Stages of Reality: Theatricality in Cinema 9781442696280

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STAGES OF REA LIT Y The atricality in Ci n ema

A groundbreaking collection of original essays, Stages of Reality establishes a new paradigm for understanding the relationship between stage and screen media. This comprehensive volume explores the significance of theatricality within critical discourse about cinema and television. Stages of Reality connects the theory and practice of cinematic theatricality through conceptual analyses and close readings of films including The Matrix and There Will Be Blood. Contributors illuminate how this mode of address disrupts expectations surrounding cinematic form and content, evaluating strategies such as ostentatious performances, formal stagings, fragmentary montages, and methods of dialogue delivery and movement. Detailing connections between cinematic artifice and topics such as politics, gender, and genre, Stages of Reality allows readers to develop a clear sense of the multiple purposes and uses of theatricality in film. is a professor in the Film Studies Program and associate dean of Graduate Studies at Carleton University.

ANDRÉ LOISELLE

is a doctoral candidate in the Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University.

JEREMY MARON

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Stages of Reality Theatricality in Cinema

EDITED BY ANDRÉ LOISELLE AND JEREMY MARON

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2012 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN: 978-1-4426-4352-9 (cloth) ISBN: 978-1-4426-1205-1 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Stages of reality : theatricality in cinema / edited by André Loiselle and Jeremy Maron. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-4426-4352-9 (bound) ISBN 978-1-4426-1205-1 (pbk.) 1. Motion pictures and theater. 2. Motion pictures – History and criticism. I. Loiselle, André, 1963– II. Maron, Jeremy, 1980– PN1995.25.S73 2012

791.43

C2012-900210-0

The University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Introduction 3 ANDRÉ LOISELLE AND JEREMY MARON

Part One

Traces of Theatricality: Stage-to-Screen Adaptations

1 Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality in Brad Fraser’s Leaving Metropolis and Robert Lepage’s La face cachée de la lune 13 S Y LVA I N D U G U A Y

2 Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation of the Stage Play 30 B I L L Y S M A RT

Part Two

Cinematic Theatricality, Genre, and Gender

3 Cinéma du Grand Guignol : Theatricality in the Horror Film 55 ANDRÉ LOISELLE

4 ‘I’ll Show Them!’ Creating Legal Spectacles in Revenge Cinema 81 R.J. TOUGAS 5 The Ethics of Murder: Trial as Performance in the Maternal Melodrama 102 BRENDA AUSTIN-SMITH

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Contents

6 Theatricality in the Cleopatra Films: Women (or We Men?) of Power 116 S A R A H H AT C H U E L

Part Three

The Politics of Cinematic Theatricality

7 Committed Theatricality

135

S Y LV I E B I S S O N N E T T E

8 Theatrical Games and the Gift of a Fable: Performance vs. Reality in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful 160 JEREMY MARON

Part Four Performance, Voice, Movement, and the Theatricality of Cinema 9 Playing to the Balcony: Screen Acting, Distance, and Cavellian Theatricality 185 A A R O N TA Y L O R

10 Bullet-Time, Becoming, and the Sway of Theatricality: Performance and Play in The Matrix 204 B R U C E B A RT O N

Selected Bibliography 229 Contributors

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Introduction ANDRÉ LOISELLE AND JEREMY MARON

The idea for this collection of original essays emerged from papers presented at two conferences held in 2008, in Philadelphia and Vancouver, where a handful of scholars debated the relevance of the concept of theatricality within a critical discourse on cinema. This anthology attempts to bring together the various strands of this ongoing discussion on the problematic of the ‘theatrical’ in film. Although the contributors offer divergent and, indeed, sometimes contradictory perspectives on the subject, there still appears throughout the book a deep convergence of opinions on the significance of theatricality as a mode of address and display common to all cinematic practices. While the topic has been discussed by many scholars in relation to individual groups of films (most notably Marcia Landy),1 there has never been a book-length study in English devoted to a general examination of theatricality as a constitutive characteristic of the moving image. Hamon-Siréjols, Gerstenkorn, and Gardies’s 1994 publication Cinéma et Théâtralité 2 remains the only comprehensive work on the subject. Through diverse approaches, ranging from close readings of specific audiovisual texts to broad theoretical speculations, this volume explores the many ways in which the notion of theatricality can be employed to elucidate certain features of film and television. The concept of theatricality has multiple connotations, as is evidenced by Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait’s lengthy attempt to define the term in the introduction to their 2003 anthology Theatricality.3 For our purposes, Patrice Pavis’s definition, from his Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis (1998) offers a useful starting point: ‘Theatricality is that which is specifically theatrical, in performance or in the dramatic text [ . . . where] theatrical means the specific form of

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theatre enunciation, the movement of the words, the dual nature of the enunciator (character/actor) and his utterances [ . . . and] the artificiality of performance (representation).’4 This definition contains three essential points: that theatricality is the central mode of address of the theatre; that it is defined by the movement of words pronounced by actors as characters; and that the performance is marked by artificiality. On the surface, only one of these elements (words spoken by actors) seems to relate theatricality to narrative cinema. But a closer look at the terms of the definition suggests greater overlap than might be initially recognized. In Theatricality as Medium, Samuel Weber interprets the theatre as a space, any space that lends itself to the observation of performances which, as performance, challenge illusions of self-identity and self-presence.5 The theatre is thus the medium of to-be-looked-at-ness, to borrow Laura Mulvey’s famous neologism. As such, the notion of theatricality as that which is specific to the theatre refers broadly to all representations that call attention to their own representationality; all representations that ‘attempt to impress the beholder and solicit his applause,’ as Michael Fried has put it.6 Erika Fischer-Lichte writes, ‘when the semiotic function of using signs as signs of signs in a behavioural, situational or communication process is perceived and received as dominant, the behaviour, situational, or communication process may be regarded as theatrical.’7 Therefore, theatricality is the set of means whereby signs are deployed within a space for the self-conscious purpose of being perceived, of being recognized by the spectator.8 Any performance, on stage, on screen or any other space, that foregrounds its function as a network of signs to be looked at and listened to operates as an instance of the theatrical, and may thus be read through the lens of theatricality. This brings us to the third term of the definition: artificiality. For Roland Barthes, theatricality ‘is that ecumenical perception of sensuous artifice – gesture, tone, distance, substance, light – which submerges the text beneath the profusion of its external language.’9 The spectator’s recognition of the sign as sign is rooted in a pleasurable, sensuous acknowledgment that what is being observed is a construct. On stage, theatricality dominates the entire sphere of the performance, as the world presented to the audience is entirely reproduced for the purposes of the show. Artificiality on film functions somewhat differently. As has often been discussed by film theorists, especially those adopting a psychoanalytical approach, cinema’s reliance on images, its status as an ‘imaginary

Introduction 5

signifier,’10 makes it a ‘simulation apparatus,’11 which allows it to create an impression of reality seemingly devoid of artifice. As a result, it is easy for film spectators to fail to recognize what they see as ‘signs of signs,’ for the medium appears as a transparent window onto the real. It is thus important to introduce Timothy Corrigan’s notion of ‘cinematic theatricality.’12 This concept serves to emphasize that while some cinematic practices recall theatrical modes of expression, theatricality on film is never identical to theatricality on stage because of the concrete presence of the actor and the set in the theatre as opposed to the imaginary presence of the world on screen – a world ‘present in the mode of absence.’13 While stage theatricality potentially embraces the entire field of theatrical performance, cinematic theatricality refers to film representations that call attention to their own artifice, foregrounding their rhetorical purposes, functioning as self-conscious interruptions within realist discourses to undermine their seeming naturalness. On film, theatricality becomes a means to fracture the impression of reality and transparency that cinema projects; it is a way for cinema to reflect upon itself through the eyes of its older sibling, theatre. The chapters of this book examine various aspects of cinematic theatricality as a disruption of standard modes of cinematic address at the level of both form and content. This disruption can take divers forms, from obvious devices like ostentatious performances, formal staging, and fragmentary montage to more subtle techniques of dialogue delivery and movement carried out to challenge film’s realist claims. Narrative elements such as intra-diegetic fabulation and mise en abyme can also be used to dispute the ‘reality’ of films and their characters. We begin the anthology with chapters that establish overt links between theatre and cinema, so as to commence our exploration on tangible grounds. Sylvain Duguay and Billy Smart discuss respectively film and television adaptation of plays to highlight the traces of theatricality that accompany the process of stage-to-screen transposition. Duguay studies in particular the work of Brad Fraser and Robert Lepage, two theatre artists who have adapted their own plays for film. This process of ‘selfadaptation’ allows the author to map out the passage from theatrical mise en scène to filmic mise en scène. Smart, for his part, concentrates on BBC adaptations of Brechtian plays, asking whether the development of television studio technology from the 1950s to 1980s created a form of television better, or worse, suited as a medium for adapting Brechtian dramaturgy.

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André Loiselle’s piece continues this exploration of direct links between theatre and film. But rather than considering adaptations per se, he switches attention towards a genealogical connection between the stage and the screen through the commonality of genres. In particular, Loiselle explores the link between horror on stage and horror on screen, examining horror films that explicitly acknowledge their debt to the gothic melodramas of the 1800s and the Grand Guignol plays of the early twentieth century. In these films, Loiselle argues, references to the theatre of horror serve ‘to foreground certain character types, expose structural paradoxes, and highlight modes of performance common to the cinematic tale of terror.’ Still under the rubric of theatricality and genre, Robert J. Tougas provides an original reading of theatricality in the revenge film. He demonstrates how revenges are meticulously staged by the avengers so that vengeance is perceived by all as an act of justice making. Revenge cinema, argues Tougas, by its theatrical expectations and displays, both reveals the theatrical quality of the legal process and describes vengeance and its films as legally significant in its efforts to produce justice. Along similar lines, Brenda Austin-Smith examines the theatrical representation of justice and the law in the maternal melodrama. The courtroom, here, becomes the stage for the drama of a mother who killed to save her child. As Austin-Smith shows, the trial scenes in a number of maternal melodramas from the 1930s to the 1960s present ‘the contest between the rival ethics of maternity and civil society in terms that draw explicitly on the performative aspects of melodrama and its association with the principle of excess,’ of ‘acting out,’ as it were. Gender identity is inextricably linked to theatricality in the films discussed by Austin-Smith. Gender becomes a central theme of Sarah Hatchuel’s chapter on theatricality in the Cleopatra films. In these works, theatricality is used to simultaneously elevate and denigrate the female character. The excessive performance of Cleopatra’s powerful yet vanquishable femininity transforms her into an ostentatious sign of exotic commodity that has served to reinforce the European and American sense of self by constructing differences with the Orient. The ‘Cleopatra’ icon has thus given the opportunity to display spectacles of seduction and conquest at the same time. As such, cinematic theatricality can take on potent political significance. The politics of cinematic theatricality is precisely the theme of the next two chapters. Sylvie Bissonnette coins the term ‘committed theatricality’ to discuss a number of Quebec films that use theatrical techniques to

Introduction 7

undermine the putative realism of cinema and make strong statements against society’s blind assumptions. Disguises, artificial declamations, and self-conscious performances are all theatrical devices that disrupt the realism of the French Canadian films discussed by Bissonnette. Especially within the Quebec context where the politics of language are paramount, ‘lyrical speeches that highlight the power of words may underline the political significance of the French language for the Québécois people.’ Issues of national politics and theatricality, but of another time and place, are also examined in Jeremy Maron’s chapter on Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. The film shows how a father performs theatrical games to distract and protect his son from the devastating experience of a Second World War concentration camp in Italy. In the process, the father’s fable becomes the truth for the child, who has no other perception of reality than that staged by his father. The film’s use of theatricality does not act as a means to distort reality and protect the audience from the very real horrors of the Holocaust. Rather, it becomes a means of acknowledging an experience of the Holocaust that cannot be separated from the mediation constructed by the ‘game.’ The powerful political statement conveyed through Benigni’s use of theatricality thus exposes how the Italian experience of the Holocaust was disseminated in postwar Italy, largely to the generation to which Benigni belongs. And Benigni’s over-the-top performance is perhaps Life Is Beautiful ’s most compelling theatrical device. The actor in performance is the topic of the closing section of this anthology. The actor in movement through space is the aspect of cinematic theatricality that most directly coincides with stage theatricality. Here theatricality in cinema becomes the theatricality of cinema, where spoken words and physical gestures, as elements shared by theatre and film, similarly appeal to the audience. Yet the term ‘theatrical’ when used to describe film acting is often derogatory. This is the prejudice that Aaron Taylor challenges in his chapter on the theatricality of film acting. Taylor analyses Daniel Day-Lewis’s Oscar-winning performance in There Will Be Blood (2007) to argue that his ostentatious acting style, far from being a flaw, functions as a rhetorical strategy that affects the selfconsciousness of viewers; a strategy befitting ‘the film’s insistence on the irredeemable separateness of self and other.’ Bruce Barton, in the concluding chapter of this volume, similarly focuses on the performance of the cinematic actor, but more specifically on the actor in movement. He studies ‘the nature of the body’s movement

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within the broader conception of the rhythm(s) of theatricality.’ By zeroing in on the manipulations of body in movement, Barton can read cinema-specific characteristics of computer-generated imagery (CGI) special effects as instances of theatricality. This allows him to declare that seemingly purely cinematic action movies like The Matrix attest, in fact, to the ‘triumph of theatricality’ – that is, if one consciously chooses the blue pill. In our ‘society of the spectacle,’14 the blue pill of theatricality might indeed have become the dominant mode of human experience. This anthology was imagined from the start as something of a theatrical space where protagonists (our contributors) could enter into a dialogue and respond to each other (sometimes explicitly). But we purposefully choose not to provide a conclusion to this drama that would neatly tie all the loose ends. We believe that any reader who takes the time to peruse this volume from cover to cover will come out with, at once, a clear sense of the multiple purposes of theatricality in film and a richly open-ended impression of all the potential variations that remain to be explored. A central goal of this collective project is a synergistic consideration of how ‘theatricality’ can function as a heuristic device that offers a plethora of paths into the problematic of the ‘theatrical’ in cinema. Such paths include the implicit or explicit overlapping of theatricality with related, albeit distinct terms that are mobilized across the essays, such as reflexivity, intertextuality, artificiality, and melodrama. In addition, the collective picture of theatricality that is painted in this book points to a number of conceptual dichotomies and frameworks that consist in the term ‘theatricality’ itself: theatricality as a positive term vs. theatricality as critique, theatricality as performance vs. theatricality as ‘mode of address,’ theatricality and technology (e.g., special effects), and politicized (or what Bissonette refers to as ‘committed’) theatricality. What ties together most profoundly the varying approaches towards these terms and conceptual frameworks that are adopted by the individual essays is a collective interest in how theatricality in film can be a powerful political tool, for it can work to undermine the putative ‘transparency’ of performance as a neutral medium of identity. While the section devoted specifically to ‘The Politics of Cinematic Theatricality’ includes only Bissonette’s and Maron’s essays, all of the chapters in this collection share an implicit concern for the political utility of theatricality as a strategy of exposure of (aesthetic, historical, or cultural) conventions, and as a means to destabilize cinema’s potential as a technology

Introduction 9

of surveillance. For instance, Smart’s piece on Brechtian television is a clear consideration of the politics of theatricality given the overt political nature of Brecht’s texts, but so are Tougas’s (through its reflection on the law), Barton’s (through its consideration of cinematic theatricality as a marker of liberating instability), Taylor’s and Loiselle’s (through their respective analyses of the rhetoric of villainy), and Duguay’s (through its queer lens), as well as Austin-Smith’s and Hatchuel’s (through their examinations of gendered representations). In short, this collective and synergistic emphasis on how theatricality can operate as a mode of exposure functions as a mirrored image to Judith Butler’s well-known notion of performativity. As Butler writes, performativity is ‘always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and . . . it conceals or dissimulates the convention of which it is a repetition.’15 While for Butler performativity is an agent of concealment, theatricality is an agent of exposure, which reveals the performativity of performed conventions. This is why she sees theatricality as an integral part of queer politics,16 and why this anthology foregrounds the political power of theatricality in cinema. By adopting an inwardly self-reflexive perspective rather than an externalizing mode of performance or address, cinematic theatricality embraces a politics of disclosure in which filmic text and spectator can be mutually engaged. Or is this naively utopian? Are we affording theatricality too much political credit? Given capitalistic hegemony’s endless capacity for cooptation, any act of self-exposure on the part of the cinematic apparatus might hide ulterior motives of deception and manipulation, using theatricality to ‘promote false consciousness.’17 Perhaps. But theatrical exposure might actually offer another option to meet the challenge of such a Marcusean scenario, namely, what could be called ‘metaperformativity.’ The spectator can turn cinema against itself and, through an overexposure of the norms that she or he incarnates, purposefully saturate all channels of communication to conceal, not the operations of the filmic text, but the reality of the spectatorial subject. This might be a powerful mode of resistance against panoptic societies obsessed with the manipulative surveillance of their citizens. Theatrical overexposure before the camera’s relentless gaze might very well be the best tactic to beat the machine at its own game. Shielding the private subject behind self-conscious histrionics, theatricality in the documentary, on reality TV, or on Youtube might provide a valuable strategy of political distraction; a politics of theatricality full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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NOTES 1 Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1943 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). 2 Christine Hamon-Siréjols, Jacques Gerstenkorn, and André Gardies, eds., Cinéma et théâtralité (Lyon: Aléas, 1994). 3 Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, ‘Theatricality: An Introduction,’ in Davis and Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–39. 4 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis, translated by Christine Shantz (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 395–97. 5 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 3–8. 6 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 100. 7 Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies,’ Theatre Research International 20/2 (1995): 88. 8 Josette Féral, ‘Foreword’ [special issue on theatricality], SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 10. 9 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 26. 10 See Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 11 Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in Cinema,’ in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Baudry, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 702. 12 Timothy Corrigan, Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999), 62–6. 13 Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 44. 14 Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1967). 15 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (London: Routledge, 1993), 12. 16 Ibid., 232. 17 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), 14.

PART ONE Traces of Theatricality: Stage-to-Screen Adaptations

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1 Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality in Brad Fraser’s Leaving Metropolis and Robert Lepage’s La face cachée de la lune S Y LVA I N D U G U A Y

As the borders between artistic practices are shown to be more porous than ever, and as creators increasingly move freely from one medium to the other, one wonders why so much critical energy is still spent trying to delineate the specificity of art forms. These criteria are obviously useful to many people: newspaper critics need to evaluate just what they’re hired to do while staying off their colleagues’ turf; funding agencies (in the arts or for research) need applicants to check boxes, choose codes, and build a ‘coherent’ portfolio; universities distribute resources according to the number of students registered in specific programs. It seems a person is more readily defined according to what she or he is not than what she or he is, and so are works of (visual or performance) art. While the past two decades have seen a strong shift towards interdisciplinarity, sources of resistance are numerous and deeply rooted. Theatre and film are two art forms whose relationship has known, in the past century, many ups and downs. It is almost always the case, when a new art form appears unexpectedly (a not-so-common occurrence), that closely related artistic disciplines adopt a defensive approach, often characterized by an attack-is-the-best-defence stance. While film was certainly widely (and wildly) commented on in its first decades, its relationship with theatre has not necessarily been one of deprecation. Once its attraction as a technological innovation had passed and its power of attraction shifted to its storytelling abilities, film turned to the theatre for many purposes. First, a repertory of well- (and less-) known plays was already waiting in many publishers’ and authors’ drawers. Better yet, many of those were immortal classics free of copyright constraints. Second, once those had been used, playwrights were eager to join in and contribute to the booming film industry, trading their dialogist skills for

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impressive amounts of money. Finally, it was discovered that the stars of the stage could shine even more brightly on the silver screen, a fact that did not displease producers or actors. Cinema was not to reap the benefits alone: popular theatre forms like vaudeville were given a modern edge through the inclusion of films in their revues, and film stars’ names on a theatre marquee would often translate in full houses and long runs. This exchange of goods and services, very useful in everyday practice, didn’t find the same resonance in the conceptual spheres. Critics and thinkers (one doesn’t necessarily include the other) saw the advent of cinema at best as a passing fancy, at worst as a debased form of entertainment, good only for the undiscriminating masses. Nascent film theorists, motivated by the potential they saw in the new medium and in the (soon to be considered) masterpieces that were being produced in the first decades of the film industry, attempted to produce a comprehensive theory of Film that would highlight the importance of the new art form and its viability as an autonomous artistic practice, and also constitute ontologically valid and epistemologically sound discourses around cinema. This was made possible through the establishment of an oppositional point of view towards the other arts, which persists to this day. When so much has been said emphasizing the differences between film and theatre, is it possible to reconcile the two half-brothers? Luckily, the bridges have not been burned to the ground, and the meeting points that were bypassed for the better part of the past century still exist. A change in focus is both desirable and feasible, and of all the new ways to look at the intersections between film and theatre, theatricality seems especially promising because it tackles the fundamental question of the specificity of theatre as well as the pervasive use of the term in many facets of cultural, philosophical, and social life. It may be essential to explore the notion of theatricality in cases where plays and dramatic texts are adapted to the big screen. Issues of performance, liveliness, temporality, spatiality, and corporeality are central to the adaptation process, and their particular fit within the world of theatre is challenged in the transition to the filmic world. The relationship is doubly confounded when the film is itself the realization of the same playwright or director who created the original theatre piece (be it the text or the representation).1 Authorship and the creative process are opened up to new possibilities. When an artist works in both theatre and film, and when that same artist adapts one of his own plays into a

Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality 15

film, what are the manifestations of theatricality, and what can be their intended meanings? This chapter will propose some answers to these questions through the analysis of two Canadian plays adapted to film by their original authors: La face cachée de la lune,2 by Robert Lepage (play created in 2000, film in 2003) and Leaving Metropolis, by Brad Fraser (based on the play Poor Super Man3 created in 1994, film in 2002). Looking at the codes of representation, I will show how these texts use theatricality in a deliberate manner, and I will also explore the various reading strategies put into place by the viewers. Since both plays include queer characters, I will give special attention to the possible interpretation of theatricality by queer spectators. Before getting to the actual works, I will examine a few definitions of theatricality, situate it in relation to performativity, and expose some principles of filmic adaptation. Theatricality as Artificiality Debates surrounding the very definition of the term ‘theatricality’ are legion in Theatre Studies and in other fields of inquiry, and they often oppose negative and positive values. Marvin Carlson rightly points out, when reviewing influential uses of the term, that theatricality was associated ‘primarily with formal, traditional and formally structured operations, potentially or actually opposed to the unrestricted and more authentic impulses of life itself.’4 Theatricality appears this way as rigid, facetious, and grotesque in comparison with the free flow of reality. This criticism can only hold when theatricality is applied to objects outside of theatre, since it would be unproductive to chastise theatrical representations for always imperfectly representing life, but it raises issues of representativeness in other spheres of life. If theatricality is shown as resisting the realness of life, of posing as something artificial, as a simulacra, then it certainly deserves its place in every constructivist view of our environment. If reality is always mediated, phenomenologically through our senses and hermeneutically through our interpretive capacities, then access to any degree of realness always requires some recourse to a form of theatricality that will allow our environment to become intelligible. This way, theatricality cannot stand opposed to the forces of life, but rather channels them and contextualizes them through our own baggage of interpretants. Life is a spectacle of signs on which we all inscribe various narratives closely related to the theatre in terms of actors, settings, temporality, and liveliness. Rejecting theatricality in the name of the authenticity of life seems short-sighted.

