Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, Renderings. With a Foreword by Lesley Stern [1. Aufl.] 9783839416488

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Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch (eds.) Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture

Volume 7

Editorial Media initiate cultural dynamics; they change the arts as well as discursive formations and communicative processes as bases of the social, and procedures of recording as practices of cultural archives and memory. The series Metabasis (Greek: change, transition) from the Institute for Arts and Media at the University of Potsdam sets out to analyze the medial, artistic and societal upheavals in relation to different cultural spaces and eras, and to trace the changes in narration and fictionalization as well as their reverse on processes of imagination. Furthermore, transitions between media and their performances are discussed, be it text-image-interferences, literary figurations and their impact on other arts, or transitions between different genres and their methods of representation. The series addresses the »inter-medial«, hybrid forms and borderlines, which suspend traditional ways of description and require new terms of description and expression. It also explores the complex and hard-to-define realm of in-betweenness, where traditional, handed-down forms become unstable and new forms become productive. A new volume will be added to the series at least once a year. Topics draw from a wide spectrum including New Media, Literature, Film, Art, and Image Theory as part of a regular intervention into current debates of Cultural and Media studies. The series is edited by Heiko Christians, Andreas Köstler, Gertrud Lehnert, and Dieter Mersch

Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch (eds.)

Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture Bodies, Screens, Renderings. With a Foreword by Lesley Stern

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2012 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Etienne Allaix, Berlin: http://www.etienneallaix.com Cover illustration: John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (Faces Distribution, 1977), modified digital frame enlargement Proofread by: Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch, Lea Katharina Becker, Alex Cline, Meredith Hall, Hans Kannewitz Typeset by: Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch, Lea Katharina Becker, Alex Cline, Meredith Hall, Hans Kannewitz Printed by: Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar ISBN 978-3-8376-1648-4 Global distribution outside Germany, Austria and Switzerland:

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Contents Foreword Lesley Stern »›Always Too Small or Too Tall‹«: Rescaling Screen Performance

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Introduction Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch Etymological Uncoveries, Creative Displays: Acting as Force and Performance as Eloquence in Moving Image Culture

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Presentations and Representations Paul McDonald Spectacular Acting: On the Exhibitionist Dynamics of Film Star Performance

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Kathrina Glitre Cary Grant: Acting Style and Genre in Classical Hollywood Cinema

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Ceri Hovland Mimesis and Narration: The Performance of Actors and Cinematic Point of View in The Lady Eve and The Virgin Suicides

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Christina Adamou Postfeminist Portrayals of Masculinity and Femininity in Action Films: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

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Keren Omry Quantum of Craig: Daniel Craig and the Body of the New Bond

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Appearances and Encounters Johannes Riis Actor/Character Dualism: The Case of Luis Buñuel’s Paradoxical Characters

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Jan Distelmeyer Frames for Ambivalence: Acting out Realism in Italian Neorealism and the Films of Christian Petzold

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Jacqueline Nacache The Actor as an Icon of Presence: The Example of Delphine Seyrig

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Deborah Levitt Living Pictures: From Tableaux Vivants to Puppets and Para-Selves

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Malte Hagener All about Gena, Myrtle and Virginia: The Transitional Nature of Actress, Role and Character

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Affects and Affections Jennifer M. Barker A Surrealist Turn: Transformative Gestures in The Birds

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Elena del Río Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Becoming-Violence of Performance

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Tarja Laine Dangerous Liaisons and Counterfeit Affections: Cinema as Seduction

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Mirjam Schaub An Inscrutable Face: Nicole Kidman in Dogville

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Lisa Åkervall Character-Witness, Actor-Medium

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Actions and Animations Susanne Foellmer Between Image and Volatility: Framing Motion in Dance and Film

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Cynthia Baron The Temporal Dimensions of Screen Performances: Exploring Expressive Movement in Live Action and Animated Film

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Sharon Marie Carnicke Emotional Expressivity in Motion Picture Capture Technology

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James Tobias Going Native with Pandora’s (Tool) Box: Spiritual and Technological Conversions in James Cameron’s Avatar

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Karen Beckman Double Negative: The Actor, the Non-Actor, and the Animated Documentary

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Reflections and Perspectives Henri Schoenmakers Bodies of Light: Towards a Theory about Film Acting from a Communicative Perspective

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Aaron Taylor Thinking through Acting: Performative Indices and Philosophical Assertions

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Jörg Sternagel An Emphasis on Being: Moving towards a Responsive Phenomenology of Film(’s) Performance

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Vivian Sobchack Being on the Screen: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Flesh, or the Actor’s Four Bodies

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Dieter Mersch Passion and Exposure: New Paradoxes of the Actor

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Contributors

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Foreword

Lesley Stern »›Always Too Small or Too Tall‹«: Rescaling Screen Performance [W]hat cinema once was can no longer be seen. For most of us it is already dead or in its death throes. For my part, I believe it has long since gasped its last, even if, like a god or any natural phenomenon, it may have taken up hiding to negotiate the conditions of its resurrection. Raúl Ruiz

Imagine All that Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955) on an iPhone in the palm of your hand; imagine Elizabeth Taylor televised, larger than life in Auschwitz; imagine careening down a rabbit hole; imagine how the cosmic acting out of a dinosaur might mutate, be instantiated in the gestures of a mid-twentieth century suburban family. Fantastic scenarios all, ranging from the dystopic to the heterotopic, but they all exist, are made manifest in some variety of moving image. And they all are mobilized by that spark engendered when cinematic imagination is fired by technological innovation and potential, and simultaneously inscribed by the archaic traces of ancient or defunct or even overly familiar technologies. Cinematic imagination doesn’t necessarily translate to »cinema« or the movies as we have been used to thinking of them, but all these images serve as provocations in thinking through the changing ways of the actor, her affects and effects, in contemporary moving image culture. Though as soon as I utter the word actor and use the personal pronoun I am confronted by an interrogative, or series of questions: can we still speak of the actor’s body, should we consider the agency of things, what to make of composited bodies, of new modes of interaction that hardly bear relation to »the movies«? Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture exhibits a faith in what I might venture to call »negative heterogeneity«. While eschewing any attempt to present a synthesized approach to con-

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temporary image culture it nevertheless offers ballast in the tensions set in play between the three key terms: bodies, screens, renderings. Across the pages and between the essays, in ideas that resonate, rhyme, refute one another, this collection is more curious about the unexpected, more engaged in seeking out surprises than in laying out blue prints, offering taxonomies, cataloguing tropes. The approach is exemplified for me in Vivian Sobchack’s essay. Her title, »Being on the Screen: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Flesh, or the Actor’s Four Bodies«, alerts us to the fact that while it is absurd to talk about the body in cinema it is equally ridiculous (and unproductive) to reject the kind of detailed analysis that might enable a refinement of our understanding of bodies, screens, and renderings in contemporary moving image culture. But just as the figure of the »film actor« morphs and transforms in this new environment, demanding new approaches to the work of performance, as the editors point out in their introduction, so too are the varieties of detailed analysis likely to morph. It is then, in the spirit of this book, though at an oblique angle to it, that this foreword is written. Skimming over the surface of the changing virtual environment and dipping in and out of »cinematic« examples I take »renderings« as the key term, the term of mediation between »bodies« and »screens«. It is customary for studies of acting and performance in cinema to focus on the actor, on the body, or on the conventions which shape viewing perceptions. But today in a climate of proliferating screens and modes of production the question arises with renewed acuity of how performance is rendered by technological determinations—including not just digital versus analogic (this perhaps matters least of all) but also the specificity of media, the mode of delivery and reception, the size of the screen, how private or public the viewing situation. Of course we all know that bodies are fantastical images, brought into being by the apparatus, we know the auratic power of the cinematic institution and the dematerialization (and remaking) of cinematic bodies effected by technology. However, if these older theoretical verities hold good for new media developments, simultaneously new performative modalities needle us into revisiting earlier instances of technological innovation. Or so it turned out to be for me. Many of the ideas I toy with were generated by the suggestive juxtaposition of the sections of the book, in particular »Presentations and Representations«, »Affects and Affections«, »Actions and Animations«. These suggestions were lured into life by two encounters, encounters with friends that prompted an exploration of this performance-technology nexus. The last few years have seen an explosion in the cinemas of 3D

Rescaling Screen Performance movies and I saw one of the first of this wave with Miriam Hansen: Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010). She was tickled by the deployment of 3D, and for hours and days afterwards spun a theoretical web linking ideas on innervation with the innovations of Alice in Wonderland, illuminating cinema’s capacity to imbricate in particular our experience of scale. The link between scale and affect was sharpened for me by the encounter with an event staged by Steve Fagin, Only for Dummies, Punctured Utopia of the 21st Century, over several weeks in the summer of 2010.1 This event, described by Fagin as a miniseries, was commissioned by a large Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, though you did not need to be present at the museum in order participate, all you needed was a cell phone. The platform of the iPhone and the syntax of Facebook were used as structuring principles in Only for Dummies but Utopia was the topic, inflected via figures and images drawn from the Soviet Revolution, the invention of Hollywood, and the Bauhaus (the Master of Ceremonies or »star« is the ventrilo quist dummy Charlie McCarthy, the wisecracking sidekick from The Chase and Sanborn Hour radio show of the late 1930s and 1940s). It is a rich work but what struck me most forcefully was an obvious »wrinkle« in time and spatial orientation: the appearance on my iPhone of familiar moving images from the great period of Hollywood cinema. It was astonishing, shocking, and surprisingly moving to cradle Judy Garland in my hand, experience her being hypnotized, to feel Jane Wyman gazing into her own reflection in the television set, Judy Holliday moving in a single long take, singing »The party’s over«, Sterling Hayden saying as he has always said and still with feeling, »Lie to me«. The process of recalibration, of rescaling, set in motion by Only for Dummies carried over into my viewing of a very different work, Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011). A common complaint about the film pivots on the perceived disequilibrium between on the one hand the grandiosity of what is commonly referred to as the »creation« interlude, marked by technological exhibitionism, and on the other hand an intimate drama of family life, grounded in conventions of realism in which acting is crucial. The question of gravity, which had been tickling subcutaneously through Alice in Wonderland and Only for Dummies, came into focus as an aspect of scale. Meanwhile on the internet I was visiting a new genre of film criticism, a revamping of the video essay which depends on a capturing and rendering of film images, a mode of address that often conjures intimacy although it is broadcast through new configurations of public space and the public sphere of new moving images.2 From

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Lesley Stern there it was a short trip back to Jean-Luc Godard’s videographic work, Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1989–1998). This is where I came to rest in the end, fixating on a fragment from this extensive work, a moment snatched from time, watched repeatedly on my tele vision and laptop, a moment that seems to open up the question of how performance might be inflected by its technological mediation. Needless to say, immersion in a Godard work is never a comingto-rest; rather, many of the questions to do with scale and gravity, the changing world of moving images, the death of cinema and the emergence of the internet, were simply crystallized and complicated here. And although Alice in Wonderland, Only for Dummies and Tree of Life were eventually swallowed up and disappeared like Jonah down the maw of the whale, I want to briefly skate over the provocations they set in motion for me.

Too Small Relative to Whom or What? [I]n the final analysis every image and every sequence of images, even the most classically constructed cannot be assigned a fixed meaning because it will always be in a relation to a multiplicity of other images, whether present or virtual, real or imagined. In other words image production necessarily arises out of a reservoir of virtual images, the photographic unconscious, for which it provides a provisional actualisation, but crucially never a completely stable form. Raúl Ruiz

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»Why is it you are always too small or too tall?« the Mad Hatter asks Alice. The question of course is relative. Too small relative to whom or what? And it only makes sense if the person who asks the question remains constant in size. The cinema has always been predisposed to mess with scale, to unhinge a world where relativity reigns, where inanimate things and live actors share the realm of performativity. Generally speaking, however, in narrative fiction anyway the disturbance of scale is effected within a framework that follows certain rules (eyeline matches, reverse shots), and safeguards certain reference points (generally privileging the human body as a point of identification for the viewer, as the site where bodies and emotions are grounded).3 But often the prospect of sensation (and the promise it brings of excessive pleasure) overrides the imperative of stability. We go to the cinema (to the theater, the palace) in order to lose not find ourselves.

Rescaling Screen Performance I do not remember all that Miriam said, actually I remember few details, and what follows here is by no means what she would have said. But it is inspired by her fierce combination of optimism and skepticism, her fidelity to the idea of cinema, her openness to infatuation, her capacity to be excited by and attentive to the detailed workings of new technologies and their cultural ramifications, to engage with the culture we inhabit, while simultaneously being skeptical of theoretical claims about »newness«. The aspirational blueprint for 3D has been, on the whole, verisimilitude, a working towards the illusion that as viewers we exist within the same continuous performance space as the diegetic characters, a space that is contoured and haptic. In fact 3D does not, as of now, produce the illusion that we are entirely within the virtual space. Or it does so selectively. It is well disposed towards snowflakes and whispy curlicues which seem so close they brush the skin. But velocity is what 3D really does well: objects that seem to careen right out of the screen, propelled from the background, exploding into the foreground of the theatrical space, virtually in our faces. This kind of 3D velocity, in combination with operations like smash zooms and digital editing, can produce transporting effects. Not effect in the sense of an action followed by a result (be it another action, a feeling, a thought) but a simultaneity, a material affect. The technological performativity frees us from gravity, has the capacity to shock, to shake up the world we inhabit and render it ludically strange. When Alice falls down the rabbit hole some of the techniques are familiar, the cutting shows her body from above, from below, combined with fragments and parts of her body, and then what are possibly point of view shots but which happen so fast that we lose perspective. We experience rapid shifts between seeing her and being her. We see her upside down, her face peering into the frame from above as though looking into the cinematic world (the rabbit hole), her long hair hanging down into the frame, candles flickering. Then the camera swivels 180 degrees. Now she is the right way up but her long hair is standing on end, straight up. The camera pulls back and whooshes, seems to suck her into a vortex. Is she falling or flying, being sucked in or spat out? Not that we ask these questions during the thrilling fall into the rabbit hole. Nor do we distinguish between Alice and us. What we experience is a loss of gravity. A loss of any sense of compositional logic, of scale. A sensation of being mashed between surfaces and pulled out, elongated like chewing gum. Becoming chewing gum. Elastic and mutable, shape-shifting. The rabbit hole sequence inducts us into another world, a world spinning into near-abstraction, in which objects are unhinged from

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their mooring, human bodies freed from gravity. So we are set up for the following sequence in which Alice drinks from the bottle which alternately shrinks her and turns her into a giant. She and we enter a world in which scale is disrupted, in which body parts can be removed and swapped around. All these effects and affects would seem to have very little to do with acting. True, if one thinks of the actors in traditional terms as the people (film stars) who embody the characters. But Alice is more akin to the Cheshire cat who changes shape and size, who folds in and out of itself. She is a conduit for our amazement and wonder and delight. Three dimensionality, it turns out, does not confer solidity and fixity and submission to gravity. But it might contribute to cinema’s capacity to address collective experience via »sensorily, bodily transmitted rhythms, hyperbolic humor, and fantasies of disruption and transformation« (Hansen 2012: xvii-xviii). In the preface to her posthumously published book Cinema and Experience Miriam also speaks of »cinema’s possible role in effecting a not-yet-apprehensible future« (ibid.: xviii). The utopian dimension, as well as the performative register of Only for Dummies could not be more different than that of Alice in Wonderland. The movie clips that play in the palm of your hand are what grabs my attention, but they are in fact embedded in a network. Charlie McCarthy has a group of friends in a Facebook-like environment, friends who include Vladimir Mayakovsky, Joseph Stalin, W. C. Fields, Bertolt Brecht, Mellisand Scott, William Faulkner and Marlene Dietrich. Ideas about Utopia, reflections on the rhetoric and logic of the new, are not elaborated in an exegetical form but rather provoked via tagging, quotation, posting and spiky repartee. What took me by surprise was the affective charge that persisted in the movie clips. Images extracted, actors shrunk, the viewing context miniaturized: I would have expected the emotional charge to have dissipated. But, on the contrary I found myself instantly immersed in those fantasmatic scenarios, almost immediately—with the flick of a button, the tap on an icon, the pause for downloading—hooked back into the somatic and psychic circuitry of cathexis. Or the sensation of cathexis. This haptic relation, holding the images in your hand, undoubtedly mitigates against a threat experienced by the middleaged (the death of cinema), by mobilizing a new old conceit: that it is possible to hold the world in your hand. Perhaps it is indeed nostalgia that overdetermines my response, and a younger generation might be more inclined to respond differently, emphasizing instead the new performative relations inscribed in cell phone technology and its inscription in a larger web of archival resources. Either way, the foregrounding, let me say the performing of the scale-affect rela-

Rescaling Screen Performance tion, in Fagin’s »mini-series«, was startling and provocative. This relation reverberates within images, through the viewing relations instigated by various technological developments, and across institutional structures. As a segue consider these words from Fagin, discussing the riff in the Bauhaus chapter where Brecht and Weill discuss distanciation and audience engagement through the YouTube clip from the first Max Schmeling/Joe Louis boxing match: Ideas around counter punching and keeping the correct distance are discussed. Brecht/Weill suggested spectators in their theater should behave like spectators at a boxing match. Also, I wanted to make perfectly clear through the punching example that affect matters in Brecht/Weill. Distance is about the correct distance to counter an attacking opponent of great danger, in this case Joe Louis, and has nothing to do with affectless alienation (Crandall 2011). Terrence Malick does not invite viewers to behave as though at a boxing match. But in Tree of Life distance and affect do matter. From the immense to the minute, from cosmic magnitude to quotidian intimacy, from the creation of the universe to the acting out of a family romance in the suburbs: Tree of Life dips and spins from one extreme to another, skewing perspective, eschewing balance, elaborating a grandly baroque cinematic allegory. Scale is »played« by the film, put into play as an animating trope. The long sequence depicting the creation of the universe might seem like an aberration because of the superfluity of special effects, abstraction, lack of perspective, lack of gravity. There are no human actors and the sequence culminates with an exchange—the enactment of a gesture—between dinosaurs. One is large and strong, the other small and wounded. The larger smashes its foot on to the little one’s face and holds it there as the smaller creature squirms. The talonned foot is lifted, then lowered again onto the smaller face but this time less violently. Then again the large one lifts, gently lowers its foot, almost touches, taps, draws back. I think it is misleading to see the creation sequence as an ab erration, as an interlude sequestered from the real meat of the narrative drama, but in a sense it is entirely correct to see it as an interlude. Tree of Life is made up interludes, of fragmentary performative moments and enactments that are nested between other moments and enactments. If it is a creation sequence it is not exactly a depiction of the creation of the universe, but rather of the cinematic process that makes matter out of the immaterial. Like other

