After making several prison-themed films using his theory of "pure

cinematography", Bresson stated that he wanted to move onto a different

style of filmmaking. The story was inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The
Idiot[3][citation needed] and each episode in Balthazar's life represents one
of the seven deadly sins. Bresson later stated that the film was "made up of
many lines that intersect one another" and that Balthazar was meant to be
a symbol of Christian faith. Bresson produced the film with help from
the Swedish Film Institute.[4]

Ingmar Bergman also said of the movie, "this Balthazar, I didn't understand

a word of it, it was so completely boring... A donkey, to me, is completely
uninteresting, but a human being is always interesting."[15]

Ignatiy Vishnevetsky similarly commented, "Bresson never attempts to

humanize Balthazar. [...] What Balthazar experiences of human nature is
both pure and limited: the embrace of a lonely young woman, the
unprovoked attack of an angry young man, and the work of the farms
whose owners worry over money. He is only a donkey, and therefore
something much more."[20] Ebert also credits Bresson's ascetic approach
to actors for much of the work's emotional power, writing, "The actors
portray lives without informing us how to feel about them; forced to decide
for ourselves how to feel, forced to empathize, we often have stronger
feelings than if the actors were feeling them for us."

Godard’s famous claim that Au hasard Balthazar is “the world in an hour and a

half” suggests how dense, how immense Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the
life and death of a donkey is. The film’s steady accumulation of incident,
characters, mystery, and social detail, its implicative use of sound, offscreen space,
and editing, have the miraculous effect of turning the director’s vaunted austerity
into endless plenitude, which is perhaps the central paradox of Bresson’s cinema.
So concentrated and oblique is Balthazar, it achieves the density, to extend
Godard’s metaphor just a little, of an imploded nova.

Bresson’s twin masterpieces of the mid-

sixties, Au hasard Balthazar and Mouchette—his last films in black and white—
are rural dramas in which the eponymous innocents, a donkey and a girl, suffer a
series of assaults and mortifications and then die. With their exquisite renderings of
pain and abasement, the films are compendiums of cruelty, whose endings have
commonly been interpreted as moments of transfiguration, indicating absolution
for a humanity that has been emphatically shown to be not merely fallen but vile.
Both “protagonists” expire in nature, one on a hillside, the other in a pond, their
deaths accompanied by music of great sublimity: a fragment of Schubert’s Piano
Sonata no. 20 and a passage from Monteverdi’s Vespers, respectively. (That these
contravene Bresson’s own edict against the use of music as “accompaniment,
support, or reinforcement” is significant; he later regretted the rather sentimental
employment of the Schubert in Balthazar, and the film without it would be
significantly bleaker in effect.) The representation of both deaths is ambiguous.
The sacred music in Mouchette (Monteverdi’s “Magnificat,” with its intimations of
the Annunciation), Mouchette’s three attempts to “fall” before succeeding, and the
held image of the bubbles on the water that has received her body imply to many a
divine, even ecstatic deliverance (and a perhaps heretical consecration of suicide).
Similarly, Balthazar’s death, accompanied by the secular, albeit exalted, Schubert,
as he is surrounded by sheep, suggests to several critics a glorious return to the
eternal, a revelation of the divine.

A common reading of Balthazar, relying on an orthodox sense of Bresson’s

Catholicism, on the Palm Sunday imagery of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on “the
foal of a donkey,” and on the film’s many references to Dostoyevsky—
especially The Idiot—ascribes to the animal a Christlike status. In this schema,
Balthazar, after enjoying a brief, paradisial childhood, apparent in the image of his
nuzzling his mother’s milk that opens the film and in his playful baptism by three
children, lives a calvary. Passed from cruel master to cruel master, Balthazar
traverses the stations of the cross, beaten, whipped, slapped, burned, mocked, and,
in the concluding crucifixion, shot and abandoned to bleed to death, the hillside on
which he slowly perishes a modern-day Golgotha. That he dies literally burdened
(with contraband) suggests, in this reading, a sacrifice for humanity. This meaning
is intensified by Balthazar’s sole, stigmata-like wound and by the sheep that flow
around him, a tide of white that surrounds his dark, prostrate form. With their
tolling bells, they evoke the Agnus Dei and thereby the liturgy, “Qui tollis peccata
mundi, miserere nobis.” Balthazar has died for the sins of those who have
transgressed against him—the alcoholic Arnold, the vicious Gérard, the mean,
miserly merchant—and of the few who have not, particularly the martyred Marie,
whose fate parallels his.

