On Not Showing Dostoevskii’s Work: Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket

This chapter focuses on Robert Bresson’s engagement of Dostoevskii’s Crime and Punishment in his 1959 film The Pickpocket. It argues that although Bresson suppresses Dostoevskii’s emphasis on psychology in favor of his own ascetic cinematic style, he nevertheless locates important points of contact with the novelist’s existentialist questions and concern for alienation from others. Bresson’s replacement of the murder of a pawnbroker with the crime of pickpocketing recalls another Dostoevskian novel, The Gambler, in which the protagonist tests himself against fate through risky bets at the roulette wheel that, similarly to Raskolnikov and Bresson’s hero Michel, enslave him in a compulsion that erodes his selfhood.