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instances of experimental cinema it is an exploration of the question: How can and does the cinema bring into being visions, sensations, affects that cannot be instantiated in any other way? What is the substance cinema works with, how can cinematic technologies render the world, especially a pre-human world?4 Throughout his œuvre Malick has been interested in cinematic practice as an experimental poetics, a conjuring of technological and imaginative possibilities, the bringing into being of other worlds, worlds that may exist imaginatively for characters and/or viewers. These imaginary worlds possess a materiality that is registered most clearly through the gestures of characters, but also through cinematic gestures and actions, through the technological potential of cinema to awaken in the viewer an experience of pathos. In Malick’s cinema each image that materializes, that comes into focus, that can be seen close up from a human perspective or scrutiny, implies another image that has not been visualized (though it may well be imagined, and materialized), from a different perspective. His cinema is constantly rescaling: The smallest gestures of humans and creatures (the crocodile at the beginning of The Thin Red Line [1998] for instance) in the present might be as mysterious (and as charged) as the ineffably huge and unseeable in the maelstrom of cosmic creation. Each utterance and gesture tied to one figure could have been uttered by another, each gesture embodied and enacted by another actant. Malick’s cinematic tree of life is inflected by a spiritual version of Darwinism. Imminent in every being are other beings, human and non-human; all beings are connected, creatures large and small, through minute gestures, actions, flutterings, floatings and flights. It is the performative valency of gestures (how they are performed, cinematically rendered, the distribution of weight and lightness, the modalities of touch, how near or far, whether still or moving […]) that is the beating heart of the film, that renders its rhythms.5 The dinosaur scene has attracted endless discussion and interpretation, particularly on the blogosphere, so that any contribution now appears to fuel the trivia machine, particularly the nerdy incantations (focused on special effects and technological minutiae). So here is another piece of writing contributing to the spammery. I think Malick was canny in choosing such a proto-cinematic creature-thing, such a fantasmatic image, as a dinosaur from which to spin his web of interconnections. But rather than focusing on what the gesture means my attention was grabbed by the gestural dimension itself and how this image works to crystallize and disperse a meditation on the relation between technology and performance. One of the things dinosaurs evoke is the tension between that moment (endless for us humans) of treading on the earth, being

Rescaling Screen Performance constrained by gravity and that utopian fantasy of floating free in flowing water or flying through the air (another about dinosaurs is that they are gigantic things that you can hold in the palm of your hand). The family romance of Tree of Life is incarnated cinematically in a series of gestural moments. It is gesture that forges a continuity between the immense and the minute, between for instance body and environment and a dinosaur and a child. Technological gestures make a cinematic world, brings things into being, and the gestures of actors make things happen, make the air vibrate, mobilize circuits of affect. New technologies, their capacities for rendering, must surely be at the heart of any cinema that today is concerned with keeping alive a concept of cinema after cinema.6 But this is not a new idea.

Happiness, the Holocaust, Hollywood In A Place in the Sun, there’s a deep feeling of happiness that I’ve rarely encountered in other films, even much better ones. It’s a simple, secular feeling of happiness, one moment with Elizabeth Taylor […] that close-up of Elizabeth Taylor that radiated a kind of shadowed happiness. Jean-Luc Godard 7

Elizabeth Taylor in black-and-white, floating in the air, freed from gravity; the corpses in color, movement stilled, looking like paintings. »How marvelous to be able to look at what we cannot see. What a miracle for our blind eyes.« Thus declares the voice-over in the section of Histoire(s) du Cinéma (»Toutes les Histoires«) that juxtaposes Elizabeth Taylor with corpses from the concentration camps. The voice is Godard’s— derisively aphoristic, bitterly droll. The images of Elizabeth Taylor are drawn from a Hollywood fiction, from A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951); the images of the camps are stills from newsreel footage also shot by George Stevens, in 16 mm color, when he was part of the allied army entering the camps in 1945.8 But it is not simply a juxtaposition of two images: star and corpse (Hollywood and Auschwitz), fiction and documentary, although the shock value of this stark opposition is surely intended by Godard. The film images are rendered in video, and moreover these emaciated dead and these erotic living beings are embedded in a dense concatenation of images and sounds and textures, a restless decomposing and recomposing of bodies, a dizzying selection and reconfiguration of gestures from the encyclopedia of cinema. And from art too. Gestures are pulled, from Francisco de

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Goya and Giotto for instance, extracted like teeth, chipped into the montage sequence of Elizabeth Taylor and the Holocaust corpses. Why counterpose this »happiness« to the Holocaust? Surely to do so, to bring Holocaust images into the orbit of the performance of happiness is to speak, obscenely, of the victims of the camps as acting, to cast them as actors in the same way that one speaks of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. A simple answer would be that it has nothing to do with acting, that when Godard refers to »what we cannot see« he means the Holocaust; what we can see, he implies, are Hollywood versions of happiness and suffering, which appear as miracles, as though they were revelatory of the truth. This response can be buttressed by Godard’s oft-repeated and polemical accusation that by not filming the camps the cinema failed in its vocation (»The final blow had come when the concentration camps were not filmed. At that moment, cinema totally failed in its duty […]« [Temple and Williams 2000: 19]). It ceded victory to Hollywood. The deaths inflicted by the Holocaust and the death of cinema are superimposed. In such a schema A Place in the Sun serves a merely metonymic purpose. But there are several limitations to the simple answer. First, the camps were filmed after the end of the war (not just by Stevens but by other film makers serving in the army, including Alfred Hitchcock); and second, it occludes the issue, which is what interests Godard, of how film makers acted on these images, how they acted on knowledge of the Holocaust. This is a political question but also an ethical one, it poses the film maker as actor. And Godard is very present in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, performing himself, enacting this very question, amongst others. The question of how film makers acted is also an aesthetic question, or more exactly a question of where aesthetics and technology intersect. Godard takes the affect produced by Elizabeth Taylor (overdetermined by the fact that George Stevens, just a few years earlier, had shot newsreel footage in Buchenwald-Dachau in April 1945) as a serious provocation. I take the performative articulation of Stevens’ short sequence and Godard’s rearticulation of it (a reperforming of happiness as Beckettian sadness, as an occasion to mourn the death of cinema) as the provocation for this foreword. Shock value granted, I also believe it gets to the heart of the matter. Of course with Godard, and it is particularly so in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, when you get to the heart of the matter you frequently find it’s all a ruse, you’ve been barking up the wrong labyrinth, or Godard has simply changed his mind, messed with the rules of the game, and puckishly recanted his own pronouncements. Nevertheless, the heuristic value of that moment in which Elizabeth Taylor radiates a simple happiness and the way Godard renders it, opens up vari-

Rescaling Screen Performance ous ways to think about performance and technology in the moving image. The extraordinary thing about Histoire(s) du Cinéma—just as extraordinary as the gravity of the shocking accusation at the heart of it—is the fact that Godard perversely chooses to film the history or histories (or some histories, almost exclusively European cinema and Hollywood) or stories of cinema in another, reductive, medium: video. Not only video, but video commissioned and shot for television. Why? Why on earth assay such a monumental project through an inevitable and drastic reduction of the cinematic image, deformation of the cinematic body, of cinematic performance? There is no simple answer of course but central to any probing of the question are the two related issues of scale and gravity. The question of scale, the immensity of the extermination camps versus the intimacy and proximity of a celluloid kiss, this is at the very crux of this video rendering of cinematic history. A scalingdown of the monstrous humanism at the heart of the cinematic close-up. »No close-ups« an inter-title declares, commands. Film doesn’t deserve to be consecrated in 35 mm, in wide screen, in Technicolor, doesn’t merit inflation; on the contrary its histories should be deflated, subjected to the flattening, pixilated, grubby process and rendering of video. That’s one way of looking at it. And certainly this is a pronounced authorial gesture in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, a gestural inflection of the battle hymn. In its instantiation as a battle hymn Histoire(s) du Cinéma is a condemnation of the action of film makers, their failure to act, and this is neatly epitomized in juxtaposing the two films of George Stevens, the point being not their similarity, but their difference; Stevens shot the evidence of extermination, and then returned to business as usual. Georges Didi-Huberman makes this case forcefully in a fine and detailed analysis of the Elizabeth Taylor segment, but concludes with a contemptuous flick of the wrist, discerning Stevens’ return to Hollywood as a return »to his little fictional stories« (2008: 146). However, the opposition is not between big worthy documentaries and little tawdry fictions. Certainly Histoire(s) du Cinéma probes the fault lines between documentary and fiction but more in order to fold and knot each term into the other than to cleave them apart. To assume that Godard is dismissive of »little fictional stories« is to miss the fact (or should we say poetry) that while Histoire(s) du Cinéma is a battle hymn it is also a love song.9 Rejection of Hollywood, in its very enactment, re-enacts infatuation, just as technologies of death crash up against techniques of love, and we are reminded that Hollywood after all and in the end is only one cinema among others. But, after all and in the end, a first love.

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Lesley Stern The question of gravity is also at the crux of this video rendering of cinematic history. Gravity in the sense of seriousness (of the accusations of the failure of cinema and its death), and in the somatic sense—the force that in the world cleaves bodies to the earth, and in the cinema renders bodies a part of the world, and enables an affective connection between us as viewers and the screen. In the last section of Histoire(s) du Cinéma (»Les Signes Parmi Nous«) Godard says of the final solution, »Nothing can comprehend this relation of the body to the world.« Nevertheless, this is what Histoire(s) du Cinéma tries to do, not through depiction or through offering comprehension, but through keeping alive and needling the question of how the cinema, in its various forms, has figured the body, and somatic engagements. Paradoxically, it is through the deployment of another medium, a different materiality, that memories of classic cinema are mobilized, and simultaneously unraveled. What do we see when we look at a Hollywood movie? What do we not see? What happens to cinematic performance when it is rendered in video? What happens to the body, to depth and scale, to gravity? It is not that hidden things are revealed. As we know from Passion (Jean-Luc Godard, 1982) video and lighting do not reveal more, but they do render the scene and the actors differently, and they do reconfigure our relation to the performative event. And this is because technological tools act upon the material they work with. Even though Godard’s tone is often elegiac and melancholic, trembling with grief, his ironic tone is just as often inflected by an impish delight in the capacity that video enables, the possibility of messing with matter, liberating bodies from the force of gravity and the law of narrative.

Video: A Play of Cut-Out Paper Silhouettes 22

Pascal Bonitzer in 1981, decrying the inferiority of video, describes the medium as pure surface; instead of depth layered through different planes of scale, there is only »a play of cut-out paper silhouettes as if all bodies were freed from depth and weight and spread out on the surface like cards« (in Beugnet 2007: 52). Video is a medium destined to reduce, flatten, blur. It emphasizes the two dimensional aspect of the moving image which film technologies struggle to transform into an illusion of three dimensionality. A pixilated image, less sensitive to light than film, it flattens the contrast between foreground and background, reducing distance and depth. It has often been thought of as a dirty medium, grubby pixels swarming on its skin-like surface. Figure and ground fuse, the human form does not

Rescaling Screen Performance have the same prominence as in film. As Emmanuel Burdeau puts it, video »does not have the same face, or the same measure […] [it] is glued to the image as to a piece of dough, and as such, is subjected to a process of slowing down, of reduction that opens it, however, to forces yet unaccounted for« (in Beugnet 2007: 51). Astonishing though Godard’s decision to use video to make the history(s) of cinema seems, in fact it is prefigured in his own history of experimentation with new electronic and virtual technologies of sound and image and editing. Video first appears in 1974 in Ici et Ailleurs (original footage shot in Palestine in 1969 and then edited in Paris, into a discursive performance of montage that incorporates a »story«, a repertoire of gestures of everyday Parisian life). Numéro Deux (1975) combined film and video to examine politics and sex in a domestic setting. Between 1976 and 1978 he made a series of programs for French television: France/tour/détour/deux/enfants is composed of twelve movements, each one opening with the everyday gestures of children. Philippe Dubois argues that this film marks a shift to a less political and more lyrical mode, employing different figures of writing: »It is, rather, organic, material, physical—in other words, carnal. It affects the body of the image« (1992: 177). And, we might add, it affects the body of the viewer. Commenting on video’s capacity to experiment with other ways than the shot reverse shot, on dissolves, on time passing in video Godard has said that you pass through an image event, »plunging as you plunge into the story, or as the story plunges something into your body« (ibid.: 181).10 Clearly Godard had used video for its potential to render the bodily through a different kind of incarnation, or we might say a different materiality of the medium. His films that are either shot on video or utilize video bring into focus an interest both in everyday gestures and in conventional poses. And what this lead to in Histoire(s) du Cinéma is an exploration of video’s capacity (the capacity to mix images electronically) for a different kind of montage. 23

Video Montage Histoire(s) du Cinéma is a grand catastrophic pile up of images and sounds and textures, like the pile up in Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967), but also unlike Weekend because the continuity of the tracking shot (a tracing in real time of contiguity) is replaced by montage, by dissolves and superimpositions, by a messing with the matter of time and the body, which are »spread out on the surface like cards.« The four odd hours of Histoire(s) du Cinéma are crammed full of clips from hundreds and hundreds of films, some go by in the flash

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of an eye, scarcely visible, others are rendered through superimposition and layering, cropping and split screen, the stretching of video skin, freeze frame, slow motion, stop motion. A few play out in real time which is to say cinematic time, time of the represented past, as opposed to the rescaling effected by the simultaneity of montage. Images from silent and sound cinema, from Hollywood and Europe, canonical moments and unrecognizable moments, fragments ripped from documentaries and newsreels and animation. And mixed in with the cinematic images are paintings, text, and a densely intricate weaving of sounds and music. Not to mention the staccato gunfire of the electronic typewriter and the authorial voice-over. Video montage is Godard’s way of doing history, a riposte to »the cinema« which failed to film the camps, or which failed to act by acting on the images, making a montage, thinking. Godard says this over and over again eliciting from Jacques Rancière over and over again the accusation that Godard reduces all cinema to a single explanation, to positing only one cinema organized around the war, the European catastrophe, the camps. And this, he argues, is because of Godard’s conviction that the cinema was/is there to show, to testify to presence; he deploys video and montage in the name of materialism, but out of the videographic operation, out of the »simulations of the machine« a new spiritualism arises (Rancière 2006: 85). True, Godard repeats his declaration about the death of cinema in the camps. True, he is serious about the betrayal of technological potential and cinematic vision, the opportunity for cinema to become the most important mode of thought in the twentieth century, the sell-out of post-war European and Hollywood cinema, the caving of public television to commercial interests. But he also, over and over again pulls the rug out from under his own feet in the very moment that he pulls a rabbit out of the hat. There is a phrase that recurs throughout Histoire(s) du Cinéma to characterize cinema: »Neither an art nor a technique. A mystery.« This is taken by some, including Rancière, as a testament to cinema’s powers of resurrection. But there is a ludic dimension to its reiteration which surfaces in the context of video montage. Histoire(s) du Cinéma pays homage to those gestural moments of cinema that are charged with extraordinary affective energy. But it also puts into play the capacities of video montage to elicit surprising connections and resonances, new ways of configuring old images, old bodies, old gestures. Watching Histoire(s) du Cinéma is like entering a new world, entering into a different but highly charged universe of images where one is propelled as a viewer by the rhythm of montage, where you plunge into the stories or the stories plunge something into your body.

Rescaling Screen Performance

Video Gesture But the camps, they were the first thing that should have been shown, the same way Marey showed how man walks with his chronophotographic gun, or something like that. They didn’t want to see them. And that’s where it stopped. Jean-Luc Godard 11

In Histoire(s) du Cinéma Godard takes up the project of ÉtienneJules Marey: to render the body. The body that is cinema, and all the bodies that perform in the cinema. He uses video as his version of Marey’s chronophotographic gun. What do we not see when we look at a Hollywood movie? Paradoxically, we do not see that which film is predisposed to show: We do not see the how of how people walk, run, dance as though on air, stagger under the weight of the real, how they reach out, pull back, express emotions and ideas—through gesture. Mostly we don’t see the gestures because they are absorbed into the fabric of quotidaneity, into the narrative propulsion, the transparent flow of images and movements. We register the affect of gesture in our own bodily responses, but do not often have time to draw breath and observe the cinematic how. We are so attracted, so drawn in to the moment, the unfolding present tense, that the connection between the cinema and the social matrix out of which it is born is rendered fuzzy. Through video Histoire(s) du Cinéma brings this gestural regime into focus. In this regime the actor is reduced, gesture expanded. Bodily movements and gestures are isolated through the choice and juxtaposition of film clips. Probably the clips are not chosen specifically for their gestural dimension, but in effect the fullness of narrative unfolding, which is also usually the unfolding of character, is reduced to bodily dispositions. Perhaps »distilled« would be a better word than »reduced«. And perhaps Rancière is right to describe the collage of fragments (he particularly pounces on those drawn from expressionist and fantastic traditions) as an example of Godard’s endless sensorium, evidence of conventionality run riot: »every one of these films seems to boil down to a demonstration of a few of humanity’s daily gestures and archetypal poses. They illustrate the major ages and essential moments of life, and cinema […] an encyclopedia of essential gestures« (Rancière 2006: 175). But, I would argue, the clips most frequently extract, isolate and distill gestural moments, figurative compositions, bodily configurations in such a way as to capture uncannily the narrative momentum and fictional energy from which they are generated. Or new

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relations are generated, relations between gestures and gestural motifs from different films and paintings. Figures in documentaries and fiction films are treated in exactly the same way: a reduction of the actor and expansion of gesture. All fiction films are documentaries, testaments to place and time and cultural milieu.12 But how to see this? One way is through gestural emphasis: to document as Marey did, using a technology that at once makes it possible to see what we could not see before in our day to day existence, and to see how the cinema (and other art forms) render gesture, both via conventions and through types of realism that efface the conventions of performance. In this sense Histoire(s) du Cinéma reprises a fascination that recurs in Godard from the earliest days, and is epitomized in a moment in Passion, a film that turns obsessively on the (impossible) performance of conventional tableaus, that moment when the maid in the motel delivering breakfast on a tray does an unexpected backbend. It is utterly surprising. It seems to interrupt the work routine with its improvisational character. Not only seems, it does. The elasticity of that body generates a thrill, a bodily gasp, as you watch. But the gesture is a learnt one, a gesture that has been practiced, its rhythm perfected. Part of what catches your breath is the way the film then just goes on, the after-affects rippling through you, just as the aftereffects of holding a pose ripple through the models in Jerzy’s video film. In the way that gesture is acted upon and re-performed Histoire(s) du Cinéma continues the legacy of Aby Warburg and the work of his Mnemosyne, »mixing personal and collective memory […] drawing the meaning of an actualization of images from reciprocal revelations possible only through montage« (Michaud 2004: 262). Warburg’s Mnemosyne (Memory) consisted of a board covered in black cloth on which he pinned in ever-changing configurations images from art history, postcards, cartoons, photographs, images torn from books and newspapers and magazines. All kinds of images appeared in the Mnemosyne, and all were copies or reproductions. Warburg was interested in gesture. Medieval iconography drew upon an archive of gestures that were, if not absolutely standardized, at least legible. Warburg, through the process of his Mnemosyne, demonstrated that although the repertoire of gestures remained fairly constant the meaning of individual gestures was in fact far from fixed. What mattered were the juxtapositions; the way images and figures were juxtaposed could affect the intensity of the gesture and the affective quality produced in the exchange. What mattered was the intensity of affect, as he showed in elaborating his concept of the Pathosformel or »pathos formula« (see Stern 2008).

