Pickpocket: Choreographed Masterpiece!
Ankur Agarwal writes about Robert Bresson’s 1959 masterpiece Pickpocket
Pickpocket (1959)
Michel is the Raskolnikoff: he is the man who thinks he can take law in his hands, since he is “intellectual”, and he can do what he wishes to. He should at least be better than so many others he silently detests. What makes the novel and the film script diverge widely are the acts which Raskolnikoff and Michel commit: while the former commits the murder of an old woman, an usurer, the latter becomes a petty thief, a pickpocket. In the former case, it’s one act against someone taken symbolic for the world’s insensibility, and greed, and power. In the latter case, it’s an obsession against the world itself, and a chain of actions from which the perpetrator finds himself unable to extricate.
Raskolnikoff’s redemption lay in the soul, in his being cured of anarchy, of being in love with the people as they are, with himself, with Sonia. Michel’s redemption, to me, lies more in getting the love that he always was hungry for, and which he could have got earlier if not for the fixated obsession. Of course, the book has a strong antithesis in the lawyer who confronts and plays the cat-and-mouse game with Raskolnikoff; while the film seems to have all its sympathies with the anarchist, and in fact has a brilliantly, erotically charged sequence of men being looted on a train, a sequence which I would have expected more in some film rendition of Artful Dodger (”Oliver Twist”) rather than here.
As a film, it stands brilliantly on its own, mainly because of the character played by Martin LaSalle - the brooding, nervous, obsessive character of Michel. The brilliantly choreographed robbery scenes and the vulnerable beauty of Marika Green add to the film, though to what and in which degrees depends on how much you can bear an anarchist interpretation of one of the greatest anti-anarchist arguments by Dostoyevsky. The character of the heroine in the film again leaves a lot desired for - while Marika Green certainly looks the vulnerable working class, she doesn’t look the girl to fire the spark of reform in a man, much less a man whose rot is more moral, more inner, more mental than most whose vices are more picked-up habits, extraneous. I did love the film for its minimal use of dialogues, its quintessential French-ness, and the erotic pleasure with which most scenes are shot (not only the robbery scenes, but also the final scene in the prison between LaSalle and Marika, where once again human hands are the focus). And I equally hated it for the lack of sincerity with which it was made: half-hearted character interpretations of Jacques (Michel’s friend) and the police inspector make serious flaws in the composition of the film.
My Rating: 
(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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A couple of years back while watching Godard’s Elgoe d lamour during one of the scene, the protagonist is standing outside a theatre, and two film posters are lined adjacent to each other: Pickpocket and Matrix, and the voice over plays the evocative dialogue from Pickpocket: “Oh, Jeanna, what a strange path I had to take to reach you”, its that key scene from a Godard film which reminded me the power and greatness which Pickpocket still possessed, incidentally released in the same year as Breatheless. Pickpocket is pure Cinema, if there is something in that dimension still being explored: model acting (Bresson technique of purification of cinema from theatre), its hard cuts, soft dissolves and most importantly the usage of ellipses. I mean the first time I saw it I almost felt like an outsider, something new, something different, no doubt when Paul Schrader talks the music becoming transcendental when it gently shifts from basic function as a noise into non-digetic symphony.
I last saw this film three years back and it’s just the gestures, the transition of spaces (usually it achieves a repetitive recursion with the opening and closing of doors and movement through stairways); the rigidity of model acting, the flatness of the photographic image, and the noise is what I still remember. Bresson is least concerned with any sort of plot device or story per se, even the character interpretation if full realized would have added nothing to the film, since that is something that dint interest him at all, and in no inherent way does it shows a lack of sincerity as Bresson was mainly using the Dostoyevsky’ text as fulcrum ant not a parameter, beside it does owe some element to hard-nut-non-stop-talkative- Sam Fuller Pickup on South Street, but that’s a different analogy.
And if there is any flaw in this masterpiece is that its quintessential cinema something you don’t get to see in everyday realities or even filmic space, but something which can exist in the world of Robert Bresson and this may just be tough for most people to digest. As J Hoberman the great American critic put:
“Bluntly put, to not get Bresson is to not get the idea of motion pictures—it’s to have missed that train the Lumiére brothers filmed arriving at Lyon station 110 years ago”
What you are basically saying, Nitesh, that you fully agree with MGM’s slogan, “Art for Art’s sake”. I never disagreed more.
