What They See is What We Get in Film: Reality Tells the Fiction

Abstract

Robert Bresson's cinematography allows him to show the affordances that things and situations have for characters in a film. By intimating these affordances, Bresson authentically presents the affordances as well as the characters. The fact that Bresson views and conceives of his `actors' as models, rather than as malleable actors, illustrates, again, an effort to authentically film real persons in real situations. Recognising people authentically is done in real-life through a reciprocal gaze, which is not automatically available to the camera's lens, an apparatus that does not look back at one. Perhaps, Nuri Bilge Ceylan's approach fits this effort better: not a writing with sounds and images, but an intuitive use of homeliness.