Bresson’s 1959 film about a misfit who dreams of rising above conventional morals is a brilliant example of the cinema of ideas
Robert Bresson’s hypnotically intense and lucid movie-novella from 1959 is now revived as part of a director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and whatever creakiness I thought I saw in this masterly film for its last UK re-release has vanished. The andante pace of Pickpocket is part of its brilliance, part of its seriousness and its status as a cinema of ideas: a movie with something of Dostoevsky or Camus, or even Victor Hugo.
The then non-professional actor Martin Lasalle was cast by Bresson as Michel, a gloomy young man who spends his days writing his journal in a seedy bedsit: a precursor for the prison cell for which he is destined. Michel is plagued with nameless guilt about his elderly, unwell mother whom he cannot bring himself to visit,...
Robert Bresson’s hypnotically intense and lucid movie-novella from 1959 is now revived as part of a director’s retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank, and whatever creakiness I thought I saw in this masterly film for its last UK re-release has vanished. The andante pace of Pickpocket is part of its brilliance, part of its seriousness and its status as a cinema of ideas: a movie with something of Dostoevsky or Camus, or even Victor Hugo.
The then non-professional actor Martin Lasalle was cast by Bresson as Michel, a gloomy young man who spends his days writing his journal in a seedy bedsit: a precursor for the prison cell for which he is destined. Michel is plagued with nameless guilt about his elderly, unwell mother whom he cannot bring himself to visit,...
- 5/31/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Pickpocket
Written and directed by Robert Bresson
France, 1959
Robert Bresson’s is one of the great singular visions of the cinema. Like Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, Bresson’s output was relatively minimal — 13 features over the course of 40 years — but it is likewise instantly recognizable. Though it’s something of an auteurist cliché to say that one can identify a given director’s work by just a single scene or even a single frame, in this case, the declaration holds true. Bresson’s work is so distinct, so deceptively simple, so regimented in its formal construction, that to see one of his films is to witness an exceptional directorial style, one consistently employed throughout an artist’s body of work. With this consistency comes the subsequent creation of one extraordinary film after another, each similar to the previous, with reoccurring imagery, themes, and performances, but each, at the same time,...
Written and directed by Robert Bresson
France, 1959
Robert Bresson’s is one of the great singular visions of the cinema. Like Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, Bresson’s output was relatively minimal — 13 features over the course of 40 years — but it is likewise instantly recognizable. Though it’s something of an auteurist cliché to say that one can identify a given director’s work by just a single scene or even a single frame, in this case, the declaration holds true. Bresson’s work is so distinct, so deceptively simple, so regimented in its formal construction, that to see one of his films is to witness an exceptional directorial style, one consistently employed throughout an artist’s body of work. With this consistency comes the subsequent creation of one extraordinary film after another, each similar to the previous, with reoccurring imagery, themes, and performances, but each, at the same time,...
- 7/23/2014
- by Jeremy Carr
- SoundOnSight
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