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The separation from the real is nevertheless necessary for many theatrical events to take place. Once the spectators have taken their seats in the theatre or have been confronted with a group of street performers, most often they will accept the fact that what is performed in front of them is not reality but an interpretative rendering. From the Brechtian perspective, theatricality is opposed to absorption in the work of art and it defines the spectacular engagement in intellectual terms, relegating emotions and affect to bourgeois escapism. Two millennia of catharsis are suddenly scorned. Richard Rushton remarks that the same phenomenon has happened with film, although the break with any viewing patterns doesn’t go as far back in time. He notes that theatricality has, nevertheless, become a forceful affirmation of the powers of spectacle over narrative, and he calls for film studies to ‘engage with the pleasures of absorption, the pleasure of entering into a film’s world, of being in a film’s place.’5 It is very good if some films foreground spectacle and, for that, are labelled theatrical. But the obsessive hierarchy instituted between absorption and theatricality appears too rigid to be applied to film, which makes use of both theatrical and filmic codes and, consequently, demands conceptual tools that will accommodate both. When applied to film, the notion of theatricality is rarely acknowledged in a positive way. Even before Sontag,6 and Bazin,7 cinema has tried to differentiate itself from theatre through a thorough exploration of what was (and still is) perceived as specifically cinematic qualities, be they material (montage, camera framing and movement, etc.) or perceptual (verisimilitude, identification, etc.). Anything that doesn’t exploit the medium-specific tools of cinema is deemed imperfect and, too often, theatrical. Lengthy dialogues, exaggerated acting, or papier mâché sets appear uncinematic. While Rushton notes a positive bias for the foregrounding of spectacle in film, a measure of intentionality seems to be required for the spectacle to emerge and reach its full potential, or else it’s just theatricality, preventing both absorption in the fiction and the pleasure of the spectacle. All of this suggests that cinema would very much like to do away with theatricality. Theatricality Exposed The negative views of theatricality are not necessarily representative of all the uses of the term, inside or outside theatre studies. When Rushton denounces the primacy of spectacle over narrativity, he doesn’t call for a complete dismissal of theatricality but, he points out, ‘one can be

Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality 17

absorbed by spectacle and narrative at one and the same time.’8 Both the story told and the way it is told need to be taken into account if we are to understand works of art in a way that encompasses all degrees of involvement experienced by the viewers. This is particularly important in relation to film since alienation (or distanciation) effects are not as potent as they can be in contemporary stage practices, where Brechtian influences can still be strongly felt. These moments of rupture (or cleavages, to borrow Josette Féral’s terminology9) are more and more frequent in the cinema, and their meanings are varied. Féral identifies three types of cleavages that give rise to theatricality: a separation of the event from the everyday, an opposition between reality and fiction, and the tension, in the actor, between the symbolic and the intuitive. Theatricality, according to Féral, is thus ‘only graspable as a process,’10 a combination of operations occurring between the stage and the spectator, and located primarily in the latter. In the theatre, this is a rather straightforward process since the spectator, upon the rise of the curtain, willingly accepts the rules of engagement: the representation is separate from the life she lives before and after the show; it belongs to the realm of fiction and is borne by the actor, who is constantly struggling to deliver his part without being consumed by the character. The suspension of disbelief (‘I know it’s not true but I choose to believe it anyway’) often prevents a complete involvement (or absorption) in the representation, leaving the contemporary spectator somewhat distanced from the action or the story. This is the basis of the theatrical contract, and it situates theatricality as essential for the theatrical event to take place. In film, the tensions between narrativity and spectacle are quite different for the spectator. While the space of the cinema and the theatre share some architectural similarities on the audience’s side, the two dimensions of the screen contrast strongly with the contiguous and continuous space of the stage. The first, cleavage between representation and everyday life, doesn’t require active involvement from the spectator since the flat screen doesn’t resemble everyday life, even today’s largely screen-mediated life. The cinema screen, on the other hand, complicates the second type of cleavage. If the separation between reality and fiction is materially obvious (the lights and shadows on the screen lack a dimension), the suture achieved by the filmic apparatus can strongly blur the frontier between the worlds of the viewer and the fiction. In this case, theatricality could very well be founded in the impossibility of suture, in the uneasy distance created between fiction and reality. Finally, identification in the theatre is more oriented towards the actor, hence

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the importance of the third form of cleavage, but cinema tends to give rise to identification with the characters, resolving the tension between the symbolic and intuitive through the voyeuristic gaze of the camera. Of all three types of cleavage, then, it seems only the second, related to the Brechtian alienation effect, is partly applicable to the filmic world. The distance created through theatricality is not necessarily a negation or a diminution of life and reality to the benefit of effect and spectacle. As Carlson puts it, theatricality is a ‘heightened, intensified variation on life, not so much a mirror as an exploration and celebration of possibility.’11 Every art form, even the most naturalist or realist ones, represents and reinterprets the real, staging it for its recipient through the signs and codes available to the medium, therefore involving the spectator in various ‘stages of reality,’ to borrow from the title of this anthology. It is this process, involving both the artist and the spectator, that qualifies as theatricality, and that allows the term to cross media, practices, and different spheres of life. Staging the Self Recent decades have seen another kind of tension develop, this time between theatricality and performativity. While the former would be an organized semiotic ensemble, the latter would be free of structures and therefore more related to impulses. But Féral points out, in her review of the writings of Elizabeth Burns and Judith Butler (who respectively deal with theatricality and performativity, thirty years apart), that ‘the heart of the theatrical process is in the subject’s subjectivity,’12 and, while their definition of subjectivity may differ, both authors stress the display put in place for a spectator. This link between theatricality and performativity (performativity being an element of theatricality) is particularly relevant to the case of queer representations, be they on stage or on screen. Since Judith Butler,13 gender can be considered as a performance, a spectacle constructed by the subject for the others to see (and interpret) according to the ideological structures at play in their milieu. While performativity stresses both the act of creation and of reception, and emphasizes the constant reiteration, citation, and validation of the subject’s identity markers, theatricality may help us identify the structures within which these impromptu and unpredictable displays are achieved. For queer subjects, performance is part of everyday life. Gender and sexual identity are constantly being negotiated and recontextualized every moment of the day. The need to ‘put on a show’ takes on a very special

Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality 19

meaning for gay, lesbian, transsexual, transgender, or other sexual minority subjects; growing up in environments where heteronormativity is pervasive, queer subjects learn to read the codes of performance and theatricality early in their lives, in search of (too) rare and (too often) stereotypical images of themselves and their peers.14 How, when you are a member of an invisible community, which you usually only enter at the beginning of adulthood, do you learn the codes of that community? Where do you learn how to be something other than the dominant model when everything discourages you from doing so? How do you reconcile your inner subjectivity with the one your environment requires you to perform if you are to belong? You first observe how others do it, then you do it yourself and observe the reactions around you, and you do it again, always slightly differently. As in the theatre, your performance is never exactly the same twice; as in the theatre, it vanishes into the past as soon as it is expressed. Representations of everyday living become life itself. The first step in learning how to express this newly acknowledged subjectivity is to locate models to imitate, and this is where the two paradigms of theatricality previously identified come into play. First, queer performativity is often characterized as a rupture with the widely accepted models of gender behaviour and representation. By subverting the norms of femininity, masculinity, and sexual desire, queer performativity stages a break with the real and opens up the way for theatricality to infiltrate and infuse everyday life. The artificiality of the performance, purposefully subverting the supposedly authentic heterocentred gender norms, allows for the identification of performativity by the onlooker, and foregrounds the theatricality of the event. This interruption in the normative gender flow also marks the entry of theatricality into the political since, as Janelle Reinelt points out, it is fundamental to insist ‘on the relationship between performance and its historical and material entailments.’15 Sylvie Bissonnette takes up this concept of the politics of theatricality in relation to queer and marginalized linguistic subjectivities elsewhere in this book. The intricacies between the personal and the political are always already present in the minds of queer subjects. They are not only represented by ruptures with the real, but are also present when the line between fiction and reality is suddenly blurred to the point when clear distinction becomes impossible and everything becomes staged. If performativity allows queer subjects to locate the performances they need to validate their subjective dissonance, the theatricality of the event allows for a decoding of the signs of the performance, their mise en contact with the subjects’ own codes of

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being, and, finally, their reinterpretation and restaging for the world to see. For queer subjects, performativity and theatricality are two inseparable facets of their marginal subjectivities. As Reinelt states masterfully in the conclusion of her article, ‘performance makes visible the microprocesses of iteration and the non-commensurability of repetition, in the context of historically sedimented and yet contingent practices, in order that we might stage theatricality, and render palpable possibilities for unanticipated signification.’16 The Adaptation Continuum The process of recognizing, decoding, and interpreting queer performances can become a very demanding task for queer subjects, who turn not only to their everyday life and immediate environments (which typically are poor in representations), but also to all kinds of cultural texts and discourses. If the twenty-first century has seen an increase in queer representations through popular forms of communication like Internet and television, art forms like theatre and film have been representing queer characters in a (sometimes) nuanced manner and in a variety of contexts. In Quebec, with playwrights like Michel Tremblay, Michel Marc Bouchard, Norman Chaurette, and René-Daniel Dubois, homosexual and queer characters have occupied an important and lasting place in the rich history of the province’s theatre. While in Englishspeaking Canada the room for queer problematics may have been smaller, authors like John Herbert, Daniel MacIvor, and Brad Fraser, as well as institutions like the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre in Toronto, have ensured that queer voices may be heard and queer lives may be performed. While the adaptation of theatre to film may not have as strong a tradition in Canada as it has in the United States or even Australia, André Loiselle has shown in his influential study17 that there are nevertheless more than fifty plays that have crossed the stage-screen divide, among which more than an impressive quarter are dealing with queer themes and staging queer characters. These works range from the 1960s to the new millennium, and while most are concerned with male homosexuality, they also leave room for representations of lesbians, transvestites, and transgendered people. What we have is about fourteen plays representing queer characters performing queerness for the spectators to see, or fourteen dramatic texts bearing the codes of queer performativity.18 As theatrical representations reach limited audiences, an important aspect

Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality 21

of the adaptation process is to bring the plays to a wider public and allow them to enter the queer social imaginary more extensively. The passage from stage to screen is not an easy one, and any adaptation will inevitably provoke debates around fidelity, value, and authenticity. Recent work on adaptation, like Robert Stam’s, focuses on an approach more grounded in intertextuality, the dialogue between the two works of art.19 This approach is very fruitful as it allows for an analysis of both objects according to their own contexts of origin (material, social, or semiotic) and prevents sterile debates on what the adapted film isn’t to focus on a more continuous apprehension of the process of adaptation. This way of approaching adaptation is essential in cases where the same artist adapts his or her own theatrical work to film, for the dialogical connections between the original dramatic text or theatrical representation (the hypotext, in Gérald Genette’s terminology)20 and its filmic extension do not gain anything from an oppositional comparison. Brad Fraser, through the adaptation of the text he had written for the stage, and Robert Lepage, while adapting his own image-based play,21 simply use the codes and possibilities of one medium to continue their exploration of the narrative and spectacular universes they have created. Self-adaptation from theatre to film is quite a rare phenomenon. Not many artists possess both the skills and the confidence (or have the opportunity) to work in more than one medium. And while interdisciplinarity is quickly infiltrating the practice of many artists (and theorists), funding agencies, producers, and artists themselves often tend to categorize their own creative process in rigid disciplinary terms. Nevertheless, self-adaptation is, for the case in point, an important opportunity to shrug off criteria of fidelity since the author, unless we embark on a psychoanalytical journey of his unconscious, probably doesn’t have treasonous intentions towards himself; rather, it opens the way for a discussion of adaptation as a creative continuum in which both source and end products must be considered on equal ground. Moreover, since both authors have chosen to work from theatre to film, we find many ‘traces of theatricality’ in the adapted films, a theatricality that doesn’t try to pass as something else or apologize for its presence in the filmic discourse. Moreover, the hybridity of the adapted film, drawing from both cinematic and theatrical codes, often highlights the performativity of the queer characters and builds a bridge between the queer viewers’ reality and the universe of the fiction. The downplaying of theatricality, which happens in some instances, has also much to say about the nature of theatre, film, and identity.

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Poor Super Man and Leaving Metropolis : The Loss of Polyphony Reading Poor Super Man is a very pleasurable experience. The play tells the story of David, a painter who has been facing a blank canvas since the success of his last show. Seeking inspiration, he decides to go back to a time in his life when creativity was flowing freely and to recreate some of the conditions he experienced at the time: he goes back to waiting tables. His two best friends, an aging columnist named Kryla and a pre-op maleto-female HIV-positive transsexual named Shannon, advise against it, sensing deeper issues behind David’s block. Violet and Matt, the owners of a small diner who hire David, are, on the other hand, quite happy with this obviously educated waiter working for almost nothing. David’s inspiration comes back in the shape of hunky Matt, who will discover his longsuppressed desire for men, and who will also be the subject of David’s new paintings. While Kryla does everything she can to uncover David’s new life, which he leads in secrecy, Shannon tries to cope with growing opportunistic infections that are reducing the odds that her impending sex change operation will take place. In the end, Violet violently throws Matt out after finding out about his affair, and David and Matt hit a dead end and both leave town. Shannon dies before getting her operation, and Kryla remains alone in her Western city (Calgary in the play, Winnipeg in the film). The play foregrounds an audacity that seems to be more easily achievable in the theatre, on the level of both form and content. The themes explored are rarely tackled on the Canadian stage; issues of queer belonging and sexuality, gender inadequacy, homophobia, and chosen families offer unusual points of view on queer space and bodies. The mixing of the arts is also to be noted: the play stages a painter who’s a fan of comic books, a writer, and a cook. The open ending, leaving all characters transformed yet not fully matured, adds a sense of contemporaneity and reflects on the uncertainties inherent in everyday life. On the formal level, the malleable codes of the theatre (theatricality in its strictest sense) are explicitly mobilized: captions are projected on the stage area, commenting on the action, granting inner access to the characters, and citing the codes of the comic book. Also, although the spaces are multiple, we jump from one place to another in a matter of seconds, a process rendered through a complex polyphony in the dialogue, where two or three conversations may follow their course at the same time, allowing for simultaneous storylines to converge at various moments.22 Written mostly in vernacular, the characters seem to spring to life through their witty campy exchanges and exposed vulnerabilities.

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The play strongly emphasizes the rupture from reality. The captions, which appear on every surface at every turn, and the necessarily unrealistic set clearly denote the separation of what is on stage from reality. They also help to impose a distance between the fictional world and the spectator’s world. There is not much room to attempt a naturalistic rendition of the text; the spectator is constantly reminded of the representation taking place in front of him or her. All characters are clearly performing: David plays the cool gay guy for Matt and the innocent predator for Kryla; Matt plays the naive husband for his wife and the straight guy for David; Kryla plays the inquisitive friend for David and the young girl for her blind dates; Shannon plays on the gender codes for everyone to see, and Violet plays her ‘wife’ role according the codes of heteronormativity. These performances, on display for the characters and the spectator, make the representation contract clear for the viewers: what is shown is not only an interpretation of life, but also an interpretation of identities and gender roles. The film Leaving Metropolis is, in comparison, very conventional in terms of cinematic codes. In Fraser’s first (and only) film, the narrative arc has been straightened: no more polyphony, no more rapid jumping between spaces, and a complete elimination of the captions. Much of the formal audacity has been tamed for the film to ensure narrative clarity and straightforward storytelling. There are nevertheless some elements foregrounding theatricality: the film relies heavily on dialogue, even though it’s been drastically cut from the play; the sets have a distinctly studio-built look; the make-up and costumes are obvious. While these traits may be intended as a reference to the comic book universes that run though the text, their aesthetic is not well-developed. The final product looks like a very conventional film, yet its theatrical origins can clearly be seen through the somewhat unremarkable use of the filmic apparatus. The opening scenes are representative of the feel of the whole work. The play starts with a polyphonic prologue exposing all characters’ visions of love and relationships, which provides a good example of its multiplicity of voices: CAPTION RUN :

Men Art Women Love Life Love Women Art Men Men MATT : It’s like I know how I feel – what I want to say – inside, but I don’t know how to get it out. CAPTION : Art CAPTION :

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DAVID :

It’s about colour. The individual colours none of us see in quite the same tone or intensity. CAPTION : Women KRYLA: Two things in the world I know for sure. If you dye your hair once you’ll never stop and if you’re born with a cunt you’re fucked. CAPTION : Love VIOLET : It’s like we’re all speaking different languages and we only understand every third or fourth word. CAPTION : Life SHANNON : I’ve always thought a vagina was the true test. Anyone can buy breasts.23

It then moves inside David’s studio, where Shannon is preparing to leave for an appointment with her therapist. By contrast, the film opens with shots of a city (unidentifiable unless you’re familiar with Winnipeg) before moving inside David’s studio, showing some objects lying around and his mixing colours and painting. Shannon comes in and they start the (condensed from the play) discussion about the therapist. There is no presentation of the other characters and very bland exposition of the locale, and an acting style too focused on line delivery creates a very stiff atmosphere, effectively bringing theatricality to the mind, but only its uncinematic connotation. It looks like Fraser chose to foreground the artificiality of theatricality rather than its power of reflexivity. Most of the formal originality found in the source text is played down, if not completely set aside. The queer spectator is nevertheless left with numerous examples of performativity, mainly in relation to space and the body. In the play, David recounts some of his nights at the bathhouse, saying how the place makes him feel connected to all the friends he’s lost to AIDS. The film chooses to show David in a very stylized steam room and, in perhaps the only moment favouring spectacle over narrativity, we see shadows of passedaway friends rising from the steam, until Shannon, who stayed alone at home to commit suicide, appears to wave David ‘goodbye.’ Not only is the spectator granted access to the space of the bathhouse, an important place of sexualization and socialization for gay men, but she or he is exposed to the scars left by the epidemic on the queer community. The gender performativity of Shannon is also made explicit in the film since, despite the make-up and dresses, her five-o’clock shadow keeps showing and her body, which she desperately tries to mould and control, fails her before she’s able to complete her gender reassignment surgery.

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Fraser therefore misses a chance to carry over the strength of the theatricality present in his play into the film medium, although some traces persist. Poor Super Man benefited both from clear separation from everyday life and exposition of the codes of representation, while Leaving Metropolis largely fails to create a similar critical distance that stemmed, in the play, from the polyphony of the characters’ voices and ordeals. Luckily, most of the campy dialogue is saved, anchoring the performativity not only in relation to the characters’ bodies and the spaces they inhabit, but also in the way they speak about themselves, about others, and about life. La face cachée de la lune : Expanding Cinema La face cachée de la lune, one of Robert Lepage’s one-man-shows, tells the story of two brothers trying to rediscover each other after the death of their mother. Philippe is trying to defend his Ph.D. thesis on the space race, hypothesizing that the race was based on narcissism, but fails to convince the jury of his theories. Still living in the apartment where he grew up, he decides to enter a contest by making a film explaining the way our world works; the winning film is to be coded and sent to outer space for intelligent beings to intercept. Philippe is invited to Moscow to present his theories, but misses the presentation due to jetlag. On the other hand, his gay brother, André, is a go-getter weatherman who takes pride in making money and showing it off. He laughs at Philippe’s misfortunes, but it quickly becomes clear that the brothers love each other but haven’t found a way to convey their feelings. In the end, Philippe’s video is selected, and we are left with the possibility of reconciliation between the brothers. Lepage is a well-known artist on the international stage. His imagebased theatre, which uses projected images and cinematic codes, mixes narrativity and spectacle in perfect balance. In La face cachée de la lune, Lepage created a marked distinction between representation and everyday life, but it is not clear that what we see on stage is related entirely to theatricality; credits roll at the beginning and the end, the scenography is completely transformable, and archival footage of the space race is often shown occupying the entire stage. While Fraser exploited the codes of theatre and comic books, Lepage is clearly situated on the side of theatre and film. The spectator is made aware on numerous occasions of the underpinnings of the fictional; for example, Philippe and André are both played by the same actor (usually Lepage, but Yves Jacques has

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also been performing the show), Lepage’s character is making a film and showing the filmmaking process, and the use of the telephone and other sound effects to suggest an off-stage reality keeps the spectator gaping at the wonders of theatricality. Audacity is present at every moment in the originality of the representation. The film, Lepage’s last,24 is a successful attempt to transcribe the originality of the stage play to the screen, and the clever use of theatricality infuses the film with striking representational strength. Fully aware of the possibilities of the filmic medium, Lepage uses montage to reproduce the transformability of the original set. A sweeping camera movement will often transform into a seamless cut, allowing spaces to merge into one another, bringing attention to the magical possibilities of editing, foregrounding its spectacular aspect, hence its theatricality. The film inside the play is transposed into a film inside the film, recreating the representational mise en abyme. Lepage maintains a certain separation between his characters, showing them communicating in different places but, again, uses editing to show what was only suggested on stage. The result is a film that achieves an innovative blend of theatricality and filmic codes, pushing the limits of cinema further through the acknowledgment of the spectacular put at the service of the narrative, for the film is not simply a technical feast or a display of ideas, it is a simple and funny story told in an unexpected and satisfying way. Again, the beginning of the play and of the film give a good indication of the overall styles of respective works. The play starts with Lepage himself standing in front of a mirror, discoursing about the relationship between men to the Moon. He tells the spectators that the show will be metaphorically related to the Moon. The set then transforms into a laundromat and Philippe (Lepage is now in character) washes some clothes, while a camera inside the washer projects his actions on the wall. The credits appear on the walls of the set as the clothes are being washed. Philippe then climbs inside the washer, but the projected images show him entering a space ship and floating away. There is a fade to black and archival footage of Sputnik is shown. The film follows a very similar path, starting with an image of the Moon slowly rotating while we hear Philippe recounting a similar text about men and Moon (including more information, which is found at a later moment in the play). There is cross-fade based on graphic continuity, and the Moon is transformed into a washing machine window. Cut to a view from inside the machine and switch to black-and-white stock. Philippe approaches and the window drifts away, transforming into a lunar module preparing for landing.

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The film therefore uses different processes to replicate the inventiveness of Lepage’s theatricality, reinterpreting it with cinematic tools, yet carrying over equivalent signifiers of transformation, escape, and drift. This embracing of theatricality also helps queer viewers to create links between their own lives and the lives of the characters. The film uses actors to play roles only mentioned in the play, giving corporeality to André’s boyfriend, even showing him eyeing Philippe in a steam room, the latter being unaware that this is his brother-in-law. André’s queerness is thus performed much more thoroughly in the film: his living space and his lover are shown, anchoring him solidly in his reality. An anchorman on television, André is always performing, often lying (a performative language act), and is shown to be artificial and lacking in empathy. By giving André a complete life, Lepage allows queer viewers to relate to his character, even if it is to find him outrageous yet funny. Theatricality, in this case, passes the test of adaptation, and it allows Lepage to continue and further develop his ideas, while placing issues of representation, hybridity, and spectacle at the centre of the viewing experience. Mixing the Codes Theatricality, as a celebration of performance and as a tool for distanciation, is an essential tool for analysis since it recognizes the role of the spectator in the artistic process. As Patrice Pavis notes, ‘performance analysis moves from descriptive semiotics to a phenomenology of the perceiving subject.’25 While his comment is intended primarily towards theatre and other live art forms, it is possible to apply it to fiction film, given its strong focus on performance, and especially to film adapted from theatre, as we have seen above. The hybridity of filmic adaptations of theatre works, both on the semiotic and on the phenomenological levels, offers a unique and fruitful point of entry for a new understanding of our relationship to representations of living beings. Queer subjects, since they can find so few positive images of themselves, are particularly sensitive to the ways they are portrayed in their environments, mining those representations to inspire new ways of being. Fraser and Lepage, both coming from the theatre into the film world, bring a large share of theatricality into their work, with more or less success. While Brad Fraser’s audacity is significantly played down in his own adaptation, traces of performativity are still carried through, allowing the queer subject to connect with his universe. Robert Lepage, on the other hand, masters the filmic medium to such an extent that

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he is able to use theatricality to enhance his own audacity, doubling the queer viewer’s pleasure by allowing not only a bond with the characters, but also a deep pleasure derived from the visual inventiveness of the film. Hence, both authors use theatrical codes to different effect, situating film and theatre on a continuum that can be further explored. The use of theatricality in film opens up many questions related to the nature of artistic forms, the various levels of performance, and their connection to audiences. After years of separation, film and theatre, each of which has developed strong theoretical fields of its own, can start the journey back towards each other. One can only hope that the new interdisciplinarity that will emerge from the encounter will bring pleasure to the artists and the theorists. They are, after all, the most eager of all spectators.

NOTES 1 The film is here seen as a reading, an interpretation of the original text, like any staging also is. Dramatic text, staging, and film are therefore considered in an equal relationship, as signifying potentialities. 2 Robert Lepage, La face cachée de la lune (Quebec: L’instant scène and Ex Machina, 2007). 3 Brad Fraser, Poor Super Man: A Play with Captions (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1995). 4 Marvin Carlson, ‘The Resistance to Theatricality,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 242. 5 Richard Rushton, ‘Absorption and Theatricality in the Cinema: Some Thoughts on Narrative and Spectacle,’ Screen 48/1 (2007): 112. 6 Susan Sontag, ‘Film and Theater,’ in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1966]), 362–74. 7 André Bazin, ‘Theater and Cinema,’ in Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1961]), 155–67. 8 Rushton, ‘Absorption and Theatricality,’112. 9 Josette Féral, ‘Foreword,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 10. 10 Ibid., 12. 11 Carlson, ‘Resistance to Theatricality,’ 246. 12 Féral, ‘Foreword,’ 6.

