Word: pickpocket
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Voilà! Each of Charlie's intentions is given a variety of interpretations, like a sunbeam hitting a prism. A pickpocket on the lam deposits a stolen watch in the tramp's trousers. Charlie looks at the watch-which the original victim spots as his own. A policeman gives chase-and corners Charlie in a hall of mirrors, where an infinity of cops vainly pursues an equal number of tramps. Disappearing into a tent, Chaplin seeks cover during an act. A top-hatted prestidigitator covers a girl with a cloth, walks to a large wardrobe, opens...
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...
Images of entrapment abound in Pickpocket. Michel is consistently found between two people. In more than one case these are police detectives. More interesting, however, are the patterns of light which Bresson manages to achieve. Bresson is fanatical in his use of light. Capable of creating films entirely in whites (Au Hasard Balthazar) or in blacks (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette), in Pickpocket Bresson uses both in conjunction to demonstrate the difference between Michel's acts and their consequences...
...amused at your discussion of pickpockets [June 20]. As an ex-member of a whiz mob (pickpocket group), it is evident to me that the kind of people Detective Inspector Candlish has had his experience with are pretty crude operators. Nor is his information entirely correct. A stall is not a "runner"-whatever that is supposed to be-a stall is an extremely skilled kinetic psychologist who knows exactly how to walk alongside or in front of the "mark" (victim) so that he is forced to slow down or turn aside, right into the wire. This is called "framing...