"My fondness for hooks, stalls, and dips made it difficult to choose between the pickpockets of David Lean and those of Robert Bresson. Both great, but Criterion’s transfer of Guy Green’s painterly cinematography put this one over the top. Please sir, I want some more . . ."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."

"I wouldn’t be here writing these lines but for Robert Bresson; when I was still a teenager, his films showed me what cinema could be, showed me how cinema could rival the masterpieces of the other arts. He showed me cinema was something worth devoting one’s life to. Ingmar Bergman once said that Tarkovsky moved effortlessly in areas most filmmakers struggled all their life to reach. I don’t think I’d be able to put it better than him."

"When will Gérard Blain's filmmaking be fully recognized and given its rightful place in the history of French cinema – one of the highest? Was it his acting career that cast a shadow; or his radicalism, the radicalism of the most authentic disciple of Robert Bresson; or the controversies that accompanied the work of this provocateur so impossible to integrate into any school or religion and into an industry even less. All of Gérard Blain's films are important – among them The Pelican is perhaps the most shattering."

"Then the second one – and let’s say, this was in no particular order – but A Man Escaped, the [Robert] Bresson movie. That has to be my favorite movie of all time, just because it always makes me cry at the end, because I feel like I’ve achieved something that the character achieves. And it tells you what happens in the title, and it makes it no less suspenseful the entire way. You’re literally feeling the sound of the gravel as he puts his foot down – those shots of the foot or the spoon going into the slot. All of these things, the editing of it, the character, the way he’s using these actors who you don’t really know, they just – you feel like they’re real people. It’s just so perfectly put together, and it’s something where I kind of feel like I’m going along with the escape in a way that’s just done by a master. In a weird way, I feel like Bresson is the Fontaine character in that movie. But what’s weird is I’ve watched it again recently, and I had a totally different feeling of it, where it was more about society and how people are talking to each other. And then you realize Bresson is just kind of making the same movie every time, just with different [settings and characters]. One’s World War II, one’s Lancelot."

"I’ll pair this with Mouchette, because they are beautiful, and if I remember right they were released only a year apart, an anomaly for filmmaker Bresson whose films often had many years between their respective release dates. I tried to go to college; in fact, I did go but did not come very close to completing a degree. The highlight of my attempt at formal higher learning was a seminar led by Michael Silverman on the movies of Robert Bresson. At the first meeting of the seminar, Silverman told us that he was still intrigued, confused, and puzzled by Bresson’s movies, even years into the experiences of witnessing them. So, he said, we would take this opportunity again to explore together their density and power. Balthazar and Mouchette slayed me, maybe Balthazar most of all because I identified more with the ass that was Balthazar than the angel that was Mouchette. Both movies are pitiless and intensely compassionate. They say, “This is how bad it is. Let us love until the end.”"