Self-Adaptation: Queer Theatricality 29 13 Many writings of Judith Butler contributed to this wide acknowledgment, an essential starting point being her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 14 While some Canadian (and other Western) cities are lucky enough to see an increase in queer visibility and queer rights, which may give the impression that queerness is now present everywhere, one only needs to look south of the border or in other parts of the world to see that heterosexuality is still the dominant model. The thirst for representation is far from being quenched. 15 Janelle Reinelt, ‘The Politics of Discourse: Performativity Meets Theatricality,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 212. 16 Ibid., 213. 17 André Loiselle, Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). 18 As the dramatic texts often subsist after the stagings have vanished, they offer an important point of entry into the dramatic universes of the characters. Reading a dialogued play brings to the mind of the reader a very special kind of imagery, since the foundations of the characterization are laid out in the words uttered, like a performativity-in-waiting actualized by the avid queer reader. 19 Robert Stam, ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,’ in James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 54–76. 20 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests, translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 21 For more details about Robert Lepage’s image theatre, see Chantal Hébert and Irène Perelli-Contos, La face cachée du théâtre de l’image (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001). 22 This polyphony is also present in other plays by Fraser, notably Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love, which was also adapted into a film by Denys Arcand, based on a screenplay by Fraser. 23 Fraser, Poor Super Man, 12–13. 24 Exasperated by the difficulties of getting funding in Canada, Lepage has withdrawn from filmmaking, preferring to concentrate his energies on theatre and other stage forms (opera, dance, etc.). Still young, one can only hope that Lepage will feel the call of the camera in the future and continue his cinematic explorations. 25 Patrice Pavis, La mise en scène contemporaine: Origines, tendances, perspectives (Paris: Armand Collin, 2007)

2

Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation of the Stage Play

B I L L Y S M A RT

The dramaturgy of Bertholt Brecht was highly influential upon the development of both television drama and theatre in Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s. In television, this influence was felt in the attempts of writers, directors, and producers such as Tony Garnett, Ken Loach, John McGrath, Dennis Potter, and Howard Schuman to create an original Brechtian form of television drama, and in a wider discourse as to the political and aesthetic direction and value of television drama.1 In this essay, I examine these arguments from another perspective. While the debate has been framed thus far around how Brechtian techniques and theory were applied to the newer media of television,2 I intend to examine how the primary, canonical, sources of Brecht’s stage plays were realized on television during this period, and how theatrical artifice was incorporated in these adaptations to achieve (or not) the effect of epic drama. If the advocates of a new, Brechtian, form of television drama called for the devices and intentions of Brecht’s dramaturgy – alienation, distance, and documentary – to be adapted from the theatre to form the basis of a new form of television drama, where did this leave Brecht’s original stage plays when they were produced for television? Which aspects of the original plays were retained, and which were altered, by the process of adaptation? To answer these questions, one must consider these adaptations in relation to the use of the television studio, as a location that either replicated or reinvented the theatrical space of the stage, and the responsiveness of the television audience towards these adaptations. This investigation must concern itself with the dichotomy between Brechtian theory and theatrical practice. Brechtian theory appears to encourage a dispassionate and objective consideration of events onstage on the part

Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation 31

of the spectator, while Brecht’s plays potentially involve characters and situations with which audiences can feel empathetic, emotional involvement.3 This paradox can be considered through examination of the conventions of television drama: to what extent could audience and critical reactions to these productions be attributed to Brecht’s dramaturgy, and to what extent could reaction be attributed to the mechanisms of television adaptation? To answer this I shall present a brief explanation of the origins and intentions of Brecht’s epic theatre, and then examine these arguments through close readings of the individual productions, considering how the effects of Brechtian dramaturgy, especially the notion of the narrator as being the focal point of the play for the audience, were affected through being adapted for television production, mediated to a domestic audience through cameras. The Epic Theatre Brecht’s conception of the epic drama was based on a series of polarities, defined in opposition to what it was not. Brecht suggested that many people would initially understand ‘epic theatre’ to be a contradictory term, between two different forms of narrative; the epic, as deriving from a bardic, oral and written tradition of storytelling while the dramatic was understood as deriving from the linear, Aristotelian tradition of the theatrical play. Brecht thought that the bardic tradition of storytelling, going back to Homer, was based around the performance of stories through narration, the process of storytelling in itself being inherently dramatic for the listener.4 Ideas about the potential of a theatrically realized form of epic storytelling had been current in German theatrical thinking since the late eighteenth century, when Goethe and Schiller jointly set out their notion of the epic drama in their essay ‘On Epic and Dramatic Poetry’ (1797), which drew a clear line of separation between the retrospective and contemplative effect of the epic poem, and the epic play, which presented historical events in the immediate and passionately engaging present moment.5 Brecht’s conception of the epic theatre was a reaction against this opposition. He attempted to create a form of the epic that would inspire the effect of the poetic model, rather than the dramatic. This drama would attempt to disrupt the collusive process between the actors and audience (that they were watching events occur on stage at the moment of their happening), replacing it with a retrospective narrative that

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created a historical sense of the significance of the events depicted. The spectator of this form of drama would then be better able to consider the events of the play in a more objective manner, evaluating the social and moral implications and consequences of characters’ actions. British television of the late 1950s and early 1960s offered both bardic and dramatic forms of narrative for the viewer, bardic storytelling chiefly being the realm of news and reporting, while television dramas (especially the majority made in the studio, rather than on film) progressed in a sequential, ‘dramatic,’ manner.6 The format of television news presented verbal information directly to the viewer through the newsreader’s narration, followed by filmed footage of the events with an explanatory commentary on voice-over, sometimes followed by a correspondent explaining the significance of events in the studio.7 This structure allowed the viewer to understand news as occurring backwards and forwards in time, encouraging contemplative and dispassionate consideration through showing events in a temporal context of cause and possible effect rather than exclusively as dramatic occurrences in the present. The growth of television satire during this period also incorporated bardic elements of narrative, such as Cy Grant’s regular ‘topical calypso’ on Tonight (BBC Television, 1957–65) and the use of sketch and monologue in That Was the Week that Was (BBC Television, 1962–3).8 Brecht believed that an important determining factor in the creation of his new epic theatre in the twentieth century was the availability of new technology. New technical ‘advances alone were enough to permit the stage to incorporate an element of narrative in its dramatic productions.’9 Brecht specifies these developments as including the possibility of projections, the greater adaptability of the stage due to mechanization, and the new narrative possibilities of film. Equivalent forms of these new technologies were also available to television producers of the 1950s and 1960s. Projections – in the form of captions – were available, as was the possibility of the voice-over. Filmed material could be interpolated into a studio television drama, although the process of specially filming it separately could potentially add to both the expense needed, and time required, to make a production. Filmed footage also tended to be ‘mixed in’ to studio production at the time of recording or transmission, rather than during later editing. The lack of opportunities for sophisticated editing of videotape in British television until the 1970s is a factor that must be paramount in one’s consideration of whether the broadcast medium could make the studio as adaptable a performance space (as a result of mechanization) as Brecht saw the theatrical stage becoming.

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I consider these differences between the two media in my account of the 1959 BBC production of Mother Courage below. These new technical developments in twentieth-century stagecraft encouraged a drama that could depict environmental forces acting upon the characters in the epic play, allowing the stage itself to form an element of the storytelling through techniques such as ‘big screens recalling other simultaneous events elsewhere’ or ‘projecting documents which confirmed or contradicted what the characters said.’10 This rethinking of the stage as an area that could contradict the actions depicted by performers would encourage the audience to accept a breaking down of the fourth wall and to be directly addressed by narrators and choruses, and invite criticism and consideration of the rightness of characters’ actions. Brecht named this form of drama ‘the instructive theatre.’11 The spectator of the epic theatre would respond in a different manner to that of the dramatic theatre. Brecht sets out these different responses in a list of polarities in which the spectators of the dramatic theatre have their responses to the world confirmed, while the spectators of the epic have to reconsider theirs. The effect upon the epic spectator can be disorientating: ‘I laugh when they weep, I weep when they laugh:’12 an intention that was also explored further through the work of Brechtian television dramatists and directors in the 1960s and 1970s.13 The Television Studio as a Stage Many of the productions cited as original Brechtian television dramas were entirely (or chiefly) produced on film (e.g., Up The Junction, BBC1, 1965; Cathy Come Home, BBC1, 1966; The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil, BBC1, 1974), a medium better suited to creating complicated effects of montage or a vérité-type emulation of news footage.14 By contrast, and in common with almost all British theatrical adaptations for television of the time, both Galileo and the main body of Mother Courage were produced ‘as live’ in the studio, meaning that the performances were recorded live through multiple cameras, allowing for scenes to progress at the speed of performance for extended periods, with mixing between shots occurring at the moment of performance, rather than cut together in post-production, as in film. The conditions of ‘as live’ studio production created a form of drama unique to television, allowing both intimate close-up scrutiny of the performer (as can be found in the cinema, but not in most theatre auditoria) and continuous stretches of performance (as are found in theatrical performances, but rarely in films).

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While sharing this mode of production, the two adaptations each indicate different stages in the development of ‘as live’ studio drama. Rudolph Cartier’s Mother Courage is a production from a period where the possibilities and limitations of the television studio were still very much being tested through production. As an epic play that called for the maximum use of resources of the studio, Mother Courage was an exceptionally demanding project to be attempted, and the chaotic circumstances of its production that I document illustrate the problems and potentials of adapting Brecht for television at this point. It also utilizes pre-filmed inserts interpolated into the run of the play.15 Charles Jarrott’s 1964 production of The Life of Galileo appears much more certain about what can and cannot be achieved in the studio16 than Mother Courage, and acknowledges that the production is studio-made through including cameras and the production gallery in shot. Mother Courage and Galileo utilize the form of ‘as live’ studio drama in different ways from each other. If the difference in how Mother Courage and Galileo used the studio meant that the viewer was encouraged to identify with each play in a different way, then this clearly had social and political implications for the reception of each text. As Brecht was a dramatist and theoretician who explicitly wanted his plays to have a social and political effect upon their audiences, then the study of television adaptations of Brecht must consider to what extent the directors of these adaptations were intentionally working towards a deliberate effect upon the television audience. Mother Courage and Her Children and The Life of Galileo were the first television productions of Brecht to be made by the BBC. However, I have concentrated upon these two productions for several other reasons: they were both produced in the same period of television history, so the decisions made in the process of adaptation were generally defined by the same technical circumstances; they both follow the same concentrated and classical episodic narrative of the epic theatre in telling a tale that spans decades in around a dozen scenes with a form of narration in between these scenes; both plays require an exceptionally demanding central performance; and the plays have broadly become accepted as Brecht’s most canonical works over the past fifty years as judged by such criteria as frequency of – and prestige attached to – performance, and their inclusion in schools and university syllabuses. The late 1950s and early 1960s was also the period during which the plays of Brecht were first starting to become established in the British theatrical repertory, but when no general sense of the most appropriate style to produce them

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had yet been established, leading to a plethora of different approaches.17 Both of these adaptations were attempting to rethink Brecht for television at a point in history when there was much uncertainty about how to stage his plays in the theatre. The process of adaptation of these two plays from theatrical texts to television productions inevitably meant that the theory of the epic was subject to a process of interpretation that was not theatrical. Both productions use different approaches; Mother Courage frequently interpolated especially filmed footage, giving the production a more cinematic sense of scale and a greater range of dramatic register between film and the studio, while Galileo displayed its mechanics of production through an undisguised depiction of the drama being made in a television studio. Both techniques left their audiences with a different sense of how the epic drama operated, affecting the plays’ reception. Wider conclusions can be drawn about the epic drama’s potential to create both dispassionate and emotive responses on the part of the television viewer from the differences between the two productions. Mother Courage and Her Children (BBC Television, World Theatre, 1959, dir. Rudolph Cartier) The plot of the epic play condensed dramatic time through selecting incidents to depict (both Mother Courage and Galileo present the events of decades in a few hours of performance), the opposite approach to the continuous real time of the Aristotelian tragic theatre, creating a response for the audience less dependent upon immediate sensation.18 It is debatable towards which form of stage play television production and technology was better suited in the 1960s and 1970s, due to the conditions of drama production in the studio, which often closely replicated those of theatrical performance.19 With only rudimentary postproduction editing available, long continuous takes of performance were encouraged, although previously filmed inserts could be mixed into this ‘as live’ performance. Therefore, a ‘bardic’/epic play such as Mother Courage, spanning a dozen scenes, required changing the conditions of drama production in 1959 in order to be completed, a circumstance that would not normally have occurred if a performance of a classically Aristotelian ‘theatrical’ play such as Oedipus Rex or Hedda Gabler was being attempted under the same conditions. Rudolph Cartier’s 1959 BBC production of Mother Courage and Her Children not only tested the achievability of studio recording to its very

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limits, but was only completed by breaking away from the established conventions of how television drama was expected to be made by running scenes without full camera rehearsals. After three days spent filming eight cine sequences at Ealing,20 production then moved to telerecording at Riverside Studios 1, for which only a single day was allocated, camera rehearsals starting at 10:30 a.m., with the recording of eight complex scenes, which required such extensive set changes that Cartier requested a crew of double the normal size,21 scheduled for between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. and 10:45 p.m.22 Under such difficult circumstances of recording, certain sacrifices had to be made in adapting Mother Courage from a stage play of over two and a half hours to a television production of 102 minutes, even allowing for the extensive use of interpolated filmed footage.23 The narrative technique of the adaptation deviates from stage productions in three particularly significant ways: the use of music and songs, especially by Mother Courage herself, is drastically reduced;24 Mother Courage’s iconic cart is rarely seen in motion in this production (in Brecht’s text, it is pulled across the stage in six scenes); and Brecht’s captions establishing the setting of, and ideas enacted in, each scene are not used. The use of songs and a mobile cart would have been almost impossible to achieve in studio drama production of 1959, but the decision not to use captions may have been as much of an artistic decision as a practical one. In a stage production the sight of Mother Courage pulling the cart in the changeover between scenes serves both a practical and an artistic purpose. Practically, it allows properties and performers from one scene to be removed and those for the next scene to be prepared, and placards to be read by the audience, without the need of a blackout. Artistically, the continual sight of the cart in motion creates associations for the audience; of the passage of time, the nomadic nature of existence for many people as a result of war, and of the fixity of Mother Courage’s position as a merchant at the time of the Thirty Years’ War. In a television production, the practical needs for the cart’s movement being shown are not there: there is no need for a blackout as recording can be stopped between scenes. In addition, the cramped conditions in Riverside Studios would allow the cart very little mobility, and Flora Robson was already presented with an exceptionally demanding performance25 even without these scenes. The necessary absence of this visual element of the stage play is not replaced by any equivalent image, however, and the scenes feel more condensed together as a result, removing some of the ‘epic’ quality of the play.

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Cartier’s production does use the song written for the play’s first and final scenes, ‘Christians Awake.’ In the first scene the music introduces the characters of Mother Courage and her children, and the action and cutting are edited to the lines of the song. The initial shot is a close-up of Mother Courage singing while seated on the cart, followed by a shot of the wagon from which the camera rolls back to show the full extent of the line of soldiers marching behind it. Elif and Swiss Cheese are first presented to the camera pulling the cart, at the moment when they sing their individual lines of the song. The effect of this ambitious sequence is powerful and establishes all of the crucial elements of the play: Mother Courage, her three children, soldiers, nomadic lives, and transitory spaces, while the song establishes the existence of the war and the profits that can be made from it. The scene, which relies upon the setting up of individual shots, a large set, and the choreographed marching of many extras, could only have been achieved in the film studio at Ealing and not as an ‘as live’ telerecording, meaning that Cartier’s production could not continue in the same rhythm and style that the initial scene establishes. The anonymous critic of the Times reacted with enthusiasm to this opening ‘long, entirely naturalistic, shot of cold (and) desolation,’26 asserting that the memorable image served to establish a harsh quality of tone for the production, from which, having made such a strong impression upon the viewer, the play was then free to deviate, allowing for variations of style in subsequent scenes that would not detract from the play’s theme. Benjamin describes the protagonist of the epic as being an ‘untragic hero,’27 whose thoughts generate the actions of the scenes, rather then events leading to an emotional conclusion. The camera style of ‘as live’ television drama, which allows for both close-up consideration of an actor’s face but, unlike cinema, can achieve this while maintaining continuity of performance through mixing (rather than editing) shots, allowed for this foregrounding of the thought processes of characters during scenes to be conveyed effectively to the viewer, as can be seen in both Mother Courage and Galileo. Epic drama required a particular register of acting, ‘cool and relaxed’ with ‘hardly any use for empathy.’28 This recalls the kind of theatrical performance Aaron Taylor examines in his chapter on Daniel DayLewis’s work in There Will Be Blood. But while Day-Lewis’s performance might appear Brechtian in form, the purpose is quite different from that of epic drama. In Brechtian practice, the lack of empathy functions

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primarily within a political and materialist discourse rather than as an experiment in scepticism as in There Will Be Blood. Brechtian acting requires a particular duality of approach. As Brecht specifies that ‘the actor must show his subject and he must show himself. Of course, he shows his subject by showing himself, and he shows himself by showing his subject. Although the two coincide, they must not coincide in such a way that the difference between the two tasks disappears.’29 This is quite a tricky distinction, requiring a sense of theatrical artifice to remain apparent at any stage of a performance, so that the actor could potentially step out of character and draw attention to the thoughts and decisions of the character she or he is depicting. The aim of this is to prevent the actor forming a sense of empathy for the role, an empathy that would prevent the objective presentation of the character’s decisions and the material conditions that have formed them. In relation to television performance this would seem to encourage actors who illustrate the artifice and mechanics of performance and accentuate characterizations that demonstrate performativity. This emphasis on recognizable and unempathetic performance is also found in the notion of the quotable gesture30 that can convey situation and detail wordlessly, to be repeated through a play in different scenes, recognizable to the audience repeated in different contexts. The intimacy of close-up scrutiny provided by television drama allows this technique to be repeated with greater subtlety than could be achieved in a large theatre auditory, through being able to show tiny nuances of gesture being repeated at different points. Both Flora Robson (as Mother Courage) and Leo McKern (as Galileo) present their characters as salespeople performing roles and tasks that are necessary to their survival (Courage bartering and Galileo seeking patronage and protection) in the plays. This level of performance (of collusion between the character and the viewer in carrying out a necessary deception) is achieved through the conditions specific to television of ‘as live’ continuity of performance and the ability to select and mix shots. Cartier creates a sense of collusion between Mother Courage and the viewer through his choice of shots, an effect established in the play’s first scene between Mother Courage, her children, the Recruiting Officer, and the Sergeant. While the other characters are generally shown in two- and three-shots, Mother Courage is depicted in close-ups, the viewer allowed to see the expressions that she gives behind the Sergeant’s back. When Mother Courage fixes the Recruiting Officer’s ballot by writing a cross on every piece of paper, Cartier cuts within the scene to show

Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation 39

Mother Courage doing this in isolation, a close-up of the papers in her hand making the emphasis upon Courage’s cunning in this scene even more apparent than it would be to a theatre audience, who could be looking at a different character on the stage. The audience’s awareness of this cunning is enhanced by Flora Robson’s awareness of when the camera can read her expression, and when the Recruiting Officer cannot, creating a series of ‘quotable gestures’ through expressions. This use of ‘as live’ television studio technique makes the viewer aware of two levels of acting: Flora Robson’s skill in transforming herself into Mother Courage, and the element of performance that Mother Courage uses in her attempt to deceive the officer. Another important way in which Robson uses quotable gestures in her performance, and how Cartier directs the viewer’s attention towards Mother Courage’s actions and responses in the production, is through contrasts of motion between Robson and the other players. In early scenes, Mother Courage is shown bobbing and weaving between static groupings of soldiers, camp followers, and her children. This figurative and tactile emphasis is particular to the continuous performance of ‘as live’ studio drama, which allows gestures and movement to be repeated and emphasized within scenes. Cartier uses this emphasis upon showing movement and responses within the performance to emphasize major reversals within the play: by the time that her son Swiss Cheese has died towards the end of the play, Mother Courage is placed as the focal point of stillness within animated groupings. Cartier’s production does attempt to bridge between scenes in its use of pre-filmed footage, using the greater space of the film studio to create expansive scenes of armies on the march. One of the most distinctive examples of this occurs between scenes 8 and 9. This sequence follows on from a studio scene where, as Mother Courage loads her cart, a line of soldiers on a route march cross her path diagonally. The film sequence is faded in, showing a company of soldiers marching in the reverse direction across the screen, conveying the passage of time and a sense of aimlessness. The single camera pans back from this marching group, allowing the extras at the head of the march time to move back to the end of the line and rejoin it. This use of extras doubling up, gives the impression of an endless army, which the camera follows to show marching back in the opposite direction from its original position, giving the impression of ceaseless, routeless, slog. This scene was shot on silent film with no sounds added other than howling wind and snow, the impression of which adverse weather is given through a

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scratchy snow effect being vision mixed over the film. The snow effect continues in a montage to a close-up of the cart, which pulls back to show the cart in long shot against the bleak landscape to the fullest possible extent. Filmed sequences such as this cinematic opening were the design aspects of the production to which audiences appeared to respond most positively, praising the ‘vivid’ suggestion of desolation and winter.’31 Mother Courage is a play entirely set in exteriors, with no building being seen until Scene 9, and Cartier’s production attempts to realize these outdoor locations through sets that, while not representational, were indistinctive, rough patches of ground marked out with scraggy trees, banners, and tent poles (with eight separate scenes being recorded in one evening at Riverside Studios, the assembling of highly realistic and elaborate sets would have added another layer of difficulty). These rough studio settings divided the audience. It was obvious that quite a few viewers were puzzled by the use of a semirealistic mise en scène for Mother Courage. They remarked, with some asperity, that the sets were poor, ‘stagey,’ and artificial-looking. However, the comment of a Shorthand-Typist to the effect that ‘one didn’t expect detail to be precise in a production so “spaced” as this’ may be taken as one expression of a widespread feeling in the sample that the producer had, rightly, altered the spatial dimensions of the epic theatre through establishing a visual character more suited to the size of the TV screen. This was done successfully, it was thought, by using stylized backgrounds that would emphasize the significance of the action of the set without unnecessary detail to distract viewers’ attention.32 The reaction of the Times (1 July 1959) to the design of the production suggested that it was an authentic attempt to replicate German theatrical design for television, and that the designer, Clifford Hatts, had hit upon ‘a brilliant way of establishing’ that the play is entirely set out of doors, through a combination of ‘open air foregrounds merged with less formalised backgrounds’ that showed potentially distracting background detail ‘out of perspective.’ The review goes on to note that great ‘care has also been taken with properties,’ citing the authentic flags used in the production. Cartier’s treatment of Scene 3 of Mother Courage demonstrates how the abstract setting served to foreground significant properties through starting the scene with a close-up of an encampment flag and concluding it with the same flag being uprooted as the camp is evacuated. This decision to concentrate viewer attention upon one emblematic property instead of a volume of naturalistic visual detail is both authentically Brechtian and demonstrates how Cartier’s

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intimate aesthetic of closeness could be applied to convey situation as well as character. Cartier’s directorial approach to drama was marked by a concentration upon closeness to the actor, creating an intimate aesthetic and a sense of the character’s inner life becoming revealed to the viewer.33 He explained this emphasis as fulfilling a wish on the part of the audience: ‘the TV viewer always wants to be as close as possible to the artist, and feels cheated, or disappointed, if the director does not give him a chance to study emotions in close up.’34 On the face of it, this intimate approach might seem to be counterproductive in an adaptation of a play like Mother Courage, which is structured to inspire dispassionate and objective analysis on the part of the spectator, rather than emotional empathy with the character.35 But when Robson is presented with this intimate closeness, on each occasion, the closeness serves to illuminate the reasons for Mother Courage’s actions to a greater degree than would be achieved through a study of her emotions. When Robson’s performance style in the depiction of Mother Courage’s haggling in Scene 2 includes much rolling of her eyeballs and nodding, the detail with which Cartier’s camera observes this encourages the viewer to register how Mother Courage is performing the role of a saleswoman and animating herself for a purpose. At the most emotional point of the play, after the death of Swiss Cheese, Robson’s face is shown to be tearful yet impassive, shaking her head. The impression conveyed through this emphasis, and Robson’s performance, to the viewer is one of awareness of the cost of Mother Courage’s actions that led to the death, rather than one of sorrow for the death itself. This demonstrates how Rudolph Cartier’s ‘intimate’ style had been used in accordance with Brechtian theory, creating a drama that was ‘instructive’ for the viewer. The Life of Galileo (BBC Television, Festival, 1964, dir. Charles Jarrott) Charles Jarrott’s production of Galileo fulfils Brecht’s wish for a broadcasting that would affect the listener (or, in the case of television, viewer) by presenting both imaginative dramatic insights into the life and scientific investigation of Galileo,36 and a wider, more educative, insight into the running of institutions, culminating with the directorial imposition of footage of nuclear missiles at the end of the play. The production achieves this effect by adopting its form as much from factual and informative forms of television as from exclusively dramatic ones (unlike Cartier’s Mother Courage, which is always clearly a television play).