Yes, as a film, when viewed in isolation, it stands very, very well. But can we, and more importantly should we, see a film like that? Forget should we, can we? You are very right in pointing out to the absence of causality in the movie, the ellipses, and it’s no surprise that Godard pays a tribute to him, another director who broke causality at will. But Godard usually suceeded in putting a meaning, a tension underlying his ellipses, unlike Bresson. If you have watched Godard’s “Vivre Sa Vie”, the extraordinary broken flow of the film, the lack of causality only lends emphasis to the film’s subject, a girl who has strayed into the life of a prostitute even when there was no need to. And lends style.
When Bresson does the same here, he only succeeds in creating a very effective anarchist argument, and thus he is still delivering a message. No one can make a film to be viewed in total isolation as a film, unless sheer poetry like Carax’s “Boy Meets Girl”. Dostoyevsky’s novel is not the fulcrum here; the whole film is just a badly simplified version of the novel. Bresson could have easily dispensed with the police detective; all the scenes in which the hero confronts the policeman are not only superfluous to a movie otherwise tightly framed and conceived, but are poorly acted, conceived and shot. Especially the scene in which the policeman comes to the hero’s house and traces a line on the dust-laden book. This is why I still call it a frivolous attempt by the filmmaker; if he had no designs to expand upon a character, to build a character, as you say, then there was no need at all of the policeman and even the hero’s friend. This would have made the film in fact tighter, more brooding, more anarchist!
If someone was able to invent the atom bomb, he invented it, and the result? Art for art’s sake, science for science’s sake, are simply arguments by people who know a technique very well but lack a higher ability to put a technique to good use. A film should either be uplifting poetry or absorbing story, neither of which “Pickpocket” is, for me. Yes, I love the tight framing, a kind of wait for something throughout the film, LaSalle’s broodedness, but this does not deter me from seeing the kind of loose-jointedness which it has simultaneously. Would you call Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers” greater than “Great Expectations”, just because the former has better and truer episodes of life painted? I would not. The parts should make a whole.
Thanks a lot for your comments, Nitesh. They made me think! You are welcome to engage further in discussion.
“Art for Art sake”, not much “Science for Science” neither, what I mainly believe is in the significance of the mise-en-scene, the properties of the cinematographic process. Robin Wood summed well in one his first published articles:
“A director is about to make a film. He has before him a script, camera, lights, decor, and actors. What he does with them is mise-en-scene, and it is precisely here that the artistic significance of the film, if any, lies”.
Hence when you put: “Dostoyevsky’s novel is not the fulcrum here; the whole film is just a badly simplified version of the novel.”
It seriously does not make this movie flawed, bad, or any such clauses, since the mark for greatness in cinema lies somewhere else. Why should I compare the “film” to its influenced “source” material, when the director is not interested in illustrating text, perhaps that’s a major reason, for me, that an argument to talk about the flawed properties of the film on that count is totally baseless.
Andre Bazin wrote about a similar account in his essay on Bresson’s “The Diary of he Country Priest:
“If he had really been faithful to the book, Bresson would have made quite a different film. Determined thought he was to add nothing to the original- already a subtle from of betrayal by omission.”
So, then, I believe, it’s important to understand and justify greatness of cinema on properties inherent to it, and not subordinate part of the medium. There absolutely can be ways to look at films, but I believe, when one makes a distinction when talking about images and creation of images alone, everything else falls behind. So, when, you say, Pickpocket, as a flawed masterpiece on the basis of its sheer flaws in dramaturgy or emotional impotence that is something not totally how this film could be justified. Since in the first place, Bresson for this film was least bothered about telling a story and emotional exuberance from actors is something he totally detested: hence his actors were mere ‘ models’ as he called them.
