8/11/2023 0 Comments Pickpocket robert bresson![]() Bresson is the real deal, at least with these two films. The film, about a young Parisian man who turns to a career of pickpocketing to avoid a life of destitution, was released in Taiwan in 1961. Bresson’s Pickpocket, loosely inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer is based on the author’s White Nights ), was the director’s fifth feature, having been preceded in the same decade by perhaps his most accessible works, Diary of a Country Priest and A Man Escaped. It took him only three months to outline a treatment, six weeks to cast and prepare, eleven to produce and twelve to edit. Pickpocket, like all of Bresson’s films, records the expiration of humane feeling in the modern world, the impossibility of decency in a universe of greed. French auteur Robert Bresson (19011999) released one of his most influential features, Pickpocket, in 1959. He lives in Paris in a small room under the eaves, a garret almost filled by his cot and his books. ![]() There isn’t even the slightest hint of the youthful posturing I often find in the other French New Wave figures of the time, as talented and influential as they were (there is a reason that Werner Herzog referred to Godard’s films as ‘intellectual counterfeit money’ in comparison with a good kung-fu movie). Issue 105 Robert Bresson described Pickpocket (1959), his fifth feature, as an impatient film. One of the early images in Robert Bresson's Pickpocket (1959)shows the unfocused eyes of a man obsessed by excitement and fear. Of the two recent Bressons, I may every so slightly favor Balthazar as a perfect match of story and vision with Christian parable, but Pickpocket is still up there as one of the great works of cinema. 1 It stars Martin LaSalle, who was a nonprofessional actor at the time, in the title role, and features Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie, and Jean Plgri in supporting roles. His movies explore the moral, the just, and the personal, although that’s probably an oversimplification of his works. ![]() ![]() ![]() Robert Bresson is one of the main figures of the French New Wave. It kinda surprises me when I read reviewers only mentioning the classic Russian novel Crime and Punishment (the only one of those heavy tomes of Dostoevsky I’ve actually dared to take on) in passing as if there are only slight comparisons with Pickpocket, when in fact the entire structure of the narrative (and the characters), including the ending of salvation through love (played up even more with the infrequent but always powerful orchestral baroque music) and the pickpocket’s openly flaunting manner in detailing his belief in the privilege of the “superior” delivered directly to the policeman who suspects him of the crimes, is almost straight out of the speeches of Dostoevsky’s morally lost Raskolnikov and his antagonistic relationship with the figure of the law shadowing him. Pickpocket is a 1959 French film written and directed by Robert Bresson, the first for which Bresson wrote an original screenplay rather than adapting an existing work. Robert Bressons Pickpocket Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket. Bresson’s austere style and minimalist approach with the actors (spending much of their time looking down at the floor, only raising their eyes to briefly interact or study something) works brilliantly in foregrounding not only the philosophical implications of Michel’s approach to life, but also, almost ironically, the thrill of seeing the master pickpockets at work (in great detail). Bresson hired a real pickpocket, Henri Kassagi, to teach the tricks to his cast and play one of the thieves: after the movie Kassagi became a stage conjuror, as he was now too well known to go. ![]()
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