The long forehead, the lean features, the closed lips, the blank stare, the frontal view, the flat light, the uncluttered background, the stationary camera, these identify Bresson’s protagonists as objects suitable for veneration. When Michel’s cold face stares into the camera in scene after scene in Pickpocket, Bresson is using his face—only one part of Bresson’s complex film-making—like a Byzantine face painted high on a temple wall. It can simultaneously evoke sense of distance (its imposing, hieratic quality) and a strange sensuousness (the hard-chiseled stern face amid a vast mosaic or environmental panorama). And when Bresson brings the rest of his film-making abilities to bear on that face, it takes its rightful place in the liturgy. Just before the priest collapses in fatigue on a barren hillock, almost enveloped by gray dusk and dark barren trees, there is a long shot in Bresson’s Country Priest which creates a composition familiar to Byzantine wall paintings, such as the Ascension mosaic at St. Sophia: an agonized, lonely, full figure set against an empty environment, his head hung to the left, wrapped in body-obscuring robes, about to succumb to the spiritual weight he must bear.