Word: closing
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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...
Pickpocket presents the story of a young would be writer named Michel, who, for motives which are never clear to him, becomes a petty thief. Through repeated series of close shots, Bresson chronicles the man's early fumbling attempts, his education in criminal technique, and finally his successive successful efforts in relieving other men of their valuables. Despite the efforts of a friend and an interested police inspector to deter him and prevent his being imprisoned, Michel purposely persists and in the end is caught by a detective who had set himself up as a foil...
...partisan, he was in a sense not political; he commanded the respect of colleagues of all persuasions whatever their opposition to his views. In no small measure the Harvard crisis was moderated and the search for solutions made easier by the special trust even his opponents--many of them close to him personally--respond in him and his integrity...
This is a key to the whole film. While apparently feeling constrained to show tradition and the recent westernization in close proximity, Marker carefully avoids cutting which would imply an ironic intent. No attempt is made to explain the westernization of Japan, nor is the modern seen as un-Japanese. Like Koumiko and the city, tradition and modernity exist within the same framework, and any effect that the one has upon the other is not readily discernible to the outsider. The outsider can merely present an image, which is nothing more than a concrete memory...
Given this, we begin to see why the Koumiko mystery cannot be solved. From the first shot of Koumiko, an extreme close-up of her eyes, she is seen as a love object. Since the film was edited in France (a fact purposely presented to the audience), it is clear that Koumiko is a memory. Marker is an outsider to Koumiko not only because he is a European but because he is a man. (The similarities between this and Hiroshima, Mon Amour are obvious and, I believe, intentional.) Solving the mystery would destroy the romantic quality both of the woman...