Pickpocket

Robert Bresson's Pickpocket is the film in which his mature method (the spare, unactorly, almost liturgical style he would call cinématographe) first arrived fully assembled. Released in 1959, the same year as The 400 Blows and Hiroshima mon amour, it sits a little apart from the New Wave around it: tighter, drier, more interior. Bresson cast the painter Martin LaSalle, who had no acting experience, in the lead and directed him with the technical precision that became the director's signature.

The pickpocketing was choreographed with the help of Henri Kassagi, a real Tunisian-French magician and sleight-of-hand expert who also appears in the film. Bresson rehearsed the gestures for weeks, treating them almost as dance steps, and the set pieces that came out of it (the long Gare de Lyon sequence above all) are still taught in film schools as lessons in editing rhythm. The score draws on Jean-Baptiste Lully, used sparingly.

Its influence travelled a long way. Paul Schrader has named it the single most important influence on Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and First Reformed, and American Gigolo quotes it directly. It places consistently in the BFI's polls of greatest films and was returned to Sight & Sound's Greatest Films of All Time list in 2022. Of all Bresson's films it is the one most often recommended to newcomers, and the right place to begin.