![]() ![]() ![]() Bresson warns the audience immediately that his film isn't made in the style of a policier, but he can't change the fact that it's a French film about crime. In any event, Pickpocket is a French crime film and therefore of inherent interest to me. They also showed a playful attitude I warmed to, as when he told a 1983 interviewer that the film then playing in theaters that best exemplified his cinematic principles was Octopussy. In the extras for that DVD Bresson expounded his ideas of "cinematic writing" in a way that suggested that he was, in his own fashion, an action director. I've also seen his farewell film, L'Argent, which I enjoyed as a grim piece of work that came complete with a car chase and an axe murder. Years later I got Au hasard Balthazar, the one about the donkey, out of the library and was more favorably impressed with the conceptual rigor of his approach. I saw Lancelot du Lac in college and found Bresson's style off-putting and pretentious. This is the fourth of his films that I've seen. Bresson may seem to many cineastes like the furthest person from genre cinema, but at a certain point style and genre converge to the point that Bresson was his own genre by virtue of having his own idiosyncratic style and a distinctive point of view that he applied to all his subjects. Bruce Li one day, Robert Bresson the next: that's the wild world of cinema for you. ![]()
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