#Pickpocket robert bresson series

Lives and events in Pickpocket are not explained or motivated the film’s genius is in cutting such material away, leaving only direct presentation.

#Pickpocket robert bresson series

They have a series of Raskolnikov exchanges about superior human beings being above the law these exchanges are not true dialogues, however, but Michel’s deadpan trying-on of postures. It is in this underworld that he finds his interlocutor/therapist, a police detective intent on apprehending him. He studies with a master and works with a Pickpocket gang, using his expertise, sometimes barely escaping capture. His one passion is the art and crime of picking pockets here he finds fear, excitement, exultation, guilt a life of feeling. But Michel reveals little, feels little: he has largely withdrawn from individual engagement with people in his world – his dying mother the friend and potential lover Jeanne, who nurses her his male friend Jacques, to whom Michel ‘gives’ Jeanne. While the film’s crystal austerity moves toward minimalism, Bresson insists on the subjective, limiting viewers strictly to that which the loner hero, Michel (Martin Lassalle), sees, says, thinks, writes this is reinforced by his voice-over narration and his on screen writing, and emphasised by a near-total absence of leading music. Pickpocket was coolly received upon release as a difficult film (not an insinuating charmer like A Bout De Souffle (3)), but it found champions along the way, including Paul Schrader (4), who saw the film as part of his favourite genre: two-character films, where one character is the man and the other is his room (and indeed, Pickpocket is one of Bresson’s films about imprisoned persons, metaphorically and finally literally). In the first instance, this shows in the film’s triangulation between old European culture, via its borrowing of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment situation new French culture, with its topical reverberation of Albert Camus existentialism, and the gratuitous act and Hollywood culture through its invocation of Frank Borzage’s films of spiritual transcendence but even more strategically specific to New Wave practice, the film twists each of these three loose from its context and re-places it in a new way (2). Seeing Pickpocket again after a long absence, one is forcibly reminded that it was being shot on the streets of Paris at the same time Godard was shooting A Bout De Souffle ( Breathless, 1959) (1), and that Bresson’s film is an often overlooked watershed film of the New Wave. This essay originally appeared in a catalogue titled “Treasures from the French Embassy Collection” produced by the Melbourne Cinémathèque in 1998 and has been re-published here with the kind permission of the author.

Martin Lassalle, Pierre Leymarie, Jean Pelegri, Marika Green, Kassagi, Pierre Etaix Print Source: Centre National de la Cinematographie Prod: Agnès Delahaie Dir, Scr: Robert Bresson Phot: Léonce-Henry Burel Ed: Raymond Lamy Art Dir: Pierre Charbonnier Mus: Jean-Baptiste LullyĬast.