Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch La Belle Noiseuse
1991 · Jacques Rivette · La Belle Noiseuse on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Listen for the scrape of pen and charcoal on paper. (sound)
With almost no score, the studio scenes run on the sound of mark-making itself, the drag of charcoal, the creak of an easel, breathing.
Payoff: The sound carries the suspense a score would normally supply, so you hear the risk in each line.
Watch the camera rotate between the hand, the body, the face. (camera)
The film attends to these three in turn and rarely lets you see Marianne the way Frenhofer sees her, no eyeline match into his gaze.
Payoff: You watch the transaction of looking from outside it, not from inside the painter's eyes.
Watch how Frenhofer physically adjusts Marianne's limbs and posture. (staging)
He poses her, tells her to hold, calls a pose wrong, discards the drawing, and the postures grow more strained as the sittings continue.
Payoff: The posing is doing the work dialogue usually does, showing you a relationship through how a body is arranged. In the reading: the gest. Deleuze calls a posture that lays bare a social relation the gest; the adjusting of Marianne's body is exactly this.
Notice how long each drawing is allowed to take on screen. (structure)
There is no dissolve from blank paper to finished work; Lubtchansky's cutting lets the drawings take the actual time they take.
Payoff: The waiting is not padding. It is the labor the film is actually showing you. In the reading: dead time (temps mort). Deleuze calls stretches where nothing advances dead time; here the dead time is where the film thinks hardest.
Notice people arriving, overhearing, or waiting outside the studio door. (staging)
The manor is staged as communicating rooms with a locked one at the center, and the house functions as the wings to the studio's stage.
Payoff: Everyone outside the door is calculating what the sitting will cost them.
Once you have seen it
Watch Béart's posture shift across the film's long middle stretch. (performance)
Marianne moves from compliant to furious to combative to something like authority, a shift Béart plays almost entirely through gaze and posture.
Payoff: By the end she has stopped being only the subject of the painting. In the reading: potisign (icon of power). Deleuze calls a face building toward a threshold a potisign; Béart's face crosses that threshold over the film's length.
Notice how Frenhofer's wife Liz watches the sittings from the margins. (performance)
Liz sat for the original abandoned canvas years earlier, and her presence around the new sittings carries a decade of unspoken accounting.
Payoff: Every mark made on Marianne is also, somehow, a mark on the woman who came before her.
Notice what the film shows you of the finished painting. (structure)
After four hours of access to the making of it, the completed canvas itself is withheld, concealed rather than revealed to the audience.
Payoff: The film gives you the labor in full and keeps the result for itself.
Carry this in: Watch the door as much as the easel. People waiting outside are calculating what the sitting will cost them.