I began to think of the future, which couldn’t have been brighter if I’d embroidered it with neon lights.

Other forms were near.

His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

I came here to find the past. I did, and to hell with it.

the ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face

Of edges and instants, light and shadow, love and work, gesture and speech, silence and dialogue, tension and fear, agitation and pressure: forces of coupling.

“In the film I made about the Straubs you can see there’s really an acute tension in the editing room between Danièle and Jean-Marie, and there’s definitely a bit of fear. Sometimes, Jean-Marie is quite afraid. That’s why he leaves. He says, though without exactly saying it: ‘Danièle, save me, save this image, save the film. I’m afraid. I’m going out for a bit.’ There’s an extreme tension in this film, an enormous resistance. For example, there’s a resistance to the first idea, which is perhaps always a bit deceptive. They say: ‘We’re going to cut the … no, let’s hold off from that, let’s work a bit more.’ Here, we have another kind of resistance: resistance to the machine itself, to the tools of the director.” -Pedro Costa

“My head’s spinning. I’m aching all over. I can’t open it.”

. . .

. . .

. . .

. . .

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.

Often in Farber’s paintings, the work takes material form as a workspace not quite sorted out.

Various angles, perspectives entwine and compete within the distribution of objects, figures, instruments, unruly but patterned, too composed to be haphazard.

The late paintings increasingly feature a dense invasion of vines and flowers and other plant life, which overtake and lyricize a space once occupied by candy bars, train tracks, things manmade.