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Technically The Life of Galileo differs from Mother Courage in several respects, but the most significant one of these is that the production was entirely made on videotape in the television studio. Although working out the reasoning for this can only be speculative, I would suggest two reasons why filmed inserts were not included. Unlike Mother Courage, Galileo is not a play that relies upon songs, the technically complex inclusion of which tended to necessitate the use of filmed inserts in early television drama. Only one is included in some drafts of the play, sung by the Ballad-Singer in Scene 10,37 and this scene is usually excluded from productions, as well as in this version. The second reason is that, while Mother Courage is entirely a play of exteriors, requiring a specifically integrated sense of design that parallels the movement of the cart between scenes, and cycloramic representation of the world of the play as used in stage productions, Galileo is a play largely set in interiors (homes, halls, palaces) that were the types of settings regularly and uncomplicatedly used for ‘as live’ studio drama. With the scenes linked by a single narrator, rather than the complicated motion of the cart and songs, all of the narrative of The Life of Galileo could be achieved for television as easily as in a film studio. With all of the scenes being recorded in the studio, The Life of Galileo could be given a more unified rhythm and aesthetic across the work as a whole than a production made with extensive use of filmed inserts. Jarrott’s production takes advantage of this opportunity by having a camera style and rhythm that could only be achieved through ‘as live’ television studio recording and acts as a microcosm of the larger motif of the play. As the earth rotates around the sun, so each scene in the adaptation focuses on either the source of power in the scene, be that a person (Galileo, the Doge, the Pope) or a property (the telescope). The ‘as live’ mode of production that allowed for both continuity of action and multiplicity of images, was particularly suited for creating this effect of pivoting a scene around one focal point, especially as mixing could occur between stationary cameras and ones in motion. This does not have the same effect as cinematic cutting, which can have the effect of cutting into a scene to be provided with a specific insight of a character’s inner thoughts and feelings, but instead allows viewers to shift their glance during a scene, noticing a detail as it occurs. This effect is determined by the director making the decision to mix from camera to camera as the action occurs, rather than retrospectively through filmic editing. For example, in Scene 1, in which Galileo explains his thinking to his housekeeper’s son, and then accepts and negotiates terms with a new

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student, the action and the camera style revolve around Galileo. One camera follows him for the duration of the scene and is the principle camera for it. Initially Galileo is shown at a fixed point (in the bath) while others revolve around him to provide him with more water and towels, the camera always keeping Galileo centrally in shot. Then once Galileo steps out of the bath and starts to dress himself and eat, the camera follows him around the room, with others stepping out of the way to dress and feed him. The dialogue in this scene is frequently shown in two-shots, but with Galileo always in the foreground, making the viewer’s’ focus of concentration upon Galileo’s reactions and thinking, even when others are speaking. The one point in the scene that partially breaks from this pattern is when Galileo demonstrates the operation of the telescope, which is shot in a close-up from outside the room, through the aperture of a window with Galileo seen looking through two lenses. But although this shot breaks from the pattern by being taken from a different vantage point, and technically illustrates how a telescope operates, the focus is still upon Galileo as the man in possession of (and demonstrating) knowledge, as the other figures follow his explanation in the background, behind the foregrounded figure. Jarrot continues this rhythm of pivoting around one character in subsequent scenes, altering the object of focus. Galileo has been established as the principal figure in the play, and is reliant upon the patronage, and avoiding the censure, of others to be able to function. In scenes where Galileo is seeking the favour of others, those characters then become the fixed point of the scene. For example, in Scene 2, Galileo has an audience with the Doge, who is seated upon a throne at the highest point in the grouping, flanked by courtiers and faced with petitioners. In this scene the camera again, as with Galileo in his bath, has one fixed point to revolve around, where the blocking and choreography of the scene show everyone’s attention to be fixed upon him. Unlike in that scene, however, the Doge’s words and reactions are not the central point to which the viewer’s attention is directed. Much of the Doge’s dialogue with Galileo is shot from behind the Doge’s head, showing Galileo at his feet talking to the patron. Although the visual focus is here on Galileo, the unusually high angle still gives the viewer a continual sense of the power dynamic of the scene, and Galileo’s dependence upon the Doge. The first time that a scene deviates from this pattern of revolving around one source of power occurs in Galileo’s encounter with the Inquisitor in Scene 7. Here the camera switches focus between both speakers, using some two-shots of characters viewed side by side for the first time in the

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play, and balancing the amount of times that each character is shown in the foreground and background in other two-shots. This giving of equal weight to characters serves both a dialectical and a dramatic purpose: in showing both sides of the argument in a way that will make it both clear and resonant to the viewer; and in adding a dramatic tension by not leading viewers towards a clear understanding of whose side they should be on in that argument, an ambiguity that will encourage them to follow the dialogue with greater concentration as they anticipate which of the two characters will ‘win’ control by the end of the scene. This technique of focusing attention around one source of power in a scene is used by Jarrott to foreground significant properties as well as characters. In Scene 9, when Galileo has renounced his astronomical studies, the camera and movement are fixed upon the bringing in and setting up of a barrel into Galileo’s study, in which he and his assistants are going to perform a series of experiments with floating pins, including a cutaway shot of a pin in the water. Then, once news arrives that gives Galileo the confidence to resume his old studies, the camera moves to the furthest recess of the study, a part of the room that has not been shown before, where he theatrically pulls back a curtain to reveal a telescope. The focus of the scene then moves on to concentrate upon this property by showing Galileo operating the telescope from outside the room, shot through the aperture of the window, as when the telescope was first introduced in Scene 1. It is the ‘as live’ continuous performance, showing the groupings and movement of characters around the barrel, combined with the ability to change shots without interrupting that continuity of performance, that makes the way that this change of focus is executed particular to the television studio. This particular camera style emphasizes the use of the quotable gesture and the sense of collusion between performer and viewer in establishing how the character operates, most notably in Galileo’s final scene where, as an old man kept under guard, he manages to smuggle his papers out of his home. To do this, he must hoodwink his captors, and to some extent his worried wife, by giving the impression of a decrepit man, disappointed, and posing no danger. The camera movement in this scene mirrors that of the first one, with action revolving around a still Galileo, but this time, the stillness accentuates a sense of Galileo’s age and infirmity, rather than his power and command. By fixing the viewer’s concentration permanently on Galileo throughout the scene, Jarrott allows awareness of Galileo’s cunning, in feigning senility to be gradually revealed to the viewer (through awareness of McKern’s

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repeated ‘quotable gestures’)38 rather than suddenly revealed through reversals of fortune. This slow display of character encourages a greater sense of empathy with Galileo on the part of the viewers – meaning that they are presented with no option other than to follow how Galileo is behaving throughout the scene – than extensive cutting within the scene would be likely to achieve. Jarrott’s production is unique among BBC television adaptations of Brecht in not disguising that it is a television production. This is achieved through bookending the production with ‘documentary’ scenes set in the television studio. The adaptation starts by showing the studio gallery at work, the opening music being shown to be a disc being dubbed over the pictures. The studio floor is then shown to be an artificial place. It is displayed to its full extent; cameras are seen beyond the end of the flats of the scene, microphones above them, the company milling about waiting for their cues in costume, but clearly not in character. The title placard does not fill the entire screen, but is framed by a boom operator. Although this behind-the-scenes display is not continued into the actual action of the play, it still serves an important function in encouraging the viewer to be in the right frame of mind to accept Brechtian dramaturgy and illusion, in showing that the story to follow will be a representation, rather than an attempt to imitate the reality of Galileo’s life (not unlike the self-reflexive role served by the opening and closing voice-overs in Life Is Beautiful that Jeremy Maron discusses in his chapter in this book). The convention of showing the mechanics of studio production surrounding performance had recent precedence in British television in 1964, with the satirical series That Was the Week that Was having broadcast the full extent of the studio, cameras, microphones, audience, in its live transmissions, providing the domestic viewer with a greater sense of liveness and immediacy.39 In particular, this introductory sequence helps to establish the convention of the narrator breaking through the fourth wall. Direct address to camera was an established convention in most forms of television in 1964, but rare, and potentially disconcerting, in drama. By establishing Galileo as a work of television by showing the mechanics of the studio, Jarrott turned the convention of the narrator into one that could better be accepted by the viewer, encouraging the convention to be understood as a broadcasting one, rather than a dramatic one.40 An example of how the narrator serves to mediate between the dramatic scene and the television camera is evident in the transition between scenes 2 and 3. The second scene (of Galileo and the Doge) is set in a

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public space, at the harbour of Venice, occurring in front of a crowd. The final shot of this scene is shown on a television monitor, which the narrator is seen to be watching, before turning to the viewer to explain how this affects the story of Galileo. Through this use of the monitor, the implication to the viewer is one of reportage, Galileo’s audience with the Doge as a news item, which the narrator interprets to the viewer. Allowing the narrator to view events through a monitor encourages the viewer to identify the narrator as an everyman figure, as he has witnessed events in exactly the same way as the domestic viewer has. The narrator also is integrated into the action by adopting disguises and costumes to become a character suitable for each scene, being seen putting on a false moustache in Scene 4 and appearing in ecclesiastical robes before scenes with the cardinals. This integration into the worlds of each scene both adds to the authority of the narrator as a witness to events which he explains to the viewer, but also adds a sense of theatrical artifice and a comic register of role playing to the instruction, signifying him as being both a part of, and detached from, the events depicted.41 A sense of the studio as being a space of representation, rather than replication is followed through in the design of the production, where sets contain both naturalistic and obviously artificial features. This convention is established in Scene 1, where the placard that gives the title and date of the play becomes a unit of the wall of Galileo’s home. Throughout the production this motif is continued, with banners forming parts of otherwise naturalistic sets, these properties adding both a sense of the artifice of the performance and an instructive purpose in showing the wider social world and conditions that affect the individual scenes (e.g., blown-up line drawings and woodcuts of the buildings of the Vatican). This design, by only forming a fraction of the set in each scene, does not appear jarring to the viewer, as did the completely artificial landscapes of Mother Courage. The production ends with another interpolation of the world of television into the world of Galileo, with footage of a rocket and a series of stills of great scientists since his time. The disruptive effect of this is different from that of the studio sequence at the beginning of the play. Where the purpose of that scene appears aesthetic, establishing the conventions of the drama that will follow, showing the viewer that the play will not be a naturalistic attempt to replicate reality, the imposition of the rocket footage seems much more ideological in intention, forcing the viewer to draw parallels between Galileo and nuclear armament. This is perhaps the closest that this production gets to the ‘Brechtian television’

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of John McGrath, in presenting the viewer with striking and unheralded juxtaposition. It is significant that this moment occurs after the seventeenth-century story of the play had finished, and therefore appears as a coda rather than integrated into the main body of the play, where it would appear more disruptive.42 Conclusion Although there was only an interval of five years between the productions of Mother Courage and Galileo, the gap in audience appreciation between the two plays (the BBC’s audience research report for Galileo reporting an enthusiastic Reaction Index of 78% far above the 58% reported for Mother Courage) indicates that something had occurred during those five years to make viewers more responsive towards television adaptations of Brecht’s work. This discrepancy is unlikely to have been the result of a greater public exposure to Brecht, as although stage performances of Brecht’s plays were becoming increasingly prevalent in the early 1960s, these productions were often unsatisfactory43 and would only have been seen by a small minority of urban theatregoers. Unlike in adaptations of Shakespeare or Shaw, few television viewers would have felt that they either already knew the individual plays or could have held a reasonably confident expectation of what they would be like. The greater sense of audience identification with the 1964 adaptation must therefore stem from the perceived qualities of the production itself; these being a sense of narrative clarity and fascination with the character of Galileo himself, as performed by Leo McKern. The greater sense of narrative clarity contrasts with the enforced omissions from Mother Courage. Without the songs and the movement of the cart, the sense of the passage of time and change of circumstances that is created by the device for a theatrical audience is dissipated. Although Cartier’s production gives the viewer brief captions specifying place and date,44 it was easy for the audience to feel swamped by attempting to follow how much time and passed and distance travelled between scenes. Similarly, although the songs are not intended to create empathy with the character of Mother Courage, the convention does create a sense of context for the theatre audience in having specific concerns and dilemmas that the characters find themselves facing made explicit. Cartier’s use of both filmed and studio sequences gave his production a contrast of register between the expansive cinematic of the long

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march and the cramped intimacy of interpersonal relations. The effect here is different from the use of separately filmed sequences in other Cartier productions. While in the Quatermass series (BBC Television, 1953–58) or 1984 (BBC Television, 1953) the contrast between expansive exteriors and individual rooms serves a clear narrative function of dividing between public and private space or establishing different forms of danger, Mother Courage is a play entirely set in exteriors where the shift between the filmic and the smaller scale registers jars more for the viewer. Through the use of ‘as live’ studio camera techniques and Cartier’s intimate style, these individual scenes allow the viewer to form a Brechtian understanding of how decisions are made by characters and the use of performative gesture, but the larger epic, bardic, structure of the production as a whole is undermined by the omissions of narrative necessitated by 1959 television production. In contrast, The Life of Galileo is a more fully Brechtian production, in that it not only continues (and further refines) Mother Courage’s use of studio camera movement and mixing to explain and illustrate the decisions made by characters and their place within a wider structure, but places them within a continual bardic narrative. This bardic storytelling operates both through the use of the guiding figure of the narrator, and through the use of captions, monitors, clearly artificial sets, interpolated non-original footage (the shots of nuclear missiles), and through not disguising the program’s means of production (a television studio, with microphones and cameras). This undisguised artifice and explicitness about suspension of disbelief appears to have assisted viewers in being able to follow the story of Galileo and draw conclusions from it. With this sense of confidence that they were being told a story, viewers felt able to both feel a sense of empathy with the figure of Galileo, while being able to place his life in the context of the state of Rome in the seventeenth century. Jarrott’s adaptation managed to achieve this effect by following a model that was as much derived from forms of television other than drama such as news and commentary, creating a bardic play, as the more realist model that ‘as live’ drama generally used the television studio to create, a model that encouraged a drama that was ‘dramatic’ in Brechtian terms. This rethinking of the studio and how it could be used for television narrative showed unexpected possibilities for taped ‘as live’ drama, far from the naturalist studio play, and capable of engaging and encouraging the curiosity of a wide television audience.

Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation 49 NOTES 1 See Troy Kennedy-Martin, ‘Nats Go Home,’ Encore 48 (1964): 21–33; Colin McArthur, ‘Days of Hope,’ Screen 16/4 (1976): 139–44; Colin MacCabe, ‘Days of Hope – a Response to Colin McArthur,’ Screen 17/1 (1976): 98–101. 2 See John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (London: Oxford University Press, 2000); Stephen Lacey, ‘Becoming Popular: Some Reflections on the Relationship between Theatre and Television,’ in Jonathan Bignell and Stephen Lacey, eds., Popular Television Drama: Critical Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 198–214. 3 For an example of how this dichotomy between dispassionate theory and empathetic performance reoccurs across theatrical generations, see Peter Thomson, Brecht: Mother Courage and Her Children (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1997), a fifty-year performance history of Mother Courage and Her Children. 4 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction,’ in David Craig, ed., Marxists on Literature: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1977), 413. 5 Martin Esslin, Brecht: A Choice of Evils (London: Methuen, 1993), 113–14. 6 See Kennedy-Martin, ‘Nats Go Home.’ 7 Opportunities for live communication and reportage from the scene were much more limited in television news of the early 1960s. 8 See Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh,‘Drama into News: Strategies of Intervention in “The Wednesday Play,”’ Screen 38/3 (1997): 247–59, for a detailed consideration of the relation between news footage and filmed drama in this period. 9 Brecht, ‘Theatre for Pleasure,’ 413. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 415. 12 Ibid. 13 Stephen Lacey and Madeleine Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘Who Framed Theatre?’ New Theatre Quarterly 57 (1999): 58–74. 14 See Ken Loach, Loach on Loach, edited by Graham Fuller (London: Faber, 1998); and Macmurraugh-Kavanagh,‘Drama into News.’ 15 Galileo does this only once, incorporating stock news footage (rather than especially filmed dramatic sequences) of nuclear missiles at the end of the play. 16 Jarrott’s production was made in the new purpose-built BBC Television Centre, an option not available to Rudolph Cartier in 1959.

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17 See Martin Esslin, Brief Chronicles: Essays on Modern Theatre (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1970). 18 Walter Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’ in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations (New York: Shoecken Books, 1969), 148. 19 For descriptions of the greater call to use the limited resources of filmed drama, in preference to the studio, from many directors during this period, see Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: British Film Institute, 2003); Irene Shubik, Play for Today (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and Lacey and Macmurraugh-Kavanagh, ‘Who Framed Theatre?’ among others. 20 Memo from J. Planter to Rudolph Cartier, 24 Feb. 1958, BBC, WAC T5/2,253/1. 21 Memo from Cartier, 10 March 1958, BBC, WAC T5/2,253/1. 22 Once much of this studio time was lost due to the sudden need to make a party political broadcast, Cartier ended up performing camera rehearsals and recording scenes on the same evening, requiring a highly expensive overrun in the studio, recording finishing at 12:03 a.m., as opposed to the scheduled 10:45 p.m. (undated budget document, memo from Holland Barrett, Television Booking Manager to H.D. Tel, 26 March 1959, BBC, WAC T5/2,253/1). 23 985 feet of 35mm sound film and 280 feet of 35mm silent film (BBC Transmission Record for 30 June 1959, held at BBC Film Archive). 24 The production file for Mother Courage demonstrates why songs could not have been used more frequently in the television adaptation. The music had to be separately recorded (using a six-piece orchestra) and then dubbed onto the live action. Although the recording session was not particularly expensive (£67 12s out of an overall budget of £6,012 12s) (undated budget sheet, BBC, WAC T5/2,253/1) it was time consuming to rehearse and record, and would have made the production substantially more difficult to rehearse and record if the cast had been expected to sing. It is noticeable that the two songs that are used in Mother Courage are both in sequences shot on film, which allowed much greater opportunities for the director to edit in post-production, disguising the performers’ miming, and enabling clearer continuity between sound and image. The effect of introducing characters through cutting used in the first scene would not have been possible in a telerecorded sequence. 25 Although the performers were asked to do no more than in a theatrical performance, the concentration of working towards one single performance on one evening, as opposed to the theatrical system of multiple performances after several previews, created a different kind of stress upon actors in television than upon those in the theatre.

Brechtian Television: Theatricality and Adaptation 51 26 Anon, ‘Brecht Triumphs in World Theatre: Effective Production of Mother Courage,’ Times, 1 July 1959. 27 Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’ 149. 28 Ibid., 153 29 Brecht, cited in Ibid. 30 Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theatre?’ 151. 31 BBC, WAC R9/7/40, VR 59/372. 32 Ibid. 33 Notably in the sense of concealed panic and attempted conformity shown through the use of close-up on Peter Cushing’s performance as Winston Smith in 1984 (BBC Television, 1953). 34 Rudolph Cartier, ‘A Foot in Both Camps,’ Films and Filming 4/12 (1958): 10. 35 This close-up style, emphasizing when characters are acting out of (for example) cunning or weakness also militates against the risk of Mother Courage appearing characterless in avoiding irrational empathy on the part of the viewer, as Martin Esslin suggested happened in William Gaskill’s 1965 National Theatre production; ‘some directors made desperate attempts to cool their actors down even further. As a result ( . . . ) [Gaskill’s production] ( . . . ) achieved an effect tantamount to miniaturization of the play and its characters. These wild and rambunctious figures, who should exude vitality, Rabelaisian appetite, lechery and meanness, appeared cooled down into whispering dwarfs and bloodless spectres’ (Esslin, Brief Chronicles, 88). The aliveness to nuance of the intimate style means that miniaturization does not tend to be an effect of Cartier’s direction, even when performances are quite quiet and subtle. 36 Bertolt Brecht, Bertholt Brecht on Film & Radio, edited and translated by Marc Silberman (London: Methuen, 2001), 42. 37 Bertholt Brecht, The Life of Galileo, translated by John Willett, edited by Hugh Rorrison (London: Methuen, 1994), 82–5. 38 Jarrott also takes advantage of Leo McKern’s partial blindness in his presentation of Galileo as old and infirm in this scene, close-ups of Galileo’s face being unsparing in showing the one blind eye in this scene (as does not occur at any other point in the play) 39 See Humphrey Carpenter, That Was Satire that Was (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000); and Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus (London: Methuen, 1980). 40 Audience research appears to suggest that the use of a narrator was accepted rather than embraced by Galileo’s otherwise enthusiastic audience (‘I like a play to proceed without somebody telling you the story every few minutes,’ BBC, WAC VR/64/243), although the convention of narrator

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41

42

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Billy Smart does appear to have been understood by the audience, rather than seen as confusing. This narrative convention had also been recently used in the theatre in the role of ‘The Common Man’ in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, a highly successful and popular play. And this would probably have been responded to with greater hostility, judging by the precedent of Michael Elliott’s 1958 BBC Television World Theatre production of Women of Troy, which incorporated recent footage of refugees and warfare (BBC, WAC VR/58/32). The end of Galileo appears to have been the least popular aspect of Jarrott’s production with viewers (‘The parallel need not have been drawn so obviously at the end,’ ‘The play provided a complete set of judgements on morality and expediency without added effects’ (BBC, WAC VR/64/243), but these complaints were only reported by a small minority of viewers, with some others considering ‘that these devices added to the impact of the play and heightened its scientific theme’ (ibid.). Again, see Esslin, Brief Chronicles. Among the reasons that he suggests for the generally poor standard of British productions of Brecht during this period are unreliable translations, the imposition of inappropriate sentimentality onto narratives, inappropriate star casting, and a general lack of appropriate training to equip actors to perform Brecht. A different convention to Brecht’s placards, which state the purpose of each forthcoming scene.

