Log

Two instruments register this “movement by vibration” in Rivette’s film: the line, the ellipsis.

The scenes in Frenhofer’s studio are deceptively continuous.

Extended lags without speech, without narrative action, without sound except for the artist’s breathing and the persistent scratching of drawing utensils on paper, have a lulling effect that disguises all the intermittent fractures: elliptical cuts embedded in the real-time sketching, elaborate switch-outs between shots (Piccoli’s body for Bernard Dufour’s hands, the sketches for the live model, one sketch-in-progress for another), changes of the model’s pose that go unstaged within the supposed continuity.

Rivette once remarked on the crucial role of ellipsis in Dreyer’s cinema, its mesmeric tracking shots abruptly discontinued, its articulations “false” by a few frames: micro-disturbances within and between shots that impress a subtle but palpable strangeness, a sense of “enigma.”

Here Rivette adapts this principle as a means of revealing — of making legible through gaps, breaks, skips, and false accords — the vibratory force of this interaction between artist and model (a principle to which a few transient swells of music alert us).

In the worked-up words of Frenhofer:

“The blood, the fire, the ice — everything that’s in your body.

I’ll get it out of you and put it into this frame, this blank.

I want the invisible. No, it’s not me who wants. It’s the line … the stroke.

Nobody knows what a stroke is, and I’m after it.

I’m running, running. Where am I going? To the sky?

Why not? Why shouldn’t a stroke burst the sky?

No more breasts, no more stomach, no more thighs, no more buttocks!

Whirlwinds, galaxies, the ebb and flow, black holes.

The original hubbub, have you heard of it?

That’s what I’ve always wanted from you.

I want nothing. It’s the painting. You and I are just involved.”

What Rivette’s film presents is a search for a line not as representation but as barometer of a confrontation, the restless traces of which are inscribed on the canvas in spare, overwhelming detail. The final result, the “unknown masterpiece,” is so disturbingly incomplete as to be alive, not the flesh of the model, not a lifelike copy but a “radiation.” And this painting must not be shown, to us or to the film’s other characters, must itself be switched-out with an inferior piece that Frenhofer tosses off and gives to the world. Of the “real” painting we only glimpse, just before it is walled-up behind bricks, a red, tantalizing portion, for a second uncovered by the sheet that hides (renders lacunary) everything else.