1950s: Pickpocket

Screening + Discussion
Our pick for the 1950s

For our third stop in film history, we screened Pickpocket—Robert Bresson’s 1959 film about a young thief searching for meaning. Minimal and emotionally charged, it captures the inward turn of 1950s cinema and helped pave the way for a new kind of filmmaking.

After the film, we stayed to talk about:
— Pickpocket as a portrait of addiction, ritual, and compulsion
— The coded nature of pickpocketing and its parallels to the queer underground: secrecy, performance, and homoeroticism
— How the intimacy of the act—touching someone without their awareness—mirrors Michel’s inability to form mutual emotional connections
— Bresson’s minimalist, non-expressive style compared to the psychological realism of 1950s Hollywood
— Hands are sexy