Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) follows the life of a donkey, Balthazar, as he is passed from owner to owner, accumulating scars both literal and figurative. However, Balthazar does not signify but instead flickers between states of being, a surface of rupture, fracture, glitch. Here, I argue that Bresson’s  "cinématographe" does not seek to define the donkey but to dislocate interpretation itself, resisting containment, unraveling meaning at the level of the cut, the gesture, the interval. Le cinématographe, a term Bresson insists upon in place of “cinema,” names not an art of representation but a system of precise, fragmented audiovisual construction that dismantles theatricality, evacuates psychological legibility, and operates instead through the force of pure material discontinuity.

Bresson exhausts interpretation. His films invite it, resist it, structure themselves in its anticipation. Balthazar is no exception: first burdened by allegory—Christian suffering (Paul Schrader)[1], social order (Julian Murphet)[2], transcendentalism (Susan Sontag)[3], anthropomorphic longing (Michael Haneke)[4], even a machinic eye (Nick Browne)[5]. The weight of meaning abstracts Balthazar, distilling him into function rather than form, sign rather than sound.  

Then, the donkey resists. Brian Price sees Bresson’s world as one where power classifies, where language structures domination, where revolt is always misplaced—too soon, too late[6]. Rochelle Rives pushes further: Balthazar undoes the human as narrative center, voice displaced by brays, presence untranslatable, meaning unmade. Balthazar’s refusal of discourse is an ethics.[7] Raymond Watkins turns this into an image: Balthazar as Jean-Antoine Watteau’s Gilles, unmoored from narrative drive, framed in stasis, the film itself a portrait of automata.[8] Zina Giannopoulou insists on creaturely agency—Balthazar’s not metaphor but matter, not symbol but sensorium, the donkey’s silence not absence but opacity.[9]

And so, attention turns to structure. Colin Burnett sees ritual: the circuit of ownership, each passage a vice, each return an undoing. Matthew McDonald hears form: Franz Schubert’s Andantino, fractured, reordered, delaying resolution, imposing rhythm, marking inevitability. The final moment is the first—music loops, bells toll, sheep gather, and Balthazar, as always, endures.

Yet these readings—whether metaphorical or formal—confine Balthazar within a striated space, structured, measured, contained. Even when his presence disrupts the animal-human relationship, interpretation still keeps him within the formal striated order, but narration fails to contain him. He breaks it. Errors, glitches, hiccups, ruptures—moments where the film does not hold but falters, stutters, resists cohesion—are not anomalies but structural gestures. They are the very means by which Bresson refuses cinema’s impulse to smooth over the raw form of existence.

So, what happens when Bresson falters, when the film stumbles, when le cinématographe breaks? What do these errors—cuts that don’t match, falls that defy gravity, sounds severed from their diegetic anchors—reveal about a cinema that refuses resolution, refuses repair? In these moments, le cinématographe does not correct; it preserves the error, holds the rupture, lets fracture remain.

At the core of Au Hasard Balthazar is a fundamental tension—not just between storylines (animal and human) but between two spatial logics, two ways of organizing sound and image, two worlds that remain adjacent yet irreconcilable. Deleuze’s distinction between striated and smooth space offers a way to understand this dynamic: one structured, measured, segmented; the other fluid, continuous, resistant to fixed coordinates. In Balthazar, these modes do not exist separately but coincide uneasily, forming a structure that is not conflicting but constellating.

The film’s narrative is doubled: Balthazar’s movement from owner to owner marks a striated space, a world of property, labor, violence, and exchange. He is owned, used, and passed along, his body measured, controlled, segmented by human order. Yet at the same time, his trajectory unfolds in smooth space, where he wanders, traverses, and remains exterior to human meaning-making. He is present but never fully assimilated, moving through the world yet always apart. Balthazar’s unfolding operates formally as well. It moves smoothly in and out of narration’s striations.Balthazar introduces his own audio-visual logic, one that does not integrate seamlessly into the film but troubles its formal parameters.

As a figure, he disrupts the spatial and perspectival order of the frame. To fit within the constraints of Bresson’s 50mm lens, which resists distortion despite fragmentation, (we mostly see him in fragment, through his feet or face) Balthazar appears mostly in profile, his presence dictated by the material limitations of the image. His gaze, too, resists classical cinematic structure; looking to the side rather than directly at characters, he disrupts shot/reverse-shot logic, refusing easy alignment with human perspectives. Balthazar brings error. His pace further unsettles the film’s rhythm. Neither aligned with the natural cadence of human movement nor the mechanized speed of bikes or cars, Balthazar’s gait imposes its own tempo—an uncountable force, a line of flight that man must adjust to rather than control. Consider the scene in which Gérard and his friends, riding their bikes, taunt Balthazar as he pulls a wagon. They are forced to slow, momentarily caught within his rhythm rather than their own. Movement—whether human, animal, or mechanical—becomes unstable, thrown into slippages and collisions, as if the film itself struggles to find equilibrium.

If Balthazar’s image unsettles the visible, his sound unsettles the sonic. His bray is largely absent; his presence is marked by noise—the clomping of hooves, the rattle of chains, the creak of the stall gate, the thuds of beatings—each a material trace of suffering, confinement, forced labor. Even his name functions dysfunctionally. Au Hasard Balthazar—the title itself moves with a rhythm, an alternating pulse between chance and name between randomness and identity, between a structure that holds and a force that escapes. Within the film’s sonic texture, Balthazar’s name does not signal recognition; it does not call him into being. He does not react, does not acknowledge it, yet it recurs—spoken, called, demanded—a sound that insists on communication but never secures it.Like his bray, his footsteps, the repetitions of labor and violence he endures, his name—its noise—is part of the film’s rhythmic structure, a beat that never resolves, a pattern that never stabilizes.

And errors exist elsewhere—look to style cinematography, the editing. There are two moments where Balthazar’s audiovisual presence breaks cinematic continuity, where glitches in editing, mismatched cuts, and temporal distortions do not smooth over but instead expose the mechanics of film style—where le cinématographe falters, and in faltering, reveals itself. 

The first occurs midway through the film , when the drunk Arnold—one of Balthazar’s owners—wields a chair, chasing him and another donkey down an alley to beat them. The donkeys run offscreen, Arnold after them; he pauses for a second, still within the shot, and calls out—“Satan! Jinx!”, before disappearing from the frame. Blows  land, brays erupt—violence gets displaced offscreen. For the camera remains fixed, it holds to a wall, a stable door, a doorknob—an indifferent surface, a space emptied of bodies, emptied of visible violence. What follows is a rupture, a fracture in both the continuity of the image and the integrity of the soundtrack. A cut intervenes—not a seamless transition but a visible mismatch, a misaligned edit, a break in the film’s stylistic continuity. The camera remains locked in place, yet the sound loses all background noise, isolating the bray as a raw, high-pitched intrusion. The effect is unsettling: the bray, severed from its spatial coordinates, becomes something else—an abstraction of pain, a brute sonic force extracted from the image of brutality it summons without accompanying. (clip)

Balthazar is not simply seen or heard; he is extracted, displaced, folded into the film’s very form. Le cinématographe does not sculpt meaning—it registers what escapes it. Where classical cinema integrates, absorbs, renders the real into image, Bresson lets the scars remain, lets rupture be its own form. This is not a cinema that assimilates the world but one that sustains its distances, preserves its excesses, lets opacity endure. Au Hasard Balthazar is not a film to be interpreted; it refuses interpretation—through gaps, through breaks, through what can neither be fully contained nor fully resolved.