Writing about film makes you appreciate the film.
You think.
What will I say about this picture?
This succession of pictures.
Sounds.
And so silently you ponder the ways to express true genius.
And how lucky we are to witness true genius.
It’s true.
The Criterion Collection has brought us many films which otherwise might have been forgotten.
Film didn’t begin with The Godfather.
It doesn’t end with Citizen Kane.
And so we need to see the other stuff.
We need to hear voices from outside of America.
Hollywood is international, to be sure, yet everything which enters there leaves marked.
It is a sentiment which Godard expressed in his magnum opus Histoire(s) du cinema.
And this is the other stuff.
Robert Bresson.
You might only know Henri-Cartier Bresson. Don’t stop there.
Robert Bresson was the master of taking non-actors and capturing their vitality on film.
Pickpocket does justice to Uruguay as much as did Isidore Ducasse (which is to say, completely).
Martin LaSalle, a young Urugayan-French actor in his film debut, plays the lead role here of the pickpocket Michel.
LaSalle’s eggshell acting is essential to this masterpiece.
Yet, it is director Bresson who brings the ballet of crime to life.
Yes, it is like Orson Wells doing his magic tricks in F for Fake (his magnum opus).
Indeed, everything has an art. Even crime.
And as paper currency disappears from the industrialized world we see the migration of subway thieves to the ether in an attempt to pilfer Apple Pay “money”.
Yes, I’m afraid that soon everything will need quotes around it.
Perhaps I just don’t understand.
But, there is an art to everything.
Take accounting, for instance: the most boring subject invented by human beings.
And yet, there is an “art” to it…I’m sure…somewhere…deep, deep down inside.
But Pickpocket is of a different era.
Perhaps computer hacking and financial calculator operations require a certain finger dexterity, but nothing like the prestidigitation which Bresson brings to life in this film.
It is a noiseless ballet of lifts, drops, catches, exchanges, etc. Buttons flicked. Buckles finessed in one motion.
It reminds me of the one true line in Goldfinger…perhaps the only genuinely cinematic moment in that film (though I love the other 99% pulp)…
Delivered by the title character, as played by Gert Fröbe, it goes a little something like this:
“Man has climbed Mount Everest, gone to the bottom of the ocean. He’s fired rockets at the Moon, split the atom, achieved miracles in every field of human endeavor… except crime!”
Ahhh…the rolled Rrrrs of that final word. Like H.W.’s brief year at Langley. Like Kissinger at Iron Mountain. Ah! But here we run into a problem.
Hoaxes. Like Sandy Hook. Like Hani Hanjour.
And will Donald Trump have the balls to read a book? Perhaps Webster Griffin Tarpley’s 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA?
I doubt it.
Is Trump a provocateur or merely provocative?
Because if he shot his mouth off a little more pointedly he’d have my vote.
And I would stand with my immigrant brothers and sisters every day to see Dick Cheney take the stand. Under oath.
And Philip Zelikow. Under oath.
And Donald Rumsfeld. Under oath.
And Larry Silverstein. And Rudy Giuliani. And Richard Myers.
Somebody else did it? Then you got nothing to worry about.
Unravel unravel unravel.
Because Trump is wrong about immigration.
And Bernie Sanders is right about Snowden.
And I don’t like Trump or Sanders.
But Trump is the only one even tangentially touching on the real issue: truth.
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Off the rails. Film review.
C’est la vie.
Conspiracy.
Don’t mind me.
I will just go back to watching films.
Go back to sleep.
Nothing to see here.
-PD
paulydeathwish 