Word: films
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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...
...pickpocketing itself are all dominated by blacks, the color of the wallet or the clothing of the victims. Michel himself, however, always wears a white shirt and either his room or the corridor outside contain 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...
Koumiko Muroaka is a woman, who, we are told, Marker "met by accident" when he was filming the Tokyo Olympics. She is apolitical, extremely beautiful, highly independent, and, Marker insists, representative of nothing other than herself. The film consists of Marker's visions of Tokyo, his visions of Koumiko, his visions of Tokyo as tempered by Koumiko, and Koumiko's visions of herself as interpreted by Marker. Instead of treating these sequentially, Marker intercuts these segments, making sure to indicate clearly which point of view is being given. Multiple points of view, equally valid and independent, destroy any direct causal...
TROPICI'S narrative barely manages to hold one's attention. When the director isn't senselessly simulating documentary reality--for some incomprehensible reason he feels compelled to film every passenger clambering aboard the truck--he is indulging himself in cheap pyrotechnics. For what it's worth, a smidgen of narrative tension is supplied by a dissident passenger who knows what Sao Paolo holds and how their employers will treat them: "Your have to watch out for those gringoes ... they don't like paying money for nothing." He plans to give them the slip once they hit the city, or else...
...documentary concerns, to deal with them not in isolation but in interaction. This failure gives his statement on foreign exploitation the ring of a superficial overview, rendering it less forceful, less immediate and real. The few times he manages to bring both elements into focus at once are the film's high points--for instance, a panning shot of the passengers waiting for their truck at a gas station starts out as a simple portrait, but is interrupted as a Texaco gas pump passes before us in the foreground. Too bad these moments are structurally isolated, a few good ideas...