Bresson's Au Hazard, Balthazar (1966, France) is an allegorical film told through the lens of a donkey named Balthazar and was based in part on The Golden Ass by Apuleius and, to a lesser extent, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. In The Idiot, a very innocent character named Mishkin associates himself with a donkey. Mishkin is a device to understand 19th-century Russian Society. The other source, The Golden Ass by Apuleius, is a 10-part novel that follows the travels of a magician who haphazardly transforms himself into a donkey.
Bresson, obsessed with the failings of humanity, was born and raised a catholic. In the Christian faith, a donkey is the source of transportation for Jesus and his mother, Mary to Jerusalem, giving the donkey incredible spiritual significance. Bresson uses Balthazar as a device to witness the vices of humanity and to lead Balthazar through an arc of life from birth to death and, in some senses mirroring the life of Jesus Christ. To do this, Bresson created two intersecting schemas. The first one is that the donkey has the same stages of life as a human: childhood, caresses, talent and work, genius in middle age, and the analytical period before death, and the second is a passage through different groups of people. Some might argue that Au Hazard, Balthazar is Bresson's most ambitious work. Bresson needed to form unity throughout his films but intrinsically so for this.
Bresson considered himself a painter first and as a director second. He liked to look at his films as if they were paintings. My father was also a painter; I remember him showing me how to take an orange and flatten it into a 2D image. That alone seemed like a nightmare, but Bresson needed to do this 24 times a second. To achieve this, he used three different methods: first, by making clever use of both the foreground and background by making Balthazar appear and disappear, Secondly Bresson used a muted directing style towards his actors to avoid over-accumulating the scene (Bresson notoriously hated actors being priorities in films and found them histrionic), and thirdly for what he lacked in close-ups and experimental photography, he more than made up for in his use of sound. With these methods, Bresson could create an economy of subtle intensity without favoring one aspect in any particular scene.
One of the most striking moments is using point-of-view during a significant ellipsis when Balthazar manages to escape the alcoholic Arnold and finds himself in the circus performing math equations. How long ago did this happen, and when did he learn to do math? Smartly, this is the only time in the film when Bresson uses the Hollywood stereotypical shot-reverse-shot technique opaquely. But Bresson does this to illustrate a point to show us what the donkey must be thinking and feeling while he makes optical eye contact with the other manhandled animals stuck in their cages.
Comparatively to Dostoyevsky’s Mishkin, Bresson used a human character as the foil for the audience to understand the plot and keep the film's flow. The human character that parallels the donkey is named Marie, which is similar enough to Jesus’s Mom, Mary. Using Marie gave him the construct and foundation for the crossing between the different characters and maintenance of some semblance of reality, although the film itself is unrealistic. In each foray of the characters, they teach and represent the cardinal sins. (I.e., the Baker's wife representing jealousy, or Marie's father, who represents pride and despondency.) Even murder is hinted at through the drunken character, Arnold, who beats Balthazar and is accused by the townspeople of murder.
In English, Au Hazard, Balthazar means "By Chance, Balthazar." Like the rest of us, Balthazar; thrust unknowingly by chance into this universe; must continue the natural progression of life to the promise of death and demise. The only redeeming hope is that because of the unorthodox baptism Marie gave him, he may be given a soul and get into heaven. However, the curiosity about Bresson's work is because there are very few sequences in the film when we get a reaction from Balthazar. Therefore, we are left to integrate the experiences ourselves and project at the images onscreen.
It is common knowledge that Bresson was the Eisenstein of the 1940s to the 1980s. His gift to us in his unique Zen-koan-styled book, Notes on Cinematography, gives his practical approach and the results of his years of experimentation. Because of his genius, Bresson created a realistic use of narrative projection to put his viewers solely in the eyes and mind of Balthazar - a beast of burden bearing it all for us and showing us what it means to survive the world in it but not of it.
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