PART TWO Cinematic Theatricality, Genre, and Gender

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3 Cinéma du Grand Guignol : Theatricality in the Horror Film ANDRÉ LOISELLE

The historical link between horror films and the gory, sensationalist popular theatre of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has often been noted. Dave Beech and John Roberts, for instance, suggest that ‘the Hollywood horror movie is no doubt the true descendant of Grand Guignol.’1 Similarly, Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson in their definitive study of the French theatre of horror assert ‘that the GrandGuignol greatly influenced subsequent horror films.’2 In the same vein, drama historian Michael R. Booth sees in the Gothic stage melodrama of the 1800s ‘an early equivalent of the modern horror film.’3 Filmmakers have often evoked the theatrical genealogy of horror cinema. Although there have been few actual film adaptations of Grand Guignol plays – Vernon Sewell’s Latin Quarter (1946) based on Pierre Mille and C. de Vylars’s L’Angoisse (1908; in English by José Levy as The Medium, 1912)4 is a rare surviving example – many horror movies explicitly refer to the stage as the originator of screen terror and the privileged site of cinematic fear. These references to the theatre of horror do not merely pay lip service to a revered predecessor. Rather, the films that acknowledge the theatre of gore do so to reflect on the nature of horror on screen. Looking at a number of horror films that identify explicitly the theatre as the locus horribilis par excellence, from the early Peter Lorre vehicle Mad Love (Karl Freund, 1935) to Douglas Hickox’s cult classic Theatre of Blood (1973) and the straight-to-video thriller Acts of Death ( Jeff Burton, 2007,), I will argue that such works use theatricality to foreground certain character types, expose structural paradoxes, and highlight modes of performance common to the cinematic tale of terror. The films discussed here overtly conceive of the theatre as the antecedent of filmic horror, as the mayhem that afflicts the characters often

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results from pathological desires rooted in prior theatrical experiences. In some cases, a character becomes obsessed with stage performances he or she attended or participated in, and manifests this perverse passion through violence. In other cases, a traumatic memory is associated with the theatre, and now returns with a bloody vengeance. In his contribution to this anthology, R.J. Tougas elaborates at length on the theatrical aesthetics of the revenge film in relation to fundamental principles of natural justice. While Tougas’s argument and mine overlap to some extent, what matters to me is less that vengeance operates according to the theatrical principles of justice, than that in the horror films considered here the theatre is visualized in concrete terms as the instigator of cinematic revenge. Furthermore, in the films I examine the theatre is portrayed as a space specifically conceived for the performance of mercilessly violent retribution. In these works, cinematic horror does not only result from a theatrical experience, it also graphically transpires on stage, thus superimposing theatrical and filmic terror. Through this equation of the stage and the screen, these films propose that cinematic horror functions theatrically as an enjoyable form of strictly regulated overindulgence. But before saying anything else, I should state that in the following pages I will not claim that all horror films work the same way. I will limit myself to arguing that explicit references to the stage provide insight into depictions of masculine monstrosity. Many horror films foreground what Barbara Creed has famously called the ‘monstrous-feminine.’5 In their reliance on the abject and the pre-symbolic ‘Real’ to induce fear, such films might not call upon theatrical artifice. But other horror movies showcase what Hand and Wilson refer to as the ‘monstrous-paternal,’ which is typical of the Grand Guignol tale of terror.6 This is a type of horror in which the artifice of the symbolic order takes over the scene in the terrifying form of a domineering father figure, adopting the theatricality of aggressively phallic signifiers to affect the audience.7 Such films, I suggest, deploy the theatricality of the disciplinary monster whose very name, derived from the Latin monstrare, connotes the state of being put on display to educate spectators by scaring them shitless. Here, the monster functions as a ‘Nemesis,’ to borrow E. Michael Jones’s concept;8 a punishing force that emerges to restore order in cultures that have rejected moral governance. The paradoxical notion of a brutal villain who uses gruesome violence to defeat immorality is central to the dual structure of disciplinarian horror, which operates simultaneously as a mode of outrageous spectacle and a practice of stringent

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authoritarianism.9 It is no coincidence that the typical slasher-film device of first hiding the monstrous disciplinarian before displaying him in all his horrific glory for the spectator’s petrified enjoyment finds its origins in medieval morality plays like Mankind (c. 1470). In Mankind, the appearance of the devil Titivillus, whose outrageous malevolence is exhibited to teach faith and obedience to audiences, marks the climactic point of the show. As the original stage directions of Mankind indicate, spectators are solicited for donations just before they are allowed to enjoy the exhilaratingly terrifying display of corrective evil.10 My contention here is that disciplinary horror thrives on the paradox of theatrical tragedy:11 a Dionysian spectacle of bestial lust and brutal violence contained within the rigid Apollonian parameters of sadistic control; or, as Stephen King puts it in his book-length essay on the topic, Danse Macabre (1980), ‘the horror tale generally details the outbreak of some Dionysian madness in an Apollonian existence.’12 The argument below shows how the theatre as space and practice analogizes horror’s aggressive urge to repress the very terror it generates.13 And at the centre of this paradoxical space stands a villain who performs his evil gestures to educate and delight his mildly sadomasochistic audience. Grand Guignol Cinema, Sadism, and Theatricality In his reflections on The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, first published in 1933, Geoffrey Gorer commented on the intriguing correlation between the sadist and the theatre artist in these terms: ‘I do not intend to imply that actors or dramatists are sexual sadists either overtly or unconsciously; at most I am implying that some of the same psychological mechanisms are involved in both situations – to anticipate a little, that sadists are failed actors and playwrights.’ Gorer added ‘it is of course with the Grand Guignol, the theatre of blood and horror, that the connection with sadism becomes most obvious.’14 For Gorer, the sadist is a performer ‘acting out a play with an audience of one,’ where the disciplinarian tries to be an effective actor, striving to incite reactions in the spectator, seeking to compel his audience to respond according to his will.15 What matters here is that the sadist is a stage performer and his cruelty is essentially a performance. As John M. Callahan speculates, it is likely that at least some spectators would attend ‘Théâtre du Grand-Guignol’ to release ‘their own sadism and/or masochism’;16 ‘sadism and/or masochism’ because these two ordinary perversions are intrinsically linked. The sadistic performance irrevocably becomes a masochistic pleasure for, as

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performance, sadism is ineffectual in concrete terms and fully dependent on the willingness of the spectator to play along. As such the sadist is the passive recipient of the spectator’s active decision to be ‘scared.’ As such, the sadist’s pleasure is a fundamentally masochistic submission to the spectator’s reaction. As Havelock Ellis wrote in his 1933 Psychology of Sex, ‘masochism, as Freud put it, is sadism turned round on to the self, or we may say that sadism is masochism turned on to others.’17 The idea that the Grand Guignol appeals to the sadomasochistic desires of the audience is central to the narrative of Karl Freund’s Mad Love, which premiered only two years after the original publication of Gorer’s commentary on De Sade and Ellis’s book on sex. Mad Love is probably the first Hollywood thriller to refer explicitly to the French theatre of horror, with the opening scenes taking place at the ‘Théâtre des horreurs,’ where spectators scream and laugh, and where a nurse is even espied in a corner, evoking one of the better-known publicity gimmicks of the original ‘Théâtre du Grand-Guignol.’18 After the opening credits, the film begins on a shot that brings us to the box office of the ‘Théâtre des horreurs,’ where a woman refuses to go in and chides her male companion for bringing her to such a sordid place. We then move to the dressing room of the famed actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake), who says a few kind words about her most devoted fan, the brilliant surgeon Doctor Gogol (Peter Lorre). He has attended forty-seven performances of her current show, Torturée, and now arrives to enjoy Yvonne’s final appearance in the play. Within the first five minutes of the film, Gogol’s fixation on Yvonne is manifest. He stares, with his creepy Peter-Lorre eyes, at a wax figure of his idol in the theatre’s lobby; he becomes jealous when a drunk patron lustfully addresses the wax figure; and sitting alone in his private box seat, he gazes with repressed passion as Yvonne is stretched on the rack in the climactic scene of the gothic drama in which she stars. As she is poked with a white hot iron before her jealous husband and screams ‘yes, yes’ in a mixture of pain and pleasure, Gogol slowly closes his eyes in a stoic display of orgasmic self-control. Conversely, the spectacle of ‘actual’ death, when he witnesses the execution of a murderer by guillotine, only affects Gogol mildly, as the scene of the beheading barely makes him raise an eyebrow. Horror on stage (and on film) is clearly something quite different from ‘real’ horror, and Gogol is evidently aroused only by the former. Gogol’s intense fixation on the spectacle of ostentatious wickedness and eroticism is at the core of his economy of perversion. As such, he embodies, at least in part, the Deleuzian masochist who is painfully enthralled

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before the torturing feminine ideal. As Gilles Deleuze writes in his commentary on Sacher-Masoch, ‘what characterizes masochism and its theatricality is a peculiar form of cruelty in the woman torturer: the cruelty of the ideal, the specific freezing point, the point at which idealism is realized.’19 Sitting in his box, Gogol is mesmerized by Yvonne who is at once kind, in appreciating his spectatorship, and cruel in relentlessly denying him any intimacy and sensual contact. As an actress, Yvonne is the ideal woman for the masochist, for she offers herself as tantalizing spectacle but forbids touch and physical proximity. It is no surprise that as the ‘cold, maternal, severe’20 woman torturer, Yvonne can appeal to Gogol’s masochism even in the form of a statue. For the wax figure in the theatre lobby evokes the ‘marble body, women of stone, Venus of ice,’ that Deleuze recognizes as Sacher-Masoch’s favourite expressions of the female torturer: ‘his characters often serve their amorous apprenticeship with a cold statue.’21 But it is not surprising either that Gogol’s pleasure results from a performance in which his feminine ideal is tortured by another man, for the surgeon’s masochism carries with it a strong sadistic impulse. This other man evokes Sacher-Masoch’s ‘third party whom he calls “the Greek.”’22 Sacher-Masoch’s Greek ‘represents the dangerous father who brutally interrupts the [masochistic] experiment.’23 The intervention of the male torturer in Sacher-Masoch’s fantasy world has the masochist ‘giving up masochism and turning sadist.’24 The appearance of the Greek in the spectacle thus transforms the passive masochist spectator into a sadistic actor. This transformation is precisely what transpires soon after the beginning of Mad Love. While the performance at ‘Théâtre des horreurs’ deeply appeals to Gogol’s masochistic tendencies, the spectacle itself only makes up a small fraction of the film. Most of the narrative is occupied with obsessive love and sadistic revenge rather than the masochistic spectacle of pleasurable pain. The story of Mad Love revolves around Gogol’s initial attempt to endear himself to Yvonne, by carrying out a delicate operation on her pianist husband, Stephen Orlac (Colin Clive), whose hands were crushed in a train crash. But when she refuses to reward him with her love – which she would refuse him even if she were not married because there is something about him that repulses and frightens her – he plots to incriminate Stephen so he can possess Yvonne. His desire to ‘own’ Yvonne as an object, which is first manifested paradoxically through his masochistic fixation on the spectacle of the woman torturer being tortured,25 is further expressed through his purchasing the wax figure he had previously admired in the theatre lobby. He brings

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the wax figure home, plays music for it and has his maid take care of it as though the statue were human. But the statue cannot reciprocate his love and therefore he must possess the ‘real’ Yvonne. During Stephen’s operation, Gogol and his assistant Doctor Wong (Keye Luke) did not reconstruct his crushed hands as they claimed they would. Rather they secretly removed the pianist’s hands and grafted the hands of the recently guillotined murderer, knife-thrower Rollo (Edward Brophy). When Stephen confides in Gogol that his post-operation hands want to kill with knives, the vengeful doctor sees a way to get rid of the husband and appropriate the wife. Knowing that Stephen and his stepfather had an argument earlier, Gogol stabs Orlac senior, and then appears as a mysterious stranger in dark cloak to reveal the ‘truth’ to Stephen. As he shows his artificial, steel hands to Stephen, Gogol whispers: ‘Look, I have no hands. Yours, they were mine once . . . and so, when you knifed your father in the back last night, you killed him with my hands.’ He then reveals himself to be Rollo, whose head has been reattached to his body by the surgeon. Petrified by the vision of the knife thrower, as performed by Gogol wearing a bizarre contraption of metal and leather around his neck, Stephen runs away in fear convinced that he has murdered his stepfather with Rollo’s hands. It is no coincidence that, as part of his evil plot, Gogol would choose to dress up and play the role of a dead man, for theatricality is everywhere in this film, from the artistic practice that triggers Gogol’s fixation to the ‘Caligariesque’ expressionism of the surgeon’s clinic. While, as I observed earlier, an actual stage appears only at the beginning of the film and is not seen again after Gogol leaves the ‘Théâtre des horreurs’ following Yvonne’s final curtain call, the narrative as a whole is dominated by sadistic theatricality. Dr Gogol provides an uncanny illustration of Gorer’s theory of the sadist as actor, as the demented scientist relies on performance to impose his will on others, transforming them into objects. Gogol’s sadistic urge to dominate is thus rooted in his desire for the theatrical artifice of symbolic authority. As J.P. Telotte argues, Mad Love ‘explores the subjects of artificial creation . . . to expose the power of subjection we wield on both others and ourselves.’26 That Gogol uses the artificial steel hands and neck brace as props in his performance as Rollo is but a minor, albeit clever, metaphor for the sadist’s appeal to theatricality to impose his will on his audience. The most obvious manifestation of artificialization or theatricalization is Yvonne’s wax figure. Near the end of the film the actress, having entered Gogol’s house and accidentally broken the statue, chooses to

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impersonate the artificial figure. To avoid discovery, writes Telotte, ‘she pretends to be that figure, that possessed, powerless, tortured piece of artifice – which she has, in another fashion, already become. A series of close-ups points out the agony of that status, as she tries to stifle her natural urge to flee or cry out – her very humanity – while Gogol plays to the wax figure.’27 When he hears the wax figure scream, as she is scratched by a pet parrot, Gogol immediately believes his Pygmalion fantasy to have materialized (incidentally, the drunken maid who has been taking care of the statue also believes that the real Yvonne is the artificial thing come to life). As voices tell him that ‘each man kills the thing he loves,’ Gogol puts his hands around Yvonne’s neck to squeeze the life out of what he believes to be an animated wax figure. In his Erotic Theatre (1973), John Elsom identifies the limits of theatrical sadism in these terms: ‘the sadistic process cannot be completed because a man cannot become an object without ceasing to be human. A man becomes an object only in death.’28 By strangling the wax figure, the insane surgeon seeks to bring to closure his sadistic performance of mad love through a final objectification of the already objectified Yvonne. In the words of Gregory W. Mank, Gogol then ‘carries his Galatea to the couch and with a horrible smile, begins strangling her with her own hair, reciting: “In one long raven string I wind, Three times her little throat around and strangle her. No pain feels she. I am quite sure she feels no pain.”’29 The declamation of a slightly revised passage from Robert Browning’s ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ combined with the declared end of sadism (‘No pain feels she’) draws the curtain on Gogol’s show and ushers the return of spectatorial masochism. Stephen and the police arrive in the nick of time, and using his new-found skills, the pianist throws a deadly knife at the twisted doctor, reducing him to the ultimate passivity of death. The theatricality of Mad Love, far from being limited to its brief opening references to the Grand Guignol, thus operates as the structuring principle of the narrative, as the whole plot revolves around the fanatical urge of the sadist-as-theatre-artist to control excessive objects to satisfy both his lustful fixation on a beautiful woman and his obsessive drive to stage the demise of his rival. The metaphor of the sadist-as-theatre-artist is literalized in a number of films, in which stage directors use the theatre as their public torture chambers where the paradox of strict discipline and gory excess finds a most pleasantly disturbing incarnation. Theatre of Death (Samuel Gallu, 1966), which also acknowledges explicitly the Grand Guignol heritage of the horror film, features Christopher Lee

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in the role of Philippe Darvas, the domineering new director of Paris’s ‘Théâtre de la Mort,’30 The film opens on a guillotine scene in which a beautiful young blonde, ingénue Nicole Chapelle ( Jenny Till) is decapitated for the enjoyment of a bourgeois audience. A voice-over then gives us a brief history of the theatre that deliberately recalls that of the original ‘Théâtre du Grand-Guignol,’ which had shut down in 1962, just a few years before the film’s production.31 Unlike Gogol’s sadism, which always operates behind the scenes, Darvas’s sadism takes centre stage. Darvas dominates his actors, hypnotizing them into submission, making them perform acts of unbearable violence. For instance, during a public play reading for an upcoming show, ‘The Witches of Salem,’ he directs his protégée Nicole into using a hot iron to burn the troupe’s leading lady, Dani Gireaux (Lelia Goldoni). The torture would have been fulfilled if an audience member, Dr Charles Marquis ( Julian Glover), had not intervened before the poker touched the older actress’s face. In a later rehearsal for a sketch on voodoo sacrifice, Darvas threatens to run a spear through an actress’s stomach because she can’t perform fear convincingly. His histrionic malevolence is such that Darvas quickly becomes Doctor Marquis’s main suspect in a series of creepy, vampiric murders he is investigating. Even when Darvas mysteriously disappears and some think he has been murdered, Marquis does not believe he is dead, seeing the director’s disappearance as an elaborate trick devised by a sadistic murderer to escape justice. Darvas is but one in a line of sadistic stage directors in horror films, such as Sardu (Seamus O’Brien) in The Incredible Torture Show (aka Bloodsucking Freaks; Joel M. Reed, 1976), and Montag (Ray Sager/Crispin Glover) in The Wizard of Gore in both its 1970 (Herschell Gordon Lewis) and 2007 ( Jeremy Kasten) versions. In these films, the theatre becomes an arena for repulsive, mesmerizing, and sexually charged spectacles in which the male stage director performs excessively violent and gory attacks on female bodies. That Darvas, Sardu, and Montag are misogynistic bastards is undeniable.32 Yet the shear artificiality of the staged violence undoes, at least in part, the disturbing impact of the sexist assaults and foregrounds the theatricality of both the villain and the victim. Both the histrionic villain and the overly eroticized victim serve as theatrical hyperboles used to create an aesthetics of terror that declares its own inauthenticity. While Sardu’s and Montag’s violence against women on stage translates into ‘real’ – albeit implausibly bloody and gory – violence offstage, Darvas’s cruelty remains strictly theatrical. Although he is portrayed as an excessively unpleasant man offstage, Darvas is eventually

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shown to have been innocent of the murders, and indeed turns out to be a victim. As such Theatre of Death makes manifest what is implicit in The Incredible Torture Show and The Wizard of Gore, namely, that the terrifying deeds of the sadistic theatre artist are just for show. Sardu’s and Montag’s ‘actual’ slaughter and disembowelment of ‘actual’ victims are so impossibly gruesome, indulging in such improbable imagery of nightmarish carnage, that the ‘reality effect’ is utterly disavowed. This is not unique to the films considered here. For Steven Jay Schneider, ‘the good horror film and the uncanny tale successfully marshal, cultivate, and maintain chary disbelief . . . horror films are generally not as circumspect about maintaining the reality effect as Freud would like.’33 The films that do foreground the artifice of theatrical horror only make the unreality of their shock tactics more obvious than other scary movies. Not surprisingly, at the very end of the original Wizard of Gore, Montag, the master hypnotist and illusionist, is dismissed by an incredulous female spectator ( Judy Cler) as a phony, thus asserting the artificiality of his sadistic persona and exposing his ‘real’ acts of violence as mere fiction. The 2007 version of the film, which emphasizes the artificiality of neon lights, expressionistic camera work, and computer-generated imagery (CGI) special effects, opens with a film noir type voice-over narration by Montag’s nemesis, investigative journalist Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue): ‘they say all the world is a stage, and the sucker that I was bought the line. I made myself the star. I built the stage. I cast the actors . . . and you’ll see how it all went to the devil.’ By the end of the film, where the past-tense narration merges with the present tense of the image, it becomes evident that the bloodbath we have witnessed was nothing but a performance staged by Bigelow’s sick mind. Theatricality is foregrounded to highlight the horror film’s own fictitiousness. The vampiric killer in Theatre of Death is eventually revealed to be the angelic-looking Nicole. The point here is not so much that ‘appearances are deceptive,’ but rather that moments of horror created by discreet gestures of violence operate differently from suspense. While the narrative focuses on the mystery of the murders being investigated by Marquis, with scenes shot in a realist style with mobile camera and gritty cinematography, individual moments of horror interrupt the narrative and focus on gestures performed by the figure of the sadistic director. The shadowy form that kills innocent victims and drinks their blood, although eventually revealed to be Nicole, is clearly meant to resemble Darvas. The revelation that Nicole is a blood-sucking psycho is merely a

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plot twist. The figure of Darvas, the impression of his threateningly overbearing presence, the perception of his violent gestures towards the victims is the main source of fear. While the narrative involves suspense generated by the ‘lack of full knowledge’34 of who the killer is, individual moments of horror are created through the disturbing theatrics of Darvas – or his semblance – savagely assailing defenceless victims. The sense of dread is thus always related to theatricality in the form of the stage director. Even the peculiar dagger used in the murders is identified as a prop from the ‘Théâtre de la Mort,’ thus strengthening the link between the killings and Darvas’s staged cruelty. Moments of horror in Theatre of Death, as in other similar films, are always at once frighteningly violent and safely contained within the bounds of performance. Darvas’s theatrical presence is so central to the horror effect that characters even acknowledge his ability to instil terror in his own absence. When Nicole proves highly capable of performing her part as a coldly vengeful woman in ‘The Witches of Salem’ even after her mentor Darvas has vanished, the owner of the theatre Madame Angélique (Evelyn Laye) remarks as she watches the show with mesmerized unease: ‘it’s almost as if Darvas were still here.’ In fact, Darvas is ‘still here,’ as he is evoked visually through stage lighting that foregrounds garish primary colours, especially blood red, whose arresting artificiality (in striking contrast with the more ‘realistic’ hues that characterize most of the film) is associated with the sadistic director’s artistic persona in earlier scenes. In the final section of the film, when Nicole seeks to get rid of her rival Dani, she adopts the persona of the domineering theatre artist, directing the other actress to stab herself to death. Marquis interrupts the scene, not unlike he had interrupted the earlier performance in which Nicole threatened to brand Dani’s face. Nicole escapes, but Marquis eventually catches up with her in the wings of the ‘Théâtre de la Mort.’ There, the ‘real’ murderess is juxtaposed to the theatrical violence of Darvas’s sketch involving a sacrificial voodoo ritual. The climactic scene of Theatre of Death merges the highly erotic dance of a curvaceously muscular black female performer with the death of Nicole, who is accidentally impaled by a spear used in the sketch – the same spear Darvas had used threateningly during the rehearsal. This amalgamation of performed violence and the ‘reality’ of Nicole’s death foregrounds the theatre of horror’s compulsion to eradicate the terror it generates. As the artifice of the voodoo performance arouses fiercely lustful desires in the audience, the apex of the sketch – the sacrifice of the virgin – coincides with the termination of ‘real’ horror through the slaying of Nicole. Sadistic theatre,

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in its grotesque and alluring artifice, produces brutal displays of sex and gore only to neutralize their effects. This is one of the central functions of theatricality in the horror film: cinema relies on theatre’s disciplinarian artificiality to expose horror’s dual purpose as an entertaining spectacle of fearsome excess and an unflinchingly repressive morality tale. I would argue that this confluence of unruly overindulgence and strict control brings fictional horror close to tragedy.35 Indeed, horror meets tragedy at the intersection of Dionysian erotic violence and Apollonian tyrannical discipline. The horror film relies on the theatre’s well-known genealogy to evince the paradoxical Nietzschean thesis that the gory and destructive pleasures of Dionysus can be given form only through the oppressive constraints of Apollo, while the Apollonian insistence on the static conventions of civility can be injected with life only through the explosive fertilization of the Dionysian orgy.36 This creative paradox is evident in Murders in the Rue Morgue (Gordon Hessler, 1971), another film that explicitly refers to the French theatre of horror as a space for bloody carnage and disciplinary revenge. Grand Guignol Cinema and the Paradox of Theatre Murders in the Rue Morgue opens on a scene reminiscent of Mad Love, as a frustrated sadist ( Jason Robards) about to abuse a female victim (Christine Kaufmann) declares, ‘Just as I once begged for your kisses, now you will beg for your death . . . prepare my darling for pain, exquisite pain!’ But the impending torture is interrupted by an ape that bursts into the room and takes hold of the victim. As the woman is being carried away by the ape, she has nightmarish visions of being pursued in meandering hallways by a masked man armed with an axe; these visions reappear throughout the film. The nightmare is then cut short by the police barging in. An officer shoots the ape, but it still has enough strength to wrestle with the sadist and eventually chop off his head with an axe. As the ape triumphantly brandishes the sadist’s severed head a woman is heard screaming. A cut reveals an audience, terrified, amused, and enthralled by what they have just seen: a stage rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ performed at Paris’s Rue Morgue Theatre. The sadist and the victim are Cesar and Madeleine Charron, the owner and leading lady of a Grand Guignol theatre troupe. Shortly after the performance, it is discovered that the man who generally plays the ape was brutally murdered, his face burned with vitriolic

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acid, and it was his murderer who played the role of the primate during the scene that opens the film. This is the first in a series of bizarre and gruesome attacks on current and former members of the Charrons’ troupe, always involving disfigurement with acid. The murderer is revealed to be René Marot (Herbert Lom), himself an actor, believed to have died long ago. Years before, Marot and Charron were rivals for the love of an actress, Madeleine’s mother, also named Madeleine (Lilli Palmer). One night, during the performance of a gothic torture play in which Marot, Charron, and Madeleine senior were performing, a special effect went terribly wrong and Marot was burned with real acid. The story goes that a disfigured, insane Marot killed Madeleine senior with an axe and committed suicide. But Marot’s suicide was faked, and he has returned to reveal the truth and seek vengeance on his former thespian colleagues. At the climax of the film, Marot confronts Charron on stage and exposes him as the man responsible for his acid disfigurement and as the mysterious axe man who killed Madeleine senior and who now haunts Madeleine junior’s nightmares. All of the Charrons’ troupe had lied to defend their boss, and swore that Marot was the insane killer. All but one, a demented dwarf puppet master, Pierre Triboulet (Michael Dunn), who now helps Marot achieve his revenge on those who lied, and especially Charron who disfigured him and killed his beloved Madeleine. After Marot kills Charron, the film closes as it had opened, on a performance of Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue.’ But this time, when Marot, again wearing the ape suit tries to abduct Madeleine junior, ‘real’ police officers step on stage, interrupt the performance, and pursue Marot until he eventually falls to his death from the rafters of the theatre onto the stage. Murders in the Rue Morgue is somewhat awkward in its baroque extravagance, and clearly derivative of Terence Fisher’s classic Hammer version of The Phantom of the Opera (1962), in which Herbert Lom also plays a disfigured man seeking revenge.37 But Rue Morgue represents nonetheless an intriguing attempt to examine the nature of fictional horror and its relationship to the real. It overtly questions the nexus between pleasure and pain, explicitly foregrounds the artifice of horror on stage and on screen, and openly exposes the overlap of disciplinary control and gory theatricality. As Graeme Harper and Rob Stone observe, ‘with its convoluted and baffling plot that deliberately mingles past, present and future, Murders in the Rue Morgue explores the confusion of the erotic and the monstrous, the real and the imaginary, dreams and waking

