Cocodrilo Nit-Pics Flics

directed by Robert Bresson, 1967 Bresson films don’t tell stories: they present blueprints. Mouchette’s rape is a wisp of smoke; her death a ripple on a pond. The rest of the film is a sequence of formal symbols, arranged in chronological order and designed to show how these events ensue. It is a dark, vivid, boring, and unforgettable film. Bresson’s characters never cry on screen, ill-used, abused, or undone though they be. Emotion does not edify: consequence is all. The drama that plays itself out in a Bresson film is deliberately stripped of verisimilitude, reduced to a sequence of significant sentences, inexpressive faces, and long silences. Most stories show both the good and the bad sides of their characters. Mouchette dwells on the bad. There is not a single act of selfless good will in the film. Mouchette dies not because of the bad things that happen to her, but because of the unbearable tedium of such a predictable...

Robert Bresson, 1983 Watching a film by Bresson is a bit like following a long and somewhat tedious proof of a mathematical theorem. In both cases the plot advances through small, logical steps which are as consequent as they are sterile. Where the mathematician strives to relieve each step of his argument from the taint of intuition or vagueness,Bresson obtains the same reduction through the paring of character, drama, and realism, leaving in their place a sequence of abstract forms whose narrative logic we admit even as we struggle tosuppress our craving for color and life. L'Argent is a somber, bloody film. It apparently derives from a story by Tolstoy, another ardent moralist with a weakness for didactic art. This is a curiousdidacticism , however: it does not so much instruct, as sketch, small, bleak segments of human experience starkly constructed with the basic,blocky elements of standard narrative. The story begins begins calmly, the story evolves calmly, the s...

Robert Bresson, 1959 Robert Bresson is a small, quietly expressive man with a vaguely rodent-like face and the floppy coiffure of a French genius. In a clip included at the end of the Pickpocket , Bresson articulates and defends his uniquely minimalist sense of cinema with clarity, humility, and a controlled passion that bubbles into his smile and gestures. One senses that Bresson has thought his world through. That he has grappled with the dark currents of vice and failure, cruelty and cosmic indifference, and that slowly, deliberately, courageously, he has made his peace with these things. What strikes is how well he has come through the peace process: how for all its sinister silence, its perversion and its suffering, Pickpocket remains a film of redemption. The Pickpocket is Bresson's version of Crime and Punishment . From the avuncular cop to a misguided theory of supermen, the allusions and parallels to the Russian novel of transfiguration follow one ...

Robert Bresson, 1966 In style, tone, and technique, Au Hasard Balthazar is very similar to Pickpocket, a film Bresson completed seven years earlier. Yet there is a depth and reach in the later film that vastly outstrip those of its predecessor. If we insist on identifying Bresson as a Catholic director and link his Pickpocket to Dostoyevski's Crime and Punishment , it will be difficult to resist the temptation to call Balthazar his Brothers Karamazov . This linkage would be a mistake. As an artist Bresson is many things: acute, engaged, profoundly human, deeply concerned with the darker side of the psyche. To focus on the formal, ethical aspects of his oeuvre, however, is to miss an essential dimension of his work: the dimension of detachment. Though his principle concern may indeed center on morality and his object may be transcendence, he proceeds with such meticulous remove that, if we insist on giving him a label, it should be Buddhist, not Catholic. As in P...