LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Bresson: Les Dames
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There are four remaining Bresson features waiting out there for release on DVD. Hardest to find may well prove be Le Diable Probablement (1977). Its producer, Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, was another who went broke financing a Bresson film (and others by Jacques Rivette). However, the world is ready and waiting for Les Anges du péché (1943), Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (Four Nights of a Dreamer, 1971) and Une Femme Douce (1969). Anybody, anywhere?
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Mr. Bresson's first feature film, ''Les Anges du Peche'' (''Angels of the Streets''), did not come until 1943. Made during the German occupation, it tells of a secluded order of nuns who dedicate themselves to rehabilitating women from prison. Hailed as a remarkable debut, the film already announced Mr. Bresson's theme of salvation.
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Apart from the personal and autobiographical, the concerns of Bresson's later films are hardly politically disengaged. What may be truer is that lessons about greed and the consequences of capitalism are usually better delivered—and so easily forgotten—by way of Hollywood entertainments like Wall Street. Bresson's ethics and tactics are far too blunt and deep to be ignored because he sees that the problems are not just the social systems but the inherent and pathetic flaws of God's misguided creation.
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Chantal Akerman has less excuse than Bresson to be evasive; unlike him, she’s still alive. But the Belgian-born director of Jeanne Dielman, Jet u il elle, and other masterpieces has been equally reticent to play the role of star-director. This isn’t merely self-effacement; as Akerman herself recalls in this engaging self-portrait ... made for the Cinema of Our Time series (speaking in the third person): “Few people saw her films and she asked no one for money.” She’s speaking here of her pre-Jeanne Dielman period, but in a sense the phrase continues to apply. Despite a high critical reputation and occasional flirtations with commercial cinema (the 1995 screwball comedy The Couch, for example), Akerman remains a marginal figure who explores to telling effect the concept of marginality, a subject well known to her not only as a matter of temperament, but also because she's both Jewish and lesbian.
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Les Dames