I’ve been reading NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPH by Robert Bresson.
Bresson was an austere and eccentric French filmmaker with very specific developed views on what film should or should not be. As just one example, he exclusively referred to his actors as “models,” as he believed acting was a hold-over from theatre that had no place in film. His NOTES are essentially a long list of epigrams, aphorisms and fragments. Here are some:
The faculty of using my resources well diminishes when their number grows.
An image must be transformed by contact with other images as is a colour by contact with other colours.
The truth of cinematography cannot be the truth of theatre, not the truth of the novel, nor the truth of painting. (What the cinematographer captures with his or her own resources cannot be what the theatre, the novel, painting capture with theirs).
Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art’s form.
Expression through compression. To put into an image what a writer would spin out over ten pages.
Be sure of having used to the full all that is communicated by immobility and silence.
His “flattened” images and his interest in silence and immobility seem to me to have an unusual amount to say to the comics form.