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life, a thoroughly Surreal conceit.’38 What is crucial from my perspective is that Marot’s revenge, triggered by dishonesty and lies, is aimed at actors. Marot does not merely kill people because they happen to have been associated with Charron. Rather he seeks revenge on Charron’s actors, those liars and cheaters whose deception and pretense caused his demise. Their crime is to have been performers playing a role in his tragedy. It is no coincidence that his revenge on Charron himself is principally directed at making him tell the truth – to force him to put an end to his performance – before he beheads him on stage. In its focus on a disciplinarian actor disfiguring and beheading other actors to teach them a lesson in unnatural justice, Rue Morgue cleverly exposes the paradox of theatre: the conflict between the stage as a space of unruly Dionysian carnality, and drama as a form of poetic dialectics where Apollonian control prevails. The theatre has always been torn between indulgence in extreme spectacles of pain and pleasure and the didactic urge to contain, stifle, and suppress such immoderation. As Anja Müller-Wood observes, ‘by putting violence, bloodshed and terror on the stage, early modern playwrights demonstrated their ability to rein them in.’39 Although Müller-Wood is talking about Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the notion of theatrical indulgence in lies and vices and blood and gore as a means for drama to contain such excesses still applies today. Recent theatrical performances such as Wajdi Mouawad’s Seuls (2008), in which academic intellectualism and creative insanity are in constant opposition, bear witness to the continued relevance of Nietzsche’s thesis. In the late sixteenth century, Stephen Gosson argued against the theatre in terms of the essential deceitfulness and treachery of actors, whose only purpose is to pretend; being the main attractions in a parade of duplicity. For Gosson, the theatre was the work of the devil. Plays, he wrote, are ‘the doctrines and inuentions of the deuill.’ Their material cause is ‘such thinges as neuer were,’ the devil being the father of lies and deceptions: distorted and exaggerated emotions, fantastic events and ‘many a terrible monster made of broune paper.’ Even when treating true events, the poet makes them ‘seeme longer, or shorter, or greater or lesser than they were.’ The formal cause is the manner of representation itself: to act is to lie, and to lie is to sin – a favorite argument with later Elizabethan critics.40

The irony is that Gosson had been an actor himself, and his most vicious attack against the theatre, Players Confuted in Fiue Actions (1582),

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adopts the five-act structure of Elizabethan drama and explicitly uses an Aristotelian model to construct his argument. So Gosson uses a classical conception of drama to suppress boisterous theatricality. ‘The theatrical discourse of excess,’ says Müller-Wood, fulfils ‘the double function of exploring the dramatic value of excess and establishing a moral response to it.’ This is not unlike Mankind, in which the theatre is enlisted to undermine the rowdy theatricality of the devil Tittivilus. In this vein, Murders in the Rue Morgue uses the proscenium arch of the theatre of horror to foreground devilish theatricality as a means to exorcize it from the stage.41 The film uses blood and gore to expose and condemn unruly, deceitful, malevolent theatricality which cheats spectators into believing its ludicrous tales of terror. Charron’s malevolent theatricality is suppressed by Marot’s own spectacular malevolence. But while Charron is just a lustful, deceitful, and violent actor, Marot performs his brutal deeds under the rubric of self-righteous vengeance. Of course, the film itself must also punish Marot in the end. For regardless of one’s justification, bloody vengeance is always on the side of Dionysus and therefore must be suppressed by the Apollonian design of conventional cinema. Murders in the Rue Morgue thus suggests through various levels of performance that horror on stage, and by association on screen, is a dangerous lie that is summoned for the sole purpose of being drained of its disruptive power. There are a number of other films that similarly show actors killing actors to explore the paradox of fictional horror; flaunting carnal terror so it can be neutralized. The Flesh and Blood Show (Pete Walker, 1972) is a case in point. A minor cult favourite, The Flesh and Blood Show showcases ‘lashings of French Grand Guignol melodrama and Shakespearian references and toss[es] in some gratuitous 3-D effects.’42 The film follows a troupe of putatively handsome actors and unassumingly bosomy actresses invited by an anonymous producer to rehearse a show in a creepy old theatre on the English seashore. As the young men and women rehearse their experimental piece, which consists mainly of primitive dances, esoteric gestures, and plenty of nudity, a shadowy figure is seen spying on them. Before long, actors start falling victim to a mysterious killer. It is revealed that the serial killer terrorizing the troupe is an old Shakespearian leading man, Sir Arnold Gates (Patrick Barr) who killed his wife ( Jane Cardew) and her lover (Stuart Bevan) years earlier during the Second World War, and in his dementia now seeks to relive the traumatic killings by terrorizing the innocent thespians. The twist is that the original murders happened during a performance of

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Othello, when Iago’s fabricated romance between Desdemona and Cassio found a manifestation in the ‘real’ world as the unfaithful wife playing Desdemona indulged in a sordid affair with the actor playing Cassio. Flashbacks shot in 3-D show Gates at the end of a performance of Othello, still in full make-up and costume, catching the lovers in the act. He proceeds to tie them up in the bowels of the theatre, where they will eventually starve to death. The Flesh and Blood Show thus mirrors Rue Morgue in its assertion that the lust, deceit, and cruelty that the theatre breeds can only be redressed by the theatre itself. But unlike in Rue Morgue, the present-tense victims in The Flesh and Blood Show had no role in the original tragedy. They are just innocent young actors involved in some hippie theatrical experiment. Yet they are guilty: guilty of being actors. When he reveals himself to be the killer, Sir Gates proclaims: ‘They are all the same, young actors: filthy and degraded lechers. All of them! And the females: flaunting their bodies, offering their thighs and breasts. Scum! Excrements!’ Gates had secretly hired the actors to come rehearse in his theatre, knowing that the young thespians would inevitably start indulging in exhibitionism, sexual misconduct, and deceit – like his wife and her lover, like all actors. Then he could assuage his monomaniacal compulsion to use the theatre to punish the innate depravity of actors. Sir Gates was ‘an actor who needed to kill actors in his theatre,’ observes one of the surviving players at the end of the film. The final twist is that one of the actresses, Julia ( Jenny Hanley), is revealed to be Sir Gates’s long-lost daughter, and confesses to having committed one of the murders herself. What is most striking about this finale is not the plot twist itself, but rather that the other actors are hardly surprised at all and barely react to this revelation, thus implying that it is all but natural for an actor to exact deadly punishment over other actors.43 Actors punishing actors are also at the centre of Acts of Death; and again as actors the victims are guilty of the usual indulgences: sex, drugs, and deception. But those who are killed in this straight-to-DVD thriller are also guilty of having acted specifically to hurt others. These actors are bullies who use the stage as a space for ‘initiation’ rituals, during which new female students are humiliated and abused before they can join the inner circle of Baxter University’s drama program. On a dark, snowy night, in between rehearsals for Macbeth, things go terribly wrong. New student Angela (Erin Scheiner) overdoses on a rape drug given to her by the troupe’s leading man, Chase (Nathaniel Nose) – ‘sadistic thespian numero uno’ as night watchman Gus (Reggie Bannister) calls

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him. Angela does not die from the overdose, but proceeds to hang herself, in front of her assailant and two other theatre students, Felix (Finn Wrisley) and Sabrina (Niki Huey). Chase and his acolytes hide the body and pretend nothing happened. But the following day, theatre students start dying in most gruesome ways. For a time, the frantically egocentric theatre professor Eamon, ( Jason Carter) is suspected of being the psycho-killer, wanting to avenge the death of Angela, with whom he was having an affair. But he is also killed, when a rack of spotlights falls over his head. In the end, it turns out that Angela’s death, not unlike Marot’s in Rue Morgue, was a deception, an act devised by her and half-brother Felix to exact revenge on Chase. Chase, the spoiled son of the Dean (Bill Vincent) who always gets away with everything, had been responsible for the death of another student, Sandra. He had raped her, and she died during the botched abortion Chase’s father paid for. Although Chase is the only one directly responsible for Sandra’s death, all others like him had to die. ‘Angela and I vowed revenge,’ says Felix, ‘revenge on you and every one like you’: all those lechers, deceivers, and exhibitionists, all those ‘sadistic thespians’ who manipulate others into passive, spectatorial submission. It is significant that Felix spends most of the film with fellow theatre students indulging in sex, drugs, and petty pranks, before revealing his finale role as a merciless disciplinarian. As such, he embodies the theatrical paradox of horror, torn between carnal recklessness and moralistic control. In Acts of Death, as in the other instances discussed in this section, actors are punished for being actors, for wallowing in brutal eroticism, malicious pretense, and all the other dubious gratifications that the stage affords. These films use theatricality to make the point that horror cinema is first and foremost a pleasurable display of shapeless transgression and rigid control. To exaggerate a bit, I would say that fictional horror is just a gush of red goo that smears the stage and must then be cleaned up. The Cinéma du Grand Guignol is thus not about deeply hidden meanings and complex motivations. Rather, it is about the horror film as surface: a spectacle of garish primary colours or harsh black and white contained within a tight frame. Horror as surface is central to my reading of Vincent Price’s role as Edward Lionheart in Theatre of Blood, which will conclude this chapter. Horror as Surface and the Depthless Performance of Villainy Robert Murphy, Geoff Brown, and Alan Burton have said that ‘Theatre of Blood is crude, witless Grand Guignol.’44 Many would disagree that Theatre

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of Blood is witless. Neil Sinyard, for one, has described it an ‘ingenious Vincent Price comedy thriller.’45 But there is little doubt that this tale of a spurned actor, who takes revenge upon his scathing critics by using Shakespearean plays as templates for increasingly inventive and bloody reprisals against his scornful enemies, is indeed an instance of Grand Guignol cinema. What critics like Murphy et al. find crude is Price’s flamboyant performance as the avenging thespian, Edward Lionheart. But what is crude for the conservative viewers becomes evocative for queer theorist Harry Benshoff, who sees Lionheart ‘as a campy madman who busily avenges himself upon the body of heterocentrist discourse via the bodies of its patriarchal agents.’46 For my purposes, the queer politics of Theatre of Blood – however elaborate and multifaceted it may be, especially when Lionheart appears as the gay hairstylist Butch to get at the only female critic on his blacklist47 – is less significant than the film’s sense of theatricality; theatricality not only as a mode of display but as a principle of doing. If one of the central agenda items of queer politics is to imagine ‘new ways of becoming oneself and belonging,’48 then a queer reading might not be the best way to interpret Lionheart’s performance of villainy. For Lionheart’s exaction of vengeance has nothing to do with issues of ‘becoming oneself and belonging.’ Rather Lionheart fixatedly demands to be recognized for what he does, for his achievements as a great actor. Like all villains, Lionheart is an actor – period!49 The theatrical villain is not about being and belonging; he is about doing. For the villain, ‘being’ is exclusively a matter of performance and ‘belonging’ one of movement on stage. Issues of genuineness and identity are irrelevant to the villain. Iago states it clearly in Othello: ‘I am not what I am.’ The villain has no interest in asserting the value and worth of his true identity. For the villain, identity is but an instrument to be used against those who still believe in ‘being and belonging.’ Villainy is not about identity politics; it only uses identity politics to fool others. Nor does the villain have any patience for post-colonial appeals ‘articulated around crisscrossing and overlapping allegiances: indigenousness, nationality, culture, region, religion, ethnicity, language, sexual orientation, gender, immigration, and individual expression.’50 The villain might feign interest in these allegiances, but only to rule over others. This is why Darvas in Theatre of Death feels free to appropriate elements of African culture for one of his sketches. The theatre owner, Madame Angelique, does express concern about the representation of ‘cannibalistic rites.’ But Darvas, as the domineering white man, is absolutely unwavering in his positivistic, self-proclaimed knowledge of voodoo rituals and his

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inalienable right to co-opt and reproduce them on stage. The villain does not look for profound social, cultural, or individual complexities behind appearances. The villain is about self-declared depthless performativity. ‘I am determined to prove a villain,’ says Gloucester in Richard III. There is no psychological depth to Gloucester.51 He is cast as the villain and that is the role he will play. In Theatre of Blood, theatricality is both Lionheart’s motivation and his teleology. Theatricality is the alpha and the omega of the villain’s stratagem. The theatre of horror so permeates every aspect of Hickox’s film that it acquires a metadramatic52 function; it is not only a mode of display but also the subject of the staging. Returning to Gorer’s remark, Lionheart is precisely the sadist as failed actor. Ridiculed by mean, pompous drama reviewers for the excessive theatricality of his performances, he assimilates theatricality to his logic of retribution as he appears in disguises for every vengeance he stages. Either as a surgeon who decapitates a man lying in bed next to his sleeping wife (inspired by Cymbeline) or as a chef who prepares a meat pie out of small dogs, which he then feeds to their horrified master (after Titus Andronicus), every gesture performed by Lionheart is an act of vengeance, and every act of vengeance is a performance. Lionheart, as the film’s retributive villain, is nothing outside of his performance of villainy. He ignores psychology and exists exclusively through his performance of villainy. After the opening credits, played over footage of silent film adaptations of Shakespearian plays that exhibit the sort of exaggerated theatrics Lionheart was probably guilty of, the first vengeful performance is set in motion. On 15 March 1972, the Ides of March, drama critic for the Financial Times and chairman of the Bermondsey Housing and Redevelopment Committee, George Maxwell (Michael Hordern), is called to deal with squatters in an abandoned building. As he arrives at the site, Maxwell is greeted by two police officers who escort him in. There he finds a group of homeless people huddled in a small area of a large warehouse, surrounded by industrial detritus, concrete walls, and grids of metal wires. As Maxwell walks among the wretched of the earth, contemptuously poking at them with the tip of his umbrella ordering them to leave the premises, some start moving, first slowly and uncertainly, but soon with increased determination and eventually with unbridled aggressiveness. One homeless man grabs a bottle and breaks it, another finds a cleaver, another has a knife. As they advance menacingly towards Maxwell, the threatened man appeals to the police officers, but they remain impassive. As the group of squatters starts chasing Maxwell

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around this space of ruins and industrial remains, the camera becomes increasingly unstable, capturing the action through wire meshes, panning and zooming frantically, until the victim is cornered and stabbed to death by the hobos. One of the police officers starts reciting a passage from Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar: ‘ O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!’ (Act 3, Sc. 1). The cop is Lionheart; he is accompanied by a young man who will later be revealed to be his daughter, Edwina (Diana Rigg). Believed to have committed suicide after having been denied an award in recognition of his artistic achievements, Lionheart is alive and well and ready to exact his revenge on those who have spurned and ridiculed him. The clever gimmick of designing vengeful tortures inspired by Shakespearian plays is only the most obvious use of theatricality as a means to incite discomfort, fear, and panic. The scene described above also creates its shock effect through a less explicit but more striking theatrical allusion. As the dispossessed advance menacingly towards the scornful bourgeois, close-ups on distressed faces and grotesque bodies, shots through bars and wires, groaning, laughing, and demented taunting all work together to bring to mind the insane asylum of Peter Brooks’s film adaptation of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade (1964/1967). Brooks’s stage production of Marat/Sade and subsequent film version are often seen as the first full test of Antonin Artaud’s theories of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty.’53 Artaud’s goal ‘to assault the audience’s senses, to cleanse it morally and spiritually, for the improvement of humankind’54 is shockingly fulfilled at the end of Weiss’s drama when the inmates regress into ferocious Dionysian madness, attacking one another, and going for the audience within the play. The hectic camerawork, frenzied editing, and aggressive cacophony that overwhelm the scene at the end of Brooks’s film are clearly evoked in the opening moments of Theatre of Blood. The stylistic allusion to Marat/Sade that hints at Artaud’s theories is later augmented by Edwina’s verbal reference to the ‘Living Theatre,’ Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s hippie experiment in ‘Theatre of Cruelty.’55 As such, Theatre of Blood is not merely a ‘witty . . . self-reflexive horror film [ . . . with] knowing self-reference to the world of theater (and its critics).’56 Rather, it stands as a conscious and cognizant – albeit humorous – addition to a contemporary artistic movement exploring the nexus between terror and theatricality, patently positioning itself within a broader context of Artaudian experiments. It is no coincidence that Lionheart’s revenge is rooted in Shakespearean performance, since

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the Artaudian revival of the 1960s emerged in great part from Brooks’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ experiments at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It is no coincidence either that the critics’ main affront against Lionheart’s sense of entitlement was their decision to ignore his achievements and give the award to William Woodstock, a young, Brando-like method actor.57 This is significant, because method acting is specifically anchored in individual psychology, something that Artaud’s theatre of cruelty radically rejected58 and that Lionheart completely eschews. In his insistence on acting exclusively in Shakespearean plays, Lionheart refuses to engage in the psychologism and identity politics of modern drama. In fact, Lionheart dismisses from his repertoire Shakespeare’s over-psychologized hero, Hamlet.59 He prefers the two-dimensional, action-oriented Richard III and Titus Andronicus – a character that Artaud had hoped to bring to the stage60 – over the melancholy Prince of Denmark. As such, Lionheart specializes in characters without a psychology or subjectivity, and is thus in polar opposition to Woodstock’s method-inspired character compositions. What is crucial here is that Price’s performance parallels Lionheart’s. Price’s incarnation of the spurned actor is purposefully depthless; it is all surface. While it may have been labelled ‘high camp,’61 Price’s performance as a psycho-without-psychology is better described, in my view, as pure theatricality. Price/Lionheart’s theatricality exposes disciplinarian horror’s symbolic simplicity as the staging of orgiastic moralizing. Michele Soavi’s Stage Fright (1987, aka Deliria) offers perhaps the most extreme example of the actor as psycho-without-psychology. As in a number of other films discussed above, Soavi’s film revolves around an insane thespian who ruthlessly kills members of a theatre company. The difference here is that there is no explanation whatsoever as to why this fugitive from an insane asylum chooses to slaughter actors. And, in fact, there is only one reference to the fact that he is an actor gone mad: neither the cause of his madness nor the reason for his revenge is ever made clear. All this psycho-actor seems to want is to appear centre stage and indulge in a performance of sadistic carnage until the bloody spectacle has exhausted its Dionysian energy and returned to the stability of Apollonian death. The psycho-killer is but a poor player who slashes and slaughters his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. Conclusion Through this reading of theatricality in Grand Guignol cinema I wish to offer a heuristic strategy for further explorations of this phenomenon in

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fictional horror beyond my immediate corpus of study. My claim here is obviously not that all horror films function the same way. Many horror films do not include retributive villains whose horrific deeds serve the ironic purpose of neutralizing horror. But I would propose that a number of horror films, from Freaks (1932), House of Wax (1953), and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964) to Halloween (1978), Silence of the Lambs (1991), and Saw ( James Wan, 2004), do rely on the theatricality of the villain and the victim to expose the paradox found in the works examined above. Cinematic tales of terror that acknowledge their theatrical antecedents, explicitly or implicitly, do so in order to comment on a common tension in horror cinema between, on the one hand, overindulgence in sex, violence, and deception and, on the other hand, a ferocious compulsion to contain and punish such behaviour. Of course, this tension is not causally arranged along a chronological axis. The punishing gesture does not necessarily follow the immoral action in linear progression. Rather, the two are often superimposed, as meaningless brutality and cruel retribution can be performed simultaneously by, and on, the same actors. It is not surprising then that Linda Williams would identify horror as a sadomasochistic genre, snuggly nestled between pornography’s active sadism and melodrama’s passive masochism,62 for in fictional horror actor and spectator are indistinguishably intertwined in a play of pain and pleasure. The lewdly moralistic horror film is nothing but a grotesquely refined tragicomedy where Dionysus and Apollo are rivals for the leading role as the sadomasochistic hero.

NOTES 1 David Beech and John Roberts, The Philistine Controversy (London: Verso, 2002), 182; original emphasis. 2 Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), xi. 3 Michael R. Booth, English Melodrama (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1965), 84. 4 Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007), 12–13. 5 See Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1993). 6 Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 111. 7 If as Hammer auteur Terence Fisher has said, horror films are ‘fairy tales for adults’ (cited by Paul Leggett, in Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion

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( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 12), then it only makes sense that there would be (at least) two types of horror films: those focusing on fear of the mother, the ‘monstrous-feminine,’ and those focusing on fear of the father, the ‘monstrous-paternal.’ For as Bruno Bettelheim argues, the fairy tale deals with the child’s overarching fear: the fear of the parents, whom the child loves and hates; see Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976), 111–23. The fear of being swallowed up by the overbearing mother and persecuted by the vengeful father makes for two types of fairy tale monsters – the witch and the dragon – and by extension, also two types of horror film monsters: the Blob and Dr Hannibal Lecter. 8 See E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence, 2000), esp. 91–2. My thanks to my co-editor Jeremy Maron for drawing my attention to Jones’s book. 9 While party-line Foucauldian readings of disciplinary discourse would tend to be concerned with the subjugation of those who are at the mercy of the controlling gaze, it is important to keep in mind that at the centre of Discipline and Punish (1975), stands a villain who is positioned as the bearer of ‘the eye of power’; see Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power,’ Semiotext(e) 3/2 (1978): 6–19. As Terence Ball tellingly observes, ‘[the] genealogical approach is brilliantly and dramatically applied in Discipline and Punish, in which Foucault traces the origins of our own “carceral society” to various late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century humanitarians and reformers. The main villain of the piece is Jeremy Bentham, whose plan for a “panopticon” prison provides Foucault with his central metaphor.’ Terence Ball, Reappraising Political Theory: Revisionist Studies in the History of Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 159; emphasis added. 10 David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 901, 920. 11 For discussions on the paradox of tragedy, see e.g., Amy Price, ‘Nietzsche and the Paradox of Tragedy,’ British Journal of Aesthetics 38/4 (1998): 384–93; Kurt Weinberg, ‘Nietzsche’s Paradox of Tragedy,’ Yale French Studies no. 38 (1967): 251–66; and Christopher Williams, ‘Is Tragedy Paradoxical?’ British Journal of Aesthetics 38/1 (1998): 47–62. 12 Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Everest House, 1980), 368. 13 Horror films are often criticized for claiming to denounce brutal violence while simultaneously indulging in it. For instance, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone dismisses the psycho-thriller Untraceable (2008) on these very grounds: ‘The perpetrators of the script think they’re taking the high moral ground, showing us how we’re degenerating into a society of

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15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

sadistic voyeurs ever ready to log on to the suffering of others. And how are they doing this? By making a movie, directed with graphic intensity by Gregory Hoblit (Fracture), that shoves the torture right in our faces while inviting us to feel superior.’ But of course the contradiction that Travers identifies is, in fact, just part and parcel of the paradox of the stage and screen tale of terror, in which Dionysian blood and gore go hand in hand with Apollonian self-righteousness. See http://www.rollingstone.com/ reviews/movie/11693796/review/18067067/untraceable; accessed 29 May 2009. Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade (New York: Norton, 1963), 230. Indeed, the term ‘Grand Guignol’ is most commonly associated with horror tales that deal not with ghostly apparitions and supernatural forces, but rather with grotesque people indulging in sadistic sexuality, pathological persecution, and perverse performances. Noël Carroll is, in fact, quite unequivocal in excluding the Grand Guignol from his definition of ‘Art Horror’ precisely because of the genre’s focus on the all-too-human tale of terror and its lack of paranormal elements: ‘though gruesome, Grand Guignol requires sadists rather than [supernatural] monsters’; see Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990), 15. This is why horror films that are labelled Grand Guignol are generally not movies about vampires, spectres, or extraterrestrial aliens, but rather about those characters who wallow in lurid violence rooted in human insanity and flaunting ‘injustice, cruelty, and lust.’ See Rick Worland, The Horror Film: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 36. Gorer, The Life and Ideas of the Marquis de Sade, 230. John M. Callahan, ‘The Ultimate in Theater of Violence,’ Themes in Drama 13 (1991): 167. Havelock Ellis, Psychology of Sex (London: Home Farm Books, 2008 [1933]), 171. As Hand and Wilson surmise (in Grand-Guignol, 71–2), seeing a health professional as they entered the theatre, spectators would be ‘left wondering whether what they were about to witness would make them lose their selfcontrol or their dinners.’ Gilles Deleuze, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 55. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 66. Ibid., 64.

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25 As Deleuze writes, ‘the masochist manipulates the woman into the ideal state for the performance of the role he has assigned to her’ (ibid., 124). 26 J.P. Telotte, Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 84. 27 Ibid., 85. 28 John Elsom, Erotic Theatre (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 157. 29 Gregory William Mank, Hollywood Cauldron: Thirteen Horror Films from the Genre’s Golden Age ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001), 146. 30 Although the theatre’s marquee reads ‘Théâtre de Mort,’ the voice-over narration correctly calls the Theatre of Death ‘Théâtre de la Mort.’ 31 The last performance at the Grand Guignol was in November 1962 (see Hand and Wilson, Grand-Guignol, 25). 32 I will not discuss the misogyny of horror as a genre. This is a topic that has occupied much critical space and about which I could not possibly contribute anything particularly original or insightful. For useful discussions on this issue, see Carol J. Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). 33 Steven Jay Schneider, Horror Film and Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Worst Nightmare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 150. 34 See Elizabeth Cowie on suspense in Hitchcock’s films, in ‘The Popular Film as a Progressive Text: A Discussion of Coma,’ in Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 128. 35 Stephen King, among others, agrees that horror and tragedy are related. See Tony Magistrale and Michael A. Morrison, A Dark Night’s Dreaming: Contemporary American Horror Fiction (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 1996), 3. 36 On this topic, see e.g., Richard John White, ‘The Individual and the Birth of Tragedy,’ in Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 54–77. 37 As Tom Weaver observes, ‘AIP recruited Herbert Lom to play an acidscarred Phantom-of-the-Opera type in their made-in-Spain Murders in the Rue Morgue’; see Tom Weaver, Return of the B Science Fiction and Horror Heroes: The Mutant Melding of Two Volumes of Classic Interviews ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999), 150. 38 Graeme Harper and Rob Stone, The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 105. 39 Anja Müller-Wood, The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 19.

