In his own particularly austere manner, Robert Bresson (1901-1999) continued his lonely pursuit of cinematic grace in Le Journal d'un Care di Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest,1951) chronicling the career of a priest from his arrival in the village of Ambricourt through his sufferings to his death. Diary of a Country Priest, adapted from Georges Bernanos' novel took an unprecedented step of retaining the author's first-person narration while neither strictly illustrating nor complementing it with images in any orthodox manner. Instead there is a commentary that is part of a complex dialectic.
Diary of a Country Priest also launched a series of Bresson features built around the spiritual progression of a confined and solitary individual towards freedom. This individual was embodied rather than 'portrayed' in each case by a non-professional actor - Claude Laydu in Diary of a Country Priest, Francois Letterier who would become a director himself; in A Man Escaped - one of Bresson's irrefutable masterpieces. and a film no doubt inspired by his own prisoner-of-war experiences - Martin Lasalle in Pickpocket (1959) and Florence Carrez in the titular role of 1962's The Trial of Joan of Arc. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) was an up-to-date moral fable that examines the life of a donkey while detailing all the instances of human failure and corruption that he passes through almost in a manner of medieval allegory. Perhaps for the very first time in his work, Bresson articulated some of his anger towards the modern world - focused in this case, on a cruel and impervious teenager named Gerard whose motorbike and transistor radio appear to make him as emblematic as the memorable bikers in Jean Cocteau's Orphee. This rage would carry over into Bresson's six subsequent films which formed the substance of 1977's The Devil,Probably.