Rescaling Screen Performance This was an utterly new way of doing art history, not through the logic of succession and progress, but through repetition and alternation; not through masterworks but through gestural incarnations that linked the past and the present, realms of art and the everyday. More than one critic has evoked the resonance between the Mnemosyne and Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Philippe-Alain Michaud, in Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, suggests that Warburg’s Mnemosyne finds its deepest resonance in Histoire(s) du Cinéma »where film, by exiling itself from its place of origin, becomes confused with the exploration of its own past and in which the superimpositions and juxtapositions that video makes possible serve the same purpose as the dislocation of plane in Mnemosyne« (Michaud 2004: 289).13 Gestures come into focus through juxtaposition, and resonance: the action of video montage renders film as a material, and connects it to the material conditions both of daily life and extraordinary life, like life in the camps, war in the Balkans. Frayed fragments are flung in a heap, tinder, waiting for a flame to ignite the virtual: gestural correspondences, rhymes of color, line, light, movement. Sometimes that flame is Godard’s tongue, the long devil’s tongue, but sometimes spontaneous combustion occurs as you watch two images dissolve into one another (becoming one or three or more), as gestures from disparate stories superimpose, or memory links two images from disparate parts of Histoire(s) du Cinéma, memory provoked through sensation, sensational affect generated here, where video and film collide. These are some of the gestures, some of the gestural constellations that come into focus as I watch: Women running open-armed towards the camera, towards Godard’s face watching; a woman (women) fainting, falling back into the arms of a man (men) who scoop her up; a prisoner, eyes covered in a blindfold, is shot and falls in a heap; struggles, all kinds of struggles, bodies tangled together in violent embrace, bodies falling; Sergej Eisenstein’s lions, here and there, in various stages of ascension; Roger Thornhill running for his life; prisoners in the Nazi camps playing music; the »little bunny« in Rules of the Game (Jean Renoir, 1939) hit by a bullet, twitching, in the vicinity of Goya’s Third of May (1814); a man tied by his neck to a post; Cyd Charisse twirling her long gloved arm looking directly into the camera; women, one after another, looking, covering their eyes; a procession of close-ups of open mouths, silent screams; two bodies mirroring one another’s moves, dancing; a body being thrown into a grave by men in uniform; kisses about to happen, not happening; Snow White (or was it the Sleeping Beauty?) lying along the bottom of the frame, the prince hovering above her,

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about to kiss her; Kim Novak, arms spread-eagled in the water, her body slowed, stop-motioned; feet, many feet, bare and shod, moving across the screen, filling the screen, a deathly procession. And hands, Histoire(s) du Cinéma is filled with hands, hands often reaching out, grasping, clasping as in the repeated clip from Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946) where the dying lovers, all living energy concentrated in their bloody and dirty hands, claw the earth inching towards one another; fingers opening an eye and slashing with a razor; a boy covering his eyes and jumping into the void; an old man holding out his hand begging, looking and leaning the other way; Lillian Gish, fingers fluttering around her mouth, juxtaposed with photos of inmates from Salpêtrière; a miniaturized Fay Wray wriggling in King Kong’s gigantic hand; a woman’s hands pulling at her necklace, beads cascading; fingers pushing a yellow key through slats; the famous Karina scissor shot from Pierrot le Fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965); Natalie Wood her fists clenched being held up, at arm’s length in a vice-like grip by John Wayne. This image is from The Searchers (John Ford, 1956), from a scene that occurs in all four sections of Histoire(s) du Cinéma. It is a scene most cinephiles know well,14 and which we know Godard has long loved: »when John Wayne finds Natalie Wood and suddenly holds her up at arm’s length, we pass from stylized gesture to feeling, from John Wayne suddenly petrified to Ulysses being reunited with Telemachus« (Godard 1972: 177). One moment he is going to kill her, and the next he is saving her. Extreme emotions are distilled, in a range of gestures, and what renders the scene so affective is, I would argue, precisely the difficulty of distinguishing »stylized gesture« (or conventional gesture) from »feeling« (or involuntary, somatic gesture). Histoire(s) du Cinéma intimates this in different ways, because although the sequence is repeated and echoed, each time the images are broken up and reassembled in a different collage. Debbie (Natalie Wood) runs away from the camera, in reverse stop-motion; the mother lets go of the pram in Battleship Potemkin (Sergej Eisenstein, 1925). The video freezes on Debbie’s face, Fernand Braudel is mentioned and the phrase »we all felt that the stakes were more obscure than political.« Godard’s voice speaks over blackness: »Cinema must exist for time to be found«, and then a cut in to the medium-close-up low angle of Natalie Wood, her fists clenched. From one moment to the next his body changes, and as he drops her into his arms the voice-over repeats »Neither an art nor a technique. A mystery.« Over all this there is music, loud sixties music, and now we see the source, it’s Bande à Part (JeanLuc Godard, 1964): Sami Frey, Claude Brasseur and Anna Karina dancing.

Rescaling Screen Performance Memory. Cinema is a memory machine, a blackboard against which gestural incarnations are juxtaposed and dissolve in everchanging configurations. Remember Godard writing, in a review of The Pajama Game (Stanley Donen, 1957), »[i]t is a curious fact that classical dance always fails to get across the screen footlights—if I may so phrase it—whereas modern ballet is as happy there as a fish in water because it is a stylization of real, everyday movements«; he praises Robert Fosse and Stanley Donen: »The arabesques of their dance movements reveal an unfamiliar grace, that of actuality« (Godard 1972: 87). John Wayne’s gesture conveys this unfamiliar grace. And its memory surfaces in the spontaneous movement and mirroring of the dancing trio in Bande à Part. These gestural motifs, drawn from different times, genres, movies, interact to spark »reciprocal revelations«, to heighten the intensity of affect. There is an affinity, Godard implies, both in the review of 1958 and in Histoire(s) du Cinéma, between modern dance and cinema. They share an aesthetic based on the »framing« of quotidian gesture, they incarnate the gestural as a vehicle for transmitting emotions and meanings. Emotions and meanings: where they escape language and logic, there where they arise in the spaces between movement and stillness, in a rhythm that moves from one cinematic frame to another, and from the screen into and through your body. Is this a mystery? »Neither an art nor a technique but a mystery«—this refrain has been taken by some to register Godard’s spiritual view of the cinematic image, his belief both that cinema has died, and that Histoire(s) du Cinéma represents a resurrection. The Godard of Bande à Part is of course not the Godard of Histoire(s) du Cinéma (or at least not the same Godard). The mystery remains (»how can I hate John Wayne upholding Goldwater and love him tenderly when, abruptly, he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?« [McBride and Wilmington 1974: 148]), but does it remain a defining gesture, a key to understanding Godard’s ontology? For Rancière »Elizabeth Taylor stepping out of the water is a figure for the cinema itself being reborn among the dead« (2006: 184). In the following sections I turn away from The Searchers and towards another Hollywood film, A Place in the Sun, but memory of The Searchers will ripple, as an after-image, through the questions to be explored. Central to the inquiry is the question of the relation of mystery to montage and to gesture. Gesture in the cinema is nearly always ghosted by a degree of mystery or undecideability, and montage—though it shows more than other modalities perhaps, the hand of the auteur—gives rise to unanticipated effects and affects. But does this designate the cin-

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Lesley Stern ematic as located within a paradigm of the sacred, invariably under the sign of death and resurrection?

Noli Me Tangere

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The juxtaposition of Elizabeth Taylor and the corpses occurs towards the end of the first part of Histoire(s) du Cinéma. In the lead up there are images of suffering, war, extermination and horror, including images from Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra (1810–1814) and extracts from newsreels as well as fiction films. Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly in An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) dance across the screen, quotations and imperative aphorisms are sounded in voice-over (»suffering is not a star«) and in the form of inter-titles (»no close-ups«, »Bon Voyage«). »And if George Stevens hadn’t used the first 16 mm color film in Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, Elizabeth Taylor would never have found a place in the sun«—these words are spoken over a dense montage in which images (and black interspacing) are connected through cuts and dissolves. These images include a detail from Goya’s Los Caprichos (1793–1799) of an angel-like creature bearing grimacing tormented souls; a series of moving images from A Place in the Sun of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift by a lake; and two still color images from Stevens’ camp footage, one of corpses heaped in a pile in an oven, the other of a single open-mouthed grimacing figure. Over this latter image a voice announces: »1939, 1944.« Elizabeth Taylor, in a swimsuit, sitting snugly against the right side of the frame, cradles Clift’s head in her lap, and as she leans down to kiss him (his face no longer in the frame) there is a dissolve to a painting. Suspended along the top of the film frame lies an angelic iconic figure, her head surrounded by a golden halo, her arms reaching down, hands open. Lying horizontally she seems at once suspended in space and supported, against the laws of gravity, by the top frame. At the bottom right an arm reaches up, hand bent slightly back at the wrist. The painting is a detail from a Giotto fresco Noli Me Tangere (1304–1306) in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, and Godard has rotated the detail (or rather, a photographic image of it) 90 degrees, hence the peculiar disposition of the figures. The fresco from which this fragment is taken depicts the resurrection. While the disciples are sleeping by the open tomb Mary Magdalene and Christ, who has already risen, are depicted in a charged encounter. Magdalene kneels, her arms reaching out to Christ, yearningly, but he repels her advance, holding his hand up in a »stop« gesture: Touch me Not, Noli me Tangere. But here in the videographic montage a fragment

Rescaling Screen Performance has been torn away (a fragment privileging hands) and turned on its side. The voice-over intones »martyrdom for the resurrection of the documentary.« Then in a miraculous—and at the same time somewhat comical—dissolve Elizabeth Taylor appears within the painting, between the two pairs of hands. She is full-bodied, seated but appearing to rise, her right arm held akimbo in a histrionic gesture. Her figure, abstracted from its context by the dissolve, is mechanically elevated through stop-motion. She rises up from the bottom of the frame like Venus out of the water, albeit a bit more jerkily. She ascends and floats, floats free of gravity, cradled by the air, framed within the womb-like space, hands around her ready to catch her if she falls, to cradle and caress her luscious but miniature body. And then the voice-over: »How marvelous to be able to look at what we cannot see. What a miracle for our blind eyes.« It is difficult to think of the figures, the bodies, in this video montage segment as acting. But the segment is highly performative in that it puts into play very different representational and performative genres and regimes, in such a way as to concentrate bodily movement into a series of gestures, gestures that are sometimes detached from bodies, or at least highly attenuated. The segment activates the question shadowing this essay: What happens to actors and acting in different media, in what ways are acting and performance affected and effected by their technological incarnation? The techniques of video here are clearly crucial: the facility, for instance, to layer images, to dissolve, decompose and recompose new configurations, to abstract parts of the body. The »primary« materials may be recognizable as pre-existing this video collage but through the video rendering those materials are no longer »primary« or predetermining. The materiality of the video action, of actors within the video, generates new and different affective possibilities. The performers are re-performed. The most expansive gesture is the segment itself, the authorial or Godardian videographic gesture. That gestural impulse is geared towards reducing the actor. The profane Hollywood goddess is scaled down; rising up like a jerkily propelled Venus, in relation to Mary Magdalene she becomes a plaything, something you could hold in your hand, or an image, just an image, tossed in the air. The spell of intimacy, proximity, is broken. But the amazing thing is that a moment before, for a moment, when her close-up fills the screen and she »looks«, proffers that famous velvety violet look, our participation in the image formation is elicited and the intensity of the happiness affect is preserved. Is this because we know and remember the sequence, seeing it in 35 mm on a big screen, or is it because conventions of performance are so highly codified that even a moment can work its magic (or its poi-

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Lesley Stern son)? These questions are hard to disentangle. Having stressed the autonomy of the video performance I want nevertheless to look for a moment at the histories that cluster around these images, particularly histories of art and Hollywood performance, and to also look at what Godard excludes from his segment in the process of pulling out details, superimposing, messing with time through processes of freezing and stop motion. To do this undoubtedly runs the risk of over-analyzing and ascribing an excess of studious intentionality to Godard. After all it is a fleeting montage sequence, and on a single viewing impossible to take in. But my intention is not to get at precisely what Godard had in mind; rather, it is to register some of the possible reverberations generated by the collage of images and associations.15 One of the most pronounced capacities of video is the element of play, the capacity to toss things into the air and see how they land, and if it doesn’t work to try something else. You don’t have to patch pieces of celluloid together with safety pins in a precarious chain like Woody Allen does in King Lear (Jean-Luc Godard, 1987). There is a sense in Histoire(s) du Cinéma of ludic experimentation. If Histoire(s) du Cinéma is about the histories of cinema it is about how cinema arises, how it intersects with other histories, histories of war and art, stories of the everyday and the imaginary, real histories and impossible histories, past and future.

Giotto and Goya

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Before turning to look in more detail at the excerpt from A Place in the Sun, I want to take a moment to consider what Giotto and Goya are doing here. Rancière accuses Godard in this sequence of legitimating cinema by locating it in the lineage of painting (particularly of the religious image and its redemptive power) and thus guaranteeing »the power of presence that consecrates the icons proper to cinema« (2002: 118). But Godard has always included paintings (even if only as postcards or tableaux vivants) in his films, his works always assume some continuity between all images, still and moving. Which is not to say that all images are equal.16 Rather, that they are equally fair game: there to be plucked from history and thrown back into the mix, part of an on-going re-mix. The how is more interesting than lineage. My focus is on their gestural potential and how this is mobilized in the segment, to what end. My reading is symptomatic, teasing out details to envision a scenario, circling around the way that these artists rendered bodies in relation to the world. If the scene from A Place in the Sun is wrenched from

Rescaling Screen Performance its cinematic context, deformed and reformed, so mere fragments of Giotto and Goya are torn from context and cut into the segment. In this collaging process the human body is rescaled and the affective charge of the original gestures recalibrated. But something persists. Giotto (1266–1337) and Goya (1746–1828) are both situated at turning points in art history. Giotto, on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, heralded a new era in painting, inaugurating a form of art that would dominate Europe until the end of the eighteenth century. Goya, on the brink of the nineteenth century, prefigured a new modernity. Godard reverses the art history sequence. Before A Place in the Sun comes Goya: darkness and demons. Then there is Giotto: luminous color and human figuration. In Goya: terrifying creatures, traced by human form but monstrous, too small or too large, ungrounded, emerging from the black hole of endless unframed space. In Giotto: the figures appear metonymically in the form of distilled iconographic hand gestures. Rather than fleshed-out they are fragmented, partial, ungrounded, but carefully reframed and rescaled by the video montage. In collision with images of immobile Holocaust corpses and moving Hollywood stars the Goya and Giotto fragments provoke ideas of history marked by failure and betrayal rather than continuity and progress. I imagine a scenario that goes something like this: just like the cinema, Giotto and Goya each embodied moments of great, even revolutionary impulse, a potential for radically changing the art of their time, for changing the way people saw the world, how they thought. They embodied the potential to make history (that region where fiction and documentary intersect). But that potential was never achieved, promise was betrayed. The promise persists, however. These artists remain illuminating, not just in the service of a bleak thesis but for the way they rendered bodies (not just human bodies) in relation to the world. Before Giotto medieval artists had privileged the celestial over the natural, opting for a highly codified and iconographic perspective. Giotto was the first to imbue figures on a flat surface with three- dimensionality, to imbue human faces and bodies with a lifelike quality, with emotional and psychological veracity. His figures were drawn not simply from the heavens and from biblical iconography but from local living culture. The dimensionality and solidity of human actors, the naturalness of his gestures, has established Giotto’s art as proto-cinematic17 and moreover enthroned him as »the patron saint of 3-D computer imagery« (Canemaker 2010). On the face of it, the lineage which connects contemporary artists and critics with Giotto, seems straightforward. The link is realism (see Manovich 2008). A lineage that links 3D to realism also values in

