“Acting is for the theater, which is a bastard art” he has said. “The film can be a true art because in it the author takes fragments of reality and arranges them in such a way that their juxtaposition transforms theme’s Cinema, for Bresson, is a total art, in which acting corrodes. In a film,

each shot is like a word, which means nothing by itself, or rather means so many things that in effect it is meaningless. But a word in a poem is transformed, its meaning made precise and unique, by its placing in relation to the words around it: in the same way a shot in a film is given its meaning by its context, and each shot modifies the meaning of the previous one until with the last shot a total, unparaphrasable meaning has been arrived at. Acting has nothing to do with that, it can only get in the way. Films can only be made by bypassing the will of those who appear in them; using not what they do, but what they are.