are films where plot and meaning are highly stylized by the director's unique manner of uniting/fusing his intellectual and aesthetic maneuvers into one alive cinematic organism. The donkey "Balthazar"
in "Au Hazard" symbolizes not only the human body but the human soul, while the bodies of the young people in "Devil" symbolize the very intelligence of nature as a pantheistically spiritual creation. In the two films (separated by the period of eleven years), Bresson compares the ignorantly indifferent and the passively cruel position of a modern society (obsessed with wealth and glamour and occupied with philistinism of "success" and competition) towards children and youth. With grace of a seeker for truth and with a sarcasm of moral frustration, Bresson depicts how today's system of values becomes more and more anti-spiritual, and for this reason more and more anti-human.
Moral radicalism of both films addresses the heart of the viewers with an insistency and intensity of a prophet's demand, and it could be unbearable to receive, if not visual harmony and the rhythmic beauty of Bresson's narrations.
These films - two chapters in the history of Western sensibility, is a scandalous verdict on the behavioral anti-Christianity of the so called Christian societies.
Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com to read an essay about Bresson's two films: "Balthazar, Marie, Charles, Alberte, Edvige, Valentine (To be Victimized Against our Will as an 'Existential' Law" [posted on Sept. 27, 2010]), with analysis of shots from the films, and also articles dedicated to the films by Godard, Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, Resnais, Pasolini, Fassbinder, Antonioni, Bertolucci, Alain Tanner and Liliana Cavani.
By Victor Enyutin
October 28, 2010
Top Critic
