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For Les Anges du Pé ché (1943) and Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), Bresson used professional actors, but would never do so again. He chose non-actors ("models," he called them), because they didn't have the habits of theatrical actors, who engaged in "competitions of grimaces." He has them speak in monotones, as if talking to themselves; they move slowly, deliberately. He shot scores of takes, breaking down all pretensions, to find the naked essence of the human being who stood before the camera.

Bresson also focused heavily on the soundtrack, recording his characters more in voice-over than in dialogue, flattening his images to bring out the sound. "The eye is lazy; the ear, on the contrary, invents," he told Jean Luc Godard in Cahiers du Cinema. "What is good, too, with sound is that it leaves the spectator free."

Bresson disliked writing and filming, but loved editing, likening the cinematic workflow to the cycles of life and death: "From start to finish, films are a series of births and resurrections. What lies dead on paper is reborn during the shoot, and dead images are reborn in the cutting room."

His film Diary of a Country Priest (1951)—based on the novel Journal d'un Curé de Champagne by Georges Bernanos—tells the tale of an ordinary country priest, dying of cancer, trying to save his troubled town. French film critic André Bazin noted "the analogies with Christ that abound toward the end of the film." He further observed: "In no sense is it true to say that the life of the [priest] is an imitation of its divine model; rather it is a repetition and a picturing forth of that life. Each bears his own cross and each cross is different." The priest's, and the film's, final words are: "All is grace."

Bresson's most pronounced treatment of predestination, A Man Escaped, tells us how it ends before it begins: the prisoner escapes. The subtitle of the film, "The Spirit Breathes Where It Will," are similar to Christ's words to Nicodemus, emphasizing the undeservedness of grace. Drawing on Bresson's prisoner of war experience most directly, this film was based on the memoirs of POW André Devigny. Unlike the heroes of many other escape films, this prisoner is a rather ordinary man who escapes through basic persistence and a little grace.

Also based on a real man's memoirs, Pickpocket focuses on a petty criminal, and illustrates Bresson's thesis: "Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen." Not only does Bresson show more hands than faces in this film, he shows how those hands lift wallets from various pockets in minute detail.

With Procès de Jeanne d'Arc (1962), Bresson again chose a true story and, in fact, wrote his script directly from Joan of Arc's trial transcripts from the year 1431. Bresson also returns to explicitly religious territory, in part because he felt that Joan belonged to "the family of mystics. She had her feet on the ground, and spoke quite naturally about the things from above, her visions, as if they were the most ordinary things in the world."

Regarding Au hasard Balthazar (1966), Bresson liked the rhyme of the title and the word hasard, French for "chance." Balthazar, the central character, is a donkey, who survives through a tortured existence of various cruelties. All the evils of humanity are on display, with the biblical reference to the donkey adding spiritual depth to the film. But Balthazar dies in a moment of quiet grace at the end, surrounded in a field by a herd of sheep.

Returning to Bernanos, Mouchette (1967) is a tale of a young girl's unfortunate life. Bresson said his heroine and her film "offer evidence of misery and cruelty. She is found everywhere: wars, concentration camps, tortures, assassinations."

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