… Bresson thought of 'performance' as something the entire film was doing, not just the 'actors' in it. The actor is one instrument, along with framing, lighting, editing, and sound, and it is usually these elements that displace the most dramatic 'actorly' scenes. In place of facial expressions of tension and rage, for example, we see falling objects, toppling tables, a skimmer clattering across the floor, impeccably shot and cut, and piercing the sonic compusre of the moment. We 'hear' and 'see' the emotion reverberating through space, often without the agent that sparked it.

One remembers a Bresson film not for a performance but for the accumulated effect of the world created. This is beyond a theory of acting.

The word scene, tied to the narrative film tradition since Griffith, the one Bresson labels 'cinema', is a component of dramatic structure of the rising and falling action type. Scenes crystallise tensions in the story, bring emotions to the surface, and move toward a climax. They excel in expressive and expository dialogue and the clashing of conflicting wills. Acting is the primary vehicle of scenes …

… whereas a scene has a certain settling-in quality in which actors move about and speak freely as if the camera did not exist and the word cut were not an imminent threat, a sequence in almost any Bresson film after 1950 minimises or dispenses with acting and expansive dialogue, neutralises features essential to the dramatic thrust of a scene, and shifts the burden of carrying tensions, conflicts, and emotions to the cinematographic register: to framing, editing, and, even more tellingly, to off screen space and sound.

… The less a film is broken down into scenes, the more momentum it is capable of building and the more inexorable seems its trajectory.

from Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion For Film