La Belle Noiseuse · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A nib touches paper and catches. You hear it before you can see what it is making: a dry scrape, closer to a fingernail on a wall than to music, and then a line arrives that is too long and goes somewhere the previous line did not promise. The hand is not Michel Piccoli's. It belongs to Bernard Dufour, a French painter then in his late sixties, and every drawing in the film is real, made on camera, accumulating in the order we watch it appear. There is no cutaway to a finished prop.

Most films would give you thirty seconds of that. The montage sequence exists precisely so a movie can skip the part where a person sits in a room and works: blank paper, dissolve, music, finished canvas. Nicole Lubtchansky cuts against that instinct for four hours. No compression into highlights. No acceleration. The drawings take the time they take.

This is where Deleuze earns his place, and not as decoration. He divided cinema roughly in two. In one kind, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the cutting exists to carry that chain forward. In the other, action stops being able to resolve anything, and what you are left with is a person who can only look and listen. Deleuze called those pure optical and sound situations: opsigns and sonsigns. It sounds abstract until you are forty minutes into a sitting in this film. Marianne is holding a pose. She cannot act; not acting is the job. Frenhofer can only look and mark. And we are given nothing to want except the next line. The film has removed every available action from the room and left the sound of the pen, which is why that sound carries the suspense a score would normally carry. Rivette uses no ambient music at all, and the credited Stravinsky is spent sparingly. The charcoal, the creak of the easel, the breath, the shift of a body on cold stone: that is the score, and you hear the risk in each line because nothing else is there to hear.

Deleuze's other word for these stretches is temps mort, dead time. Usually dead time is what a film puts between its events. Here the picture can only be made in real time, so dead time is where everything happens. Notice what Rivette does around it. The meals, the walks, the talk in the garden are cut in an unhurried but ordinary way. The rest of the film is paced. The studio is endured. That contrast is the whole design.

Then there is Béart, and Deleuze has a precise name for what she is doing too. Late in his second cinema book he describes a cinema of the body: film that reaches time through postures and attitudes rather than through decisions. Frenhofer poses Marianne, adjusts a limb, tells her to hold, tells her the pose is wrong, throws the sheet away. The postures get less classical as the film goes on. Twisted, crouched, held past comfort. Deleuze's term for a posture that exposes a social relation is the gest, and this film is made of gests. Nicolas has effectively traded his girlfriend for proximity to greatness. Porbus, a painter in Balzac, is a dealer here. Liz, Frenhofer's wife, sat for the original abandoned canvas and is being painted over. None of that needs a speech. It is legible in the arrangement of one person's limbs by another person's hands.

The most radical thing the camera does is refuse something. It attends to three things in rotation, the hand and the paper, the model's body, the painter's face, and it almost never gives you an eyeline match into Frenhofer's gaze. Deleuze's word for an image where the camera perceives someone who is perceiving, so that you feel the camera as a separate presence, is the dicisign. Rivette holds it for four hours. Films about artists nearly always install you behind the artist's eyes, which quietly hands the artist the argument. Rivette keeps you in the room at a third position, watching a transaction between two people. That is his specific invention here, and it is why the film is not a portrait of genius. Genius is one of the parties.

Something else is happening with the canvas. Deleuze's crystal-image is a shot where the present and its memory cannot be pulled apart, a thing locked to its double. He thought Rivette's version of it was always a crystal in the act of forming, because Rivette's structure was theatrical rehearsal, the same encounter run again with its terms renegotiated, going back to L'Amour fou. The canvas Marianne poses for already has a woman in it. Every mark Frenhofer makes on Marianne is also a mark on Liz, and Jane Birkin's scenes with Piccoli carry a decade of unspoken accounting without ever quite naming it. That is the seed: not a flashback, but a present that will not come apart from its past.

Béart's face is the film's other instrument. Exposed for hours of screen time, with Lubtchansky's flat north light granting her no romance and no chiaroscuro to hide in, she has only attention to act with. Deleuze called a face where small movements build toward a threshold a potisign, an icon of power. Marianne begins compliant, becomes furious, turns combative, and arrives somewhere else: she stops being the subject of the painting and becomes its co-author. Béart plays that almost entirely in posture and gaze. It is a genuine reversal, achieved without a single scene of the kind that usually delivers reversals.

And then the film hides the result. After the completion comes a concealment, which is Balzac's ending from 1831 and also the point. Deleuze wrote about the unthought, the encounter with something thought cannot get around. Four hours of total material access, real hand, real paper, real time, no faking, and the one image the whole apparatus was built to produce is withheld. The film gives you the labor and keeps the work.

The debts are specific. Clouzot's Le Mystère Picasso had already proved a screen could be held by a mark appearing alone, but it hid the rig behind translucent paper; Rivette restores everything Clouzot concealed, the hand, the sheet, the nib, inside one unbroken frame. From Straub-Huillet's Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, whose directors Lubtchansky also shot for, comes the contract: record the performance live and whole, let the physical noise of the instrument be the score, no playback and mime. From Bresson's Pickpocket comes the hand as an autonomous performer with the sound of its gesture pushed forward in the mix. From Céline and Julie Go Boating comes the house as communicating rooms traversed on foot, so eavesdropping and interruption become the editing logic instead of cutaways. From Out 1 comes the tolerance for length and the practice of building two films from one shoot, which produced Divertimento in 1993, assembled from different takes rather than trimmed, and which Rivette insisted was another film, not a digest.

Rivette was a founding Cahiers critic, and the studio scenes make a Bazinian argument on new ground. If the integrity of an event in front of the camera is worth more than the assembly of it, then hold the event. Bazin was arguing about space. Rivette applies it to labor. The film took the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1991 and became the reference point for a whole category, the film that actually shows the work, which is another way of saying it proved a drawing session could carry an audience for four hours if you trusted the sound of a pen.

Watch it again for the door. The studio is a stage with two players; the house is the wings, full of people waiting outside, listening, calculating what the canvas will cost them. The film is not only about what gets drawn. It is also about who is standing in the corridor while it happens.