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Pickpocket

Pickpocket

Robert Bresson


  • Country: France
  • Year: 1959
  • Language: French
  •  
  • Runtime: 75 min.

Along with Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson is one of the cinema's paramount filmmakers of faith, wrestling with questions of damnation, salvation and transcendence in settings ranging from Arthurian Britain to present-day Paris.

Cinematheque

screening times

    • Friday October 1
    • 5:00:00 PM
    • Tiff Bell LightBox 3
    • Wednesday October 20
    • 6:30:00 PM
    • Tiff Bell LightBox 3

Note: indicates Premium Screening.

official description

NEW PRINT!

Along with Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky and Carl Theodor Dreyer, Robert Bresson is one of the cinema's paramount filmmakers of faith, wrestling with questions of damnation, salvation and transcendence in settings ranging from Arthurian Britain to present-day Paris. His masterpiece Pickpocket, loosely based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, is an intense portrait of Michel (Martin LaSalle), a compulsive thief who, in true Raskolnikovian fashion, believes himself above the moral constraints of common humanity. Jousting with a dogged police inspector (Jean Pélégri) and entranced by a fetchingly innocent neighbor (Marika Green), Michel seeks to carry his Nietzschean course out to the end—or is he courting damnation to reaffirm his faith in something higher than himself? One of the foundational films of the modern cinema, Pickpocket exemplifies the uncanny precision and transporting beauty of Bresson's fiercely personal aesthetic.

Thanks to Sarah Finklea and Fumiko Takagi, Janus Films.

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