![]() On closer inspection, the alliance of opposites is everywhere in Pickpocket. Pickpocket was the first of Bresson’s film to embrace the streets, cafes and metros of Paris as a location for his films (as Truffaut and Godard did in the same year), but alongside the pinball machines and fun fare rides, blasts of Lully’s Baroque music interrupt the scene, and Michel’s garret, bare of even running water, seems to belong to the nineteenth-century rather than Pickpocket ’s post-war, consumption-driven modernity. Only two films - The Trial of Joan of Arc and Lancelot du Lac - are actually set in the Middle Ages, but something like a medieval setting is often conjured by the cinematography, which makes the banks of the Seine appear like a moat, or a Gestapo prison like an ancient dungeon. In Pickpocket, shot lists were meticulously planned, especially for the complex outdoor scenes, but when it came to filming, which Bresson deliberately scheduled for the July vacation, they were rarely consulted, let alone followed. For all his emphasis on precision and control, chance is a key element of Bresson’s work. This mingling of the spiritual and the material is a key element of Bresson’s formalism, but throughout Bresson’s thirteen feature films, a similar tendency toward contradiction is at work. The scene is all but silent, and it is only the repetition of gestures, dissected into a montage of hands, looks and objects, that marks Michel’s arrival as true pickpocket. The scene is the counterpart to Michel’s earlier transformation in which he is wordlessly, disinterestedly, taken in hand by the professional Kassagi and initiated into the real art of what he had hitherto only practiced desultorily. A single line of narrative combined with a reprise of Lully and the image of Jeanne kissing Michel’s culpable hands are enough to signal his spiritual liberation, even as LaSalle’s performance remains affectless, stripped of all expressivity. Economy and suppression-watchwords of Bresson’s style-are key. What motivates Michel’s last-moment swerve toward Jeanne (Marika Green) in Pickpocket ’s final scene remains mysterious, but nonetheless intense for this. Though less explicitly religious than Diary of a Country Priest or The Trial of Joan of Arc, Pickpocket is equally a film concerned with what Bresson referred to as the human soul, both in its captivity and, as each of his films dramatize, its transformation. In A Man Escaped, the convict’s handiwork delivers him from prison in Pickpocket, it paves the path toward Michel’s incarceration.īresson’s depiction of pickpocketing is almost documentary in style, but for all its tactility, it is Michel’s interior struggle that lies at the heart of the film. In the latter, Bresson captures Michel’s (played by Uruguayan non-actor Martin LaSalle) dexterous deeds as they learn and ultimately master the art of pickpocketing. In the earlier film, hands are shown constructing the tools for the hero’s suspenseful liberation from a Gestapo prison. ![]() In this respect, it’s a companion piece to A Man Escaped (1956), which directly preceded Pickpocket and is also a film about hands at work. In making his protagonist a petty thief rather than an axe-wielding murderer, Bresson’s film focused on the mechanics of pickpocketing. ![]() The film’s story is borrowed from Crime and Punishment - it’s about a man who commits forbidden acts, gets caught and goes to a prison, where his suffering is ameliorated by the love of a steadfast woman - but Pickpocket suppresses much of Dostoevsky’s plot in favour of a distinctly cinematic language. 1Īs a finished product, it appears as almost paradigmatically Bressonian: a taut statement of his singular and economic style identifiable by its syntax of faces, hands, isolated objects and empty spaces, shot starkly with a 50 mm lens and cut to a rhythmic soundtrack of mostly diegetic sounds. For an artist who made only thirteen features over the course of his forty-year career, it was, he said “very sudden, very fast”, it went off without a hitch. It took him only three months to outline a treatment, six weeks to cast and prepare, eleven to produce and twelve to edit. Robert Bresson described Pickpocket (1959), his fifth feature, as an “impatient film”.
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