Movie Notes

The pinnacle of Rivett's film aesthetics, a unique viewing experience, the images are like flowing water flowing through the viewer's hollow body, never slumbering or retreating.

Like Rivett's other works, he creates a pair of distinct but mutually attractive female figures in this film. Liz's aphasia suggests that she no longer has any expectations for life, only ghostly memories linger, presumably the old house in Rivett's films, and has formed a symbolic sequence, as if a A body occupied by layers of memories, secrets, and hidden diseases. Liz is bound here, willingly or not. Her job is to make specimens of birds, and this job is inseparable from death. In her eyes, "everything is non-renewable." This is the case with love and people.

All the impulses of artistic creation come from the resistance to death - a kind of mummy complex. Frenhofer told Marianne about the models he had painted before, but they were either gone or lost in memory. Marianne is still alive on the screen, her body looming as if within reach, but that horrific premonition—the pre-future tense of death—still dominates. Everything will pass away, the image, the life, the image that captures the life will pass away.

Those lengthy painting processes cannot be cut for a minute or a second. This process is not so much a great creation out of nothing, but a cycle of a series of opposite actions: tear down-restart, destroy-rebirth, confession-worship. Frenhofer's every smear is carefully probing, wandering and hesitating, and every stroke contains a wrestling between the self and the other.

When Marianne's body trembles in front of the painter, under the camera, Rivette is also revealing the workings of the male gaze. The painter wants to break up the model's body, stripping away its smooth and attractive surface to reveal the inside, and the lens sometimes serves the same function, just as Liz doesn't hesitate to cut open a bird's chest.

But Marianne eventually took back ownership of her body, refusing both the contorted pose the painter had arranged for her, and Liz's gem—"I'm not a doll." She lay casually on the mattress, like a Curled up like a baby, this return to the mother's position is often seen in Rivett's films, such as the shocking opening of "Nova".

This inaccessible, inseparable pose, as if plucking oneself out of the world, brings many associations, womb, number zero, Cezanne's apple, a complete fossil...