Preceded by-Paris la belle (Pierre and Jacques Prévert, Marcel Duhamel, 1928/1959): "Two beautiful and moving voices, cheeky and poetic, with a crack that comes from the soul: those of Arletty and Jacques Prévert (who read the commentary in) this Remembrance of Things Past and Time Recovered"--Claude Mauriac. Photographed by Henri Grignon, Man Ray, Jacques-André Boiffard (1928), Sacha Vierny (1959). Edited by Henri Colpi, Jasmine Chasney. (22 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W and Color, 35mm) Inspired in part by the donkey anecdote told by Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, Bresson cast Balthazar the donkey as the central character in this extraordinarily sensitive film. Passed from one owner to the next, Balthazar is both witness to and victim of their stories, their suffering, their violence. His life, and his death, are as mysterious, if not meaningless, as any of theirs. (If anything, Balthazar's deep eyes, as captured in Bresson's fragmented framing, intimate an understanding lost to the blank-faced peasants. He is the transcendant Bressonian actor.) The other main figure in the film is a young farm girl (Anne Wiazemsky) who befriends Balthazar and suffers some of his fate in the grip of her passion for a leather-jacketed motorcyclist. Bresson was interested not only in the Biblical image of the donkey-his patience, his humility-but in the Greek and Roman concept of the donkey as a symbol of sexuality. Thus Au hazard Balthazar is an extraordinarily sensual film in addition to being "a sublime illumination of innocence too profound for this world" (Tom Luddy) and "a morbidly beautiful flower of cinematic art" (Andrew Sarris).