silver nitrate notes

Pickpocket and the Hands at the Gare de Lyon

19 dec 2022

Bresson's Pickpocket (1959), his third collaboration with Léonce-Henri Burel, is a film about a young Parisian pickpocket named Michel (Martin LaSalle) who works the train stations and race tracks of the city, gets better at his craft, falls in love, and eventually gets caught. The film is seventy-six minutes long. It contains, on a careful count, approximately six lines of dialogue per minute. It is also, on several lists, one of the greatest films ever made.

Burel and Bresson work out, in this film, how to photograph hands. Pickpocketing is a manual art. Michel and his colleagues move wallets, watches, money clips in precise choreographed actions. Bresson shot the pickpocket sequences over several weeks in actual Parisian train stations, using Kassagi (a professional pickpocket and magician) as both technical consultant and occasional double for the close-up hand inserts. Burel photographed the hands with a tight, shallow-focus lens at conversational height. The wallets move from jacket to hand to inner pocket in single takes. We see the entire mechanism.

The Gare de Lyon sequence is the set piece. Michel and two colleagues work a crowded platform at rush hour. The three pickpockets move through the crowd in a choreographed pattern, passing stolen wallets to each other so that no single one of them is holding anything when a policeman looks at them. Burel shot the sequence with multiple cameras at ground level, so that the crowd could flow through the frame naturally. The cuts in the edit are on the hands. We see one man lift a wallet. We see a second take it from him. We see a third pocket it. The choreography is the shot.

The film's theological frame is the same as Bresson's other work. Michel is a young man convinced that an extraordinary person is entitled to commit crimes an ordinary person is not. The philosophical source is Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, which Bresson acknowledged. What Michel learns, by the end of the film, is the same thing Raskolnikov learns: that there is no such thing as an extraordinary person. The final scene, in the prison visiting room, with Jeanne (Marika Green) pressing her hand against Michel's through the bars, is the closest Bresson's cinema ever comes to direct tenderness. It lasts about twelve seconds. Then the film ends.

[ « prev: Night of the Hunter · next: The Virgin Spring » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Bresson, Robert. Notes on the Cinematograph. Urizen, 1977.
[2] Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film. University of California Press, 1972.
[3] Reader, Keith. Robert Bresson. Manchester UP, 2000.
[4] Cunneen, Joseph. Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film. Continuum, 2003.