Re-Examining Bresson’s Carpentry
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Robert Bresson’s “Pickpocket” opens today at Film Forum in a new 35mm print, presenting anew the problem of what remains to be said about this singular French filmmaker, considered by many one of the great artists of the 20th century – and by others a dour, overrated mannerist.
I’m not interested in defending Bresson against the charges of the latter camp. I suppose there’s still a crowd who thinks of Braque as a second-rate Cubist who devolved into the maker of ugly bird pictures, but they’re not the sort of people worth getting into arguments with. Neither will it do any good to kneel at the shrine of St. Bresson, transcendental artist, and preach his ineffable genius. Let’s try something else. Let’s go through the front door.
“Pickpocket” atomizes the existence of a petty thief named Michel (Martin LaSalle), his talent, isolation, eventual entrapment, and possible redemption through the love of a woman named Jeanne (Markia Green). The film is an existential noir (in shades of gray), a parable of the spirit, a strange kind of love story, an ode to manual dexterity, a redaction of “Crime and Punishment,” and massively influential (“Taxi Driver” is only the most famous of its descendents).
It’s also the greatest movie ever made about doorways.
Bresson insists you notice them: Many a scene is framed by the image of an empty doorway through which someone will momentarily step, or has moments ago passed through. Every second counts in a film this concise, and a striking number of them return again and again to these spaces. (Someone ought to assemble them into a montage; it would be beautiful and inevitable.) “Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence,” runs one of Bresson’s famous aphorisms. Yet what, aside from a declaration of visual simplicity, is being said?
All doors open and close around Michel. Great attention is paid to the passage between his spartan Parisian apartment and the hallway, and the space that connects his building to the street. Incident in “Pickpocket,” physical and otherwise, circulates from public to private, inside and out.
Bresson’s meticulously chosen images are always concrete, functional bits of the material world. True, each of his films builds a complex symbolic structure, but they also create intelligible places, palpable milieus. You could read “Pickpocket” in strictly literal terms and come away with a finely detailed understanding of one man’s existence in mid-century Paris: the layout of his home, the way he wears his clothes, how he moves in a crowd, bedroom, or cafe.
So on one level the fixation on doorways shows us, quite simply, the manner in which Michel moves from one kind of space into another. What movie doesn’t, and who cares anyway? The difference is that Bresson makes you conscious of it, concentrating your attention around the simplest screen phenomena. Anything, everything is meaningful; the artist simply unblocks obstacles to our awareness. Bresson bulldozes assumptions, expectations, habits of mind.
Sometimes a door is just a door, sometimes not. You can walk through the ones in “Pickpocket” wherever you please: into social relations, the realm of the spirit, the labyrinths of formalism, the thickets of theory. Every film is a door of perception, hinging the reality of the audience with imaginative space. There’s one way to penetrate tough Robert Bresson: Examine the carpentry.
Until October 13 at Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street, between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).