The Frame
Au Hasard Balthazar
The life of a donkey, passed from owner to owner and cruelty to cruelty, becomes the most piercing film ever made about innocence in an indifferent world.
Watch for
Things to notice
Not a summary. What the film keeps returning to, so you can see it when it comes.
Sacred Routine
Mundane acts — harnessing a donkey, loading grain, leading an animal to pasture — are rendered with such sustained attention that they become overwhelming registers of a life being spent and wasted.
Going Nowhere
Balthazar's movement through human hands has no teleological shape — no goal, no return, no lesson learned — and this directionless passage is the film's structural argument about innocent existence in the world.
The Signature
Five of twenty readings. Sign in to open all of them, with the sentence behind each one.
Plot DNA
Time Flow
Grey Area
Hidden Layers
Emotion Topology
How Heavy It Feels
How Long It Stays
Rhymes With
A double bill: three films that keep this one company, and one that answers it from the far side. Read across all twenty readings at once, never a genre tag.
2010 · Lee Chang-dong
Poetry
They share Time Flow, and diverge on Violence With Purpose.
Step sideways
2018 · Lee Chang-dong
Burning
They share Time Flow, and diverge on Power & Politics.
Step sideways
1974 · Francis Coppola
The Conversation
They share Time Flow, and diverge on Visual Feeling.
Step sideways
2015 · George Miller
Mad Max: Fury Road
They split hardest on How It Ends.
Step sideways
When in a life this lands
The Long Echo
A grower: it stays long, it asks the big questions, it hides its layers. It will not mean the same thing twice.
This one is folded until you have seen it
The Long Echo talks about what a second and third viewing open up, and it cannot do that without going past the ending. It stays closed until you say the word.
The Ledger
- Country
- France
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