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 in fully assembled form. Released in 1959, the same year as The 400 Blows and Hiroshima mon amour, it stands slightly 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 sequences were choreographed with the assistance of Henri Kassagi, a real Tunisian-French magician and sleight-of-hand expert who also appears in the film. Bresson rehearsed the gestures over weeks, treating them as a kind of dance; the resulting set pieces — particularly the long Gare de Lyon sequence — are still studied in film schools as object lessons in editing rhythm. The score is built around Jean-Baptiste Lully, used sparingly.

The film's cultural reach is enormous. Paul Schrader has named it the single most important influence on Taxi Driver, American Gigolo and First Reformed; the closing scene is directly quoted in American Gigolo. 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. For Bresson, it remains the entry point — the film most often recommended to first-time viewers of his work.