-Bresson’s apprenticeship with Renoir was starting to pay some dividends.  The film documents the largely untold (and highly compelling) story of the repatriation of French prisoners of war in the wake of the Third Reich’s defeat.  Aside from a single scene in which a still photographer snaps a portrait of a group of home-bound former prisoners, not a single shot of the film looks staged.  Every minute has a sense of immediacy and poignancy, and nearly every frame is shot with the eye of a seasoned still photographer.  This film alone almost makes the set worth buying—and I’m surprised I’ve never run across this bit of American propaganda elsewhere.

The Return also sets the stage for the shorts California Impressions (1970) and Southern Exposures (1971)—both of which also demonstrate that you may have hired Cartier-Bresson to make a film, but you certainly were not going to dictate the film’s contents.  These latter efforts are highly sardonic.  Given complete carte blanche by CBS to deliver films on literally whatever subject in the world he chose, Cartier-Bresson elected narrative-free exposes of Cold War-era free-world self-absorption which, in contrast to his earlier films, only highlight how shallow the world had become.  Oddly, this pair of 25-minute personal statements also come off as entertaining but ultimately trivial.

The late Cartier-Bresson’s real value, of course, lay not in his filmmaking ability, but in the ethic with which he pursued his subjects.  After you watch the collection of documentaries about his work found on Disc 2 of this set, you will be so grateful that he took the time to document the world and its very human inhabitants in the fashion that he did—the work of a true documentarian in every best sense of the word.

Henri Cartier-Bresson: Collector’s Edition is unrated—but for the war-period documentaries, I would definitely recommend parental guidance.   Propaganda of this sort really warrants some educated commentary.

Courtesy of the set’s distributor, Greg screened a promotional copy of Henri Cartier-Bresson: Collector’s Edition.