LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Bresson: Works
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Robert Bresson’s incomparable tale of crime and redemption follows Michel, a young pickpocket who spends his days working the streets, subway cars, and train stations of Paris. As his compulsion grows... so too does his fear that his luck is about to run out. Tautly choreographed and crafted in Bresson’s inimitable style, Pickpocket reveals a master director at the height of his powers.
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For those of you who missed the religious experience of seeing the recent new prints of Bresson's work, 10 of the 13 features are available on tape. (The missing ones are Joan of Arc, Four Nights of a Dreamer, and — unforgivably — Au Hasard Balthazar.) Check out New Yorker Films' web site for most of them or race to your local video store with fists raised.
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Bresson sought literary inspiration for his second film, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Made two years after Les Anges, the film's plot was taken from a novel by Diderot, Jacques le fataliste, and featured dialogue written by Bresson and Jean Cocteau. A tale revolving around a woman's revenge on her seemingly uncaring lover, it was made with professional actors and the same composer and cameraman that Bresson used for his first film. Although it proved to be critically and financially unpopular (owing in part to its use of highly stylized costumes and formal dialogue), it contained the seeds of what would later become hallmarks of Bresson's work, namely the kind of spare, icy calm that pointed to an interior world of quiet alienation.
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For his next film, Une Femme Douce ( A Gentle Creature, 1969), Bresson turned to a short story by Dostoyevsky. The work, his first color film, begins with a woman jumping to her death from the window of her apartment. The events leading up to the suicide are shown in flashback, recounted by her husband as he paces up and down a room in which the body of his dead wife is laid out.
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After his release, Bresson returned to Paris, and during the height of the war he began preparing his first feature-length film, Les Anges du Péché (Angels of Sin). Released in 1943, it was one of his only films to use trained actors, stylized dialogue, and a specially composed soundtrack, features that Bresson would reject in his later work. The film, which revolved around a nun's love and self-sacrifice in the service of the rehabilitation of a fallen woman, showed early indication of the director's preference for a narrative composed of a series of short scenes, as well as a fascination with the details found in human skill and ritual.
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The strongest influence on Bresson seems to have been his Catholicism. Salvation, redemption, suffering, and the nature of the human soul are common themes in his work. His films ... often deal with the struggle between creating your own path in life or submitting to some sort of destiny. Yet, Bresson's works transcend any religious pigeonholing. They hit you on a human level because the moral and philosophical situations depicted in his works are so familiar.
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