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Giotto’s dramatic compositions the spatial quality of harmony, of the figure and the whole. Every detail is subordinate to the overall mise-en-scene. Moreover, as an avatar of the moving image, Giotto invested his paintings in an entirely novel way with a sense of time passing, conjuring a tension between movement and stillness, between the eternal present tense of the painting and the past (or the sense of time passing) that it depicts. His framing similarly, through the device of cutting off figures at the edges of the frame, suggested a world moving beyond the cinematic frame. But there might be another way of looking at it. Moshe Barasch suggests that although the notion that Giotto’s gestures were mainly drawn from nature, »accords well with his historical image as the artist who brought painting ›back to nature‹, freeing it from the dead, dried-out conventions of the Middle Ages, as a famous Renaissance stereotype has it«, in fact »a careful scrutinizing analysis of Giotto’s work leads to an altogether different conclusion. Our artist’s primary source was not uncontrolled nature, carefully and independently observed; it was rather the gestural patterns provided by established social acts« (1987: 13). Giotto, he argues, worked with the conventional gestures of Western art, transplanting those gestures into more »natural« bodies and scenarios. However, when he removed conventional gestures from their original cultural matrix and used them in a new context, the gesture’s original character was not altogether obliterated. »Transplanted gestures […] retain their meaning and character, although they do so in a hidden, submerged way« (ibid.: 14). In Giotto, then, we see the beginnings of a blurring between »conventional« and »natural« gestures, a feature that characterizes the cinema, particularly sound cinema. Like Giotto Godard transposes gestures from the original fresco so that they are almost unrecognizable, and yet something persists, something of the original cultural matrix is transferred. In Giotto hands are central, the laying on of hands, hands reaching out, hands repelling, hands enfolded. Histoire(s) du Cinéma distills this aspect, condenses the actors so that their actions are in the hands alone. The actor is reduced, gesture expanded. Giotto’s heritage lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. And then came Goya. Goya was the first painter to combine attention to the everyday and a savage rejection of the celestial and transcendent. He was a symbol of all that was new in the nineteenth century, registering in his art, through »creative fantasy« the crises that rocked Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, and to which no other artist could adequately respond (Hetzer 1973: 93).18 Where Baroque painting presented a harmony of the whole, an integration of man with his surroundings, with heaven and earth, in

Rescaling Screen Performance Goya there is no redeeming after-life or future resurrection. There is only the void, despair, darkness. Classical techniques of composition, lighting, geometry and figural representation—all this Goya smashed. Bodies, human bodies but other bodies as well, certainly matter in Goya, but lack the clarity of gesture of earlier art. Goya intensifies each detail, each gestural motif, until it becomes significant in itself, he transforms the apparently trivial or insignificant detail into something »gigantic, uncanny, incalculable« (ibid.: 109). If hands are privileged in Giotto then it is the mouth that in Goya exceeds the body: Mouths leer, grin, gape, gasp, moan, shriek, belch. A hanged man’s mouth lies open and a woman reaches up to filch his teeth. Grown men stick fingers in their mouths like sucking infants. Mouths vomit, the sick gushing out of them, and a great furry beast sicks up a pile of human bodies. Mouths guzzle: they guzzle avidly, ferociously, living flesh as well as dead (Sylvester 2001: 254). Bodies on the other hand appear as great blobs in space, or as silhouettes, ungrounded, without gravity. Even though they may fly or be suspended and revolve in space, they are not buoyed up by »an energy which counteracts gravity« (ibid.: 257); rather they are suffocated, sucked in by the dead space, by the airless void. Goya presages the open-mouthed grimacing Holocaust corpse, just as Giotto presages the Hollywood love scene. As with cinema both artists promised much. Giotto disrupted the past and anticipated the future because he conceived of painting as an apparatus that had the capacity to offer totally new ways of imaging the world, of imagining ideas, of exploding horizons. So much promise. And what did we get? Baroque art. Goya, on the other hand embodied a dystopic augury, a radical and uncompromising rendering of the social world of modern Europe. This too was a vision that could have transformed the apparatus of art production, could have produced an alternative modernity. But we landed up with Neoclassicism. Cinema was a totally new technology that could have rethought, reimagined the world, could itself have been history. And then came sound, and then came the war, and what did we get? The (Hollywood) feature fiction film. Instead of documentary »martyrdom for the resurrection of the documentary.« Documentary was killed when film makers failed to act upon the Holocaust images that had been recorded (»the camps, they were the first thing that should have been shown, the same way Marey showed how man walks with his chronophotographic gun«).

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Lesley Stern This failure constituted a betrayal of technological potential and cinematic vision. Documentary of course means something more than merely documenting. Documentary that merely shows does not think. To show exterminated bodies in real time and space is to produce a powerful affect of suffering, but also to risk making suffering a star, to pretend comprehension, whereas »[n]othing can comprehend this relation of the body to the world.« Histoire(s) du Cinéma is Godard’s attempt to enact the imperative dilemma, to think through images the large unthinkable act of extermination. Through video montage he documents cinema but not by using film clips in an illustrative fashion. No, taking a cue from Giotto and Goya he emphasizes and juxtaposes gestural details as a window onto a larger socio-political world. He does not show George Stevens’ moving images from Buchenwald-Dachau, he freezes two moments. He anticipates the grimacing corpse with Goya and his monsters, Goya and his savage rejection of salvation. And Giotto? He promised much for moving images. So much promise and yet in the end he bequeathed to cinema precisely what it didn’t need: harmony, psychological veracity, gravity. Gravity inscribed in figures with their feet on the ground but their faith in the celestial. An apparatus dedicated to securing faith from its followers. But Godard’s act of montage also, it seems to me, reads Giotto’s gestural dimension as a tool, a key that can open the tin and let sardines out of the bag. Tearing the detail of hands from its original cultural matrix of course means that its meaning and affective potential changes. But something of the original dynamic matrix of emotions, the affect carried by gesture, is retained, lives for a fractional moment in this fleeting image. The excluded does not totally disappear but persists, registers, rises from the tomb.

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Fay Wray Wriggling in King Kong’s Palm In Godard’s reconfiguration the bodies of Mary Magdalene and Christ are almost excluded (entirely so in the case of Christ). In the fresco the hands, the gestural impulse registered in the hands, is important. But so are the bodies. Their disposition is, in art historical terms, very conventional. Two elements carry over from Romanes que art: the outstretched arms of Mary Magdalene (signifying sorrow), and the emphasized contrapposto (counterpose) of Christ’s figure. But Giotto imbues the bodily encounter with drama and tension. Magdalene is moving towards Christ, reaching out not only in sorrow but with desire, her hands yearning to touch, to feel. His

Rescaling Screen Performance figure is totally ambiguous. He withdraws, moving away not just from Magdalene but literally is moving out of the painting, out of the frame. While he reaches forward he leans backward, away, withdrawing. The pose which is associated with grace in Romanesque statues is here in the Giotto fresco an embodiment of contradiction and ambiguity. Similarly, the gesture of reaching forward (with desire? An instinct of protection? Blessing?), arm outstretched, is imbued with an opposite tendency as the hand bends back at the wrist asserting rejection and distance: stop, do not come closer, do not touch. In Histoire(s) du Cinéma this erotic tension is transferred from Christ and Mary Magdalene to Godard and Elizabeth Taylor. Montgomery Clift is also in the picture, although Godard doesn’t mention him. He lies like a sleeping beauty in Taylor’s lap.19 It is a medium close-up, the frame is ample, like her lap and bosom, cradling, delivering plenitude. The composition is balanced, composed on a diagonal—the right side and bottom of the frame joins their two bodies in an arc, while the left side of the frame opens up as an inverted triangle to water and mountains and sky. Perspective and scale are preserved. And desire. Their looks are locked, the scene is composed around the axis of their gaze at one another. Our own gaze is sutured into the scene, and then wrenched violently out in the cut to the corpses. A quick cut, and then the scene returns. There is a dissolve to a close-up of Elizabeth Taylor in profile looking down and off to the left. We know that she is looking at Clift but he is more or less out of the picture now. This is the shot that radiates a feeling of »simple, secular happiness.« Charles Affron, discussing acting and performance in A Place in the Sun, speaks of the film’s »affective style«, stressing particularly the dramatic role of black-and-white film in creating an aura of intimacy and revelation (1982: 60). George Toles adds to Affron’s close reading of a scene between the lovers, a different scene from this one but equally pertinent: Strangely, and I would argue, mystically, the camera no longer feels as though it is outside the lovers, scrutinizing them from the perspective of a troubling other, as it has just finished doing. It is now inside them […] We are within the charged field of their locked gaze, from which all competing stimuli and stirrings of memory have been (as by a feat of mesmerism) excluded. We too expand within the radiance of their seeing and almost experience, in our tremulous isolation, the transient, totalizing connection of their kiss (Toles 2011: 99).

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But in Histoire(s) du Cinéma the kiss never happens. There is a dissolve from this almost-kiss to Giotto’s hands, into which Elizabeth Taylor is dissolved. As she lifts her right arm up, histrionically, and rises she is actually saying she will marry him but the film’s soundtrack is replaced by a short extract from a viola sonata by Paul Hindemith. The close-up of the face (larger than life, auratic, charged with affect) is replaced by a montage of hands and a miniaturized, mechanized body. Godard once said: »when Griffith invented the close-up, he wasn’t trying to get next to an actress, as legend maintains. He was trying to find a way to bring together something close and something far away« (Daney 1992: 161). Something huge and faraway, with sensations that are intimate and immediate. The Holocaust and the look of happiness. Thinking and feeling. Rescaling renders the goddess as a miniature. Although bodily present she is rendered here, because of rescaling, small and without gravity, a putti (mechanically stuttering rather than buoyed up), a plaything of the gods, Fay Wray wriggling in King Kong’s palm. But curiously, the secular gods, represented by hands, are configured so as to promise protection. The hands seem to be surrounding her, there to soften her incipient fall. A clear and ironic analogy is acted out here, between Christ’s hand and the hand of the auteur. Godard has cut Elizabeth Taylor down to size, but is there also to catch her when she falls. Or does her rising up, floating free of gravity, simply represent the idea, as Rancière would have it, of redemption and resurrection? He proposes that for Godard, »Elizabeth Taylor positively deserved her happiness because Stevens filmed the dead of the camps positively, and, by so doing, redeemed the art of the cinema, i.e. its guilt at not having been there and documented the images of Nazi extermination« (2004: 226). But the happiness is not Elizabeth Taylor’s, it is not something she possesses, but something she enacts. Godard’s savagely ironic polemic surely revolves around »art and cinema resurrected from what was burnt«—a denunciation spoken, with irony, just after a dancing clip from An American in Paris (the exterminated of the camps were filmed and then the film makers went back to Hollywood and made entertainment out of a devastated Europe). There is a contradiction at the heart of the moving image, particularly moving images of dance, of martial arts, of close-up kisses. The cinematic articulation conveys in us a bodily sensation of being freed from gravity, and yet for the cinematic illusion to work the apparatus must be dedicated to preserving a sense of bodies ultimately grounded, balanced between heaven and earth. Bodies are always falling in cinema and always coming back to life, the cinema

Rescaling Screen Performance is always trying to retrieve happiness, which is by definition lost (a thematic played out in the section of Histoire(s) du Cinéma called »Fatal Beauty«), failing and trying again. Perhaps we can think of this dynamic in terms of resurrection and redemption. Certainly it is true that these are terms Godard uses with reiterative intensity in Histoire(s) du Cinéma. But to me Godard’s preoccupation in Histoire(s) du Cinéma is much more with cinema’s capacity to articulate the relation of bodies to the world, both in terms of sensation and thought. His video rendering of the cinema—at once an elegiac homage and a mordant critique—investigates the performative potential of bodies, or to borrow a phrase from Christa Blümlinger, »the social function of performative acts and the performative function of the cinematographic dispositif« (2004: 183). Within this problematic it is not that the corpses act in the same way that Elizabeth Taylor acts, but that their images are inserted into a gestural regime. And the question of how film makers act is also articulated within this regime.

Godard as Performer: »More like an Athlete or Dancer in Training« Serge Daney introduces his written transcription of the Godard video interview that plays in Histoire(s) du Cinéma thus: »Alone at last with the century’s mementos, Godard looks more like an athlete or dancer in training than like an artist above the fray« (1992: 159). His is a body tensed, in training, in rehearsal. An actor preparing for a performance. But the exercises, the routines, the improvisations, all these manoevres constitute of course a performance, especially when they are staged for the camera and inserted into a dense layering of images (setting up the microphone, the recording session). This is not the first time that Godard has appeared in his films, construing a virtual persona, meditating upon the role of film maker. But it is perhaps the first time that he inserts himself so centrally, »mixing personal and collective memory […] drawing the meaning of an actualization of images from reciprocal revelations« (Michaud 2004: 262). In Histoire(s) du Cinéma the greatest performance, or should we say the pivotal performance, is that of Godard himself. And what is it that he performs? Himself, yes. But really (or at the same time, time continuously lost and found and lost again) it is cinema. In performing himself he performs cinema or the story or stories of cinema. A re-performing. We can speak (and so we shall) of the gestures and bodily dispositions that characterize this Godard. But let us think for a moment

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about video montage as a way of gesturing. If this montage gives us not a history of the cinema as a body of work, but a series of excerpted fragments, if it decomposes and recomposes bodies then this mirrors Godard’s own performative valency. Rather than giving us a thesis, a problem with pathways towards a solution, he offers a series of gestures. He gathers gestures around a problem and offers them to us as material to think with, to run with.20 This gestural modality is less easy to describe than the more familiar bodily poses. But if we ask how gestures of varying kinds materialize, then we come back to the body, and to the materiality of technology: how gestures materialize, how they are inscribed, how they are traced in the body of the film. And then, to return to the beginning, there is the ethical question. The question of the film maker as actor. If Godard provokes the question of how film makers acted in relation to the Holocaust, he keeps alive, throughout Histoire(s) du Cinéma, the question of the ethics of film making as integral to the performance of cinema, to that realm where politics, aesthetics and technology intersect. Where the line between documentary and fiction is not only blurred but heightened. In discussion with Daney Godard says that he had no past of his own until he discovered, thanks to Henri Langlois, cinema. Through cinema he acquired a history, and so he felt it his duty to make this film, these histoire(s). Call it the Lutheran in me, he says. Video montage, then, as a kind of Lutheran performativity. An athlete and dancer, yes, a thinker, and a grumpy old man, too. And a spectator, or as Raymond Bellour says, a meta-spectator: »Godard has been driven to finally imagine himself as a meta-spectator, seated behind his typewriter, facing the entirety of cinema which then parades itself—fragmented, frozen, fixed, carried off, set in movement, mentally mixed—all throughout his Histoire(s) du Cinéma« (2012: 19). Godard assumes various personae and postures (we see him, for instance framing, conducting, painting). He possesses, seemingly, more than one body and in one instance two different Godards face each other, so he is in dialogue (»Don’t tell tales, kid«) with himself (and, of course, we know from Vivian Sobchack’s essay in this volume that he has at least four bodies). But mostly we see him working at the editing bench or the video editor; or even more ubiquitous is the image of him at his desk typing and/ or, pen in hand, writing. He types on an electric typewriter. Often he holds a pencil in one hand and reads and writes as he types. Cigar clenched between teeth, sucking, inhaling, exhaling. Flicking a lighter. He hammers the keys, he underlines, he scribbles. The electric typewriter produces an uncanny effect, a delayed reaction. He types in almost-silence, and then there is sound, like the staccato

Rescaling Screen Performance rhythm of machine gun fire. As Jonathan Rosenbaum has pointed out, Histoire(s) du Cinéma is characterized by «the alternating sounds of typing and of film turning on an editing table: staccato and legato, the sounds of Godard’s two activities as a critic« (1997). What is most striking about this self-representation of the auteur is the insistent characterization of these activities—editing and writing—as artisanal, as activities undertaken with the hands. Touch as a medium of transmission, writing and editing as manual technologies, interacting with machine techniques. Equally striking is the insistence on film as a mode of thought. Hands and thinking are brought together under the slogan »But man’s true condition is to think with his hands« (in »Le Controle de Univers«). »Video is closer to painting or to music [than to film]. You work with your hands like a musician with an instrument«, Godard has said, »and you play it« (in Rosenbaum 1997). The auteur’s hand, slowly writing a title with a squeeky felt-tipped pen, is dissolved into the fingers of King Kong (in »Seul le Cinéma«). The actor is reduced, gesture expanded, just as the body is distilled into the hands. Words emerge from the typewriter, from the pen, from the mouth, from the actor’s body. Words acquire a very material dimension in Histoire(s) du Cinéma—spoken, written, broken up and rearranged, flying on and off the screen, the letter subjected to permutations, punning, expansion and pruning. He stands by his bookshelf and takes down books, opens, reads with his hands. He lays his hands down, one on top of the other on the pages of an open book. Then he closes it and we see it is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s de la certitude (1949–1951), the cover of which depicts a hand, finger pointed deictically down, at the ground, or a table (Wittgenstein’s On Certainty [Über Gewißheit, 1950–1951] launches from George Edward Moore’s argument »Here is a hand«—a rejection of idealism or skepticism towards the external world). In dialogue with Daney Godard talks with his hands. Over green fields and trees a large hand is superimposed, rescaling the landscape. Another hand enters the frame. The phrase is uttered »[b]ut man’s true condition is to think with his hands«, to which is added »I will not denigrate our tools but I’d like them to be usable […] A hand which weakens proletarianizes itself.« Images of hands dissolve into one another. Written text announces: »Dirty Hands« and Godard’s voice repeats the words as he holds out, flexes and turns his hands (he has been talking about the complicity of the German film industry during Hitler’s rise to power). Over a pair of hands turning and clasping one another the voice-over intones, »the hand—the tyrant state prosecutor torturer.«

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There is a repertoire of gestures around typing: inserting the paper, straightening it. Typing. Taking the typed sheet out and reading it, either silently or aloud. It is as though the machine has some agency in the production of text. And so it does. In the closing credits to each chapter Godard lists himself amidst Amplex, Agfa, Video and Audio. His own body, argues James S. Williams, is »the principal site of encounter between the human and the inhuman« in Histoire(s) du Cinéma (2000: 190). Memory is inscribed into machines but machines also generate memories. In the interstices, in the moment of physical contact (which passes as soon as it happens), this where gestures are generated, recorded, rendered copiable, opened to history and processes of differentiation. Life thrashes around worse than Nanook’s fish and memory slips away like Monica Vittis’ in the red desert (as we hear in »Les Signes Parmi Nous«). Histoire(s) du Cinéma is about recovering memories (of cinema), through technological revitalization, but also about confronting amnesia. Remember Giotto, remember Goya, remember Wittgenstein’s pointed finger. Words, images from the past, from icons and frescos and films: rendered through the medium of video, video investing the images anew with energy, with gestural dynamism. Paradoxically, this video enactment of history renders film as a material, prizes it away from an archival hermeticism, and connects it to the material conditions both of daily life (in the office, in the editing room) and extraordinary life, such as life (or exterminated life) in the camps. We know that bodies in the cinema are cinematic, whether produced analogically or digitally. They are constructed of bits and pieces, they move through the volition of the machine. Nevertheless, the indexical character of bodies persists, always haunting us, touching places in the body that do not speak. And the phenomenological status of the actor continues to pose questions for the generation and transmission of affect. Equally, the presence (»the hand«) of the film maker. If cinema has the capacity to think, to essay an understanding of the relation of bodies to the world, so the human appears, disappears, flickers in memory. The last image of Histoire(s) du Cinéma cuts to this, to the import of Godard as performer. He tells a Borgesian story about a man who dreams he is holding a yellow rose and when he wakes up he holds the rose in his hand (see Lack 2004: 325–329). He casts this as the story of cinema, and speaks the final words of the film: »I was that man.« This is a version of Pedro Calderon’s fiction Life is a Dream (La Vida es Sueño, 1635) so wonderfully realized by Raúl Ruiz in a film of the same name from 1987. It poses an old puzzle (linguistically about the stability of the pronoun, psychoanalytically

Rescaling Screen Performance or ideologically about subjectivity, about the shifting and essentially unstable nature of the »self«): Where does the »I« exist, where is he now, the »I« who says »I was«? And is he who utters the sentence in the present the same »I« who in the past dreamt of a yellow rose? It is also, within the purview of performance, a question that disturbs the habitual boundary lines erected between a series of binary terms, such as character and actor, personal and public, story and history. The story of the rose is indeed a story about being inside and outside of cinema at one and the same time, of living the cinema, and of telling a story about and through the cinema. It also involves mobilizing a vivid motif to gesture towards the relation between stories and history and cinema. History, in one sense, is always over. On the other hand to conceive of history as over and done with, rather than something in which we are implicated now, at this very moment, is to miss the boat, to submit to blindness, numbness and amnesia. It is not very Godardian to cast impersonation in allegorical terms, but in musing on Godard as performer the image that persists for me is of a circus ring master or lion tamer, cracking the whip, rounding up clips from cinema, orchestrating the bodily wildness and grace of those myriad images that make up cinema. Beasts and fantoms conjured and coerced into a precarious cinematic bestiary. The cinema appears as an apparition, at times movingly familiar and at other times strange and estranging. It is made manifest as is the old lion in the truly extraordinary Argentine film Las Historias Extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008). Its appearance is utterly unexpected, and for all its remnants of beauty and grandeur it is just a circus lion trained to do tricks, now old and mangy and dying. But oh how it can surprise, how it can melt our flinty anger and hardened hearts. Just as the rhythm of Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse even though they were in a pact with the devil, of Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron, even though they rose from the ashes of the Holocaust. The taste of ash is there. And so is the movement, the affective power of those fragmented moments, Godardian gestures rendered in video (»But what is truly mysterious about Histoire(s) du Cinéma is precisely the power with which cinema does return form the dead and succeeds in reprojecting itself even from the meanest square screen of the smallest little box« [Temple and Williams 2000: 9]). The death of cinema is a big deal—from a certain vantage point; from another perspective cinema never dies, resurrection is an iterative process, a performative and rhetorical act. Technology changes and as the moving image mutates so our bodily relation to the image changes. The rescaling of cinema, of the cinematic body in Histoire(s) du Cinéma is a correlative of the material process of

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Lesley Stern history. In re-performing cinema Godard puts in to play a new iteration of the moving image, of technological vision and potential. Just as motion capture technology today effaces and remakes human and non-human bodies so Godard was doing with video two decades ago.

Notes 1 2

3

4

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6

All of the episodes are archived at [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Examples of this video essay work can be readily viewed online, especially at the Moving Image Source website, and at the vimeo site Audiovisualcy. Catherine Grant gives a videography listing at . Film Studies in Motion is a recent web series curated by Volker Pantenburg and Kevin B. Lee for the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival: For a critical overview see the essay by Christian Keathley (2011). See Kristin Thompson’s review (2010) of »Little People, Big Effects«, the supplement to the DVD of Darby O’Gill and the Little People (Robert Stevenson, 1959). Varieties of experimentation in the creation interlude of Tree of Life range from the homespun to the super gigantic and extravagant (including Douglas Trumbull’s recreation of the Big Bang with paint, water, and high-speed cameras; and the involvement of CalTech and NASA technicians). Some moments it is like an IMAX science movie and at other moments it is reminiscent of the kind of experimental cinema that prompts us to ask »What am I seeing?« (see David Bordwell’s discussion [2010] of this question, particularly as provoked by the work of Ken Jacobs, including his recent Magic Lantern Show). However, much experimental cinema includes both. In Forms of Being Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit explore Malick’s characters, particularly in The Thin Red Line, in terms of aesthetic rather than psychic individuation or subjecthood. This phrase is used by Carlos Losilla: »en el hecho de adoptar una nueva identidad cinematográfica que tiene que ver con el hecho de querer vivir el cine después del cine« (2011). See also a book which has just arrived (as the crucial one always does) just as I finish writing: Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema (Koch et al, 2012).

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8

9

10

11 12 13

14 15 16

17 18

19 20

In an interview with Serge Daney (Daney 1992: 165). This interview is a transcription of a filmed conversation, much of which is included in Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Many thanks to Orly Shevi, who drew my attention to this image sequence and whose dissertation challenged me to think anew about Histoire(s) du Cinéma (2010). It is not as though the love song is a qualification of the battle hymn. As Godard notes in the section »Seul le Cinéma« (Only the Cinema), when he is berating European governments of the time: »You can always qualify exaggeration, for instance qualifying the number killed in a purge as though the qualification made everything OK. Toning down makes things worse […] subtlety pleading in favor of barbarity.« Most recently, Film Socialisme (2011), in which screens of all kinds—public and private—proliferate, was shot in HD video on the 16:9 aspect ratio. Parts were shot on a cell phone. See Daney 1992: 164. For a more detailed analysis of this nexus between fiction and documentary see Alan Wright (2008). Jacques Aumont suggests that Godard has found a new form of the Pathosformel that »brings forth a pure energy. Pure emotion because pure rhythm; pure form because pure movement (not beautiful but pure and energetic)—this is the beautiful form that Godard invents for cinema« (2000: 112). See The Scorsese Connection, chapter 3 (Stern 1995). For a more representative approach see Orly Shevi's analysis of art works included in Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Shevi 2010). Rancière’s argument is that ultimately in Histoire(s) du Cinéma all images are rendered polyvalent, interchangeable but fundamentally evidence of the world, of the co-presence of things, so what arises is not a politics of difference but a poetics of spirituality. The Precinema museum is situated in Padua, close to the Arena chapels. I am indebted to Hetzer’s article which argues a very different view of Goya than the conventional Anglo-American view. Many thanks to Norman Bryson for bringing this article to my attention, and for his immediate and lively engagement in helping me to think through this issue. Ten years later he would be described by J. Hoberman (2009) in Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960) as a »sleeping beauty«. Thanks to J.P. Gorin for his suggestions and discussions. Also for the gift of Las Historias Extraordinarias (Mariano Llinás, 2008).

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Literature

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Affron, Charles (1982): Cinema and Sentiment. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Aumont, Jacques (2000): »Mortal Beauty«, in: Michael Temple, James S. Williams (eds.), The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 97–112. Barasch, Moshe (1987): Giotto and the Language of Gesture. New York, NY, London: Cambridge University Press. Bellour, Raymond (2012): »The Cinema Spectator: A Special Memory«, in: Gertrud Koch, Volker Pantenburg, Simon Rothöhler (eds.), Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Vienna: Austrian Film Museum, 9–21. Bersani, Leo and Ulysse Dutoit (2004): Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. London: BFI Publishing. Beugnet, Martine (2007): Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Blümlinger, Christa (2004): »Procession and Projection: Notes on a Figure in the Work of Jean-Luc Godard«, in: Michael Temple, James S. Williams, Michael Witt (eds.), For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing, 178–187. Bordwell, David (2010): »Jacobs’ Category«. Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Canemaker, John (2010): »Giotto and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs«, in: imprint (5 May). Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Crandall, Jordan (2011): »Only For Dummies: An Interview with Steve Fagin«, in: Rhizome (4 May). Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Daney, Serge (1992): »Godard Makes [HI]stories: Interview with Serge Daney«, in: Raymond Bellour, Mary Lea Bandy (eds.), JeanLuc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, H.N. Abrams, 159–167. Didi-Huberman, Georges (2008): Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Dubois, Philippe (1992): »Video Thinks What Cinema Creates: Notes on Jean-Luc Godard’s Work in Video and Television«, in: Raymond Bellour, Mary Lea Bandy (eds.), Jean-Luc Godard: Son + Image, 1974–1991. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, H.N. Abrams, 169–185.

Rescaling Screen Performance Godard, Jean-Luc (1972): Godard on Godard: Critical Writings. London: Secker and Warburg. Hansen, Miriam Bratu (2012): Cinema and Experience. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Hetzer, Theodor (1973): »Francisco Goya and the Crisis in Art Around 1800«, trans. Vivian Volbach, in: Fred Licht (ed.), Goya in Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 92–113. Hoberman, James (2009): »Electricity for All in Elia Kazan’s Wild River«, in: The Village Voice (13 October). Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Keathley, Christian (2011): »La camera-stylo: Notes on Video Criticism and Cinephilia«, in: Alex Clayton, Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. New York, NY, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge,176–191. Koch, Gertrud with Volker Pantenburg and Simon Rothöhler, eds. (2012): Screen Dynamics: Mapping the Borders of Cinema. Vienna: Austrian Film Museum. Lack, Roland François (2004): »›Sa Voix‹«, in: Michael Temple, James S. Williams, Michael Witt (eds.), For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing, 312–329. Losilla, Carlos (2011): »Desaparecer sin dejar rastro (para luego regresar) el camino desde los años setenta«, in: La Furia Umana, 10. Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Manovich, Lev (2008): »Assembling Reality. Myths of Computer Graphics: Giotto, the inventor of 3D«. Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. McBride, Joseph and Michael Wilmington (1974): John Ford. London: Secker and Warburg. Michaud, Philippe-Alain (2004): Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion. New York, NY: Zone Books. Rancière, Jacques (2002): »The Saint and the Heiress: A Propos of Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma«, in: Discourse 24.1, 113–119. — (2004): »Godard, Hitchcock, and the Cinematographic Image«, in: Michael Temple, James S. Williams, Michael Witt (eds.), For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog Publishing, 214–231. — (2006): Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista. New York, NY: Berg Publishers, Talking Images series. Rosenbaum, Jonathan (1997): »Trailer for Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma«. Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Ruiz, Raúl (2005): Poetics of Cinema. Paris: Dis Voir. Shevi, Orly (2010): Memory and Power: Reflections on History, Memory,

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and Auschwitz in Contemporary Art and Film. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of California, San Diego. Stern, Lesley (1995): The Scorsese Connection. Bloomington, IN, London: Indiana University Press, BFI Publishing. — (2008): »Ghosting: The Performance and Migration of Cinematic Gesture, Focusing on Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, Good Women«, in: Carrie Noland, Sally Ann Ness (eds.), Migrations of Gesture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 185–215. Sylvester, David (2001): About Modern Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2nd edition. Temple, Michael and James S. Williams, eds. (2000): The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985–2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Thompson, Kristin (2010): »Beyond Praise 3: Yet More DVD Supplements that Really Tell You Something«, in: Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, Observations on Film Art. Available from: [Accessed 9 May 2012]. Toles, George (2011): »Writing about Performance: The Film Critic as Actor«, in: Alex Clayton, Andrew Klevan (eds.), The Language and Style of Film Criticism. New York, NY, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 87–106. Williams, James S. (2000): »Beyond the Cinematic Body: Human Emotion versus Digital Technology in Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma«, in: Scott Brewster, John J. Joughin, David Owen, Richard Walker (eds.), Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human. Manchester, New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 188–202. Wright, Alan (2000): »Elizabeth Taylor at Auschwitz: JLG and the Real Object of Montage «, in: Michael Temple, James S. Williams (eds.), The Cinema Alone: Essays on the Work of Jean-Luc Godard, 1985-2000. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 51-60.

Introduction

Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch Etymological Uncoveries, Creative Etymological Uncoveries, Creative Displays: Displays: Acting Performance as as Acting as asForce Forceand and Performance Eloquence in Moving Image Culture Eloquence in Moving Image Culture What do I start from? From the subject to be expressed? From sensation? Do I start twice? Robert Bresson

By the end of his Notes on Cinematography, where he generally reflects upon film making as a creative process, as »cinematography«, as »writing with images in movements and sounds«, French film artist Robert Bresson seems indeed to have started twice (1977: 2): while his subject to be expressed, broadly, is moving images, their production, their bringing to the screen, his subject, narrowly, is also acting, its affect, its result, its effect. In other words, Bresson combines thoughts about his practical work as a director behind the screen with reflections on his sensation of it as a spectator in front of the screen and thereby thinks through art and everyday life, acting and performance, moving images and human bodies. Vehemently, however, Bresson rejects to work with professionally trained actors, and correspondingly emphasizes: »No actors. (No directing of actors). No parts. (No learning of parts). No staging. But the use of working with models, taken from life. Being (models) instead of Seeming (actors)« (ibid.: 1). Out of necessity though, he is eager to reduce the material he works with to a level of precision, to a level of shaping the human material: bodies and faces he does not want to appear on the screen as resonating artificially, as just seemingly rehearsed. Committed to an aesthetic that aims at leaving open the moving image’s capacity to be transformed by subsequent images, Bresson tries to arrive at the essence of cinema: »a seizing of the phenomenologically visible

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and audible world of bodies and faces, actions and spaces, sounds and words that lead inexorably to successive actions, gestures, sounds, and words, the sum of which defines character and situation« (Pipolo 2010: 22). During this artistic process, Bresson systematically reflects upon the images and sounds in time that he and his models, his cameramen and editors create, and he and them search for ways to control the rapports between images and sounds in time, in order to give, to offer, to create a work of art, in order to closely »tie new relationships between persons and things which are, and as they are«, as opposed to loosely »deform or invent persons and things« (Bresson 1977: 7). In finding ways to make these relationships between persons and things visible and audible, perceivable, also always in dissociation from theater, Bresson certainly does not leave the task entirely on his models, the persons, but successively recognizes »that every action they perform, however involuntary, is an indication of who they are and what rules their lives« (Pipolo 2010: 26). In cooperation, he generally concentrates on image and action and »the revelatory powers of material reality«, while relying on human ability (ibid.: 26). In a reflection on bodily action on the screen and its bodily grounded perception in front of the screen, Bresson’s notes serve as a useful source of inspiration, and establish a possibility and opportunity to discover and explore the artistic contribution to film as well as its affective and performative dimensions, its images of conduct: While Bresson’s subject here is not only to dissociate film from theater, but also actors from models, trained artists from untrained laymen, the model develops to be and the actor enters to seem, although both move into visibility. Again, Bresson’s subject to be expressed, broadly, is moving images, their production, their bringing to the screen, but his subject, narrowly, is also acting, its affect, its result, its effect: »Acting, which seems to have an existence of its own, apart, outside the actor; to be palpable« (ibid.: 18). From here, our focus is decisively less on the how (quomodo) of who appears on the screen, whether the model or the actor is a trained professional or not, but more on the that (quod) of who shows on the screen. Our opening reflection on acting and performance in moving image culture thus borrows from Bresson the sensation of bodily action as palpable, tangible, readily perceptible, as originally generated from living beings, as also central to the experience of moving images. At this very point of our introduction, we are then also less emphasizing on the historical context of Bresson’s writings and film making in the 1950s, but more on his notes’ argumentative relevance to our attempt of quite literally coming to terms with acting and performance in moving image culture. Our begin-

Etymological Uncoveries, Creative Displays ning therefore works with basic etymologies, continous processes of describing, in an attempt of uncovering, of bringing to light, where the character in a film does not have an existence on its own and the embodiment of the character does not settle outside corporeal processes.1 Image and body therefore meet in a close encounter, are grounded and interrelated in perception, or as Bresson describes: »Images, conductors of the gaze. But the actor’s acting throws the eye« (1977: 24). Images and sounds conduct, guide us; the actors, too, they lead us, they bring us to a place that is not ours, and contribute to both the affective and the performative dimension of film: Acting then is the art of performing parts, the way of conduct, influence, work, operation, activity, an instance of these. Performance is the art of composition, an accomplishment carried out in action, mobilizing, into effect. Acting and performance creatively display, unfold in present tense, expand in and with analog and digital films as well as videos along their modifications of forms and senses, whereas forms are related to as visible configurations and senses as bodily faculties (cf. the foreword by Lesley Stern to this volume).

Descriptions and Modifications The instance of acting is exertion of force, expressed with strength and fluency; the accomplishment of performance is eloquence, in passing, while discovering the exerted forces2: What we propose here is to incorporate acting as force and performance as eloquence, whereas both grow into each other and form an intimate union. In-between, the bodies on screen and off screen develop to transfer points, with energy, vigour, flexibility, in behaving, stretching, responding, while the actor carries out an elastic capacity that dynamically reverberates beyond the frame, conjuring up presence, alterity, un-seeming, making herself known, being.3 »What film does«4: Within such a chiasmatic structure, film renders the material dimension of the everyday and invests in human material. But, the terms of these reflections on film, film acting and performance, inspired by Bresson’s treatise from the 1950s, also demand to be interrogated and rethought in the light of the massive technological and aesthetic changes that cinema has undergone in the last decades. If »film« once named a relatively homogenous and delimitable object, it no longer does: To begin with perhaps the most apparent dimension of this transformation, many films today have little relation to film, that is, celluloid, at all. They are shot, edited, and projected digitally, and even films that are shot on film

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Jörg Sternagel, Deborah Levitt, Dieter Mersch today typically pass through digital phases in editing or projection. While digital cinema no doubt often extends and even reproduces many features of classical film making as it engages actors, or models as Bresson would have it, the indexical ontology that subtends Bresson’s notes can no longer be assumed. When we see a human being—or any being, entity, or view—on the screen today, we can no longer take for granted that it appeared before a camera in a real life world. The expanded field that was once called »film« includes several other transformed features, from the ubiquity of screens to media convergence in its various forms. While movie screens were once the unique property of movie theaters, screens have proliferated through homes, public spaces, and mobile devices. We watch movies in the gigantic, maximal forms of new theatrical formats like IMAX 3D as well as in the minimal, low-fi forms of streaming video on our PCs or miniaturized movies on our phones or iPods. We may very well interact with screens and moving images many times per day—in numerous forms and at multiple sites—and this interaction of course includes creating and sharing our own audiovisions, now easily captured with cell phone cameras and uploaded onto the web. In contemporary post-industrial societies, the world has become our movie theater, as media forms play across multiple platforms, and new genres—particularly ones that revise and reconfigure forms of »reality«, on the one hand, or develop extended means for the depiction of perceptually realistic fantasy, on the other—emerge from these new conditions. No doubt, as a number of the essays collected here will attest, the figure of the »film actor« morphs and transforms (in) this new environment, demanding new approaches to the work of performance.

Approaches and Contributions 54 From here, our volume offers transdisciplinary approaches to discuss acting and performance in moving image culture. It assembles 26 international scholars from dance, theatre, film, media and cultural studies, art and philosophy who analyze analog film, digital cinema, animation, and video from a variety of historical and generic perspectives, but with a particular emphasis on new theoretical approaches. These range from continental and analytical philosophy to new media theory and cognitivist research. All of these essays, some of which include case studies and reconsiderations of film studies’ classical approaches to acting and performance, interrogate the fundamental conceptions of »act« and

Etymological Uncoveries, Creative Displays »actor« that underwrite both popular and academic notions of performance in moving image culture. The volume is divided into five sections, each containing five contributions: In the first section, »Presentations and Representations« within genre and narration, Paul McDonald opens with »Spectacular Acting: On the Exhibitionist Dynamics of Film Star Performance«, where he deals with the question of how acting creates show, while pointing out strategies that come together to exhibit individual actors as exceptional. In »Cary Grant: Acting Style and Genre in Classical Hollywood Cinema«, Kathrina Glitre considers how Grant’s acting style and technique are effected by genre and how this relates to his star persona. Ceri Hovland continues with »Mimesis and Narration: The Performance of Actors and Cinematic Point of View in The Lady Eve and The Virgin Suicides« and thinks about the actor’s work itself as offering some of the mediation of the action of film and world. In »Postfeminist Portrayals of Masculinity and Femininity in Action Films: Mr. and Mrs. Smith«, Christina Adamou explores how acting makes a major contribution to the meaning and aesthetics of any non-abstract film, particularly in relation to gender. Keren Omry focuses on the shifting role of bodies in film in »Quantum of Craig: Daniel Craig and the Body of the New Bond« and introduces the cyborg as a principle fractal subject in her argument. The second section, »Appearances and Encounters« in film and art, begins with a contibution by Johannes Riis on »Actor/Character Dualism: The Case of Luis Buñuel’s Paradoxical Characters«, where he suggests to regard actor and character as separate agents. The section continues with Jan Distelmeyer and »Frames for Ambivalence: Acting out Realism in Italian Neorealism and the Films of Christian Petzold«, elaborating on three levels of acting and the processuality of cinematic reality. In her essay »The Actor as an Icon of Presence: The Example of Delphine Seyrig«, Jacqueline Nacache points to the aesthetics of acting, to the presence of an actor on screen as an aesthetical category. Deborah Levitt conceptualizes the actor’s body in »Living Pictures: From Tableaux Vivants to Puppets and ParaSelves« between changes in media technologies and political as well as social coordinates. Malte Hagener examines the actor’s labor and life in »All about Gena, Myrtle and Virginia: The Transitional Nature of Actress, Role and Character«, whereas circling central concepts of performance from stage to screen. In the third section, »Affects and Affections« between image, body, and thought, Jennifer M. Barker focuses on »A Surrealist Turn: Transformative Gestures in The Birds«, highlighting Tippi Hedren’s performing body and gesture. In »Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Becoming-Violence of Performance«, Elena del Río introduces per-

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formance as a differential play of material forces, contiguous with violence in the image. Tarja Laine analyzes »Dangerous Liaisons and Counterfeit Affections: Cinema as Seduction«, whereas performance is established as cinematic, supporting the affective exchange between film and spectator. Mirjam Schaub closes up on »An Inscrutable Face: Nicole Kidman in Dogville« and elaborates on the expresssion of the actress. Lisa Åkervall suggests a new type of actor in »Character-Witness, Actor-Medium« and expands on processes of becoming visionary. The fourth section, »Actions and Animations« of image, body, and hybridity, begins »Between Image and Volatility: Framing Motion in Dance and Film« and Susanne Foellmer explores the use of cinematic and choreographic principles. Cynthia Baron goes on with »The Temporal Dimensions of Screen Performances: Exploring Expressive Movement in Live Action and Animated Film« and focuses on the continually changing temporal aspects of physical and vocal expressions. Sharon Marie Carnicke scrutinizes »Emotional Expressivity in Motion Picture Capture Technology«, pointing to screen performances as hybrids of human agency and technological interventions. James Tobias investigates character design and actor performance in »Going Native with Pandora’s (Tool) Box: Spiritual and Technological Conversions in James Cameron’s Avatar«. Karen Beckman explores what questions the film actor raises in »Double Negative: The Actor, the Non-Actor, and the Animated Documentary«. In the fifth and final section, »Reflections and Perspectives« from communication to media theory, Henri Schoenmakers moves to »Bodies of Light: Towards a Theory about Film Acting from a Communicative Perspective«, including production and reception. In »Thinking through Acting: Performative Indices and Philosophical Assertions«, Aaron Taylor proposes to regard acting as an embodied form of philosophical activity. Jörg Sternagel puts »An Emphasis on Being: Moving towards a Responsive Phenomenology of Film(’s) Performance« and thinks through the actor as part of a material aesthetics of film. In »Being on the Screen: A Phenomenology of Cinematic Flesh, or the Actor’s Four Bodies«, Vivian Sobchack suggests an active play between four bodies of the actor. Dieter Mersch closes the volume with »Passion and Exposure: New Paradoxes of the Actor« and draws our attention to the difference between what the actor is and what he shows.

Etymological Uncoveries, Creative Displays

Acknowledgements The collection gathers a selection of contributions from the international conference »Acting in Film—Concepts, Theories, Philosophies« that took place at the University of Potsdam from 2 September to 4 September 2010, organized by the European Media Studies program, a collaborative project of the University of Potsdam and the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. We thank the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ästhetik and the Universitätsgesellschaft Potsdam for funding the conference. We are grateful to Nadja Ben Khelifa, Winfried Gerling, Christine Hanke, Kai S. Knörr, Alice Lagaay, Jan-Henrik Möller, Ludger Schwarte, Matthias Steinle, Simon Vincent, and Patrick Vonderau for their support. A very special thanks goes to Etienne Allaix who designed both the conference’s and the collection’s artwork, and to Lea Katharina Becker, Alex Cline, Meredith Hall, and Hans Kannewitz who helped editing and formatting all texts for the book, as well as to Nicole Hall-Elfick, Marie Hermet, and Laura Radosh for working on the translations. We are very grateful to all our contributors and their chapters, and want especially thank Lesley Stern for writing the foreword to this volume.

Notes 1

2

3

4

With the introduction »Descriptive Acts« to their collection Falling for You. Essays on Cinema and Performance, Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros encouraged us »to move towards a notion of performance as closer to bodily action« (1999: 3). Eloquence here is discussed as bodily accomplishment, and is opposed to rhetoric where, as Denis Donoghue concisely stresses, »one is trying to persuade someone to do something: in eloquence, one is discovering with delight the expressive resources of the means at hand«; eloquence then is »a token of other ways of being alive, in passing, the flair of being alive«, it adds to »a life otherwise thought to be already known« (2008: 148). Andrew Klevan eloquently points to the actors’ and the camera’s behaviour that »are mutually considerate; each trusts the other to enhance understanding and to relieve them of the sole burden of making themselves known« (2005: 14). In a panel on »New Dimensions in Film Theory« at the conference »Sonic Futures: Soundscapes and the Language of Screen Media« of the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) in London in June 2011, Thomas Morsch elaborated on images as actions in his insightful paper »What Film Does. Notes on Film’s Performative Dimension«.

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Literature Bresson, Robert ([1950–1958] 1977): Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin. New York, NY: Urizen Books. Donoghue, Denis (2008): On Eloquence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Klevan, Andrew (2005): Film Performance. From Achievement to Appreciation. London, New York, NY: Wallflower Press. Pipolo, Tony (2010): Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Lesley and George Kouvaros (1999): »Introduction. Descriptive Acts«, in: Lesley Stern, George Kouvaros (eds.), Falling for You. Essays on Cinema and Performance. Sydney: Power, 1–35.

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Presentations and Representations

Paul McDonald Spectacular Acting: On the Exhibitionist Dynamics of Film Star Performance Conceptualizing and analyzing the workings of acting continues to present film scholarship with a significant challenge. Several valuable contributions have already been made to this debate. Underlying this work I believe there has been a single core question: how and what does acting mean? This is both a necessary and a complex question. It is necessary because as all characters in film are acted characters, film scholarship needs an advanced understanding of acting if it is to grasp how film narrative works. At the same time, grappling with acting opens up many complex problems, which in the simplest of terms may be summarized by the questions, how can the workings of the voice and body be described, and how do vocal and physical actions create meaning? These questions have by no means been conclusively settled and they continue to test film scholarship. Here, however, I want to begin to open up a further line of enquiry which I think is equally necessary and complex. Narrative film rests on a basic contradiction. While the narrative invites a voyeuristic contemplation of the story world, at the same time, because the film is organized for the attention of a viewer, it is equally a form of exhibitionist show. As a performance medium, film is intended to be displayed and so, in one way or another, is always spectacle. Film acting is situated within this tension between representation and presentation, or story and show. In the most general of terms, acting can be described as the representation of dramatic character through the medium of the performer’s voice and body.

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By playing characters, actors belong to the story, becoming a source of narrative meaning. Equally, actors are part of an event staged for public presentation, and so all film acting has an element of spectacle. With film acting, narrative and spectacle are inextricable for the actor is at the same time both someone who represents character and but also someone presented to an audience. Discussing film performance, Richard Maltby notes »[t]he audience experiences the presence of the performer as well as—in the same body as—the presence of the character« (2003: 380). If recast in semiotic terms, what is at work here is the distinction is between the actor-signifier and the character-signified. This co-presence of both representation and presentation or narrative and spectacle suggests that the question—what does acting mean—should always be accompanied by the equally pressing question—how does acting create show? For the purposes of this essay, I want to apply this question to considerations of star acting in contemporary Hollywood film. My reason for focusing on star acting is that while all film actors are spectacle, some actors have a greater spectacular status than others. Star acting is lifted out of the general condition of spectacle which characterizes all film acting to become spectacular acting. Now this may sound tautological, for already implicit in the term acting is the sense of the actor as spectacle. But in the case of the star, various strategies come together to exhibit individual actors as exceptional. This essay therefore aims to identify some of those strategies. As a starting point, I want to take the opening sequence from the action comedy Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008). When watching Hancock, it is difficult to ignore how the central figure is both a drunken superhero but also Will Smith. Despite his unkempt stubble and trashy clothes, Smith is immediately recognizable. This recognition spills over from the star’s appearances in a string of previous roles: I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence, 2007), The Pursuit of Happyness (Gabriele Muccino, 2006), Hitch (Andy Tennant, 2005), or I, Robot (Alex Proyas, 2004), to name but a few. But who plays the three gang member in the SUV, the little boy who wakes up Hancock, or the woman he molests? Following Maltby’s argument, with each figure on-screen, the audience is confronted with actor and character, signifier and signified, in the same body. But Smith’s is a body and voice with a name. His known and named body is distinguished from the anonymous bodies of supporting actors: this is not just an actor; this is Will Smith. However, the recognizability of the body and voice is not enough to explain the spectacular show of the star. Later in the film, Hancock builds a friendship with a family. Viewers who have seen The Kingdom (Peter Berg, 2007) or Juno (Jason Reitman, 2007) may recognize

Spectacular Acting Jason Bateman as the father, or the mother, who is played by Charlize Theron from Monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003) or Æon Flux (Karyn Kusama, 2005). Elsewhere, followers of TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory (Chuck Lorre, Bill Prady, 2007) may spot Johnny Galecki, or Eddie Marsan, a familiar face from numerous British films and television dramas. Recognition of the named voice and body is therefore not confined to the star alone. What distinguishes the star from these other familiar faces is the systematic heightening or amplification of awareness of the actor as signifier. With star acting, the spectacularization of the performer does not emerge from what is represented but rather through the means used to focus attention on upon who is doing the representation. Returning to the opening sequence of Hancock, several elements come together to show off Will Smith as the film’s star. All actors in the sequence are photographed, but in Smith’s case, framing, camera movement and editing all work to isolate and center the star as an object of attention. At the same time, the script sets up a situation which makes Smith/Hancock a focal point for the narrative. All actors in the sequence are spectacle, but by visually isolating the star and giving him narrative centrality, film form and the script both work to separate Smith from the rest of the cast. In part, the spectacular presentation of the star can be attributed to how the performance of the film medium and the construction of the narrative in the script achieve an effect of ensemble differentiation by creating a hierarchy of actors and characters. However, medium and script only provide a context for the spectacular quality of star acting. Elements of film form mediate the presence of the actor but, as Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke note, they do not »do the acting« (Baron and Carnicke 2008: 61). It is one thing to note the spectacular presentation of the star through elements of form and the script but to understand spectacular acting it is necessary to focus on the voice and body. When thinking about stars, the spectacle of the actor is always linked into the commerce of popular film. Stars are deployed in films with the intention to trying to provide a guard against the uncertainties of audience demand. For this to work, the star must be a known feature. In other fields of business, branding is a competitive means of communication which is to make products recognizable and distinctive. Over the last fifty years, the processes of branding have shifted, as Fabian Faurholt Csaba and Anders Bengtsson note, »from identifying products to managing the meaning of brands through elaborate brand identity systems« (Csaba and Bengtsson 2006: 106). Basic to this change has been the belief that »to stand out and be successful, brands must be imbued with human

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characteristics and traits« (ibid.: 106). This is a process in which the brand is conceptualized as a living entity, so that the branded product can be described as having an identity or personality. In other words, it is a process in which the brand becomes a person. Film stardom reverses this equation: the person becomes a brand. Stardom takes a set of lived qualities and turns them into a product. The star-signifier serves to differentiate products in the market. To a certain degree, this strategy of differentiation depends on the deployment of the star’s name through marketing media. With films featuring stars, posters, trailers, interviews, etc., all work as channels for disseminating the star’s name. However, this process is not confined to the name alone. Marketing media also circulate the physical likeness of the star so that the star’s body, and more particularly the face, come to summarize the concept of the film. Consider the posters for a few star driven movies: according to the key artwork, Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) just is Julia Roberts; whatever they are about, the films of the Mission: Impossible series (Brian De Palma, 1996; John Woo, 2000; J. J. Abrams, 2006; Brad Bird, 2011), Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), or The Last Samurai (Edward Zwick, 2003) are condensed entirely into the right profile of Tom Cruise’s face; and the poster for Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008) tells a historical tale of real life intrigue communicated through Angelina Jolie’s pout. Here the promise of the star’s body is shown as an attraction to sell the film, becoming not only a source of meaning or spectacle but also of commercial value. With stardom therefore, strategies are systematically used to brand the performer’s body and voice. In this process, the creation of spectacle to heighten awareness of the actor as signifier is essential towards making the star a definable, enduring and stable component of the film product. I therefore propose that when applied to star acting, my earlier question—how does acting create show—is always tied into concerns about the branding of the voice and body. After the boy alerts Hancock to the gun battle taking place on the freeway, the hero takes to the skies in pursuit of the hoodlums. Sitting in the back seat of the SUV, Smith/Hancock confronts the gang and the moment brings together a set of idioms which are characteristic of Smith’s performances (see figures 1–3 below). At one level, this is an effect of the script, which provides the star with smart wisecracks that bring humor to a perilous situation. But it also comes from how he uses his body and voice to enact a certain attitude to the situation. The line »I don’t give a shit what you did« states he is unperturbed by the threats he faces. Ultimately, however, it his loose, open use of gesture, together with the slow

