Pickpocket at the Orson Welles Sunday through Tuesday

THERE COULD probably be no more appropriate film with which to close a series entitled "The Crisis in Narrative Cinema" than Robert Bresson's Pickpocket. Bresson's work is highly individualistic, representative of no particular movement in the current cinema, and thus almost alone among current French filmmakers he has not benefitted by the surge of interest in the new-wave in this country. This is particularly unfortunate since Bresson is one of the few truly great living directors, and the unavailability of his films here makes us truly poorer indeed. Pickpocket, made in 1959, represents the very essence of Bresson's work: tightly controlled, carefully delineated, and concerned with the inscrutable relationship between man's action and God.

Pickpocket presents the story of a young would be writer named Michel, who, for motives which are never clear to him, becomes a petty thief. Through repeated series of close shots, Bresson chronicles the man's early fumbling attempts, his education in criminal technique, and finally his successive successful efforts in relieving other men of their valuables. Despite the efforts of a friend and an interested police inspector to deter him and prevent his being imprisoned, Michel purposely persists and in the end is caught by a detective who had set himself up as a foil.

Bresson is never quite as simple as his subjects would seem. Michel's belief that the two men who wish to "save" him are set upon trapping him and his near oblivion to the intent of the man who does put him in jail is a perfect reflection of the total situation. Attempting to damn himself by committing what he considers to be the lowest of actions, Michel ends up being trapped into salvation. Bresson thus transforms a simple story into a discussion of the power of man as opposed to that of God.

Images of entrapment abound in Pickpocket. Michel is consistently found between two people. In more than one case these are police detectives. More interesting, however, are the patterns of light which Bresson manages to achieve. Bresson is fanatical in his use of light. Capable of creating films entirely in whites (Au Hasard Balthazar) or in blacks (Diary of a Country Priest, Mouchette), in Pickpocket Bresson uses both in conjunction to demonstrate the difference between Michel's acts and their consequences.

The scenes of pickpocketing itself are all dominated by blacks, the color of the wallet or the clothing of the victims. Michel himself, however, always wears a white shirt and either his room or the corridor outside contain areas of light into which he invariably steps. At a central point in the film he goes to visit his dying mother. As he lies to her about her health and bends over her bed, rays or light cross him like prison bars. That light should entrap is something almost inpermissible in our set of conventions; Bresson's use of it to convey a value almost totally discredited in our society is as daring as it is right.

There is a third character in the sequence described above, the girl Jeanne who is the agent of Michel's salvation. Like Michel, she permits herself to be degraded. After he flees Paris, she becomes pregnant by his friend Jim, but unlike Michel she does not permit herself to believe in her own degradation and refuses Jim's offer of marriage. Whenever a sequence includes both Jeanne and Michel the ligthing becomes fantastically complex, creating dark and light areas through which the characters continually move. It is only at the end, when separated by the bars of the prison, a spiritual union between Michel and Jeanne is effected. The couple is finally found in the same area, in contradiction to all physical deterrents, and the frame is dominated by the white light of salvation. TERRY CURTIS FOX