Robert Bresson

Known for: Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), Pickpocket (1959)

Robert Bresson directed 13 films across five decades, each made with non-professional actors he called "models" and a systematic minimalism of image and sound he described in his 1975 book Notes on the Cinematograph. His films — Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Pickpocket (1959), Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) — reduce cinema to what he considered its essential elements. Paul Schrader's study Transcendental Style in Film (1972) took Bresson as its central example.