Even more than in Mouchette, Bresson is concerned [in Le Diable, probablement] with the system of defences with which modern man shores up the form he has contrived to give to the void: on the one hand, the array of ideologies with which he ensures his spiritual well-being, and on the other, the battery of alarms and devices with which he protects his physical safety….

'What impelled me to make this film is the mess we have made of everything…. This immense demolition job in which we shall kill ourselves by trying to go on living….'

Yet it is evident that for Bresson the ecological message conveyed by [the images in his film], familiar or otherwise, is self-evident. Far from preaching to the converted, he is concerned less with the impact of these images and intimations of disaster than with the implications apparent in the ways people...