A Film Canon

With Pickpocket, Bresson invents a physical language that stands in relation to (nascent) post-industrial space as classical slapstick does to industrial space, expanding the manual literacy that preoccupied A Man Escaped into a system of friendship, romance and, ultimately, political solidarity, and enlivening the hand to the extent that it not merely becomes a substitute for the face, but the purveyor of language and signification, whether in its various, tactical forays across printed surfaces (newspapers, train timetables, a classic study in pickpocketing), or in its production of the diary entries that effectively constitute the script. Narratively, this corresponds to Michel's (Martin LaSalle) recognition that his paranoid need for physical and intellectual privacy can only be achieved by immersing himself in the anonymity of rapidly moving crowds; or, alternatively, his recognition that post-industrial life somehow precludes the physical abstraction represented by his cell-like room (and the jail cell with which it becomes continuous), such that the only opportunity for escape becomes a radical identification with it's spaces and processes - an attempt to deindividuate himself to the point where he eludes reflection in the spirals of glass and mirrors that constitute those spaces, which the camera poetically embodies in a series of extravagant (for Bresson) tracking-shots - until he finally manages to identify himself with the very demographic he is pickpocketing. The result is a distant, catholic socialism, and the most perfect vehicle for Bresson's replacement of actors with "models", insofar as the near-inanimate, luminous physicality of the latter represents another form of this radical identification: "These walls, these bars, I don't care...I don't even see them..."