Cinéma du Grand Guignol : Theatricality in the Horror Film 79 40 Marvin Carlson, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 81. 41 As Jacques Bourgaux argues in his book Possessions et simulacres:Aux sources de la théâtralité (Paris: Epi éditeurs, 1973), exorcism always contains an element of theatricality, for the casting out of the devil must also scare the audience into religious submission. Exorcists have always been stage directors: ‘Très tôt les exorcistes se transforment en metteurs en scène. Ils ont un message à faire passer mais les exorcisées sont peu dociles et les réactions du public les surprennent parfois. Il faut que les prêtres redoublent de conviction, trouvent de nouveaux effets spectaculaires’ (46). 42 Steve Chipnall, ‘Double Exposures: Observations on The Flesh and Blood Show,’ in Deborah Cartmell et al., eds., Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience (London: Pluto Press, 1997), 91. 43 A very similar plot line appears in the little-known Canadian film The Clown at Midnight ( Jean Pellerin, 1998) in which a group of theatre students is recruited by a drama teacher (Margot Kidder) to restore an old opera house. Again, the young actors are dispatched one after the other, and again the killer is revealed to be a jealous old man (Christopher Plummer) who had killed his unfaithful opera-signer wife and framed her lover. Again the ‘innocent victims’ are deemed guilty for their indulgence in the theatrical pleasures of dressing up, making pranks, playing violent games, and of course, having sex. 44 Robert Murphy, Geoff Brown, and Alan Burton, Directors in British and Irish Cinema: A Reference Companion (London: British Film Institute, 2006), 292. 45 Neil Sinyard, Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 23. 46 Harry M. Benshoff, Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 205. Benshoff is referring here to Lionheart as well as other similar Vincent Price characters. 47 See ibid., 214. 48 Robert Reynolds, From Camp to Queer: Re-making the Australian Homosexual (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 168. 49 As Aaron Taylor writes, ‘any melodramatic villain worth the upturn of his moustache will be adept in the art of trickery, disguise, and deception. In other words, he will be an actor’; see Aaron Taylor, ‘Cain’s Homecoming: Villainy and the Cinema,’ doctoral dissertation, University of Kent, 2005, 173, emphasis added. 50 Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort, The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 159. 51 William B. Toole is among those who recognize the absence of a ‘deep psychology’ in Richard III’s character. As Toole writes, ‘the delineation of

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60 61

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André Loiselle Richard’s character is ultimately conditioned more by his structural role in the overall design of the play than by psychological reality’; see William B. Toole, ‘The Motif of Psychic Division in Richard III,’ Shakespeare Survey 27 (1974): 25. There are, of course, counter-arguments. For instance, Bernard J. Paris insists that ‘Richard is not a motiveless villain, like Aaron the Moor; he is a suffering human being, like Shylock, whose behavior is monstrous but understandable.’ But such an argument does not hold water since Shakespeare’s Richard III is most certainly not a suffering human being; rather, he is a character in a play, like all other characters in all other plays. See Bernard J. Paris, Character as a Subversive Force in Shakespeare: The History and Roman Plays (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991), 33. See Frank Ardolino, ‘Metadramatic Grand Guignol in Theater of Blood,’ Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 15/2 (1991): 9. J.L. Styan, Modern Drama in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 112. Milly S. Barranger, Theatre, a Way of Seeing (Belmont: Wadsworth, 1986), 271. Styan, Modern Drama, 160. John Kenneth Muir, Horror Films of the 1970s ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 306. Ibid. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, translated by Mary C. Richards (New York: Grove, 1994), 90. The plays that compose Lionheart’s Shakespearean repertoire are Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Henry VI part 1, Titus Andronicus, and King Lear. Susan Sontag, ‘Approaching Artaud,’ in Edward Scheer, ed., Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 94. Jeffery Brown Martin refers to Price’s Theatre of Blood performance as ‘high camp’ in his book Ben Hecht, Hollywood Screenwriter (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984), 169. Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Genre, Gender, and Excess,’ in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, 6th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 737.

4 ‘I’ll Show Them!’ Creating Legal Spectacles in Revenge Cinema R.J. TOUGAS

[It] is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done. – Lord Hewart, R. v. Sussex Justices, Ex parte McCarthyl 1

Widely considered a principle of natural justice, the above axiom sets out a standard designed to preserve the legitimacy of legal authority in courtroom practice in the Western adversarial process.2 Lord Hewart’s probably familiar phrase posits two central premises. First, it expresses a preoccupation with form for its own sake – a legal decision’s just appearance is as significant as the justness of its actual content. The second premise then follows – justice must be witnessed. Lord Hewart’s statement does not require that justice-making be viewable but demands it actually be viewed. The justness of legal practice is revealed by having those external to a legal dispute observe the court’s procedures, assess their efficiency, and where necessary, provide regular comment and criticism to ensure accountability and restraint in judicial action.3 Because the standing of courtroom justice is, in part, reliant on the spectacle of its procedures, legal practice can only be just when it is effectively designed to be seen. Although the need for openness and publicity is cited above with reference to ritualized and formal courtroom trials, there is little reason to resist applying it to other justice-making methods such as revenge. William Ian Miller, writing on talionic cultures, cites the desire for justice as one connected to the avenger’s relationship with those beyond the particular dispute: ‘There is an urge to poeticize justice, to make sure it is the stuff of good stories; the moral point, we believe, is enhanced when

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it elicits a triumphant smile, a small frisson at its perfection, as it surprises both its victim and the audience alike in its perfection, as it surprises both the victim and the audience alike in its aptness, at how perfectly it settles all outstanding accounts, banishing the hobgoblins of incommensurability.’4 Miller is even more explicit in his description of the public quality of revenge-made justice: ‘Revenge was seldom, if ever, a two-party affair; it was invariably played before an audience, and much of the satisfaction one took in one’s own revenge was “caught,” like a disease, or like laughter, from the response you observed in others to your actions. If they liked your performance, then you most likely would like it too; if they did not, it would be like ashes in your mouth.’5 While the trading of harms is characteristic to vengeance, Miller emphasizes the need for reprisal to be seen and acknowledged by those outside the dispute. And this demand for confirmation of self-achieved justice is not unique to Miller. In describing the performed and popular nature of legal punishment, legal scholar Jean Hampton notably relies on the conventions of the western film: Even people who seem to be seeking revenge on wrongdoers behave in ways which show that they want to make a moral point not only to the wrongdoer, but to anyone who will listen. The hero seeking revenge in a Western movie, for example, never simply shoots the bad guy in the back when he finds him – he always confronts the bad guy first (usually in the presence of other people) and tells him why he is about to die. Indeed, the movie would be unsatisfying if he didn’t make that communication. And surely, the hero’s desire to explain his actions is linked with his desire to convey to the bad guy and to others in society that the bad guy had ‘done him wrong.’6

Hampton’s repeated reference to ‘others’ refers to individuals within the western’s diegesis apart from the relevant dispute, for example, townsfolk. Her comments, however, also acknowledge the western as an experience felt by the movie spectator. Film exists foremost as an object for reception and the manner by which revenge-themed films are constructed to declare themselves to their audiences is of central importance in identifying the cinematic production of justice. Punishment is the tool of both law and vengeance; its justification transforming violence into justice.7 This analysis concerns how ostentatious spaces constructed in vengeance-themed cinema ensure that justice is ‘manifestly and undoubtedly’ seen to be done.8 After first considering

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how avengers turn themselves into declarative entities, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige (2006), Chan-wook Park’s Lady Vengeance (2005), and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) will be examined individually to consider how spaces for seeing justice created are respectively presented, inferred, and reflexively engaged. In each case, avengers utilize theatrical spaces to appeal to the higher standard of open justice described by Lord Hewart and, in turn, to encourage the recognition of just punishments. It is possible to mistake the need for outside acknowledgment in justicemaking as a demand for complete endorsement. Richard Shusterman elaborates on this distinction in the context of personal positions of principle – ‘As with aesthetic interpretation and evaluation, we want our friends and associates to understand our ethical perspectives and choices and see them as reasonable; but no longer is it so crucial that they accept them as universally right and valid for all.’9 Aesthetics and ethics become entwined in the construction of justice-making spaces by their shape and purpose. Miller similarly allows room for instances where actual approval does not accord with the avenger’s personal satisfaction. Without popular endorsement, vengeance may be disappointing to his vengeance takers, but at least not necessarily. The relationship between publicity and justicemaking is described by Miller as one of proscription – ‘The avenger is constrained in his revenge by his need to keep his legitimacy intact, to operate within limits that still make him, if not the good guy, at least not a villain.’10 These clarifications are essential to understanding that justice has the possibility of being recognized, even if it is not in accord with the style or content we might each have individually selected. A six-shooter or a samurai sword may not be our chosen means of resolving harms nor may it be what we consider the most efficient means of accounting for injury, but it remains possible to still identify the justice achieved. It is my position that the construction of spaces specifically for seeing is a crucial element in revenge cinema employed to satisfy our expectations for reading violent action as justly punishing. Wearing Your Harm on Your Sleeve In devising a means to demonstrate the production of justice, cinematic avengers may reconstitute themselves. An excellent example of this transformation can be found in another Christopher Nolan film – Batman Begins (2005). Multimillionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) suffers two childhood traumas. First, he is caught in a swarm of bats after falling

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into an abandoned well. Second, he witnesses his parents being gunned down in a Gotham City alley. As his parents entered the alley to avoid the bat-costumed performers of an opera that terrified young Bruce, the two traumas become entangled. Appropriately, when the adult Bruce Wayne commits himself to avenge his parents’ deaths against the criminal element that dominates Gotham, he costumes himself in the image of the bat. By doing so, Wayne embodies in his own figure an ironic reversal characteristic of poetic justice. The Batman inspires terror comparable to young Bruce Wayne’s fear of bats and, in turn, to the young man’s orphaning. While criminals are terrorized in a manner comparable to the traumatized child, the costume offers notoriety not just within Gotham City’s criminal community but in the popular press and the city at large. The spectacle of the Batman’s theatrical costume is an essential means to announce the justice-making intent behind his vigilante campaign. The description of harm, repetition, and spectacle in Batman Begins, and in the other films herein, undoubtedly brings to mind Cathy Caruth’s notions of trauma and ‘double-telling.’11 The presentation of an ostentatious revenge-space over Bruce Wayne’s figure recalls Caruth’s position that the comprehension of traumatic experience necessarily requires its expression to another.12 Interestingly, Caruth affords special attention to acts of violence as means for achieving shared experience. She describes the scene in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959), where the Japanese man (Eiji Okada) slaps the French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) while in a restaurant as both a moment of access to the traumatic past and for its exchange between individuals. This slap, a ‘shock of sight,’ provides a necessary separation between the retelling of the past and the reality of existing in the present while at the same time creating a display of violence and sound that calls the attention of others and expands the shared experience to those nearby as well.13 Costumes figure prominently in the other films of principle interest herein. In The Prestige, two rival magicians, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), are locked in a violent, vengeance-minded feud in which acts of revenge generally consist of thwarting their adversary’s stage-performed illusion. Remarkably, the assumed disguises are not designed to fully deceive, but to gain proximity to their opponent, ruin the trick, and if possible, inflict some injury. Costumes and false facial hair are employed, but when each illusionist is close enough to his opponent, he reveals his true identity by his voice, look, or disfigurement, as in the case of Borden’s missing fingers.

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Deceiving an illusionist is itself a small revenge, but revealing the ruse is necessary to satisfy justice’s need for publicity. These disclosures come as revelations to both magician and film spectator and their publicity is contingent on those costumes’ only partial ability to convey a misapprehension that both men value as illusionists. Lady Vengeance similarly combines constructed costumes and inflicted injury to announce the pursuit of justice. Geum-ja (Yeong-ae Lee), the film’s protagonist seeking vengeance on her kidnapping, murdering, and betraying former lover, is depicted during her initial release from prison and in flashbacks to her time incarcerated as simply an attractive woman. Once released and committed to her vengeance quest, her appearance changes significantly. Most prominent to her avenging persona is her often-commented-upon blood-red eye shadow – a reminder of the figurative blood on her hands as an accomplice to her corrupting former partner and a referent to the harm she must revenge. Other changes, such as her pale make-up, black trench coat, high-heeled boots, and ornate gun, reveal her as dangerous, severe, and foreboding. Geumja’s preoccupation with style is openly acknowledged when asked about the ‘fanciness’ of her antiquated and elaborately adorned handgun – ‘It has to be pretty,’ she responds, ‘Everything should be pretty.’ Yet while Geum-ja often strikes the pose of a confident and proficient avenger, she evidences at the same time her past harms in her present physicality. Geum-ja’s pursuit for justice through revenge continues to expose her to injury and her split lip and bandaged pinkie, as Richard Peña observes, demonstrate bodily the past offences committed upon her mentally, psychically, and emotionally.14 This practice of revealing the avengers’ past harms through present injury is often repeated in Kill Bill as well.15 Therein, the harms to the main character, the Bride (Uma Thurman), in being denied a life other than as an assassin, in the attempted murder on her, in the murder of her wedding party, in the loss of her unborn baby, are regularly embodied as cuts, bruises, and other physical injuries incurred during her pursuit for vengeance. Such costumes and injuries create spaces about avengers for other characters and film viewers to witness and acknowledge their pursuit of justice. Still other declaring guises exist. An ‘inexpressive persona’ is identified by Lee Clark Mitchell as a central component of western heroes who value action over words.16 Their silence becomes the most dramatic aspect of their character and the conspicuous absence of their voice serves only to more greatly emphasize their appearance, be it their body language, costume, or physical injuries. This characteristic stoicism extends

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beyond the western genre to other cinematic avengers – Wilson (Terence Stamp), the titular Englishman in The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999); Walker (Lee Marvin) in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967); Matsu the Scorpion (Meiko Kaji) of Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (Shunya Ito, 1972). Tattoos offer the same declarative function in Nolan’s Memento (2000) and in Martin Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991) in which, as Richard Sherwin notes, ‘He [Max Cady (Robert De Niro)] wears his biblical mission in his flesh: tattooed, stained indelibly, mixed with his blood.’17 Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988) opens with its avenger, the Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close), dressing and putting on make-up and concludes with her crying as she firmly wipes her heavy make-up from her face, her revenge plot over. Stevie Simkin observes the eponymous cyborg (Peter Weller) of Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987) as demonstrating bodily the tension between man and machine and, therefore, personal revenge and impersonal legality.18 In each case, an ostentatious space is created about the avenger that encourages attention and, each in his or her particular way, demonstrates engagement in producing justice. Staging Justice Turning from avengers’ physical appearances to the environments they occupy, spaces in revenge cinema frequently address directly justice’s need for public recognition. Nolan’s The Prestige is exemplary in this regard, as the vast majority of the vengeances taken in the film literally occur on the stage and before an audience, including the repeated compromise and theft of the illusion, ‘The Transported Man.’ With the exception of the final vengeances, all of the revenges are presented in the specifically public context of the theatrical stage. Under the proscenium arch, they are spectacles to be viewed and, by each trying to outdo the other and make the same illusion their own, the revenges refer back to the rivalry of two specific individuals. While upstaging Angier in his ‘Professor’ alias, Borden goes so far as to address the theatre’s audience, ridiculing Angier and encouraging them to leave the theatre to view his version of ‘The Transported Man,’ confident that they will prefer his trick and his vengeance. The magician’s stage is revealed in The Prestige to be an eminently suitable space to locate the practice of justice-making. Just as the offending harm exists as an unfair exertion of power elevating the offender and reducing its victim, the stage literally elevates the illusionist above

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others and identifies him as the master of that world. And just as poetic justice requires some artful reversal to balance the unevenness created by the transgression, Borden and Angier each intervene on the other’s illusions to overturn that relationship of power and reduce the stagemaster again to powerless victim or, still worse, another mystified audience member. In each instance, these revenges are orchestrated for an audience’s reception and The Prestige promotes the presence of the theatre audience by acknowledging their reaction, be it through the laughter of the failed bullet-catch, the screams during the injuring bird-cage collapse, the applause and accolades of the Professor’s hijacking, or the gasps that follow Angier’s incomparable ‘The Real Transported Man.’ In each case, the public nature of the justice Borden and Angier seek is literally described in the film’s diegesis. Justice as ostentatious spectacle is actually placed on a stage to be viewed and considered; the reactions of the witnessing audiences explicitly conveyed. It is Angier’s ultimate revenge on Borden to frame him for his death, removing him from the magician’s stage and placing him at the centre of other ostentatiously public spaces – the courtroom and the gallows. The scenes recall Milner S. Ball’s assertion that ‘something of the sense in which the public may be theatrically necessary may underlie the observation of one court that the judicial process “does not unfold legally and normally” when it “takes place behind closed doors.”’19 For Ball, courts necessarily require an audience as they are a form of theatre – ‘a “judicial theatre” or “theatre of justice.”’ In these environments, Borden remains the central figure on display but is far from its master. He is again elevated, with the judge and witnesses, high above floor level, yet he is ironically stripped of his power and knowledge, costumed in drab prison wear, and bewildered at being unable to defend himself against a crime he knows he did not commit. Rendered powerless in this ‘judicial theatre,’ Borden is imprisoned and ultimately hanged. His restraints for his execution recall the restraints used on Angier’s wife during the originating harm, her drowning in a water-filled tank. Further, the gallows Borden stands on is yet another elevated stage for which he is the central performer on display in another justice-making spectacle. Angier orchestrates Borden’s demise by transferring his vengeance from one stage, the theatre, to another, the courts. In doing so, The Prestige confirms the public nature of justice-making and its equal application to both objective legal contexts and self-achieving vengeance. The concluding revenge of The Prestige does not occur in the courts or on the theatrical stage, but below and behind it. There, Borden and

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his disguised twin Fallon’s double lives are revealed to Angier. Fallon, unconcealed and resembling Borden, derides Angier’s unwillingness to make the sacrifices necessary to be a great magician and shoots him in the stomach. Angier responds with shock, more at the verbal attack than the physical one, and his eyes canvass the glass illusionist’s tanks that line either side of them. Fallon resists acknowledging his surroundings but eventually his intense gaze moves off the dying Angier to the dark forms suspended in the many tanks. The shot tracks leftward, revealing the interior of one of the tanks and a drowned Angier duplicate staring towards the scene of Fallon’s revenge with unblinking dead eyes. The implication, given Angier’s plan to frame Borden and the multitude of tanks, is that each tank contains a drowned Angier clone bearing grim witness. Angier has thus unwittingly gone so far as to construct an audience for even this final revenge. He outdoes his rival by having found a way to surrender his very life again and again, creating a gallery that reveals to Fallon his sacrifices towards besting his enemy and being the superior illusionist. Yet their presence is poetically tragic; these dead figures display Angier’s dedication to his profession and his vengeance while at the same time observe, with us, Angier’s final, permanent death at the hands of his rival ostensibly returned from the grave as well. Ultimately, the vengeful acts in The Prestige are dominantly focused upon the credibility, acumen, and reputations of Borden and Angier as magicians. These are qualities for which each surely has an internal sense, but they are more broadly characteristics that require popular confirmation. Their esteem as illusionists, like the process of justicemaking itself, is something that requires observation and appreciation to be garnered. Therefore, The Prestige draws a natural parallel between the theatrical nature of stage performers and the public requirements to justice-making in the ‘judicial theatre.’ By embedding the desire for justice between two rival magicians, the film is able to fulfil justice’s demand for publicity within its diegesis. Theatrical performances and literal stages, however, appear infrequently in vengeance cinema. Instead, many films are left to infer their theatrical nature through their revenge spaces. Making Justice-Stages The diegetically located stages and audiences contained in The Prestige are sporadic in Lady Vengeance. The film does express the centrality of theatrical contexts at its opening. A preacher and his troupe, each dressed as a Santa Claus, prepares for a performance to welcome Geum-ja back into

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a free society after serving a sentence for kidnapping and murdering a young boy, a crime masterminded by her unpunished former lover, Baek (Min-sik Choi). A long shot of the scene reveals the preacher and his Santas standing in front of a large landscape mural painted onto the side of the prison. The filmmakers identify it as a ‘back drop’ where some grand, spectacular event would be expected.20 Other literal performances occur, such as when Geum-ja reconstructs the kidnapped boy’s suffocation to an observing news media or the imagined re-enactment of a pimp’s strangling by Geum-ja’s cellmate, Kim Yang-hee (Yeong-ju Seo). Small performances such as these repeatedly recall and emphasize the larger, more extensive performance of Geum-ja’s revenge. Geum-ja’s justice-making activities are more commonly evoked in the staged and theatrical environments of the mise en scène. Often she is placed in positions to be actively viewed by other film characters, such as when she kneels on the living-room floor in front of the murdered boy’s parents to cut off her finger in atonement or when she places herself in the same position to read her prepared address to the adoptive parents of her estranged daughter. In the latter scene, Geum-ja nearly approaches the position of direct address to the filmic audience. The fourth wall is, in fact, often broken in Lady Vengeance, as characters are frequently blocked to look and speak directly to the filmic audience, enhancing the film’s staged sensibility and promoting their association as figures explicitly presented for our scrutiny. In their DVD commentary, the filmmakers note a variety of theatrical-looking scenes, such as Geum-ja’s presentation of her evidence of Baek’s murder of numerous children to their parents and families from a slightly elevated teacher’s stage. Perhaps the most explicitly theatrical scene occurs when Geum-ja’s employer, a baker, recites the story of the car accident that injured him. He stands in explicitly direct address, the staged aspect of the scene emphasized by an actual spotlight that frames him to the exclusion of other surrounding content. Reception of these scenes is also conspicuously called to mind in Lady Vengeance, as characters are repeatedly positioned in lateral rows across the frame, as if they were spectators themselves positioned in a row of theatre seats. Such moments are evoked in various scenes such as when the ransom videos filmed by Baek are first watched by Geum-ja and her accomplices or when the families of Baek’s victims await their turns to torture him. In each case, the film audience is watched by film characters, making explicit the act of seeing. The blocking of characters is, however, only one technique utilized in Lady Vengeance to demonstrate Guem-ja’s justice-making enterprise.

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Theatrical spaces are also implied by the film’s mise en scène. Having already noted some examples of literal and figurative stages contained in Lady Vengeance, it is the repeated occurrence of unobstructed, flat spaces and the presence therein of curtains that create environments for action that specifically demand conscious attention like the theatre stages of The Prestige. Domestic scenes where Geum-ja displays herself to different families conspicuously include the presence of window curtains in the mise en scène. Notably, the scene where the ransom videos are first watched even contains a framed picture of curtains above the viewers, again evoking a theatrical space.21 The location where Geum-ja first considers killing Baek by shooting him while he is tied to a chair importantly evokes a stage environment by its floorboards, large open space, and curtained background. Once Geum-ja realizes that other children have been kidnapped and murdered by Baek, she then tears down the curtain backdrop, allowing daylight to flood into the space. At the same time that she decides to delay her revenge and honour the vengeance claims of the families of these children, Geum-ja also compromises the theatrical quality of the space. Once the room no longer functions as a place for justice-making, those aspects that encourage its explicit viewing are destroyed by her. Ultimately, a space is specifically designed and constructed to contain the vengeance of Geum-ja and the mourning families. In the classroom of an abandoned school, Baek is bound to a chair centred on a translucent plastic sheet that will later collect his blood. The sheet expressly demarcates the area as a stage for violent reprisal. At each corner of the tarp is a fluorescent lamp resting on a chair, illuminating Baek from every angle and ensuring no detail is unrevealed. In this small performance space for violent revenge, Baek appropriately becomes both victim and star of Geum-ja’s fearsome theatre. Accordingly, Lady Vengeance culminates its theatrical evocations and encourages the viewer to assess its performance, fulfilling Miller’s vision of revenge as a process requiring popular inspection. While literal stages such as those in The Prestige, the prom stage in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976), the ‘Théâtre du Grand-Guignol’ setting of the horror films discussed in André Loiselle’s chapter in this volume, or the seppuku mat in Harakiri (Masaki Kobayashi, 1962) appear infrequently in revenge cinema, evocations of bare, theatrical spaces that allow for an unencumbered performance by avenger and offender seem far more frequent. Park’s Oldboy (2003) concludes with competing avengers facing off on a catwalk-like space reminiscent of a fashion show runway.

