Beautifully said by Richie

What a lovely commentary! Especially about the ending.

Thank you Mr. Richie. Truly, for close to 60 years, I can not overcome the effect of the last scene of the film which you so naïvely, tenderly but eloquently described. It touched our childhood when we first saw it

This is so concise, beautiful and unaffected. We forget what art is and what it can do.

I'm still discovering Bresson's filmography. My introduction to Bresson was "Le Diable Probablement". It took me substantial efforts at first to be able to enter his universe, with scenes that show only the legs of a central character while he/she is talking, with the monotonous line delivery so characteristic - so it is said- of his cinema. However, my energy input not to abandon and to look further, past the stylistic obstacles that can be frankly discouraging, was ultimately rewarded. I was touched very deeply by that movie, a most honest look at our own mortality and at the meaning of life. Such a topic is obviously the hardest to treat through cinema and only iconoclastic directors such as Bresson or Malick have succeeded to approach to any significant extent with relative success. "Le Diable Probablement" remains a tough nut to crack and requires a total openness and confidence in the director's images in order to understand his purpose and his vision. Once one is available enough, that movie will grab you by the guts and leave you emotionally transformed. Beauty remains in the eye of the beholder, and that's why a Bresson's film requires such a high degree of emotional availability. Yes, it is a difficult style because nobody but yourself takes you through his maze of existentialist enigmas. And yes, it is rewarding beyond words. The only other director that can compare to Bresson in terms of a high degree of availability on the cinephile's part is Eric Rohmer, albeit in a different way. Rohmer isn't nearly as hermetic or "unconventional" as Bresson but his cinematographic style is very similar in terms of "difficulty". I won't hide it: I love Rohmer totally, unconditionally. And his films require the viewer to involve him/herself as entirely as in a love relationship. But once you have accepted the language, the conventions or "code" he uses in most of his films, your reward will be do enormous, so life-altering that you will bless the day youdecided to explore his films. I will watch "Au Hasard Balthazar" with a beginner's curiosity. Richie's capsule certainly convinced me so.... In conclusion, I have this to say to Bresson's aficionados: if not a Rohmer's fan already, take a chance with my proposal and watch any of a long list of masterpieces. From what I found out among people's social media discussions, it's "Le Rayon Vert" (The Green Ray") which appears to be the one Rohmer film that most universally and consistently wins moviegoers' heart. It's a hard one to "domesticate", and you'd wish the protagonist would stop trying so hard already, but when you manage to navigate past her emotional breakdown and enter her heart, it's certainly one of the most truthfully, completely moving an sentimental (in a good way) films you'll ever see. And the rest of Rohmer's films is full of comparably rewarding experiences. Bresson and Rohmer are 2 lonesome cowboys who managed to do their own thing with very thin financial resources and attain modest but sufficient commercial success to make their next film, and so on. One would wish nowadays there would be more of these hard-headed directors who refuse the industry's conditions to get major resources, and hold on to their own vision while ignoring the heartless criticism from those who think it's just suicidal to persist with one's personal artistic vision. It's a timeless debate: those major directors with great, original, iconoclastic ideas all reach fame and recognition eventually. The only downside is to be too old or too dead 😁 to appreciate it, with few exceptions. The greatest among them all, the bigger-than-life Orson Welles paid a heavy price to make his films according to HIS vision and ideas, although he was enduring enough to witness some of the current recognition of his incredible genius. Bresson's minimalist and ascetic character that penetrates each of his mere handful films (13 in an adult lifetime of nearly 8 decades!) brings about the memory of a Kubrick: same laborious, painstaking creative process that resulted in a far lower output than with the average director. When confronted with such a quantitatively limited production in artists such as Kubrick and Bresson, one may be very critical and even condemn what has been described as an ivory tower complex that is counterproductive and even autodestructive.. This ignores completely the fact that artists are not machines nor even "workers". Such great visionaries can only be understood as total, 'pure' artists, not out of snobbery - a frequent type of attack - or poor discipline -which would thereby account for their relatively modest output, to put it mildly, but out of a profound, authentic dedication to their "vision", which serves as the principal motor to their art. How does one describe, express, attain and translate a "vision"? The whole mystery, and the 6 million $ -worth question lies in how one answers such a difficult riddle, mainly because nobody has ever defined of what a "vision" consists, except through self-evident statements and guesswork. I personally believe that an artistic "vision" obeys Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Once you try to examine it upfront, you automatically, inevitably lose information about its properties. In other words, an artistic "vision" behaves strikingly like an atom's electron. If you stop and observe an artist's "vision" in order to dissect it or follow where it's moving to, you inevitably blur it out. You can't really define what an artist's vision actually is, the more you stop at its various qualities (shape, color, sound, odor, etc.), the more you drift away from it and end up doing pure guesswork essentially. Thus, one would better stop trying to grab and observe an artist's vision for oneself in one's laughable attempt at reproduce the artistic creative process (i.e. the "vision"), and exchange one's Cartesian filter of reality for one's unique intelligence or soul, which means to abandon one's subjective defenses in order to get impregnated with the artist's ideas, which cannot be objectively defined but can only be experienced through being in the presence of the artist's object, book, music, etc. Heisenberg, unbeknownst to him perhaps, came up with the best expression of an artist's vision in general with his principle of uncertainty...🙂

When people are faced with challenging movies, they either either engage or shut down, depending on how seriously they take cinema. I totally understand why people fall asleep during Bresson films. Because they've never seen anything like it, their knee-jerk reaction is apathetic aversion.

I love this film and its nuanced layers which I see in it.

"The Inland Sea" is truly the most beautiful book I've ever read. R.I.P. great man

1:33 very true, especially with now a days people don't the real amazing films of that time!

What a remarkably eloquent guy.

Wow! Great clip.

Trying to work out if my spirit can actually hack watching it. Tearing up at a commentary of it is probably not a good sign

R.I.P. Great man.

😥😢😭

R.I.P. from Japan.

He is better because he cries.

So an animal is used to describe and make us see ourselves completely . Did Bresson chose the Schubert sonata or was the music stuck on . Anne Wiazemsky can be seen in Pasolini's Teorema as well as Godard 's films .

1:20 I mean he said it

Seems like the captioned text of the speaker wasn't proofread. So many mistakes, it is a laughably misdirected effort.

Ok. Look up "Bresson (on Cinema) " on youtube, listen closely how his name is pronounced at the beginning.

I know... and still we get called morons for pointing this out!

spoiler alert!

"Brayson is a director that..." Is his name really that hard to pronounce?

SPOILER ALERT in the video. Shameless for something uploaded by Criterion. Then, again, some would argue it's shameless enough that Richie was asked to comment on a Bresson masterwork. Some embarrassments never cease.

Still not as bad as AkEEra KuroSAAWA.