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When the Museum of Modern Art announced "The Hidden God," a major faith and film series featuring titles as diverse as Magnolia, Andrei Roublev and Groundhog Day, the curators said the one film which clearly had to be included was Robert Bresson's masterpiece, Au Hasard Balthazar. The New York Times recently proclaimed, "Forget the Sith, Tom and Katie, the big movie news this summer is the release on DVD of one of the greatest films in history: Au Hasard Balthazar."

Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer writes: "No film I have ever seen has come so close to convulsing my entire being. Bresson's Christian spirituality finds its most earthy, layered and life-giving expression. Grace has never been dramatized more lucidly, or more movingly, than it is here."

Not bad for a donkey movie. This unadorned 95-minute story follows the young colt Balthazar's adoption as a family pet, through the hands of many masters, to the moment of his eventual death. It is a fragmentary portrait of a French village in the mid-sixties, tracing the interwoven lives of eight characters. It's a study of human weakness and cruelty, it's a portrait of Christ the suffering servant, it's the heartbreaking story of a young girl's descent from innocence to despair.  But above all, it's a movie about a donkey.

The donkey Balthazar finds himself in a variety of situations

Bresson was a French Catholic who made his greatest and most deeply Christian films in the two decades following World War Two. Afficionados would be hard-pressed to choose his masterpiece—A Man Escaped, Diary of a Country Priest, The Trial of Joan of Arc and Pickpocket all have their advocates—but Au Hasard Balthazar may be his most resonant and profoundly spiritual work. It is certainly his most affecting. Film scholar Donald Richie describes the film's final moments: "The combination of something awful and something wonderful going together defeats any critical acumen I may have. It reduces me to an emotional human being—which I think was Bresson's intention in making this picture."

This director had no interest in merely making movies, which he thought of as filmed plays, hybrid creations cobbled together from other art forms. He was intent on forging a pure and completely new form which would have a unique capacity to evoke spiritual responses. He shot his most distinctive films in stark black and white, focusing his camera on repetitive physical activities and dreary, impoverished locales. We watch feet and hands, not expressive faces. His soundtracks are mostly silence, punctuated by mundane sounds, usually off-camera: footsteps, the clank of metal on stone, a braying donkey or a clanging harness bell juxtaposed against the brashness of a transistor radio or a harsh motorcycle engine. 

Bresson's story-telling style was just as sparse: he pruned away explanations of behavior, standard plot set-ups and obvious emotional build-ups to the point where we're frequently unsure of what exactly is going on in a given scene. He once said, "We must let the mystery remain. Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their cause, like in real life. We're unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness. We see the effects and only later discover the cause." In Bresson's world we feel like children (or animals?) viewing the baffling behavior of adults: not understanding the context or background of what's unfolding in front of us, we pay fierce attention to every nuance of every interaction, fine-tuned to emotion and implication and barely-grasped subtext. 

Marie (Anne Wiazemsky) with the film's protagonist

Bresson's characters were the plainest of all his elements, ordinary people with small lives and  petty, terrible troubles and vices: self-preoccupation, pride, faithlessness, suspicion, cold-heartedness and all the small cruelties that flesh is heir to. Bresson hated artificial or self-conscious effects, and would run his non-professional actors through a scene as many as fifty times before filming, so they would stop interpreting and simply live the scene. (Perhaps a donkey was Bresson's ideal performer!)

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