PICKPOCKET FILMS MOVIE
PICKPOCKET FILMS CODE

That’s because Bresson handles Michel’s incompleteness entirely through style. It is only at the conclusion that the audience is aware of this disjunction. At the start of the movie, Michel doesn’t realize that anything is missing-and Bresson doesn’t tip his hand that it is-but everything in Michel’s world and everything about Pickpocket is slightly off. Michel is a man searching for his soul, but it is a search he isn’t aware of. However, that is what Pickpocket is, not what Pickpocket is about. Michel identifies with Nietzsche’s idea of the superman and tries to embody that idea through the act of pickpocketing, something that provides him sexual ecstasy more than it does financial stability. The pickpocket of the title, Michel (Martin La Salle), is an aimless, amoral man with a blank Byzantine stare.

PICKPOCKET FILMS MOVIE

Yet, viewers won’t have to strain hard to find strands of Fuller’s movie as well as Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Dante’s Divine Comedy. This bit of trivia is notable considering that Pickpocket was Bresson’s first script not adapted from a previous work. The story goes that Bresson saw Samuel Fuller’s Pickup On South Street (1953) and was struck with the idea of a man picking the pockets of others and finding himself. “I would like in my films to be able to render perceptible to an audience a feeling of a man’s soul and also the presence of something superior to man which can be called God.” -Robert Bresson Though he only made 13 features over the course of four decades, every one of his films bears a signature style-the mark of a master-but none convey his ideas quite like his 1959 masterpiece, Pickpocket.

PICKPOCKET FILMS CODE

That’s why those who crack the code are so lauded, and few have been as voraciously lauded as the French director, Robert Bresson (1901-1999). Movies are a glorious and exciting exploration of the human condition, but without style, the images hang to the screen, failing to be anything more than a light flickering on a blank canvas. Indeed, what is important here, this time, does not lie on mastering technics but the rapidity of decision between the three accomplices when they risk being caught: put the stolen wallet in another traveller’s pocket in case the man who got robbed would understand what happened to him.Above all, cinema is a style. The following theft, the notes sticking out of the wallet is filmed in one mastered sequence shot where Bresson plays with the frame sizes: we go from the man who gets robbed in full, perfectly seen, but the frame closes down on his hand and his wallet until another hand anonymously comes to steal the notes and passes them to other anonymous hands before a shot widening enables us to see that this last man in the theft chain is no one else but the main character.įor the third theft, the one from the man with the hat, Bresson makes a different choice: he shows us this time, in the same close frame, the faces of the robbed man and the three thieves, but the hands job is much more elliptic, shown is very short shots. One of Bresson’s theories was that hands often act independently from the brain and will, that they are gifted with a long autonomy, especially when it’s actions repeated a hundred times before. We cannot recognise who the hands belong to because what is important for Bresson is to show the well thought through mechanism of the pickpockets technique, the perfect synchronous rhythm of their actions, not their identity. To film the woman’s bag theft, Bresson makes the radical choice of not filming the characters, their faces, but only the move of the stolen bag from one hand to another.

Instead of showing us the film’s main character, who is the true scene stake, Bresson shows us some anonymous people who are only there to hide the pickpocket’s moves when then appears suddenly after we lost sight of him. He hid him and his itinerary away from us from the start through a game of a wandering camera, as if it was distracted, which followed the first person in sight, even people who had nothing to do with the action. Starting from a close-up on her luggage, Bresson moves up to show us the pickpocket coming close to her. The camera then follows that woman up to the counter where she stops. This couple then passes by a woman in a suit, holding a luggage in each hand and her handbag under her arm. The shot begins with the main character coming in the station, but instead of following him, Bresson lets him leave the picture and films a couple that was behind him and who has no role in this scene. The first shot of this scene is a sequence shot where Bresson masters a play between what he shows and hides from us in one shot.

Pickpocket films