The first time I attempted “The Red and the Black,” in high school, I had a paperback with a Clifton Fadiman introduction, warning that the novel could not be understood in one reading. Knowing that my effort would amount to no more than a dry run put me off Stendahl for years. (Thanks, Clifton.) What he might have written is that every Great Work of Art rewards revisits, but that every GWA also offers initial frissons that can be had only once, in the course of virginal submission.

I mention this with regard to Robert Bresson’s films (only 13, made between 1943 and 1983 – an earlier film, from 1934, is lost) for two reasons. First, his work is ideally suited to DVD, on Fadimanian grounds. They offer emotional experiences that bring you back repeatedly to peer deeper into the work and yourself. Second, people who venerate Bresson often find naked emotions embarrassing and tend to validate them with intricate exegeses. This helps to explain why most Bresson films were greeted first with ambivalence and upgraded to masterpiece on second thought, and why he is reputed to be a difficult filmmaker when his best work offers first timers the almost frightening pleasure of simplicity itself.

“Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and “L’Argent” (1983), recently released by Criterion and New Yorker, respectively (each now has three Bressons in its catalog; collect them all), complement each other, underscoring a Bressonian paradox. He paints a world of unrelenting sadness, malice, cruelty, and corruption – so why do we emerge into the daylight feeling elated, stronger, better? The answer lies not in the redemption he holds out for some characters and not others, but the pact he makes with his audience, neither to compromise nor condescend.

“Au Hasard Balthazar” is one of the most elegant, calculated, and strikingly textured films ever made. Ghislain Cloquet’s black-and-white photography bleakly reflects the grim, disenchanted lives in Bresson’s rural French village. At the center of the story is Balthazar, a donkey baptized by children; whipped and burned by a chain of brutal owners; briefly honored as a circus “genius” (he can do multiplication); declared a saint by a woman who loses her daughter and husband but not her moorings; exploited by criminals, and killed by a stray bullet. The donkey is the central character, a mute witness, the one with whom we ultimately – incredibly – identify.

If this sounds like a hee-haw version of “Black Beauty,” albeit with an unhappy ending, it may be because a precis cannot convey the effect of the telling, so economical and graceful that each frame, line of dialogue, and off-screen sound adds essential information. The ending, especially, defies storytelling logic; it isn’t really unhappy, though fans boast of how copiously they weep. Bresson, a Catholic whose work resounds with harsh religiosity, crafts Balthazar’s death as deliverance – a scene that believers and nonbelievers alike not only accept (for that matter, we accept vampires and “Looney Tunes”), but feel in our bones. Call it devastating, apocalyptic, inspiring, redemptive, beautiful – “unhappy” doesn’t cut it.

Bresson found his stimulus in a remark Myshkin makes about the delight fulness of a braying donkey in “The Idiot” (Dostoevsky provided much of his source material, though he also accessed Bernanos, Diderot, Mallory, and Tolstoy, among others), but the closest he comes to suggesting Myshkin’s crazy benignity is in the character of the alcoholic Arnold (Jean-Claude Guilbert), who may or may not be a serial killer: He is falsely accused of informing on local thugs, inherits unwanted money, and accepts punishment and death with a bemused indifference. Arnold is a relatively minor yet essential figure: He saves Balthazar’s life, tries to brain him, and terminates his idyll in the circus.Ah yes, the circus – in which Balthazar exchanges meaningful looks with other animals, a stunning episode that probably can’t be described (QED) without making the film and the describer sound foolish.

The central human character is a girl, Marie – played unforgettably by Anne Wiazemsky, an amateur (with few exceptions, Bresson rejected professional actors for his films) – whose life mirrors that of Balthazar. A heartbreaker, Marie is brutalized in a masochistic relationship with Gerard, the tormentor of Balthazar, whom she loves and neglects. By the time Gerard is finished with her, her capacity for love is extinguished.

Bresson believes in motiveless malignancy; he is less interested in why people behave than in the unintended consequences of cause and effect. For one example, Marie’s fatally proud father chases off the bland yet faithful Jacques, who might deliver her from drudgery, setting her up for the fall that will destroy them all.

Ultimately, they all accept their fate, which Bresson seems to admire – his actors typically lower their eyes in desolate humility. Balthazar runs away twice, but cannot escape his burdens. Marie runs from the thug Gerard but only gets a few yards, then waits to see what will happen. People pray and their prayers are unanswered or renounced. God is inactive, yet present – not least in the remarkable soundtrack. The score mixes pop records blaring on Gerard’s radio, Balthazar braying, and in rare instances a passage from Schubert’s Piano Sonata No. 20 – godly music oddly dispensed. We hear it during the opening credits, in the final moments of the donkey’s ascension, and, inexplicably, when Gerald threatens Balthazar with fire and the donkey acquiesces.

Balthazar is an object, a useful tool to most of his owners. He may, as the title suggests, represent a random soul, but his life is blessed and a blessing.

“L’Argent” is a darker film, shot in cold, metallic colors, also concerned with a relayed object.The tool here is a forged banknote that brings ruin to most of those who pawn it off on unsuspecting dupes, defining a world so devious that petty crime leads to wholesale slaughter. Except for a prison prayer group, spiritual comfort is nowhere to be found. The central character, Yvon, loses his job, freedom, child, wife, moral compass, and sanity, retaining only his spooky tranquility – he attempts suicide with Valium, which his body seems to naturally manufacture – as he delivers himself to the police, having axed an entire family, including a crippled child.

In this film, redemption is no longer an episode to observe, but something for us, Bresson’s collaborators, to experience. As the murderer is taken into custody, the crowd gawks in shadows with a there-but-for-fortune curiosity, emphasizing a randomness that might have fastened on any of those faceless souls, luring him or her into madness. Bresson’s choice is especially severe, given his source material – Tolstoy’s last novella, published posthumously, “The Forged Coupon.” Tolstoy tells his story in two parts, the first an ethical thriller in which the coupon poisons the souls of all who handle it; the second a didactic reverie on contagious Christianity – the murderer achieves sainthood, and infects everyone else with goodness and a desire to help the peasantry.

Bresson adapted the first half with remarkable fidelity, but beyond the confession and an anecdote concerning a Robin Hood thief, he skips the second part. Tolstoy’s tutorial is ridiculous, a pipe dream – yet Bresson doesn’t reject it entirely. Malignancy is everywhere: A transition from city to country suggests at first a contamination of the natural life, but it is already polluted with exploitation and despair – the doomed widow with whom Yvon shares one exquisitely erotic moment (eating hazelnuts) courts her own destruction. As do we all: The crimes that instigate the mounting atrocities are nothing special – just paltry lies and selfish connivances. Rather than dramatize a relay of saintliness, Bresson takes a far more radical approach, extending the spiral of madness directly from the screen to the audience, as Yvon walks toward the camera, forcing us back on our own resources.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.