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Robert Bresson’s seminal film Au hasard Balthazar from 1966 opens with a tender, fragmented image of a donkey’s hind legs and back, its calf reaching for milk, as the distant bleating of a herd of sheep echoes through the frame. What begins as a scene of apparent pastoral idyll gradually unfolds into a harrowing tale of suffering, tracing the animal’s life through a series of human cruelties and indifferences. At the time of its release, some critics dismissed the film’s austere tone and apparent mundanity. Indeed, Ingmar Bergman famously quipped, “It was so boring I fell asleep … A donkey, to me, is completely uninteresting.”
For Bresson, however, the donkey was anything but. The equine animal is used in his film as a way of interrogating the very mechanics of cinema; an anti-heroic figure which serves to dismantle narrative conventions. In line with his post-war French film contemporaries, Bresson rejected the motion of plot-driven spectacle and linear causality akin...More
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Press Release
Robert Bresson’s seminal film Au hasard Balthazar from 1966 opens with a tender, fragmented image of a donkey’s hind legs and back, its calf reaching for milk, as the distant bleating of a herd of sheep echoes through the frame. What begins as a scene of apparent pastoral idyll gradually unfolds into a harrowing tale of suffering, tracing the animal’s life through a series of human cruelties and indifferences. At the time of its release, some critics dismissed the film’s austere tone and apparent mundanity. Indeed, Ingmar Bergman famously quipped, “It was so boring I fell asleep … A donkey, to me, is completely uninteresting.”
For Bresson, however, the donkey was anything but. The equine animal is used in his film as a way of interrogating the very mechanics of cinema; an anti-heroic figure which serves to dismantle narrative conventions. In line with his post-war French film contemporaries, Bresson rejected the motion of plot-driven spectacle and linear causality akin...More
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