1969 A balcony film. Based on the short story A Gentle Spirit by Fyodor Dostoyevsky,

A Gentlewoman was Robert Bresson’s first film in color as if the intensity of feeling of the young unnamed woman could not be felt in black and white.

The film begins with the suicide of the 17 year old wife and ends with the nail in her coffin.

Her story is told by her husband in voiceover to their maid.

There is a failure to communicate in death as there was in life. She is penniless and meets her older future husband at his pawn shop, there are many references to the nature of transactional human relationships.

In Something and Nothing 2021 the death is translated into an abortion.

Screengrab Something and Nothing 2020

Acrylic paint and paper on glass 20 x 10 cm 2021

Fanny Robin in her coffin Far From the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy dir. John Schlesinger 1967

Une Femme Douce A Gentlewoman in her coffin 1961

But for this reason I

fancy that I am seeing myself

lying in the coffin, and my

two selves stare at each other in wonderment

Karoline Gunderode

quoted by Christa Wolf in No Place

Karoline Friederike Louise Maximiliane von Günderrode (11 February 1780 – 26 July 1806) was a German Romantic poet