Pickpocket 1959

According to French film director Robert Bresson. "A film is not a show. It's, above all, a style." He liked to distinguish between cinema and cinematography. The cinema, for him, was nothing more than filmed theater, while the cinematograph was a new art, a combination of sounds and moving images that, properly harmonized by the montage, was capable of transferring feelings. He did not like professional actors either. “I preferred to work with people who did not have any experience in the world of interpretation and whom I called models.” In short, he sought the very essence of cinematographic language, its maximum purity. That is why his works seem to be surrounded by a kind of aura of spirituality and asceticism.

To understand Bresson, the critic Michel Estève turns to Sartre, who affirmed: "Every technique refers to metaphysics". Notes on the cinematograph is an example of this relationship, from the numerous aphorisms that run around the representation (the "form") and the support (the "matter"), and that hardly make any allusion to the story (the "Content"), and never to faith or religion.

Baes on his aphorisms, Bresson did not even look for the beauty of images-which he calls "cardpostism" -but "the ineffable that you will release". This is the difference between "CINEMA" and "cinematographY". The first is the one that swarms in the exhibition halls and is usually nothing more than "filmed theater". On the contrary, the cinematograph is a search: "CINEMA drinks from a common fund. The cinematographer makes a voyage of discovery on an unknown planet."

Bresson shuns "representation"; that is, to understand the cinematograph as a reproduction of reality. On the contrary, the cinematograph consists of founding a new reality, constituted by the "truth" characteristic of the artistic work: "A thing that can only be expressed by the new cinematographer; consequently, something new."

Many pages would be necessary to explain the Bressonian poetics. However, it can be said that Bresson is entrusted to the machine, from which he praises his "scrupulous indifference". In the machine the cinematographic specificity begins, which continues with the montage. This consists -according to the filmmaker- in stringing images and sounds from the "internal" energy that the paintings contain. A single image is nothing without the existence of others, before or after: the image, devoid of beauty, loses its individuality and is part of a becoming.

Bresson's cinema is consistent with the novelty sought in “notes” on the cinematographer: surprising breaks and links, even opposed to the spatial-temporal logic, unexpectedly and markedly black melted, or sequences that begin or end after or before the action occurs (events that would be so relevant in a film by any other filmmaker, such as a death, attempted rape or murder). Materiality is not only visual: sound is also a fundamental element in the assembly equation. "Noise must be turned into music," says Bresson.

The work of the spectator is an important part of those who have devoted some pages to examine the Bressonian cinematography, like André Bazin and Sontag to the aforementioned Estève and Provoyeur, they all agree that the "writing" of Bresson is not in the images, but in the spirit of the spectator. His films are a constant invitation to reconstruct the story, incomplete or enigmatic that is what’s offered on the screen.

The Bressonian poetics - the exploration of materiality and of the staging, of which Notes on the cinematography gives an account - is finally coherent with that vision of the world: the ascetic image, the actors and actresses of the Stoic mood, the montage "unraveling the narrative." The characters are thrown into a brutal world, in which they must choose between virtue and vice, and accept all kinds of humiliations - as does the ass Random Balthazar, considered by one of its owners as a "saint" - . The immobility, the silence and the strangeness of the characters and situations arouse what Bresson calls the “ineffable.”

It should be noted that the Bressonian stories evolved towards pessimism as the years passed: there is a great distance between the Christian hope of the Diary of a rural priest (the priest dies, but "saves" a soul) and A Man Escaped (the prisoner escapes, against all odds), and the inevitable pain of Au Hazard Balthazar or Lancelot of the Lake.

Pickpocket

It is the story of Michel, a lonely young man who is fascinated by thefts, raised to the level of art. One day he goes to a horse race and steals money from one of the attendees. Confident that no one has seen him, he is surprised when the police stop him. After this episode, a band of pickpockets will teach him the technique of the trade and to exercise the skill of your hands and steal in public areas with many goals.

Filmed with non-professional actors, in the purest Bresson style, and based loosely on the Crime and Punishment of Dostoevsky, this film is considered by many as an essential title in the history of cinema. He was a finalist for the Bear of the Berlin International Festival.

'Pickpocket' is a film of silences, of silent emotions, of hidden feelings. And Bresson hits right on something that a priori is risky: the choice of non-professional actors. It must be said that at certain moments you can see that inexperience, since some do not manage to be as expressive as they should be, and more so in a film of its dramatic intensity. However, Bresson knows very well what is done, and turns all that acting inexperience into one of the best assets of the film, always wanting to reflect the lake of communication of the characters. The apathy of some of them contribute positively to the director reflecting perfectly what he wants to reflect.

During a robbery, something goes wrong. Michel does not realize it, but when he guesses that everything that has happened to him is part of a police strategy to find his apartment, he must flee with the money he has. Michel then decides to earn an honest living, but he has to do it outside his home, to hide from those who persecute him.

"This is not a police-style film, the author tries to express through images and sounds, the nightmare of a young man pushed by his weakness, in an adventure of theft for which he was not made for. Strange ways, will reunite to two souls, that without it, perhaps never they would have known ". With this prologue Robert Bresson introduces us in one of the seventy-two most beautiful minutes that have existed in the seventh art.

Michel is a lonely young man, living in a small room full of books. The relationship with his mother is distant and is in charge of Jeanne, a young woman who has been abandoned in turn by her mother and who lives with an alcoholic father. Michel’s attraction to thefts, is more about fascination and experiencing different sensations, given by his intellectual superiority and personal satisfaction, than by real need. When his mother dies, Michel will dedicate himself professionally to what until now was a pastime that brought him some benefit.

Pickpocket is photographed in a splendid black and white by Léonce-Henry Burel, Bresson, the director draws us, in his fifth feature film and, using a linear voiceover, a sober and lyrical story where objects, hands and looks are much more eloquent and necessary than any high dialogue. Magisterial and millimetric is the assembly of the planes of the theft of purses or the very first planes of the protagonist's hands that hypnotize us for their perfection.

Michael is played by Martin Lasalle, a true stranger, and his first and last role with the director, since Bresson hardly used professional actors in his films, since he had the belief that their inexperience helped them to offer more spontaneity to their characters ; to achieve it he only worked only once with them.

The characters of Bresson's cinema are almost always marginalized beings and offenders of the rigid rules imposed by society. Beings that experience a deep loneliness, anguish and uneasiness with a tendency to isolation, but with a great spiritual wealth, although this and its redemption, through love, come from within the bars of the prison. Bresson does not encourage us to judge or prejudge the criminal behavior or lack of ethics of Michel, although this is contrary to law and outlaws, but it is his own moral: - "The fact that we know something is wrong fact, it does not prevent us from doing it ". A nihilist would not find anything reprehensible this behavior, if it is to feel satisfaction or pleasure in the execution of some act that moves us away from reality.

Bresson, with a brief but shocking filmography, places Pickpocket, in his own right, among the best films in history. We will not find in it action or a fast-paced rhythm, or eloquent dialogues, but mostly in contention, simplicity, silences and subtle glances, portrayed by the French through a fluid narrative and planes and with a montage of extreme beauty and delicacy. And since beauty cannot be described, but is made to be felt and contemplated, it is absolutely necessary to see it.

Director: Robert Bresson.

Cast: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal, Pierre Leymarie, Kassagi, Pierre Étaix, César Gattegno.