Introduced by David Fear.
 

35mm print! Robert Bresson’s brief, elliptical tale about the life and death of a donkey contains such plenitude – in its steady accumulation of incident, characters, mystery and social detail, its implicative use of sound, off-screen space and editing – that it might very well merit Godard’s famous claim that it is “the world in an hour and a half.” Paralleling the mistreatment and downfall of two innocents – Marie, a young farmer’s daughter, and Balthazar, a Christ-like donkey passed from one master to the next – the film has been chosen as one of the greatest in cinema history by countless critics and cinephiles.