Word: bressons
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...What Bresson is doing with all of this-the frustration of expectation, the off-center perspective, and the naturalism-is measuring the distance between vain idealization and reality. He triggers stock emotional responses and then demonstrates their misapplication. He poses sentimentality only to refute it. He is consciously near-missing the idyllic, falling back to the real...
...BRESSON wants the involvement of emotionalism without its stickiness, and again it is Balthazar that provides the necessary detachment. One by one the human figures fade from the film and Balthazar gradually assumes their sympathetic features...
...Bresson's technique in this regard owes much to literary symbolism. Balthazar is a vessel for emotional associations that multiply as the film proceeds. He is a symbol of the promises of Jacques and the physical love of Gerard. He is a sexual substitute. He is the personification of stoicism. He is variously called a saint, a genius and an anachronism. By the end of the film, he is an embodiment of the whole complex of dramatic relationships...
...Bresson's success is precisely in this capacity to coax sentimentalized associations and then undercut them with his formal austerity-the down-turned camera angles, the quick cutting away from scenes, the static framing. What is left is a nature that is neither scorned nor valued, only accepted for the fact of its existence...
...being used to smuggle goods out of the town, he is deserted and accidentally shot. Slowly bleeding to death, he walks to the middle of a field, lays down and silently dies among a flock of bleating sheep. The immediate impression is of the nobility of the death. But Bresson holds his shot on the heaped mass of dead flesh. And all the humanizing emotions one is tempted to attribute to Balthazar, all the pity one wants to feel for him. all his symbolic reference-one realizes that all that is finally false and quite beside the point. That Balthazar...