It’s hard to agree with all of Robert Bresson’s dogma, but in his tiny book Notes on Cinematography, he advances a few great metaphors about editing and the way it informs the live-ness of film, and performance on film. Yeah, he called all his actors “models”.

“Cutting. Passage of dead images to living images. Everything blossoms afresh.” p.80

“Your images will release their phosphorus only in aggregating. (An actor wants to be phosphorescent right away.)” p.82

“Cutting. Phosphorus that wells up suddenly from your models, floats around them and binds them to the objects (blue of Cézanne, grey of El Greco).” p.77