No matter how much one may love the cinema, purity is something that we rarely find on the screen. Wonder, yes. Spectacle, emotion by the bucketload, but purity, very rarely.
And Au Hasard Balthazar is the zenith of purity in the cinema. Through this matchless masterpiece, Bresson has shown us what the cinema might have been if it did not have the crushing obligation to make money.
For many years I regarded this as the greatest film ever made - and it still could deserve that epithet. What is certain is that with Balthazar, Bresson entered a form of expression in cinema that is so profound that it almost burns you to watch it.
Of course it's not about a donkey, but the sins of the world. And it is a measure of Bresson's staggering achievement that at the end of the film you can actually believe that you have witnessed the sins of the world. And it leaves you not shocked, nor angry - though both emotions are entirely appropriate - but numb with a desperate sadness.
On top of all of this, it is also the film which is the subject of probably the finest piece of film criticism in the English language - Andrew Sarris' long and wonderful review of it in The Village Voice on its initial New York release. That ends, 'it stands alone atop one of the loftiest pinnacles of artistically realised emotional experiences.'
And so it does.
And Au Hasard Balthazar is the zenith of purity in the cinema. Through this matchless masterpiece, Bresson has shown us what the cinema might have been if it did not have the crushing obligation to make money.
For many years I regarded this as the greatest film ever made - and it still could deserve that epithet. What is certain is that with Balthazar, Bresson entered a form of expression in cinema that is so profound that it almost burns you to watch it.
Of course it's not about a donkey, but the sins of the world. And it is a measure of Bresson's staggering achievement that at the end of the film you can actually believe that you have witnessed the sins of the world. And it leaves you not shocked, nor angry - though both emotions are entirely appropriate - but numb with a desperate sadness.
On top of all of this, it is also the film which is the subject of probably the finest piece of film criticism in the English language - Andrew Sarris' long and wonderful review of it in The Village Voice on its initial New York release. That ends, 'it stands alone atop one of the loftiest pinnacles of artistically realised emotional experiences.'
And so it does.