alr

Pickpocket

Screening on Film
Directed by Robert Bresson.
With Martin Lassalle, Marika Green, Pierre Leymarie.
France, 1959, 35mm, black & white, 75 min.
French with English subtitles.

The first film for which director Robert Bresson composed an entirely original script, this tale of a lonely young man who embarks on a career as a petty thief was to some extent inspired by Crime and Punishment. In Pickpocket, however, Bresson deals more directly with themes of submission and salvation: “With theft I entered by the back door into the kingdom of morality,” the director stated. After being arrested, Bresson’s novice thief reflects on the morality of a life of crime but, although temporarily deterred, returns to his “vocation” after lessons from a master pickpocket. Voted by Cahiers du cinéma as the greatest French film of the postwar era, Bresson’s masterpiece has been praised by generations of fellow directors, including Louis Malle, who described it as “one of the four or five major events in the history of cinema.”

Part of film series

Read more

Serge Daney:
L’Homme cinéma

Other film series with this film

Read more

Treasures from the Harvard Film Archive: N–R

Read more

The Film Experience: Existentialist Adaptations

Read more

Masterworks of World Cinema

Read more

The Complete Robert Bresson

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Melville et Cie.

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf