In an interview with Claire Clouzot, Catherine Breillat says that the first film that moved her during her adolescence, and made her want to become a film-maker, was Ingmar Bergman's Sawdust and Tinsel (1953). She saw Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961) one week later (Clouzot, 2004, 149). These films offer images of ravishing and glacial women, Anne in Sawdust and Tinsel played by Harriett Andersson and Viridiana played by Silvia Pinal. These protagonists, pale, sensual, virginal women, are precursors of Breillat's heroines. If there is an affective and erotic imprint of Bergman and Bunuel felt in Breillat's films more widely, Sawdust and Tinsel and Viridiana also yield very beautiful images of reclining. Breillat tells Clouzot of the persistence of images from the films in her imagination, and of the ways in which this imagining reaches into her far later filming of Amira Casar prone on the bed in Anatomie de l’enfer (149). The films are recalled pictorially, but also in the relation they materialise between pose, angle, and meaning.

In Sawdust and Tinsel, Harriet Andersson is first seen upside down in the frame. Her eyes are closed and the close shot reveals the delineation of her lashes, her full mouth. The image is intimate, illicit, because it is inverted and because it shows her unawares, unconscious. She is childlike in a broderie anglaise camisole. She is sensual with her dark hair cascading and her pale throat. Her body is moved as she is jolted in her sleep by the rolling of the circus wagon. Her lover looks in at her like a creature catching sight of a nymph. He kisses the skin of her upper arm. She turns and a scene between them unfolds. The shots are thick with hesitation between sleep and waking. In the tight-framed world of the carriage the scene has a felt intimacy of skin, hair, cotton, closeness, animality.

Viridiana extends these meanings of unusual, childlike sensuality, of hidden intimacy, all wrapped up in these images of reclining, to elaborate a further, related obsession with eroticism and death. Viridiana's uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey) touches silk ribbons, flowers from a nosegay, the satin wedding dress, corset, and shoes his dead bride has left behind. Visiting his house Viridiana sleepwalks, her somnambulism dissolving the divide between sleeping and waking.