I think all masters of cinema from the time of Lumiere Brothers to Abbas Kiaorstami make film which can be viewed in total isolation as film and film alone. And, Leos Crax masterpiece is just a small drop in the library of great films in this category. I quite dint see any form of anarchy in this Bressionisn tale only if, his idea to move away from illustrated text, boisterous theatric seem like an anarchy? Perhaps, the title could be more associated with Godardian way of making films during 60s than Bresson. Since Bresson was more concerned with finding ways to make cinema and not break rules. Godard has never been up there in using ellipses so effectively like Bresson, and his idea in My Life to Live was more of a Brechtian device to break the flow of narrative which does bring in a meaning to his sound, image and text dissociation, though the purpose of the device is purely theatrical which does manifest in the final tableau. Hence, this tableau does not serve as ellipses but more as a foreword to the image. Since, the omission of scene is not effectively taking places (absence). This Godardian tract of dissociation of what see (visual) to what we read (text) brings in the formalistic style (to seek inside from the outside, hence it does give it the “emotional push unlike Pickpocket which is seeing inside from inside and uses no theatrical devices, and Godard tableau never achieves the sheer austerity of the use of ellipses in Bresson Cinema. Take for example, from Pickpocket:
“The two- year absence of Micahel is broken down into one single 23 sec shot of him writing in his diary. Only to see him return back to Paris in the same dress we see him leaves”
I mean, doesn’t this ellipse bring a tension to the image and also the photographic character being captured. Since the absence in the form of any expression or gestures in his actors, to the omission of crucial evidence in what we take for granted as “narrative” necessity including the allegiance to sourced text brings a certain verisimilitude to the film. E.H. Gombrich in Art and Illusion calls this the “beholder’s share” of the aesthetic experience, and Bresson creates this effect with the sheer mastery of absence from acting use of ellipses and narrative fragments. So, these absences allows us to “project” our thoughts as we start filling this absence, that’s why it’s very difficult for most people to effectively watch a Bresson film. Similarly the way Bresson mixes and uses his sound in his films makes it as an important part of the narrative to tell story through absence of sound and images. For example: The use of it can be seen during the racetrack scene where the sound of the off-screen presence of horses, the overall atmospheric chatter and experience of the milieu could also be build even when we don’t see the actual race. Even in the end when the music finally moves in, the almost expressive use of sound fills one emotionally without any source of pretence of presenting it in the characters or during the course of the film. So the sudden introduction of this non-digetic sound makes it part of our sensation.
As u said:
If someone was able to invent the atom bomb, he invented it, and the result? Art for art’s sake, science for science’s sake, are simply arguments by people who know a technique very well but lack a higher ability to put a technique to good use. A film should either be uplifting poetry or absorbing story, neither of which “Pickpocket” is, for me. Yes, I love the tight framing, a kind of wait for something throughout the film, LaSalle’s broodedness, but this does not deter me from seeing the kind of loose-jointedness which it has simultaneously. Would you call Dickens’s “Pickwick Papers” greater than “Great Expectations”, just because the former has better and truer episodes of life painted? I would not. The parts should make a whole.
I don’t agree with this particular notion in the case of Robert Bresson who came from a background in painting and tried to invent or understand cinema. Trying to strip it away from its sub-ordinate obligation and create visual language- syntax, idiom, through the use of absence, restraint emotions, self-reflection- which one can do so in a Bresson film like a mirror and not be obliged to make art for art sake. He just dint shoot innumerable takes or with the same 50 mm Normal lens because he knew his techniques, but he shot, he composed, he created because he was ready till the very end to understand cinema, a medium still very much hanging in mystery. And quite frankly he could never put his technique to great use like most directors, because he was always trying to understand it. The “Camera” offers a “Gaze” which a “pen” or a “paintbrush” does not hence all great directors have always have lost their higher ability to put their technique to good use. When the director start questioning the power of the “Gaze” and in the purpose to understand “images” the techniques fail them, and it is this flaw that makes their aesthetic remarkable, and their mise-en- scene exemplary. Pickpocket is its finest example, its cinema and cinema alone it does not need to be poetry nor it needs a story it can exist only in the illusion of the photographic image for which it should never be judged even subjectively on the basic properties to which it owes just a mere casual encounter. Just as Brain Parain in Vivre sa Vie says, error is necessary for that discovery of the truth, and hence, the casual encounter (text) is just a way to find the path to cinema. What use is Cinema if it trails after literature? Nothing. Can’t say much about the Dickens analogy, not a very well read person. It reminds me an anecdote: ” Godard was asked to make King Lear, but he had never read anything by Shakespeare; except the movies based on his plays, neither did he go out and read his text, so the end product was made out of the images and fragments of Cinema, no wonder it shocked the world, after all, Godard just killed two birds with one stone: Norman Mailer and Shakespeare.
In the end as Jean Luc Godard put:
“”Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music”
Thanks for your reply ankur and this discussion, the comment just got long- cinephilic testosterone to blame. Just was curious to know whether you got a good print of Boy Meets Girl?
Hi Nitesh, it’s been an engaging discussion so far. And I would continue with it in a broader scope soon, maybe as a completely different article here.
Of course, we would never be reconciled, for I cannot see an artist’s art in isolation as just something which proves the artist to be great. Especially cinema. It’s just not an image, a sound, even a composition in isolation. There is a certain integrity, which of course the film in question too has. But there’s also a purpose behind everything. Otherwise, art begins to like like those ultra-literary poems, filled with great words, placed at deft places, marking the right pauses, yet somehow inferior to the simple, well-formed, flowing poems.