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Film Data
Pickpocket  1959
Director:  Robert Bresson
Producer:
  Agnès Delahaie
Art Director:
  Pierre Charbonnier
Editor:
  Raymond Lamy
Music:
  Jean-Baptiste Lully
Screenplay:
  Robert Bresson
Director of Photography:
  Léonce-Henri Burel
slideshow
Cast:
spacer1 Martin LaSalle spacer1 Marika Green spacer1 Pierre Leymarie spacer1 Jean Pélégri
spacer1 Kassagi spacer1 Pierre Étaix spacer1 Dolly Scal spacer1 César Gattegno
spacer1 Sophie Saint-Just
Uncredited
spacer1 Dominique Zardi
Uncredited
spacer1 spacer1
spacer1 Martin LaSalle spacer1 Marika Green spacer1 Pierre Leymarie
spacer1 Jean Pélégri spacer1 Kassagi spacer1 Pierre Étaix
spacer1 Dolly Scal spacer1 César Gattegno spacer1 Sophie Saint-Just
spacer1 Dominique Zardi spacer1 spacer1
spacer1 Martin LaSalle spacer1 Marika Green
spacer1 Pierre Leymarie spacer1 Jean Pélégri
spacer1 Kassagi spacer1 Pierre Étaix
spacer1 Dolly Scal spacer1 César Gattegno
spacer1 Sophie Saint-Just spacer1 Dominique Zardi

Synopsis:
Voted the greatest postwar French film by Cahiers du Cinéma, Robert Bresson's Pickpocket has exerted an immense and enduring influence on directors as disparate as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Aki Kaurismäki, Louis Malle, Paul Schrader, and Chantal Akerman, who wrote that "seeing Pickpocket is an experience that marks you for the rest of your life," and frequently cited Bresson's film as a formative influence on her own work; and Martin Scorsese, who singled out the film's racetrack sequence as "[one] of the most breathtaking set pieces in cinema."

Loosely based on Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Bresson's terse, intense portrait of Michel (Martin LaSalle), a compulsive thief who believes himself above the moral constraints of common humanity, turns the act of theft into a ritual at once erotic and aesthetic. (The sequences where Michel learns and plies his trade – the "ballets of thievery," as Jean Cocteau called them – are choreographed with dazzling rhythmic precision.) Curiously, the most singular and controversial element of Bresson's aesthetic system, amply evident in Pickpocket, has also been one of the most imitated by later directors: his use of what he called "models," non-professional actors trained in neutral line readings ("Talk as if you're talking to yourself," the director instructed), automatic gestures engendered by dozens of habit-breaking takes, and emotional inexpressiveness. "A film of dazzling originality. On its first viewing, it risks burning your eyes. So, do like me. Go back to see it every day" (Malle).

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