The cinema panorama was rich in 1966, with many great films.
Balthazar and Masculin féminin are two films about and with youth. Youth is an invention of 1966, and particularly of these films (or of the sixties): youth culture constitutes youth. There are two types of youth: urban and rural. But both have one culture in common: song, dance and sexuality. These are two black-and-white films in the age of color, two dark, hard-hitting, metaphysical and sociological films, investigative and inquisitive.
Au hasard Balthazar is Bresson's most complex and personal film, both ahead of its time and outside it. It's an anti-modern film. In it, Bresson opposes the cinematograph to cinema (which he reduces to photographed theater) and seeks to purify cinema of what is not cinema. The camera must not reproduce, but create. Similarly, Bresson renounced professional actors, deeming them paralyzed by habit. Godard also intended to "break" actors, "to destroy them, as the Nazis destroyed the Jews". The choice of a single lens also helps to break down the cinema, forgoing tracking and panning, while sound and noise supplement the image as often as possible. Bresson creates a film-world, seen through the eyes of a donkey, taken from the Bible, Apuleius' The Golden Ass and Dostoyevsky's The Idiot.
Alongside the donkey is a young girl who acts as his counterpart. Their lives intertwine and intersect. Bresson emphasized the difficulty of constructing such a film, with so many episodes allegorically representing vices. More than a sketch film, it's a film in which human groups are interwoven, composed more like a tableau than a narrative. Bresson and Godard both see cinema as dying, and lament the end of the arts. Au hasard Balthazar could allegorically describe this trajectory: the donkey's death is a death without redemption, reduced to carrion, to its animality.
The sociological dimension of this film also lies at the heart of our reflection on 1966; we see in particular how, in France, song crystallizes youth culture.
