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BALTHAZAR’S CIRCULATION
Au hasard Balthazar - Robert Bresson, 1966
By: Ali Mehraban Ramirez
A pair of friends recently returned from Vietnam. While viewing photos from their trip, an image from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum stood out. Rising from the earth were woody figures, clustered together and forming a crowd. These Cypress “Knees” are part of the tree’s root system, and can be observed wherever the swamp-bound Cypresses are anchored. The most commonly circulated explanation assigns these Knees the function of gathering oxygen for the root system, which oftentimes is fully submerged in water. It seems, however, that no one has been able to confirm this theory, nor any of the other hypotheses that have been advanced and withdrawn over the years. Their final cause is missing yet, but their effect is uncanny. The huddled Knees immediately take on the image of humans, milling around in some social scene, or even huddled together for protection. It is very hard to shut off the projection of humanity onto them.
They lack understanding, not only in the sense that we have yet to explain their role in the life-striving of the cypress tree, but if we see them through our anthropomorphism we are unable to pin down their expressions. Where a face is expected, there are no “features”. They remain misunderstood and un-understood. Both as objects of science, and of encounter, they are grounded in a sense of mystery and myth. Moments arise (sometimes drug-induced) where we see all life in this way. We may typically work with a set of causes and scientific explanations that help us understand “natural” phenomena, which can produce their own experiences of wonder and appreciation. But the moments of incomprehension that skirt the move into comprehension have their own power. It is the power to feel viscerally your place on this planet, and simultaneously feel like a visitor to Earth. A reorientation emerges: why should the Knees be any more mysterious than the Cypress themselves? To ask this question is to put your ear to the ground and listen not for meaning, but for bare signs of life - conditions of necessity.
“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.”
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Karl Marx,
Grundrisse (1857–1858)
From the earth emerges Balthazar, the donkey trompo from which the world is spun out in Bresson’s 1966 masterpiece, Au Hasard, Balthazar. The credits are presented against a backdrop of coarse stone, and interrupting the piano sonata we are greeted by the equally coarse braying of a donkey. Balthazar is born from this raw material, we see him suckling milk from his mother, and just as quickly as we make his acquaintance, we see the hand of Man (in this case a child) claiming his life as possession, and thrusting him into a world of ceaseless circulation. Throughout this circulation, our noble donkey is constantly enfolding into the lives, or unfolding the lives of others. It is this position of circulating that exposes him to the possibility of violence as well as love. The Knees of the Cypress, without the emergence of a “face”, without the locus of intelligibility, face no threat of this exposure to violence or love. Balthazar’s legibility ensures and affirms this circulation. He looks with and is seen through two faces: the fascia of earth and the expression of the sky.
Through the first face: as “natural material transformed into [an] organ of the human will over nature” we see Balthazar forged into machine, industry - into fixed capital. The sweet dawn and christening of Balthazar in the first few minutes of the film becomes but a memory, a lost childhood, nearly entirely suppressed, and we awake to the rest of life, at the crack of a whip, at the singe of iron to hoof. He is “created by the human hand” for the purpose of - and through the acts of - lugging dirt, hay, and timber. But in the passage quoted above, Marx’s “self-acting mule” is no animal, but the late 18th century textile-industrial hybrid of the Spinning Jenny and the Water Frame, which eventually was developed into a more or less automatic machine which was able to greatly speed up and simplify the production of cotton textiles, and accelerate the spread of capitalist production. This conception of “self-acting” refers to the automation of the production process, an automation impossible for Balthazar, who is always being yanked around or beaten into acting. He never can become self-acting, like those revolutionizing machines, and this tension is signaled by the very violence which always comes his way. But by positioning Balthazar as the thread spinning across the lives of Marie, Gerard, Arnold, etc., he can be seen - with the mastery of Bresson - as “acting-as-self”. This “acting-as-self mule” steps into another role, a role embedded in the very human failures, the disappointments, the stubbornness, the unrequited loves, the loss, the cruelty and the depravity. Becoming level with the rest of Bresson’s “models” (firmly opposed to the concept of the actor and the baggage of theater) we find Balthazar’s second face, the ephemerality and rhythm of human life, in sequence with the movement of dusk and dawn of the sky: shedding tears and burning hot, shapeshifting texture, form, and hue, all while eyes shut and peel back again and again.
