Au Hasard Balthazar, directed by Robert Bresson, screenplay by Robert Bresson, cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet, music by Jean Wiener, and edit by Raymond Lamy.
"Perhaps the idea came to me plastically because I am a painter. A donkey’s head seems to me something admirable. The plasticity, no doubt." Painting greatly inspired Robert Bresson, and his cinematic style is informed by his early years as a painter. Bresson admits that he "wanted to make a portrait" with Au Hasard Balthazar, and in this scene from his masterpiece, we get a window into how he feels about the art of cinema through the art of painting. In filmmaking, Bresson executes action painting, that is putting a cinematic world into movement, by emphasizing his paintbrush, that is his cinematic style. In the films of Bresson, the experience of the film itself becomes the art which calls back the hand that brought it into existence.