Spectacular Acting and even tone of his speech, which assume the manner necessary to demonstrate his nonchalance. Taking a note from how Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke have recommended the use of Laban terminology as a way of conceptualizing and describing acting choices, Smith/Hancock asserts his authority over the situation by employing actions which can be described as »sustained« (Baron and Carnicke 2008: 192). Had Smith made »sudden« gestures, the moment would have been imbued with a sense of aggression and possibly lack of control (ibid.: 192). Smith/Hancock’s containment contrasts with the fast, jittery gestures and speech of the gang members. Even when Smith points his finger separately at the occupants of the vehicle, a gesture which in many respects is direct, he maintains an indirect quality for the hand remains slack and floats from one position to the next. Smith’s performance works in the service of the narrative for the attitude he strikes illuminates understanding of character. But at the same time, the scene is a distinctively Will Smith moment. The physical and vocal attitude he strikes is similar to that seen in the television series The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (Andy Borowitz, Susan Borowitz, 1990–1996) and other movies. After supporting roles in Where the Day Takes You (Marc Rocco, 1992), Made in America (Richard Benjamin, 1993) and Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993), Smith co-starred alongside Martin Lawrence in Bad Boys (Michael Bay, 1995). Lawrence gained top billing but the box office success of the film became the platform for Smith’s rise to stardom and was immediately followed by the back-to-back hits Independence Day (Roland Emmerich, 1996) and Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997). It was with this series of performances that Smith consolidated a distinctive onscreen personality. Continuities in the use of the voice and body across these roles gave Smith a recognizable on-screen manner. Taking terms suggested by Barry King, Smith’s acting achieved »personification« over »impersonation« (King 1985: 27–50). Although Mike Lowery in Bad Boys, Captain Steven Hiller in Independence Day, and Jay in Men in Black all work for authoritarian agencies— police, air force, or the clandestine band of alien hunters who are the »Men in Black«—Smith’s physical and vocal looseness always communicated his relaxed informality, thereby placing him apart from the institution. Lowery, Hiller and Jay were particular characters but instead of playing up the differences, Smith’s enactment of these roles preserved continuities across performances. For King, impersonation is achieved when the personality of the actor »disappears into the part«, while personification sees the actor taking »parts consonant with his or her personality« (King 1985: 30). The latter description is potentially misleading, for it may sug-

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gest the actor does not act but simply »plays him/herself«. However, from the point of view of the audience, any sense of the actor’s self is always mediated, for his or her personality is only intelligible as the product of a series of performances. Whatever »personality« the actor brings to the screen is not an outcome of any natural, innate identity which the performer has, but rather the product of a series of performances. I therefore suggest revising the definition of personification to emphasize the enacted status of the personality carried across roles. Personification depends on the actor’s reproduction of certain physical and vocal traits in performance. It is achieved wherever there is the systematic preservation of continuities in the body and voice to accomplish similar meanings and effects across a series of film roles. Brand identity depends on enduring and stable qualities, and so stars can only work as brands if they bring to the screen durable features. Scripts can construct similar types of situations or lines for the various characters played by stars, but it is the body and voice which provide the most tangible embodied evidence to confirm the star’s presence on screen. Personification is therefore an essential strategy in the branding of the star’s body and voice. Foregrounding the actor-signifier over the character-signified, or the who is acting over the what is acted, personification achieves the spectacularization of the star actor through the media of the body and voice. While the spectacular aspect star acting is dispersed across the whole of a star’s performance, contemporary Hollywood films frequently appear to include certain scenes where the exceptional status of the star becomes amplified. These I will refer to as star moments. One example is the star entrance: Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven (2001) brought together an ensemble of star names, with a cast that included George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. In a sense then, the film performs a balancing act between multiple star spectacles. Roberts, however, is given a special moment with her entrance (see figures 4–6 below). Here the flow of the film is halted as slow motion, framing, camera movement, depth of focus, lighting, editing, music, costume, hair styling and make-up all conspire to give Roberts a grand entrance. It is a moment designed to introduce the character of Tess but also to spectacularize Julia Roberts. While the impact of the entrance is largely achieved through the performance of the film medium and elements of visual styling, the moment makes certain performance demands on the star. As Roberts does not speak, her presence is reduced to just the body, which she holds stiff and erect. The performances of the film medium and the actor combine in the moment to display Roberts/Tess as a beautiful, otherworldly object.

Spectacular Acting A second category of moment is the star turn. In such moments, the star gets to demonstrate extraordinary skills of performance. In the musical, such moments do not belong to acting but rather dance and song. However, they are also evident in character-based comedy with those moments where the star is given the room to use physical and/or vocal virtuosity as a way of showing the extreme states of mind or emotions experienced by a character. This is certainly true in those comedies of Jim Carrey where circumstance lead to the central character having to fundamentally change the way he conducts his life. I am thinking here in particular of The Mask (Chuck Russell, 1994), Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997), Me, Myself and Irene (Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly, 2000), How the Grinch Stole Christmas (Ron Howard, 2000), Bruce Almighty (Tom Shadyac, 2003) and Yes Man (Peyton Reed, 2008). In these films, Carrey’s character first experiences the impact of the change in a particular scene. As illustration, I will take a moment from Liar, Liar: Carrey’s character Fletcher Reede is a lawyer. In his professional but also personal life, he is a habitual liar. When his lies result in him letting down his son, the boy magically casts a spell on Reede which forces him to tell the truth. Consequently, Carrey literally has a funny turn. In Carrey’s films, moments like these enact the battle between who the character has been and who he is becoming, performing what Vivian Sobchack refers to as the »dialectic of character« (Sobchack 2004: 281). Although the workings of the medium always have a hand in the creation of such moments, here the struggles of the moment are primarily created through the extraordinary feats performed by the actor’s body or voice. Although the scene is essential to the narrative, it also stands slightly apart from the plot as a concentrated moment of performance spectacle. I call this the star turn but to emphasize the spectacular quality of the scene, it could otherwise be termed the showcase moment. A final category I will consider is the self-reflexive moment. In such instances, the star’s performance self-consciously refers to the star in other roles. These may come through the most fleeting of moments. In The Matrix (Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski, 1999), Keanu Reeves evokes his earlier Bill and Ted movies like Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (Stephen Herek, 1989) when he utters the single expression »whoa« after watching Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus jump between the roofs of two skyscrapers. With Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008), Clint Eastwood strikes poses that awaken memories of the Harry Callahan thrillers beginning with Dirty Harry (Don Siegel, 1971). The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008) is a curious case, for initially the spectacularization of the star performance comes from

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Paul McDonald seeing Brad Pitt not being Brad Pitt. Prosthetics and make-up, combined with posture, gesture and voice, produce the necessary age for Pitt to play the »young« Benjamin. Late on in the film, however, a familiar Pitt appears. Although the film has already run for over two hours, according to the reverse chronology of Benjamin’s life cycle, this moment is effectively Pitt’s entrance. It is interesting that in this moment, Pitt does not appear as his actual age, a man in his mid-40s, but rather seems to be recalling a younger version of himself visible in Seven Years in Tibet (Jean-Jacques Annaud, 1997) and Meet Joe Black (Martin Brest, 1998). In these self-reflexive moments, awareness of the actor-signifier is heightened by the star playing the star. To conclude, it has been my argument that examinations of film acting must combine attention to how acting works to produce both narrative meaning and spectacular show. All film actors are spectacle but the acting of star performers achieves additional spectacular status as it is rendered special and exceptional through various strategies. I have argued the spectacularization of star actor is achieved through the named body of the star, the use of film form and the script to achieve ensemble differentiation, the branding of the body and voice through personification, and the creation of concentrated star moments. In one way or another, these strategies work to emphasize the star-signifier over the character-signified. In many respects stars provide the most obvious example of how the film actor is presented as spectacle. Returning to the question raised at the opening, »how does acting create show?«, I suggest star acting provides only a starting point from which to consider how this question could be applied more widely to explore the exhibitionist component of the performances given by actors with less obviously spectacular status.

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Literature Baron, Cynthia and Sharon Marie Carnicke (2008): Reframing Screen Performance. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Csaba, Fabian Faurholt and Anders Bengtsson (2006): »Rethinking identity in brand management«, in: Jonathan E. Schroeder, Miriam Salzer-Mörling (eds.), Brand Culture. New York, NY, London: Routledge, 106–121. King, Barry (1985): »Articulating Stardom«, in: Screen 26 (5), 27–50. Maltby, Richard (2003): Hollywood Cinema. London: Blackwell Publishing, second edition.

Spectacular Acting Sobchack, Vivian (2004): »Thinking through Jim Carrey«, in: Cynthia Baron, Diane Carson, Frank P. Tomasulo (eds.), More than a Method. Trends and Traditions in Contemporary Film Performance. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 275–296.

Illustrations

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Figures 1– 3: Will Smith in Peter Berg’s Hancock (Columbia Pictures, 2008). Digital frame enlargements.

Paul McDonald

Figures 4–6: Julia Roberts in Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (Warner

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Brothers Pictures, 2001). Digital frame enlargements.

Kathrina Glitre Cary Grant: Acting Style and Genre in Classical Hollywood Cinema Genres promise specific pleasures that are sometimes closely linked to particular kinds of skilled performance, as in musicals, action movies and biopics. As a system, genre undoubtedly »creates a conceptual framework for the meaning of performance« (Cornea 2010: 6), helping position the actors’ approach and the audiences’ expectations. Acting style is also effected by verisimilitude and the kinds of worlds imagined by specific genres: what is expected and plausible in the benign world of romantic comedy will be out of place and implausible in the alienating environments of film noir. Such differences require nuanced variations in technique, expressivity and methods of access to characters’ emotions and thought processes. Consequently, it is tempting to believe that acting style may form »a defining feature of genre« (Wojcik 2004: 5) or involve »genre-specific rules« (de Cordova [1986] 1995: 129). However, such beliefs tend to reinforce the misperception of genres as discrete entities, clearly and permanently distinguishable from each other. Instead, we need to understand that genres are interdependent and easily mixed, and always have been (see Staiger 2003). Recognizing the continuities between particular genres becomes especially important when analyzing a star’s function in relation to genre. For example, although Doris Day is often identified with the musical and John Wayne with the western, both were very successful in coterminous genres as well, such as the sex comedy (Day) and the war movie (Wayne). As Andrew Britton argues, Many stars repeatedly cross genres. In some cases, a star is associated with a particular genre at a particular stage of his/her career.

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Kathrina Glitre […] It is most often the case, however, that major stars are associated simultaneously with several genres […] demonstrat[ing] again the historical interpenetration of the genres. (Britton 1995: 145)1 Although an individual star may move across several genres, this does not mean he or she could appear in any genre. On the contrary, because stars tend both to embody types and to have distinct personas, they will succeed in a select group of genres that enable different inflections of the star image. To explore how Cary Grant’s acting style and technique are effected by genre and how this relates to his star persona, I want to consider three films released between 1940 and 1942: His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941) and The Talk of the Town (George Stevens, 1942). These are particularly useful examples, since all three complicate the idea of generic purity through noticeable shifts in tone. The limited time frame is deliberate, motivated by Britton’s emphasis on historical interpenetration of genres, but also by an interest in the films’ production contexts. Critical and audience perceptions of Grant’s acting ability and star image are historically determined and change over time. I want to remain alert to how these changes operate, particularly in terms of how the star’s relationship to genre is regulated by audience expectations and verisimilitude.

Production Contexts

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Generic production, casting and acting style are inevitably underpinned by economic considerations. Before analyzing Grant’s performances, it is helpful to establish his unusual relationship to the studio system. In 1937, Grant worked out an exceptional deal with Columbia and RKO, signing a non-exclusive contract with both, alternating between them to make four films a year for two years, with an option for another two years after that; the option was picked up, and the 1940–1942 period is part of this second phase. The Columbia contract specified the films must be class A productions, budgeted at not less than $400,000 (negative cost), with first class directors.2 Between His Girl Friday and Suspicion, Grant starred in My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), The Howards of Virginia (Frank Lloyd, 1940), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1941) and Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941); following The Talk of the Town, he made Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942). Although romance is dominant, it is combined with various genres: for example, The Howards of Virginia is

Acting Style and Genre one of Grant’s rare forays into period drama, and Penny Serenade quickly switches from romantic comedy to domestic comedy and melodrama. Grant had also recently appeared in the more adventure-oriented films Gunga Din (George Stevens, 1939) and Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939). During this period, Grant worked with all of his favorite directors: Hawks, McCarey, Stevens, Cukor and Hitchcock. Grant later wrote, »Each of those directors permitted me the release of improvisation during the rehearsing of each scene […] permitt[ing] me to discover how far out I could go with confidence, while guided by their quiet, sensitive directorial approval« (quoted by McCann 1996: 150, original emphasis). As his career developed, Grant demonstrated knowledge and understanding of the relationships between his acting and the filmmaking process. He was a skilled screen actor, highly conscious of his affective interaction with the cinematic apparatus (camera, lighting, sound, editing, projection). According to Garson Kanin, who directed My Favorite Wife, Grant, was always prepared; he always knew his part, his lines, and the scene. […] He took not only his own part seriously, he took the whole picture seriously. He’d come and look at the rushes every evening. No matter how carefree and easygoing he seemed in the performance, in reality he was a serious man, an exceptionally concentrated man (quoted in McCann 1996: 149, my emphasis). As Cynthia Baron has demonstrated, »for practitioners [working in Hollywood] in the 1930s and 1940s, concentration, not feeling, was the key to great acting« (1999: 42), partly because this was seen as a way of managing the discontinuous process of filming. Baron quotes Lillian Albertson’s 1947 manual, Motion Picture Acting: »as your powers of concentration increase, you will be able to turn mood on and off [like a faucet]« (1999: 42, original emphasis). Cary Grant was among those who endorsed Albertson’s book.

Acting Style and Genre: H ,6 G ,5/ F5,'$< Grant is now most commonly associated with the genres of romantic comedy, screwball comedy and Hitchcockian suspense thrillers. James Naremore believes Grant is »especially effective« in these kinds of films, »where everything depended on timing, athletic skill, and a mastery of small, isolated reactions« (1988: 224). Comedy and suspense may seem an odd combination, given their different

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modes of address and narration: comedy tends towards presentational modes of address and narrative omniscience; suspense favors representational modes and narrative restriction. However, both emphasize epistemic instability, often in combination with themes of duality and duplicity. In screwball comedy, for example, at least one of the main characters usually pretends to be someone else at some point, drawing attention to performativity and performance. Consequently, screwball comedies often involve disguise and deception, sometimes extending this to outright lying and cheating. In terms of acting style, screwball comedy requires high energy vocalization and physicality, including elements such as fast-talking, overlapping dialogue, eccentric accents and gestures, pratfalls, and unconventional behavior. Examples from Grant’s own performances quickly spring to mind: David Huxley stuttering, muttering and interjecting repetitively, or slapping his top hat to cover Susan Vance’s (Katharine Hepburn’s) exposed derrière, before the pair march out in closestep unison in Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938); Jerry Warriner’s idiosyncratic decision to sit on the back of a sofa with his feet on the seat, or his later pratfall, when a chair slips out from under him in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937); and Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson’s (Rosalind Russell) rapid verbal sparring, perfectly pitched and timed to maintain clarity and hit the punchline in His Girl Friday: Walter Burns is an extreme case. Walter does not pretend to be someone else, but is inherently devious, deceitful and manipulative: Hildy calls him a »double-crossing chimpanzee« and a »stinker« (amongst other things). Grant embodies Walter’s doubleness through a combination of extrovert overplaying and sneaky introspection. Walter and Hildy’s first scene together establishes the pattern. When Walter realizes Hildy is not coming back to work, he launches into a speech about gratitude; Hildy, familiar with his stratagems, »wishes [he]’d stop hamming.« We too recognize Walter is performing because Grant uses exaggerated hand gestures, thrusting his lightly closed fist towards Hildy/Russell on »We’re a team, you need me[…]«, triple-thumping his flattened hand to his breast on »and I need you«, before turning his body, bending his elbow back and then swinging it forward to jab his finger towards the news room on »and the paper needs both of us!« During this speech, Grant’s voice pitch rises, as he speaks louder and quicker with each phrase. The climax is reached as Hildy—who has been imitating the incomprehensibly fast mutterings of an auctioneer ever since Walter started talking about being a team—slaps her hand on the table, declaring, »Sold, to the American!« Tension relaxing, Grant drops

Acting Style and Genre his voice (both volume and pitch) shrugs with his arms thrown out from the elbow, before settling himself on the edge of the table. The pace and rhythm of the sequence is expertly handled, building and relaxing tension without becoming unbearably manic. During these moments of extrovert overplaying, Walter appears to be responding instantaneously but not spontaneously, as if these are oft-repeated speeches (reminding us of Hildy’s reaction to his line, »I’d know you any time, any place, any where«). In contrast, there are moments of sneaky introspection where Grant modulates his style, switching from high energy gesture and vocalization to relative stillness and self-containment. For example, when the news of Hildy’s engagement finally sinks in, Walter is (for the first time) lost for words, breaking off part way; he stands still, head and eyes slightly cast down, face held at an angle to Hildy’s so that she cannot see him directly. Grant shuts down Walter’s exterior, indicating that Hildy’s words have hit home, but this also gives us time to recognize Walter’s mental processes via quick left-right shifting of his eyes. We do not know exactly what Walter is thinking—we never do—but we understand that he is thinking ahead, plotting his next move. In contrast to the bold performative gestures Grant uses for Walter’s speech-making, here he uses his hands more delicately, lightly tapping his fingers on the telephone, reminding us that Walter has already used it to lay the groundwork for tricking Hildy into coming back. Similarly, when Walter discovers Hildy plans to get married the very next day, he is again pulled up short, returning to the telephone, lightly touching it again, before reaching for a boutonniere, his fingers then stroking and tapping his lapel instead. These techniques of switching from high energy, ostensive externalization to low energy, intensive internalization prove typical of Grant’s acting in various ways. Here it is used to connote dissimulation. It is used similarly in Suspicion when Johnnie Aysgarth (Grant) lies about selling the chairs General McLaidlaw (Cedric Hardwicke) sent as a wedding present. Johnnie is initially very open and positive, grinning broadly when he sees his old friend Beaky Thwaite (Nigel Bruce): Grant performs this with high energy confidence. When Beaky mentions the missing chairs, Grant registers the words by stilling his head and body and letting the smile fall from his face. He drops his eyes, too, then flicks them up-and-down towards Beaky quickly, his eyes spotting Beaky’s pipe (out of frame) and then his hand bringing Beaky’s hand and pipe into shot to motivate a change in subject: lighting the pipe. This quick eye movement connotes »quick thinking«, then, and by the time Johnnie has got the matches from the mantelpiece, he has recovered his composure and is prepared to lie.

