Why I keep going back to Bresson
A model — Bresson's word for what most directors would call a non-actor — is not an absence of performance. It is a refusal of one.
I have read Notes on the Cinematograph maybe twenty times. It is a book that gets shorter every year. Now there are perhaps thirty sentences I really need; the rest, I have absorbed without noticing.
What stays with me is the suspicion of the dramatic — of effect, of intention visible on the face. Bresson is not making a case for restraint. He is making a case for trust: that the world, photographed honestly, is enough.