The interpretation is tempting in its simplicity. That Balthazar passes through the
hands of seven masters suggests to some a numerical trace of the seven words from
the cross, the seven sacraments of the church formed by Christ’s Passion, or the
seven deadly sins. The mock baptism performed by the children and the auditory
equation of church bells with Balthazar’s bell indicate the animal’s divinity;
Marie’s name suggests the mother of God, and the garland of flowers she makes
for Balthazar is reminiscent of Christ’s crown of thorns; the strange bestiary in the
circus implies the ark; the smugglers’ gold and perfume are the equivalent of the
offerings of the magi; Gérard’s band of blousons noirs represent Christ’s
tormentors (or, as Gilles Jacob has suggested, the thieves of Ecclesiastes); the wine
that Arnold drinks and the bread that Gérard delivers both suggest
transubstantiation; Arnold is in many ways a Judas figure; and so on.

But Bresson’s art never proceeded by strict or simple analogy—he is no C. S.

Lewis, no Christian allegorist—and he always resisted such a reductive reading
of Balthazar. While the name “Balthazar” alludes to that of the third magus and
thereby to the birth of Christ, for instance, one wonders if Bresson, who began as a
painter and was inspired by Chardin, among other artists, also had in mind the art
historical references conjured by the name: Balthazar appears in
several Adoration of the Magi paintings, by Dürer, Mantegna, Leonardo, et al.,
often portrayed as the African or Ethiopian king, following medieval custom. And
just as the pale, sculpted face of Marie’s father reminds one of a Bellini doge, her
garland of flowers, which returns as an ornamental spray on Balthazar’s harness in
the circus sequence, certainly also suggests the feathered or jeweled turban of the
third magus that was a common index of his “exotic” origins in these paintings.

A transcendental reading of the film also ignores the pessimism of Bresson’s vision
—what he preferred to characterize as lucidity—which was to intensify in his
subsequent films. Indeed, one is reminded more than once of Henri-Georges
Clouzot’s acidulous Le Corbeau in Bresson’s insistence on the iniquity and malice
of French provincial life, in particular with the anonymous letters sent to condemn
Marie’s father. Resolutely turning away from the spiritual or metaphysical subjects
of his previous films—the belief that “all is grace” in Diary of a Country Priest or
that the hand of God guides humanity to its predestined fate in A Man Escaped—
Bresson here begins the trajectory to the materialist world of his last
film, L’Argent (in which Yvon Targe’s cellmate, echoing Marx, calls money “le
dieu visible”). In Balthazar, little is numinous. We are placed in a hard, corporeal
world of rucked, muddy fields and of things and objects, some of them signifiers of
a modernity Bresson finds wanting: cars, carts, coins, benches, guns, tools, booze,
jukeboxes, telegraph poles, deathbeds, transistor radios, and—especially—official
documents (police summonses, audits, wills, orders of sale) and instruments of
control and incarceration (harnesses, bridles, chains, muzzles). The latter manifest
the film’s theme of liberty and freedom, of Balthazar’s and Marie’s parallel
captivities. She, too, passes from master to master (her father; Gérard, into whose
subjugation she willingly enters; and Jacques, the childhood sweetheart who
sustains an ideal image rather than any real sense of her), but there is no release
from her suffering. She simply disappears near the end of the film, one infers into a
universe of servitude.

The elliptical, sometimes clipped rhythm of Bresson’s editing, the physicality of

his sound world (the skidding cars, Balthazar’s braying, the clanking chains with
which Gérard is repeatedly associated), and his fragmentation of bodies through
truncated framing—the focus on torsos, legs, and hands, in particular—amplify
this sense of materiality. Money and its equivalents (bread, land, contraband) are
insistently shown, alluded to, and invoked, especially in the grain dealer’s speech
about loving money and hating death. This avaricious miller is played by writer
Pierre Klossowski, expert on de Sade and older brother of the painter Balthus, and
he briefly takes the film into Buñuel territory as he surveys the shivering Marie,
who swats his hand away from her neck and hungrily spoons compote from a jar.
He offers her a wad of francs for sex, fulfilling the command of the young man
who danced with her at Arnold’s party: “If you want her, pay!” In this monetary
setting, Balthazar’s circuitous journey to death suggests less a traversal of the
stations of the cross than an exchange of value, like the passing of the false note
in L’Argent. His transit from hand to hand does not unleash “an avalanche of evil”
as the trading does in the latter film, but just as determinedly reveals a world of
moral and physical barbarity.

