AU HASARD BALTHAZAR
Dir. Robert Bresson | France | 1966 | 95 min | French | subtitles in English, Lithuanian
SKALVIJA: December 8th
A profound masterpiece from one of the most revered filmmakers in the history of cinema, Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar follows the donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly. Through Bresson’s unconventional approach to composition, sound, and narrative, this simple story becomes a moving parable about purity and transcendence.
“Any film programme exploring animal existence cannot do without Balthazar, because it is a seminal work that showed what the widening of the human perspective can bring to the narrative. It is also undoubtedly Bresson's strangest film, unsettling as people and their behaviour are observed through the eyes of an animal. Human diversity and societal norms, reflected in donkey’s eyes, bring us closer to the inevitable existential questions that changing generations ask themselves over and over again, in an almost sacred séance.”
– Aistė Račaitytė
