Sitting in his tiny room, Michel seems absorbed by a vague discontent. Pickpocket presents realistic people in naturalistic locations - drab rooms, metro platforms, a racetrack. Michel is essentially as unknowable as strangers we see on the street. Michel mumbles a few unconvincing words about Nietzschean supermen existing above the common morality, but Pickpocket doesn't fit human behavior into a cause-and-effect dramatic pattern. No psychological explanation is offered for Michel's behavior. He controls his actors as a writer chooses words, to connect with the audience only on his terms. Bresson's aims are far less commercially oriented. Alfred Hitchcock sometimes talked about using actors as posed 'objects' for his visual schemes, but for the most part he depended on star personalities to bring his films to life, to establish an emotional contact with his audience. If a 'model' says his line with too much emphasis or meaning, the shot is re-taken as many times as Bresson feels are necessary to 'deaden' the performance into a rote, neutral delivery.īresson does not want his actors to project their personalities, but to serve only as a conduit for his thesis. He asks his cast to behave without expression or theatrics, and employs special techniques to prevent them from performing in an expressive manner. As has been repeated in almost every review of a Bresson film, the director refers to his on-screen talent as 'models' and insists that they be non-actors. He has no use for movie stars, or even professional actors. Robert Bresson takes his ideas about cinema theory to an extreme. We tend to champion mainstream film directors that profess a strong personal vision. He is perversely intent on pursuing his criminal life, which can only end in one way. Michel falls into league with two accomplices led by a particularly talented pickpocket (Kassagi). His friend Jacques (Pierre Leymarie) tries to understand Michel's odd behavior, as does Jeanne (Marika Green), a neighbor of his mother. He cultivates an interest in public sneak-thievery. Vaguely referencing a philosophy about privileged 'supermen', Michel considers himself too special to work like others. Pickpocket's melancholy loner Michel (Martin LaSalle) is a close cousin to the director's soulful, suffering Diary of a Country Priest. Many critics consider Bresson's 1959 film Pickpocket to be his best. Schrader says that Pickpocket instead recedes from the viewer into its own mystery. Most films accost us, asking for our involvement. Critic Paul Schrader asserts that for him this transcendent emotional rush was a consciousness-raising, inspirational event. His most frequent theme investigates the notion of spiritual transformation, and his most successful films generate a sense of spiritual mystery. His ideas about cinema go directly against established narrative conventions. French filmmaker Robert Bresson was a bona fide artistic iconoclast.
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