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Grant also uses the switching technique to signal emotional control—a sense of reining emotion back in before it gets the better of the character, or exposes the depth of the emotion. In The Philadelphia Story, for example, when Mike Connor (James Stewart) proposes to Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn), Grant embodies C. K. Dexter Haven’s emotion by standing squashed close between the door frame, the wall and a side table: his elbows are tucked to his sides, his head pressed back into his neck, tensing his spine in an uncomfortable way, holding his breath, awaiting the answer. His stillness and rigidity is paradoxically expressive. Similar techniques work particularly well in Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946). Devlin momentarily loses his sadistic self-control upon hearing Prescott’s (Louis Calhern) plan for Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman): Grant stands up quickly, eyes widening and flashing intently, and he raises the pitch and volume of his voice (in marked contrast to his very soft, whispered tones from the preceding love scene). However, when Prescott declares, »I don’t understand your attitude« the scene cuts to a tight close-up of Devlin’s face: again, Grant shuts down the exterior, lowering his eyes, emotion draining from his face, as he turns away from the camera (and Prescott), keeping his back to us for longer than strictly necessary, before completing the turn. Devlin is now back in control. Grant’s back-turning movement echoes Devlin’s first scene, when Grant’s silhouetted back is all we see, a sinister, silent presence. Throughout the film, this motif of turning his back to the camera signals Devlin’s duplicity. Although these four films occupy quite different generic worlds, the characters Grant plays have something in common: they are morally ambivalent figures whose motivations are never quite clear-cut or explicit. We guess that Walter is maneuvering to get Hildy back, but this is mixed in with other agendas (such as unseating the Mayor); we hope that C. K. Dexter Haven is helping Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell) for just reasons, not for money or petty revenge; and we want to believe Devlin loves Alicia, but his shadowy presence undermines our certainty. Part of our indecision here stems from the fact that, although Grant is top-billed (as required by his contract), these characters are not protagonists. As Andrew Klevan suggests, Dexter is a »celestial presence hovering on the edge of things, interfering vividly and yet influencing indirectly […] Does he shape events or wait for them to take their course?« (2005: 39). Rather than driving their own stories, Grant’s characters in these films are catalysts, interfering with and influencing the female protagonist’s narrative trajectory. Taking this into account, Grant’s casting in Suspicion is not as against type as might be assumed: the film is centered on Lina’s experience and how she is affected by Johnnie’s presence. Nonetheless, it does place Grant in a suspense thriller for the first time.

Acting Style and Genre

Genre and Ambivalence: S 863,&,21 Suspicion has frequently been described as a flawed film, and the myths around the changed ending and Grant’s casting add to that reputation. As Rick Worland notes, »The most commonly repeated explanation for the movie’s abrupt and unsatisfying happy ending, one Hitchcock encouraged, is that either RKO would not allow Cary Grant to play a murderer or Grant himself refused to risk compromising his romantic screen persona« (2002: 6). Worland has explored these issues in depth, drawing on archival materials, including preview cards for the original version. As he explains, the film is based on a novel called Before the Fact (1932), in which Johnnie Aysgarth murders his wife, Lina. However, there is no evidence that RKO ever intended to end the film in this way. Instead, the film ended with a confession scene, in which Lina willingly drinks the milk she thinks Johnnie has poisoned (as in the book), but Johnnie reveals it is not poisoned. He admits he has embezzled money and intended to cheat Beaky, but »begs forgiveness and vows to reform« (Worland 2002: 14) before a final embrace and fade. Preview audiences were highly critical of this ending, finding it implausible and unmotivated. The scene was dropped and a new ending was devised, which reworked an existing scene (the struggle in the car) to create a more exciting climax, and added new footage that revealed Johnnie was considering poisoning himself to escape disgrace. At this point, the studio also decided to change the film’s title to Suspicion. It was not just the ending that was a problem. As Worland notes, respondents also »complained about the movie’s unsettling and ambiguous shifts in tone« (2002: 14), with some directly linking this to a switch from light comedy to murder mystery (ibid.: 15). Others complained about Grant’s casting in this kind of film specifically, repeatedly suggesting that he should only make comedies, not »serious« films like this one (ibid.: 15). Worland concludes that the audiences »were most disturbed by the (often interrelated) issues of genre and star persona. Each of these major structuring systems was difficult for viewers to interpret as presented in the first cut: is this a romantic comedy or a psychological thriller?« (ibid.: 14). Such responses provide a strong indication of the preview audience’s desire for genre purity and typecasting: the respondents were not only disappointed by the unexpected ending, but also disconcerted by the film’s generic ambivalence.3 Rather than seeing this generic ambivalence as a failure on the film’s part, I want to suggest that the film’s effect depends upon it, in order to maintain epistemic uncertainty. Grant’s enactment of Johnnie is at the heart of this uncertainty, as indicated by

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Kathrina Glitre Respondent #35’s comment: »Cary Grant was very good, but I could never tell when he was trying to be serious. Or was he?« (quoted by Worland 2002: 15). Johnnie is simultaneously attractive and mysterious, charming and sinister, and Grant switches mood to keep us guessing about Johnnie’s motives and emotions. Strikingly, Grant uses a more screwball style to embody Johnnie’s charming unconventionality. For example, when General McLaidlaw’s wedding present first arrives, Grant comically exaggerates Johnnie’s reactions. Sitting down on one of the chairs, he turns his head and upper body towards Lina (offscreen) and presents himself to the camera. He raises his lower arms, shoulders and eyebrows in a baffled shrug, then rocks in the seat slightly, so that the wood creaks. Lightly gesturing towards the noise, he mouths an inaudible comment as if querying the chair’s fitness for purpose. In the next shot, he is leaning back, swiveled at an angle on the seat, his left knee raised and bent over the arm-rest, his right leg outstretched to rest on the other chair.

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Cary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s S U S P I C I O N (RKO Radio Pictures, Warner, 1941). Digital frame enlargement.

While signaling a certain disrespect for General McLaidlaw, this pose also feels like a suitable response to the dark monstrosity of the high-backed chairs—a clash between patriarchal tradition and a more vital disregard for outmoded stiffness. The effect is similar to the moment in The Philadelphia Story, described by Klevan,

Acting Style and Genre when Dexter »pulls up his knees to the height of his chest and feet onto the chair, an eccentric position when contrasted to the correct seating of high society« (2005: 41). In Suspicion, such eccentricity marks Johnnie’s status as the black-sheep of a respectable family, but it also reasserts his attractive roguishness. As Bosley Crowther noted in his review, »Grant […] is provokingly irresponsible, boyishly gay and oddly mysterious, as the role properly demands« (1941: online, my emphasis). Let us imagine, for a moment, that light comedy and sinister mystery had not been combined in such a way. Without such »unsettling and ambiguous shifts in tone«, there would be nothing for us to suspect. We would either know Johnnie was plotting to murder his wife, or we would know that Lina was neurotic. By combining generic moods through acting style, Grant’s performance refuses to resolve our uncertainty. Even the revised ending maintains this ambivalence, rejecting the obvious choice of a reassuring final embrace in favor of a last minute U-turn as Johnnie maneuvers the car to head back home. Since the narrative centers on Lina’s perspective, and our access to knowledge is aligned with hers, this structure also conforms to Hitchcock’s recurring thematic interest in (feminine) masochism and sadistic (masculine) control. Contemporary reviews of the film repeatedly drew attention to the ending, still finding it unsatisfactory: Variety described it as »inept and inconclusive« (Variety Staff 1941: online). However, these reviews do not express any issues with genre or Grant’s casting.4 On the contrary, Otis Ferguson felt Grant was »just right for that part« and John Mosher acknowledged Grant had found »a new field for himself—the field of crime, the smiling villain […] Crime lends color to his amiability« (both quoted in Deschner 1973: 155–156). Mosher’s description reinforces a sense of Grant’s doubleness—his criminal amiability—in a way that qualifies Worland’s conclusion that »1941 audiences were reluctant to see Cary Grant play a murderer« (2002: 22). Certainly, Grant’s very next role capitalized on this new found criminal potential.

Generic Twists: T+( T$/. 2) 7+( T2:1 The Talk of the Town begins by establishing Leopold Dilg (Grant) is an arsonist and murderer. A two-and-a-half minute montage sequence superimposes flames and newspaper headlines with various shots of the Holmes Woolen Mill fire and its aftermath, Andrew Holmes (Charles Dingle) asserting it was arson and the Chief of Police (Don Beddoe) asking who did it, Dilg’s arrest and court

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Kathrina Glitre appearances, Dilg escaping from his cell, and the ensuing manhunt. The newspaper headlines efficiently establish a sequence of events that the other images and music reinforce and confirm—including the way Grant enacts Dilg. Two partially visible policemen swing a chair around to reveal Dilg in medium shot: he is dressed in a very dark shirt and jacket made of rough-looking fabric, and his hair is tousled and unkempt. Grant keeps his eyes downcast and immobile as he is turned, then looks up slightly, shifting them right-left, as the policemen jostle him by the shoulders, before one grabs his hair and pulls his head back. Dilg appears surly and uncooperative, and this is repeated in the court sequences. A shot shows Dilg’s slightly hunched back in the foreground as a lawyer points at him accusingly; the reverse shot is much closer, using a high angle to emphasize Dilg’s sullen face and lack of reaction. Grant’s eyes are hard and tensed as he turns his head slightly, and low key lighting casts a dark shadow behind him, again making Dilg seem sinister.

80 Cary Grant in George Stevens’ TH E TA L K

OF THE

TO W N (Columbia Pictures,

1942). Digital frame enlargement.

In jail, the cell bars cast hard, criss-crossing shadows on to the wall, Dilg’s body and face; in medium long shot, we see him lying back on the bunk at an angle, propped on an elbow, only part of his face visible amid the shadows, watching the guard come to a stop with his back to the cell. Slowly and stealthily, Dilg moves towards him. The camera adjusts for his movement, so that the final moments of the shot are close-up: Dilg carefully moves his left hand through the

Acting Style and Genre bars, then quickly and precisely thrusts his arm around the guard’s neck, choking him. A blast of harsh muted trumpets emphasizes the violence and, as the guard collapses, the camera cranes into a tighter close-up on Dilg, grim and unrelenting, an ugly look on his face. This opening places us in the generic world of crime and prison drama. Performance, framing, mise-en-scène, sound and editing work together here to convey the sense that Dilg is a violent criminal. It is a highly conventionalized sequence, of course, relying on such prison drama cliches as low key lighting effects, a ticking clock counting down towards sentencing him to death, and a night-time escape accompanied by a thunderstorm. Grant’s performance complies with these conventions: he is silent and sinister, his movements minimal and very controlled, including the sudden burst of violence. He looks dangerous. The film’s tone shifts almost immediately, though, with the introduction of Nora Shelley (Jean Arthur). Initially, the film positions Nora as vulnerable, potentially Dilg’s next victim. However, the first words Dilg speaks are surprisingly polite, softly-spoken and quite hesitant: »Miss Shelley […] I’d appreciate the keys to your car.« Grant hobbles across, his elbows bent and forearms slightly outstretched showing his hands clearly, fingers quite loosely extended, emphasizing that Dilg is unarmed and not directly threatening her. When he later asks, »Miss Shelley, do you believe I could burn down a factory?«, she sees he is crying. He looks hurt, not dangerous. This marked contrast in characterization poses a question about the truth of what we have seen: do we believe the montage, or the man? Unlike Suspicion, which depended upon maintaining suspense through uncertainty, The Talk of the Town is not ambivalent. We soon have no doubt that Leopold is innocent of the crime, because of his way of being in, and of, the world. Grant embodies Leopold as energetic and forthright, unafraid to speak his mind, undaunted by class and social difference. The scene when he first meets Professor Lightcap (Ronald Colman) is typical. Leopold has crept downstairs to the kitchen in search of food. Whilst raiding the icebox, he keeps one eye and ear on the exit, meaning he overhears Lightcap dictating a chapter of his book to Nora. Grant shows that the words have caught Leopold’s attention: pausing, his brow furrows slightly, as he turns his head (and ear) toward the sound, indicating he is now listening more carefully. Shifting closer towards the offscreen voices, he raises his elbows to rest against the top of the ice-box, the better to concentrate, while still chewing on the food he has grabbed. There is an association here between physical nourishment and »food for thought«; Grant’s embodiment indicates Leopold is chewing on these words, too. As Lightcap contin-

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ues to discuss the logic of legislation, Grant turns his whole body and hobbles towards the voice, as if drawn to it by another kind of hunger, much as he was previously drawn to the kitchen. Emerging outside, still gnawing on a sausage, Grant raises his right arm and casually grasps a beam above him, leaning into it before interrupting Lightcap. So begins the first of Leopold and Lightcap’s debates on the nature of the law, opposing practical experience with rational idealism. The scene establishes Leopold as a down-to-earth man with honest appetites (there are ongoing jokes about how much he eats), concerned with social justice even at the risk of his own safety. Why switch the characterization of Leopold Dilg, from dangerous criminal to honest man of the people? Grant could easily have used a higher energy style to appear less sinister in the montage sequence, to imply Leopold Dilg was an innocent man. It is certainly a deliberate choice to present Dilg in this menacing way at the outset. In retrospect, the montage works as a self-reflexive critique of the ways in which the media (and the masses) can be manipulated: without adequate investigation or evidence, Dilg is arrested, tried and convicted. Generic verisimilitude lends the montage’s story plausibility, but the sequence is a con, constructing a corrupted version of events, just as the newspaper headlines do. The rest of the film exposes this fraud, changing genre in order to do so, using comedy conventions to turn the establishment on its head. There is, I think, something peculiar to Grant’s star image at work here, too: the montage depends on Grant for its effect, just as Suspicion does. As the Variety review noted, The Talk of the Town was »another in the string of semi-serious, whacky comedies patterned after Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (Frank Capra, 1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Frank Capra, 1939)« (Variety Staff 1942: online). All three co-starred Jean Arthur and were produced by Columbia, but the earlier films starred Gary Cooper (Deeds) and James Stewart (Smith). It is impossible to imagine either of these stars working in the montage sequence: their star images lack the requisite doubleness. Conversely, while Cooper and Stewart’s brand of solid, dependable masculinity worked well in westerns of this period, Grant was never cast in a western. The moral universe of the western demanded a more unified, consistent performance style from its hero (think John Wayne or Clint Eastwood). In Grant’s case, his ability to switch with ease from extrovert energy to introverted stillness keeps us guessing. There is a kind of »double agency« inherent in both his star persona and acting style that means he is suited to generic worlds rooted in comedy, suspense and uncertainty. Here, Grant’s acting style enables the film to develop a very unusual genre twist, in order to make its point about social justice.

Acting Style and Genre

Conclusion The continuities and differences between His Girl Friday, Suspicion and The Talk of the Town suggest the relationships between casting, acting style and genre are complex. Although His Girl Friday and Suspicion are seen as belonging to two very different genres—screwball comedy and suspense thriller—the characters Grant plays in both are ambivalent figures, and he uses similar kinds of acting strategies to embody this. Furthermore, the way he draws on screwball unconventionality in Suspicion and sinister criminality in The Talk of the Town complicates the idea that there might be »genre specific rules« affecting acting style. Instead, it seems more likely that acting style operates as a continuum across genres, enabling nuanced variations in response to generic and narrative determinants. Certainly, the films’ shifts in tone demonstrate that genres themselves often overlap and interact in productive and intriguing ways.

Acknowledgements The research for this essay was supported by a Research Leave grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) in 2008. I would also like to thank the staff at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles and, in particular, Sandra Joy Lee and Jonathon Auxier at the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California, who went above and beyond to help me during Spring Break 2008.

Notes 1

2

For Britton, this »historical interpenetration« is produced by the individual genres’ shared relationship to reality: in effect, each genre provides a distinct way of manifesting and resolving the same ideological contradictions. Thus, to use Britton’s example, genres such as the melodrama, the western and the smalltown comedy offer variations on the contradictory impulses of domesticity and freedom in the US imagination. Genre interpenetration was also economically motivated, though, as Staiger demonstrates (2003: 67–71). I assume the RKO contract was similar, but I have only seen the Columbia contract, a copy of which is held in the Legal Contracts file for Night and Day (Michael Curtiz, 1945) at the Warner Bros. Archive at the University of Southern California.

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Worland also reveals such desires, aligning Grant with »a string of successful romantic comedies« (2002: 7) without mentioning the other genres Grant worked in during this period, and equating Penny Serenade with romantic comedy rather than recognizing it is primarily a melodrama. Consequently, he seems to miss the nuance of Respondent #84’s complaint that Grant’s »last films have all been serious« or its connection to #124 suggesting that »After Penny Serenade don’t like to see Cary Grant in such a characterization« (2002: 15). I am drawing on Crowther (1941), Variety Staff (1941) and three reviews reprinted in Deschner (1973: 154–156).

Literature

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Baron, Cynthia (1999): »Crafting film performances: Acting in the Hollywood studio era«, in: Alan Lovell, Peter Krämer (eds.), Screen Acting. New York, NY, London: Routledge, 31–45. Britton, Andrew (1995): Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist. London: Studio Vista. Cornea, Christine (2010): »Editor’s introduction«, in: Christine Cornea (ed.), Genre and Performance: Film and Television. New York, NY, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1–17. Crowther, Bosley (1941): »Suspicion« [review], in: The New York Times, 21 November. Available from: [Accessed 9 April 2011]. de Cordova, Richard ([1986] 1995): »Genre and performance: An overview«, in: Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Film Genre Reader II. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 129–139. Deschner, Donald (1973): The Complete Films of Cary Grant. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press. Klevan, Andrew (2005): Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation. London: Wallflower Press. McCann, Graham (1996): Cary Grant: A Class Apart. London: Fourth Estate. Naremore, James (1988): Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Staiger, Janet (2003): Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York, NY, London: New York University Press. Variety Staff (1941): »Suspicion« [review], in: Variety, 24 September. Available from: [Accessed 9 April 2011]. — (1942):»The Talk of the Town« [review], in: Variety, 1 January. Available from: [Accessed 9 April 2011].

Acting Style and Genre Wojcik, Pamela Robertson (2004): »General introduction«, in: Pamela Robertson Wojcik (ed.), Movie Acting: The Film Reader. New York, NY, London: Routledge, 1–13. Worland, Rick (2002): »Before and after the fact: Writing and reading Hitchcock’s Suspicion«, in: Cinema Journal 41 (4), 3–26.

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Ceri Hovland Mimesis and Narration: The Performance of Actors and Cinematic Point of View in HE L and THE VIRGIN SUICIDES T+( LADY $'