Word: almost
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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THERE COULD probably be no more appropriate film with which to close a series entitled "The Crisis in Narrative Cinema" than Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. Bresson's work is highly individualistic, representative of no particular movement in the current cinema, and thus almost alone among current French filmmakers he has not benefitted by the surge of interest in the new-wave in this country. This is particularly unfortunate since Bresson is one of the few truly great living directors, and the unavailability of his films here makes us truly poorer indeed. Pickpocket, made in 1959, represents the very essence...
...areas of light into which he invariably steps. At a central point in the film he goes to visit his dying mother. As he lies to her about her health and bends over her bed, rays or light cross him like prison bars. That light should entrap is something almost inpermissible in our set of conventions; Bresson's use of it to convey a value almost totally discredited in our society is as daring as it is right...
...Landlord wants us to move. He originally gave us the place for a couple of months and we've been here almost two years. It isn't political repression or anything; he just wants us to move. Besides, there's no one to organize. I can't organize secretaries, businessmen, and cops...
Mike Ferber, Bill Hunt, and the community feeling in the Resistance were probably more convincing than the war as reasons to hand in your draft cards. Almost everyone later decided that there were better places to fight the war than jail. The people who didn't receive 4-F's or 1-Y's took back their 2-S's. It was easy to say that the whole strategy of the Resistance about filling the jails to end the war was wrong. It was good to have a handy rationalization around...
Although Chekhov is depicting a group of people, almost everyone of them is decidedly lonely, and frustrated in one way or another. And they are all ordinary, unexceptional people, essentially failures. Yet they are not carbon copies of each other--except in bad productions. Director Kahn and his players have managed to assure that every single one of these average people is unique, is an individual, is a three-dimensional character, with a past, a present, and--this is important--a future. Chekhov envisions a happier future for later, generations, and underlines the necessity of hard work and hope...