Pickpocket

The protagonist—a principled pickpocket—refuses to work like everyone else and can’t love like everyone else. He moves through the world as if it were a game with hidden rules, where people are chess pieces in a match he’s already lost. His hands have a life of their own, choosing which pocket to slip into—what matters to him is not the crime itself, but its choreography. In this strange dance of gestures, what emerges is not a story of theft, but a study in observation, a laboratory of purity: of purified movement, purified speech, purified gaze. The camera strives to remain unnoticed, and the non-professional actors don’t perform—they simply act. There are only movements, the voids between them, and editing, which turns it all into poetry.

Bresson on Pickpocket:
 “People don’t understand that creation is, above all, reduction, squeezing out the unnecessary. It’s the necessity of choice. The most dangerous thing for a film is sloppiness, overload, disorder. Too many incompatible elements end up in the pot. On top of that comes dramatic art (which has no place here) and muddles things even further. What I try to do is capture reality—fragments of reality—in the purest form possible, and then arrange them in a specific order. This can give an unprepared viewer a feeling of austerity and dryness, which they don’t experience with ordinary films and which may puzzle them deeply by comparison.”