- character, model, mimesis -

The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system." (Wright Forrester, American computer engineer and systems scientist)

The ‘model’ is the single word that appears most often in Notes on Cinematographer, written by Robert Bresson, film director. Model is also the term most evoked by critics trying to describe Bresson’s cinema language. To Bresson the model refers simply to the performer who lays bare their soul to the camera. Term "model" also has the meaning of ‘template,’ a prototype:

“Models. Mechanized outwardly, Intact, virgin within”

“An actor needs to get out of himself in order to see himself in the other person. YOUR MODELS, ONCE OUTSIDE THEMSELVES, WILL NOT BE ABLE TO GET IN AGAIN”

- true and mimesis in cinema -

According to Bresson, the true in film is not encrusted in the living persons and real objects. It is an air of truth that their images take on when you set them together in a certain order. With this remark, the mimetic relation between the imitating and the imitated, or the representation and its original, is completely overturned, such that the representation becomes originary and takes precedence over both the true and the reality.

Bresson's solution to the problem of reality and it's photographic representation consists simply in suspending the sense of the image. By the suspension of its sense, the image seems to cease function as an image. It ceases to be an image of something and withdraws to being just an image. It is thus like an ‘empty' or a flat image, apt to take on other meanings in the film. This is why Bresson prescribes: ‘Work on insignificant (non-signifying) images.'

The ‘BEING' of the model is in fact this withdrawal, this self-effacement before the camera. His being is not the identity of a self that the filmic image is apt to reproduce. This withdrawal undermines not only the identity of the model, it undermines at the same time the referent of the filmic image. With the withdrawal, the immediate sense of the image is suspended, and we are left with an ‘open' image that can take on new significations. 

"Mechanics gives rise to the unknown." (Bresson)

Mimesis, as Deleuze says, is no longer the question of ‘modern' cinema. But it is a power that ‘restores our belief in the world' in that it continuously creates our world anew as fiction.