“Clearly, an organism has a greater range of activity than a machine. It is less bound by purposiveness and more open to potentialities. Every aspect and every movement of the machine is calculated; and the working of the machine confirms how each calculation holds up to certain norms, measures or estimates; whereas the living body functions according to experience. Life is experience, meaning improvisation, acting as circumstances permit; life is tentative in every respect . Hence the overwhelming but often misunderstood fact that life permits monstrosities. There are no monstrous machines…Whereas monsters are still living things, there is no way to distinguish between the normal and the pathological in physics and mechanics. Only among living beings is there a distinction between the normal and the pathological.”
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Georges Canguilhem,
Machine and Organism, (1952)
But this second face is caught in the grip of the human hand which creates it. Balthazar reveals the desires of the others, takes their burdens as his own, flees when they cannot, and stays put when they flee. He is never able to exit this socialized production and production of the social: even when Arnold dies, Balthazar’s property rights become available at auction, and his total undetermined freedom is yet again foreclosed. His own desires, his own drives, his own story are formed in relation to the rest. The cinematic grammar that enunciates this split “appearance” of Balthazar (and illuminates the contradictory and fallen nature of the other characters) is in one part composed by the “whispers” between the shots - the displaced echoes and superimpositions of the film’s layered, forking paths.
Early in the film, the overreaching hand of Gerard is planted in the damp soil, and is immediately replaced (next shot) on the same ground by the gentle bare feet of a young girl toeing around, pampering and adorning her donkey with a crown of flowers. Marie and Balthazar, the tenderness of their love and their impossible solidarity, is delivered to us sensually, not only in the light caresses and kisses, but in the first instance by the primal feeling of wet earth against Gerard’s hand. When the flesh of Marie is nearly breached, as his hand reaches toward her from the darkness, she escapes only to have her place exchanged for a senseless pummeling of Balthazar. Here we can begin to grasp the exchangeable and disposable tandem paths that Marie and Balthazar will travel. They will be passed from hand to hand, marginalized in the violent alternation from useful (or lusted over) to used up (the lusting is over). For the young woman Marie, she will never be found, becoming a monument to “so much swept away in so little time”. Her life in the rural economy of her father’s farm is never transcended, and she is reduced, in the final instance, to obsolescence. Balthazar, the antiquated work animal, has his days numbered in this very way. This exhaustion of time in the world moving on, becomes the clock to which all their lives are set in turn. This sequence, and its movements of displacement, is the sort of tumbling dance that Bresson choreographs throughout the entirety of the film. This rearranged (and deranged) “primal scene” between Marie, Gerard and Balthazar serves as an exposition that outlines their fate, and reveals the structural necessity - albeit without stability - of Balthazar to not only stand in for humans at times but also to serve as the “acting-as-self machine” that makes him productive and conductive to the frustrations and violence of the social intercourse beyond him.
“The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species in the same way. He does not reserve a special look for man. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognised as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look…The animal scrutinises him across a narrow abyss of noncomprehension”.
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John Berger,
About Looking (1977)
How does a saddled donkey see a caged tiger? A man of vice? A flock of sheep? What lies between the look of an elephant’s eye (memory-itself) and the eyes of Balthazar (intelligence-itself)? Midway through the film we confront this question. Balthazar wanders off into becoming an attraction for the circus, where he is led across a series of caged animals. A tiger, a monkey, a polar bear, and an elephant. They face off with one another, looking across the “narrow abyss of noncomphrehension”. We may feel empathy for the shared plight of all these animals, in a pre-taxonomical way, from our self-awareness of “Man...returning the look”. Yet our own look occupies the same space as the abyss, Bresson merely makes us conscience of it. What may feel like a moment of exception in the film, where animals are able to recognize their fellow animals, is but a deterritorialization of this taxonomy that makes the Knees appear as mysterious as the Cypress, so to speak. In this new field, we see the overdetermined positions of the humans in relation to eachother, each character is unable to move beyond their condition, unable to exit their cage, stuck in a circus of sad passions. As they die off, disappear, or spiral downward, they become equally more legible to us, and less legible to eachother. As Balthazar lays dying on idyllic pastures, he is surrounded by a flock of sheep, and crucially - their shepard. The cattle bells ring out, the same bells from the very beginning of the film, at the birth of Balthazar. Balthazar, the lonely donkey who acts as a self, and is treated like a machine, ends where he begins: in a composition of alienation, his capacity diminished along with the rest of the flock, the lives of others, and the earth which has yet again failed to narrow the threshold of miscomprehension between itself and the sky.
February 1, 2026
Works Cited:
Berger, John. "Why Look at Animals?" About Looking, 1977. Writers and Readers, 1980
Canguilhem, Georges. "Machine and Organism." In Knowledge of Life, 1952. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009
Marx, Karl. “Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy”, 1857–1858 (M. Nicolaus, Trans.) Penguin Books, 1973