Using a rhetoric of reversal, in which a prayer or promise or characteristic is

bluntly contradicted, sometimes within just one edit (a cut or dissolve), Bresson
repeatedly depicts religion, or at least the church, as false, ineffectual. The casual
criminal acts of Gérard, which Gilles Jacob says “introduce a satanic element” in
the early sequences—slicking a highway with oil so that cars spin out of control
and crash—are immediately followed by a sequence in which Gérard sings
angelically at church, inciting Marie’s enthrallment with his beatific evil. Arnold
cries to Christ, the Virgin, and all the saints that he will never drink again but
within a quick edit is once more slugging back the booze. And as Marie’s father
lies dying from grief at the end, a priest tells him, “There must be forgiveness for
all. You’ll be forgiven because you have suffered.” The ailing man turns his body
away from the priest and the latter reads from the Bible: “He may punish, yet he
will have compassion. For he does not willingly afflict the children of men.” Even
as we wonder what compassion we have witnessed in the film, aside from Marie’s
tender ministrations toward Balthazar—the dubious kindness of the baker’s wife
toward Gérard, perhaps?—Bresson all but ridicules the priest’s teachings. Outside,
the dying man’s wife prays: “Lord, don’t take him from me too. Wait. You know
how sad and miserable my life will be.” The priest’s hand beckons her through the
window. She goes in. Her husband is dead.

The mourning wife tells Gérard, who wants to borrow the donkey for a smuggling
operation, that Balthazar is “a saint,” much, one assumes, as Bresson’s gaunt,
alcoholic country priest had become a saint, through his ceaseless suffering. In his
famous essay on Diary of a Country Priest, André Bazin notes “the analogies with
Christ that abound toward the end of the film.” A transcendental reading
of Balthazar relies on a similar proliferation of signs: the donkey’s death, serene
and glorious, sanctified by the Schubert andantino; the sheep and their pealing
bells; his physical burden and spurting wound; and the silence that engulfs him
before the screen fades to black. But Bresson’s lucidity sees the death differently,
as the prolonged expiry of an old, abused animal, too wounded to bray, too
exhausted to do anything but collapse to the earth, his value depleted.
This essay was adapted from one that first appeared in The Hidden God:
Film and Faith, edited by Mary Lea Bandy and Antonio Monda (2003, The
Museum of Modern Art, New York).

The work of the French director Robert Bresson,

it follows a simple donkey named Balthazar from birth to
death, passing from owner to owner, subject to both violence
and the purest affection. Perhaps this sounds facile, though
that is true of all of Bresson’s great movies, which found
graceful means to portray a cruel and compromised world.
He favored bare necessities (discussed in his book Notes On
The Cinematograph, which has just been reprinted) in a
personal mode of filmmaking that drew a relationship
between mystery of meaning and clarity of form. For
Bresson, one of the defining iconoclasts of film, the essence
of cinema lay in its most rudimentary tools, and the simplest
things could be invested with the most power. This could be
a shot of a hand or a single sound effect or an object falling
to the ground.
Starting with his third feature,   Diary Of A
Country Priest, Bresson began discarding those aspects of
film style that he considered theatrical or redundant, but he
never considered eliminating narrative. Out of his wholly
original scripts,   Au Hasard Balthazar   is the richest with
incidents and figures: the naïve and loving Marie (Anne
Wiazemsky), the abusive hooligan Gerard (Francois
Lafarge), the saintly town drunk Arnold (Jean-Claude
Guilbert). But it depends exclusively on Bresson’s singular
and controlled style. Bresson didn’t like professional actors
(though Wiazemsky ended up becoming one) or most
conventions of performance, and he shot with a single lens,
keeping camera movement to a minimum. But in its effects,
his ascetic style is sensual, delicate, gripping, transcendent.
This is why generations of filmmakers and critics have
revered Bresson: More so than any other director after the
silent era, he demonstrated the potential of the fundamentals
of film.
Au Hasard Balthazar   is often called a difficult
film; it is in the sense that Bresson resisted the way movie
audiences were conditioned to watch movies. In Balthazar,
his “models”—as he preferred to call his often blank-faced
non-professional performers—don’t portray characters, but
lives, stripped of the momentary and reactive, revealing
consistent arcs of tragedy, abuse, unhappiness, and desire in
a look or a hand reaching for another hand in the dark.
Perhaps most importantly, Bresson never attempts to
humanize Balthazar. Blessed with “the salt of wisdom” in a
mock baptism at the beginning of the film, he never behaves
with anything but an animal’s ignorance, and his bray—
never uttered in reaction—has to be the most ear-splitting
sound in all of Bresson’s carefully edited soundtracks. What
Balthazar experiences of human nature is both pure and
limited: the embrace of a lonely young woman, the
unprovoked attack of an angry young man, and the work of
the farms whose owners worry over money. He is only a
donkey, and therefore something much more.