Film - Think

(This is an extract from my paper "Jesus Beyond His Genre: The Non-Canonical Jesus Films" delivered to the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section at SBL 2006 in Washington, D.C. It is minus a boatload of footnotes in which I express my consternation with Quandt, and interact with Baugh.)

Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, is arguably the most successful rehearsal of his preoccupation with diegetic sound, deep focus cinematography, editing and the duration of time, and film as a medium of presence, a means of spirituality. Bresson’s previous films begged for transcendental readings, as they are saturated with quiet images of his peculiar sense of grace, and his pioneering triangulation of film opposite from the spiritual and real evoked a realism that informed the auteurs of the next generation which we now know as the French New Wave. It is this realism, motivated by the formal properties of film against the written word and painted or photographed image, that lends such a gravity to what may be the most unexpected Christ figure in film history. The film follows the stages of life of a donkey and the vicissitudes of its owners in a French village, the often abstract storyline cycling through the life of Marie, a young woman wavering between the love of a good man and the local bad boy. Against this simply polarized narrative backdrop Balthazar stands mute, often in the frame only as a flicking ear or tail, both a witness to and participant in the sufferings of those men and beast he comes into contact with throughout his life. Though Bresson has resisted the reduction of this film to a Christian allegory, there is a constellation of features that point to Balthazar as a sort of Christ-figure. Bresson took the name Balthazar from the traditional name of one of the three wisemen, saying that the film “is about our anxieties and desires when faced with a living creature who's completely humble, completely holy.” He draws on biblical imagery of the donkey, lacing its story arc with images of the virgin birth, gift of the magi, a baptism, stations of the cross, crown of thorns, a stigmatic wound, and a strikingly emblematic death. The film ends with Balthazar laying down in a field among braying sheep, having been shot in a botched smuggling attempt the night before and finally succumbing to this mortal wound.

In this final scene, in which Balthazar consummates his role as witness of the suffering of those around him by falling quietly, laden with the ill-gotten gain of his last masters, the obtuse spiritual imagery of the films comes into focus. Bresson lets the camera linger on this startling image of mortality until the frame fades finally to black. Balthazar has passed silently through the film as a reference to something deeper than the materiality of its characters, and even its naturalist imagery. Critic James Quandt sees his death simply as the “prolonged expiry of an old, abused animal.” But this misses the accumulation of Bresson’s referential links to Christ by means of Balthazar as a wordless image. It is not a representation of Jesus’ narrative at play here in the subtext, but simply the enormity of his divine presence. This is not a “Christic subtext” in Kozlovic’s sense, but an opaque image in a profoundly Bressonian sense. In Balthazar, he evokes the prologue of John: “We beheld his glory…and his own did not receive him.” Similarly, Balthazar’s image has difficulty fitting into the film, moving quietly through it until he exhausts its narrative potential, paradoxically being broken by the dramatic mechanisms of the film that he has given shape and purpose.