All of this tension must be leading somewhere, or it’s just our own projection.Īnd it’s perfectly understandable that we’re tense. With Pickpocket, the viewer will naturally impose their own order on the film- seeing it as a thriller with a doomed protagonist. These emotional constructs- plot, acting, camerawork, editing, music- are “screens”.” Bresson calls “screens” those things that “interpose themselves” between the viewer and reality. Schrader writes that his “use of the everyday is not derived from a concern for “real life,” but from opposition to the contrived, dramatic events which pass for real life in movies. Bresson hated all of the contrivances of dramatic plotting and, instead, made movies that seem like fly-on-the-wall documentaries.
PICKPOCKET FILMS MOVIE
What I noticed this time is how much Bresson subverts movie conventions simply by skipping them altogether.
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And, somehow, in spite of my having seen the movie before, I expected this time it would end with Michel being guillotined and damned. Again and again, we expect Michel’s friend or Jeanne to confront him and there to be a big blowout. We can’t help feeling that there’s something going on beneath the surface of this man, that will erupt in some dramatic climax… which Bresson keeps denying us.
PICKPOCKET FILMS DRIVER
Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver as well as a key book on Bresson, notes the “disparity” in Bresson’s films: between the flat everyday events he depicts and an “unnatural… human density” that develops nonetheless. But, throughout, Michel seems affectless and dazed. There is also a police officer who is either trying to help him or help to catch him. He has a friend, who shows some concern, and the friend’s girlfriend is taking care of his dying mother, who once protected him from the law. We also come to recognize how this obsession places a disconnect between Michel and the world around him. We realize that he could do anything else to earn money, if he so chose. I recently wrote: “With Bresson’s films, we get the chance to see what it’s like for someone else to be themselves, in the most direct and generally incommunicable way, which makes them miraculous.” Michel is as obsessed, in his own way, as the country priest, and he treats is as almost a religious calling, convinced of the supposed superiority of the thief. I was reminded of drummer friends who are always beating out a rhythm without even noticing. In Pickpocket, we spend a great amount of time watching the small-time Pari thief Michel stealing from people and his actions are so well-rehearsed it seems like his hands are acting of their own accord. The pickpocket then revealed he had already stolen Fuller’s wallet. When Fuller made his film, which also features a pickpocket, he called in an actual pickpocket as an advisor and, during the interview asked the man what qualified him to serve as an advisor. But Fuller was a great director whose ideas can be spotted in movies by directors like Scorsese and Spielberg as well. Some critics have expressed surprise by this influence because Bresson is seen as a religious ascetic filmmaker and Fuller is associated with lurid b-movies- Pickup is a classic noir.
![pickpocket films pickpocket films](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/XizK6qRdOg4/maxresdefault.jpg)
It’s an incredible ending, but, as they say, Spoilers Follow.īresson had the idea for a movie about a pickpocket after watching Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street.
![pickpocket films pickpocket films](https://i1.wp.com/thebogotapost.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Pickpockets-4.jpg)
What I noticed this time is just how much the entire film allows the viewer to build their own expectations without actually guiding them in any way, and then subverts everything we thought we knew about the characters, the story, and human reality in general. I think I realized when I first saw it that the ending is a “twist”, although it’s also a depiction of the miraculous. This week, I dug further into Robert Bresson by rewatching “Pickpocket”, a movie I loved years ago and still loved this time around, but for different reasons. The Scriptures must have seemed a relief. This is in stark contrast with the structure of tragedy, where a character’s fate is adhered to and inescapable, for the most part, but turns out even worse.
PICKPOCKET FILMS FULL
And yet, the Western tradition is rooted in the Scriptures, which are themselves full of stories with a special type of “twist ending”, as grace is continually extended to those who logically shouldn’t receive it- indeed, the illogic is the point of the miraculous. I love a good twist ending it’s something hard to pull off in fiction without it coming across as corny or unbelievable.