Diary of a Country Priest (Journal d'un curé de campagne)

A new priest (Claude Laydu) arrives in the French country village of Ambricourt to attend to his first parish. The apathetic and hostile rural congregation rejects him immediately. Through his diary entries, the suffering young man relays a crisis of faith that threatens to drive him away from the village and from God. With his fourth film, Robert Bresson began to implement his stylistic philosophy as a filmmaker, stripping away inessential elements from his compositions, the dialogue, and the music, seeking a purity of image and sound.

David Kehr, writing in the Chicago Reader, calls “Diary of a County Priest a “spare, intense” film that represents “Robert Bresson at his greatest and most difficult, building a profound sense of a higher order through its relentless detailing of the cold, small facts of everyday life. A masterpiece, beyond question.” The New York Press’ Armond White asserts that “Bresson set a standard of moral and spiritual contemplation that few filmmakers have matched” and observes that “the visual beauty of ‘Country Priest’ is matched by its profundity.”