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David Von Ancken’s Seraphim Falls (2006) ends with its two protagonists alone on the alkali flats, a barren and empty space for them to perform their vengeance drama to its conclusion. Point Blank concludes with another flat, bare space – a concrete courtyard complete with spotlights. In each their own manners, vengeance films bring their narratives to a close in spaces that strip away ancillary content and encourage attention to the punishments and equivalences pursued therein. Revenge themes appear so widespread in cinema that settings such as these potentially become indexical for justice-making processes themselves, making intertextual analyses of vengeance films necessary to further appreciate the public spectacle of creating justice cinematically. Screening Justice-Making While Tarantino’s Kill Bill does contain spectacular costumes and personas (the Bride’s various outfits and injuries) and literal stages (the dance floor on which she battles the Crazy 88s), what stands out are the intertextual references to film genres that regularly employ vengeance themes in their conventional narratives.22 Maximillian Le Cain argues that the function of genre is central to understanding how Kill Bill operates. Without necessarily agreeing with his conclusions, Le Cain’s observations about the structure of the film are often insightful, describing the Bride as ‘a Jane-of-all-genres’ who proceeds through ‘the chambara (Sonny Chiba), the yakuza movie (Lucy Liu), the Kung Fu film (Gordon Liu), the Western (Michael Madsen), [and] the Blaxploitation picture (Vivica A. Fox).’23 He elaborates, ‘with every major character representing a genre, the Bride’s almost invariably violent encounter with each antagonist is Tarantino’s way of invoking and even explaining those genres and thus creating a stylistic plurality.’ For Le Cain, each of the Bride’s adversaries ‘are conscious symbols of their genre and carry with them the weight of its history.’ Without going so far as to suggest that the mobilization of such generic intertextuality explains these genres, which tend to share a narrative emphasis on revenge, Le Cain is correct in stating that, by invoking them, their respective histories summon their particular justice-making styles. Further, it must be acknowledged that it is the filmic spectators who are called upon to engage their generic knowledge of the cinema and rely upon their expectations of particular revenge-plot conventions. Kill Bill’s intertextual references therefore create explicitly ostentatious spaces that do not merely demand that the viewer evaluate the justice

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being produced, but consider it in the context of a specific standard or style appropriate to the genre invoked.24 This is not to say that a viewer of Kill Bill is required to have an understanding of the specific films referenced. Stephen Prince maintains that ‘self-reflexiveness depends on the viewer’s knowledge of the norm that is being violated’ but comes short of requiring full and exact knowledge.25 Greater familiarity with the films or genres cited will likely make the claim to open justice easier to appreciate; however, even rough understandings or mere awarenesses of the existence of specific genres may be sufficient to produce this reflexive perception. A given viewer may not know the conventions of a Kung Fu film, let alone actually have seen one, but the tropes of training towards a purpose or the desire of the hero to avenge the murder of her master may nonetheless be popularly recognizable. The mise en scène in Kill Bill also contains specific intertextual referents to past revenge films. Costumes are one such example. Most obviously, the Bride’s yellow-and-black track suit worn at the end of Vol. 1 emulates that worn by Billy Lo (Bruce Lee) in Robert Clouse’s Game of Death (1978). Game of Death is a martial arts revenge film involving a movie star who fakes his own death after an attempt on his life and then seeks vengeance on the criminal syndicate that attempted to murder him. By wearing the track suit, the Bride recalls another avenger and doubles her ostentatious quality by both engaging in her justice-making endeavour and by recalling the effort of another. The House of Blue Leaves, where the climax of Vol. 1 occurs, appears to be an elaboration of a restaurant depicted in Chang-hwa Jeong’s The Five Fingers of Death (1972).26 That film involves a martial arts student participating in a tournament and then avenging the murder of his former master, with the restaurant appearing when the student first clashes with members from a rival school. With its open-stepped staircase, elevated walkway, square paper screens, and rectangular-designed guardrails, the House of Blue Leaves bears a strong resemblance to a set in The Five Fingers of Death, thereby encouraging it and the action taken within it to be seen, re-seen, and scrutinized as related to the process of producing justice. Similar observations can be made between the final battle involving the Bride and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) in the House of Blue Leaves’ snowcovered garden and an early scene in Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973). Another revenge-themed film, Lady Snowblood follows a young woman, Yuki (Meiko Kaji), on her quest to avenge the death of her family by four criminals. The scene in Kill Bill, Vol. 1 again ostentatiously

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contextualizes itself as concerned with the process of finding justice by establishing a scene reminiscent of another, earlier revenge tale. With her kimono, her hair worn up, and her sword hidden in a short cane like Yuki’s sword concealed in her umbrella, O-Ren poses like the protagonist of Lady Snowblood. Even the garden’s snow resembles that at the opening of Lady Snowblood, seeming more like white sand or salt than actual snow. Its clearly artificial presence is obviously intended in the scene, as the snow appearing in the later scene where the Bride dumps another of Bill’s protégés at a hospital appears far more realistic in texture. Again, the film makes spectacular a scene of justice-making through a cinematic referent that involves its own revenge processes and stylistic expectations. Kill Bill further demonstrates the public nature of its justice by utilizing iconic shot compositions from other revenge films. A recurring demonstration of this is the very low-angle shot of the Bride’s assassins, the Deadly Vipers, looking down upon her at the time of her originating harm – the ‘Massacre at Two Pines.’ The shot refers to an almost identical composition in Lady Snowblood, where four different offenders look down at the dying husband of Yuki’s mother. This view recurs throughout Kill Bill, sometimes with all four Vipers in frame and on other occasions with each of them alone. These single images are frequently flashbacked to when the Bride meets one of the Vipers, always remaining compositionally consistent and doubly referring to the ‘Massacre at Two Pines’ and to Lady Snowblood. Similar contributions are used to identify others as offending parties, such as when Sophie, one of Bill’s protégés, is introduced, or in demonstrating the ironic reversal of poetic justice, as when the Bride is depicted from a similar view looking down at her various victims. Kill Bill thereby expands the cinematic expression of open justice by evoking it through cinematography as well as by mise en scène. Kill Bill is riddled with cinematographic expressions of intertextual references to justice-making. The audacious split screen sequence of Kill Bill, Vol. 1 recalls the work of Brian De Palma and, more precisely, the revenge story of a bullied, humiliated, and telekinetic young girl in Carrie. Carrie is also evoked by the Bride’s hand outstretched from the grave of Paula Schultz in Vol. 2, recalling the hand of Carrie reaching out from beyond the grave at that film’s conclusion.27 Visual puns in Kill Bill may further elaborate on these techniques, as B. Ruby Rich cites Vol. 2’s scene of Budd, one of the Vipers, spitting on the to-be-buried-alive Bride as a referent to the most famous rape-revenge film of all – I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978).28 These visual techniques, particularly

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suitable to the cinema, create ostentatious spaces for seeing and reseeing the process of compensating harms and claiming justness. Audio practices in Kill Bill are also of central importance to establishing a justice-making process that calls attention to itself and demands consideration. The most striking of these techniques repeatedly occurs when the Bride is first reunited with a Viper. These scenes recall moments from The Five Fingers of Death where the protagonist meets an individual who wronged him. There, a siren-like wail occurs and, when he utilizes his ‘Iron Fist’ technique, his hands glow red.29 A comparable experience occurs in Kill Bill. When the Bride is faced with one her intended victims, the shot flushes red, and the same siren-like wail occurs. Through this intertextual, audio reference, the scene again declares itself as having a generic context with expectations for justice production and a visual referent that encourages attention. Soundtracking and scoring practices in Kill Bill also refer to other revenge genres, as the film includes songs from Japanese revenge films Lady Snowblood and Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion and Ennio Morricone compositions that carry associations with the western and spaghetti western. Even sound effects, punch and sword clash noises taken from earlier Kung Fu films, assist in contextualizing the generic spaces depicted in Kill Bill as related to redressing harms. Such intertextual references demonstrate how the need for publicity in justice-making can be described through both filmic content itself and the techniques and practices particular to cinema. Just as the theatrical stage makes explicit the need to observe the production of justice, these reflexive references similarly rely on the ability of the film viewer to recognize filmic or generic contexts of justice-making. These situations make explicit our demand for demonstration by showing us what we are already familiar with. This quality likely need not be limited to the intertextual when referring to the cinema.30 The placement of a film in a specific genre may have architextual expectations that encourage spectator attention.31 Revenge narratives may have hypertextual components. Kill Bill, Lady Vengeance, Oldboy, Point Blank, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion, Batman Begins, and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas Meyer, 1982) might all be thought of as hypertexts of Alexandre Dumas’s hypotext, The Count of Monte Cristo, or even Homer’s The Odyssey. Film marketing may paratextually create expectations and awareness in film viewers entering the multiplex. If justice requires it be seen and such variety exists to draw attention to ostentatious displays, then Kill Bill ultimately suggests through its travels in vengeance cinema that film and its viewing

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may intrinsically be linked to the practice of producing justice by the inspiration of judgment. Cine-Legal Displays Much of this analysis concerns the convergence between legal viewing and cinematic spectatorship – a topic of some recurring interest in law and film scholarship. Orit Kamir conceives of that viewing as a form of active participation, describing the visions presented by both the legal system and by the cinema as not being passively accepted but as having its content vetted by its audience. As already noted, the courts are natural and expected venues for this scrutiny, but Kamir places special emphasis on such practices for film viewers, maintaining: ‘Judgment is often an activity not merely portrayed but actively performed by films, together with their (constructed and/or actual) viewers; it is often a function of film’s constitution of a community-of-viewers and its engagement in social constitution of primary values, institutions and concepts.’32 A given film’s commitment to specific goals or concerns is no surprise, but how cinema goes about creating a community engaged in this practice is unresolved. Unpacking the legal nature of film spectatorship is essential to identifying cinema as an inherently legal forum for justicemaking. Ball’s notions of a ‘judicial theatre’ necessitates an audience which he locates in courtroom spectators generally and more specifically in its legal decision makers – the judge and jury.33 Without reference to Ball, Carol Clover draws a related connection between the resemblance and function of cinema audiences and courtroom juries. In Clover’s experience, courtroom spaces presented in the cinema leave the jury box largely undeveloped and/or unrepresented – ‘The reason that juries are largely unseen in trial movies and the jury system largely uncontested within the regime of cinema is surely that we understand the jury to constitute a kind of necessary blank space in the text, one reserved for us.’34 She cites the primacy of juries in the popular consciousness in specifically American terms. Clover quotes Alexis de Tocqueville, who maintains that ‘so fundamental is the jury in the American imaginary that it turns up in and structures even the sheerest forms of play.’35 Further, Clover agrees with his observation, declaring ‘we are a nation of jurors, and we have created an entertainment system that has us see just about everything that matters – from corporate greed to child custody – from precisely that vantage and in those structural terms.’36 Being an American

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is to therefore be a juror and to question, evaluate, and decide upon virtually any topic or issue. Faced with conflicts and denouements, Clover supposes that filmic narratives and formal techniques have developed to encourage American film spectators to relate to movies in this legally critical fashion. Clover’s observations are problematic in the sense that they so heavily connect juristic thinking and cinema viewing with American culture, yet representations of open justice and the explicit desire to engage active spectatorship in revenge films appear across world cinema. While it might be argued that this simply expresses the dominance of classical Hollywood cinema, it should be remembered that this principle originates from a British context and has been adopted as legal principle across the globe, contemplating jurisdictions that rely much less heavily on jury systems. Moreover, Miller’s attention to the need for publicity in revenge contemplates talionic cultures that significantly pre-date American jurisprudence and culture. While Clover may be correct specifically in the American context, Lord Hewart seems to express a baser premise in justice making – that being a juror does not simply require assessing witnesses or considering a particular accused, but standing in judgment of the process itself, regardless of that system’s particular form. Arrangements that encourage that viewing naturally, then, have an easier claim to the justness and legitimacy of their punishments. The process of observing, considering, and judging is bolstered by actual analysis of juristic behaviour. W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman argue that a desired jury verdict is most often achieved where evidence is presented in a manner that best conforms to an overall story form. Through their research and experimentation, Bennett and Feldman maintain that factual components to specific crimes or skills in advocacy, such as witness sequencing, diversionary tactics, or body language, are not productively considered alone – ‘Effectiveness is more a function of whether these and other resources can be employed selectively at critical junctures in the development of the overall story about a crime.’37 Their analysis describes a jury positioned to receive a courtroom story very similar to the story listeners of their experiments and, coincidentally, especially similar to a film audience: Neither the juror nor our story audience could question the storytellers directly or ask for clarification of their accounts. They had to be content to judge the stories as they were presented. Unexplained details, gaps in the stories, confusing linkages, and competing definitions for the same

‘I’ll Show Them!’ Legal Spectacles in Revenge Cinema 97 structural elements simply remain for the audience to puzzle over. Trial cases and our simple stories are also similar in the fact that the audience members understand that the accounts must be regarded either as true or as probably false, and, in the end, they must commit themselves to either believing or not believing them. These similarities suggest that jurors, like the story audience, must evaluate trial cases according to structural considerations, and that they will pay attention to the same story features for the same reasons.38

Bennett and Feldman’s jurors and story audiences are distinguishable from film audiences in that they will actually be called upon to make judgments with real and significant consequences, but they are importantly alike in that those judgments are generated principally through narratives that demonstrate and justify their own positions chiefly through a sense of coherency and explicability. Moreover, the similarities in how narratives are consumed in trials and cinemas may reveal that making decisions about those narratives is an inevitable and admirable practice of the receiver. A parallel may be drawn to Martha Nussbaum’s concept of the ‘literary imagination’ – where the act of becoming engaged in a work of literature is a founding quality for good jurists because it requires that we ‘concern ourselves with the fates of others like ourselves, attaching ourselves to them both by sympathetic friendship and by empathetic identification.’39 As such, my considerations of the theatricality of justicemaking spaces differ from Aaron Taylor’s reflections on theatricality and film acting articulated elsewhere in this anthology. While, according to Taylor, the theatrical performance of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) interdicts empathy, the staging of justice in the revenge films studied here creates aesthetic conditions that encourage the spectator to sympathize with the avenger’s pursuit for justice without necessarily agreeing with the means employed. Cinema may therefore become a forum for judgment simply by its presentation of narratives and conflicts. This analysis posits that this activity is elevated to the higher standard of open justice by its ostentatious practices for active reception and consideration by film spectators. Sights and sounds specifically designed for self-conscious reception elaborate on a pre-existing capacity in narrative cinema to elicit judgment that may not be sufficient alone to describe justice. By engaging with the theatrical and intertextual displays described earlier, revenge cinema ensures that the justices created therein are manifestly and undoubtedly seen. This aspect of a justice-making style, coupled with the centrality of narrative in

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legal processes, the need for jurists to find engagement and coherence in narrative, and similarities between juries and film audiences suggests that demands for publicity in legal processes and justice may be similarly fulfilled in the movie theatre as in the courtroom, making cinema attendance a potentially spectatorial event in the legal sense.

NOTES 1 [1924] 1 KB 256, [1923] All ER 233. 2 Lord Hewart’s statement, sometimes referred to as publicity or the principle of open justice, has been accepted as authority in many jurisdictions that follow the English adversarial tradition, such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, and among a variety of case law involving diverse legal topics. 3 J.J. Spigelman C.J., ‘Seen to Be Done,’ Keynote Address to the 31st Australian Legal Convention, Canberra, Australia, 7 Oct. 1999. Available at http:// thewislangcase.com/files/folders/documents/entry24.aspx, 9–14; accessed 31 March 2008. Spigelman C.J.’s keynote address astutely enumerates a series of characteristics, rules, obligations, and purposes contained within this principle that emphasize the importance of publicity in the relationship between the court system and the society it operates within. 4 William Ian Miller, Eye for an Eye (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 63; emphasis added. 5 Ibid., 151; emphasis added. 6 Jean Hampton, ‘The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,’ in Joel Feinberg and Hyman Gross, eds., Philosophy of Law (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991), 711–12; original emphasis. 7 For further consideration on the role of violence in law and formal legal practice, consider Robert M. Cover, ‘Violence and the Word,’ Yale Law Journal 95 ( July 1986): 1601–29. 8 This chapter principally refers to four examples of contemporary revenge films with references to many others. By ‘revenge cinema,’ I refer to films that make the pursuit of revenge or self-achieved justice the film’s narrative premise and/or the primary motivation of the principle character(s). Naturally, it is a challenging body of films to collect as they at once cross a multitude of identifiable genres and modes while claiming obvious generic significance to varying genres, such as westerns, chambaras, Kung Fu films, and many others. Establishing definite borders around ‘revenge cinema’ is not the goal of this analysis. Rather it is to describe a principle and its

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9 10 11

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cinematic expression that may usefully contribute to identifying films connected to justice making. Richard Shusterman, Pragmatic Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 245. Miller, Eye for an Eye, 157. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7. In short, Caruth describes ‘double-telling’ as the repeated oscillation between an unbearably traumatic offence inflicted in the past and the confounding experience of surviving it in the present. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 42, 45. Richard Peña, ‘Commentaries,’ Lady Vengeance (DVD), dir. Chan-wook Park (Montreal: Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm Inc.), 2006. It is also interesting to note the significance of Geum-ja’s reattached pinkie, appearing prominently in many scenes. Miller notes that the pinkie is the most expensive finger after the thumb in bodily injury cases, as it provides grip strength for which other fingers are never able compensate. The significance of the pinkie in this regard has long been recognized – its removal historically being the penalty for stealing in some cultures. Miller, Eye for an Eye, 124. For ease of reference, I will refer to both films simply as Kill Bill and make specific reference to each volume where necessary. Lee Clark Mitchell, ‘Violence in the Film Western,’ in J. David Slocum, ed., Violence and American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2001), 179. Richard K. Sherwin, ‘Cape Fear: Law’s Inversion and Cathartic Justice,’ University of San Francisco Law Review 30 (1996): 1033. Stevie Simkin, Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 63. Milner S. Ball, ‘The Play’s the Thing: An Unscientific Reflection on Courts under the Rubric of Theatre,’ Stanford Law Review 28/1 (1975): 86; original emphasis. I specifically use the term ‘filmmakers’ to acknowledge the joint efforts of the director, cinematographer, and art director as reviewed in their DVD commentary. Director, Cinematographer, and Art Director’s Commentary, Lady Vengeance DVD. In their DVD commentary, the filmmakers specifically note selecting this picture for the scene, mentioning in passing that its presence suggested for them activities unseen behind it. With this in mind, the filmmakers seem to imply a theatrical space that includes a world backstage or behind the scenes and, necessarily, a world in front of the curtain to be staged and

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viewed. Director, Cinematographer, and Art Director’s Commentary, Lady Vengeance DVD. While discussing the selection of music in Kill Bill, D.K. Holm notes the centrality of vengeance themes in the films and genres referenced. D.K. Holm, Kill Bill: An Unofficial Casebook (London: Glitter Books, 2004), 48. As an exhaustive analysis of Tarantino’s intertextual references is far beyond the scope of this analysis, interested readers would be well served to consult Holm’s excellent and extensive review of such content. Maximillian Le Cain, ‘Tarantino and the Vengeful Ghosts of Cinema,’ Senses of Cinema ( June 2004). Available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/ contents/04/32/tarantino.html; accessed 14 Dec. 2007. In this regard, this analysis resists the characterization of Tarantino as a postmodern magpie superficially engaging in what Jim Smith refers to as ‘spurious intertextuality.’ Jim Smith, Tarantino (London: Virgin Books, 2007), 7. Stephen Prince, ‘Cinematic Self-Reflexivity,’ Movies and Meaning, 3rd ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2004), 294. Holm identifies Seijun Suziki’s Branded to Kill (1967) as an inspiration for the House of Blue Leaves design. While this may be true of some aspects, it may be more accurate to say Branded to Kill provides inspiration for how the restaurant is shot. Put side by side, it appears clear to me that the House of Blue Leaves elaborates on a template taken from The Five Fingers of Death. Holm, Kill Bill, 74. The circulation of such images and the trading on such references may be bolstered by De Palma’s comment that this image was itself taken from John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). Brian De Palma, interview in Visualizing Carrie, dir. Laurent Bouzereau, in Carrie, special ed. DVD (Santa Monica: MGM Home Entertainment), 2001. B. Ruby Rich, ‘Day of the Woman,’ Sight & Sound ( June 2004). Available at http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/25/; accessed 4 Feb. 2008. This siren noise is itself appropriated by The Five Fingers of Death from the American TV series Ironsides, the music credited to Quincy Jones. This observation is itself interesting, as Tarantino appropriates a number of musical sequences from legendary cinema composers (such as Ennio Morricone and Bernard Herrmann), recontextualizes music into surprisingly suitable contexts (such as relocating the sound of Zamfir’s Romanian pan-flute into an Eastern context), and has decided proclivity for covered versions of pop songs (such as Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) and Don’t Let Me be Misunderstood). In each instance, Tarantino emphasizes the act of hearing film music through the activity of conspicuously re-hearing it.

‘I’ll Show Them!’ Legal Spectacles in Revenge Cinema 101 30 Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 23–5. 31 On the notion of the ‘Architextuality,’ see Gérard Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. 32 Orit Kamir, ‘Honor and Dignity in the film Unforgiven: Implications for Sociolegal Theory,’ cited in a different version as ‘Law, Society and Film: Unforgiven’s Call to Substitute Honor with Dignity’ Law and Society Review 40 (2006): 19. Available at http://sitemaker.umich.edu/Orit_Kamir/files/ Law_Society_And_Film_Unforgivens_Call_To_Substitute_Honor_With_ Dignity.pdf; accessed 4 Feb. 2008. 33 Ball, ‘The Play’s the Thing,’ 86. 34 Carol J. Clover, ‘God Bless Juries!’ in Mick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 265. 35 Ibid., 256. 36 Ibid., 272–3. 37 W. Lance Bennett and Martha S. Feldman, Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom: Justice and Judgment in American Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 150. 38 Ibid., 113. 39 Marth C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 35.

5

The Ethics of Murder: Trial as Performance in the Maternal Melodrama

BRENDA AUSTIN-SMITH

The violence of American film is manifest not only in genres conventionally associated with excessive surges of masculinity, such as war films, noirs, or westerns, but also, curiously, in a generic staple of Hollywood production during the Golden Age of the studio and star system of the mid-twentieth century: the maternal melodrama. The maternal melodrama, as Mary Ann Doane observes, featured ‘scenarios of separation, of separation and return, or of threatened separation – dramas that play out all the permutations of the mother/child relation.’1 They were, again in Doane’s words ‘the paradigmatic type of the woman’s film’ which was itself a generic staple of Hollywood production during the Golden Age of the studio and star systems. Melodramatic woman’s films traded in the stock elements of literary and stage melodrama such as plot convolutions and female victimization, and depicted romance, domestic relationships, child-rearing, and female friendship from a woman’s point of view. It was, though, the emotional suffering of the melodramatic heroine, particularly if she was a mother, that made these films popular with their female audiences, and gave rise to the pejorative term ‘weepie’ used to describe them. Dismissed for decades as aesthetically trivial for their extreme emotionalism and contrived storylines, woman’s films have enjoyed a significant resurgence in critical attention from film scholars drawn to films that place female characters and conventionally female concerns at the centre of the filmed action. Critical attention in the wake of Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Thomas Elsaesser’s analyses of film melodrama has often been directed to the domestic content of the melodramatic woman’s film, and its preoccupation with the family as a site of struggle and identification.2 Though the emotionalism of the woman’s film has been recuperated from the

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disdain heaped upon it in previous decades, the emphasis on the representation of private settings in the melodramatic woman’s film remains a dominant concern in much writing on the genre. However, in each of the classic Hollywood maternal melodramas I am discussing here, the private realms of the family are joined to a more public world of ethics through an accounting that takes place in a courtroom. In each of these films a mother kills in order to protect her child. When she is brought to trial for her crime, the ethical obligations to children presumed to arise from motherhood are pitted against the claims of the law. The trial scene in each of these films offers a literal staging of the ethical issues at stake in the maternal melodrama, and promotes a radical critique of an ethics sanctioned by the courtroom. The outcome of the trial is different in each case. In Johnny Belinda (1948) a last-minute witness changes the jury’s mind, while in Confession (1937) the mother’s death sentence is commuted when the secret of her identity, and thus her motive for murder, is revealed to a closed court. And in Madame X (1966) the arraigned mother dies before a verdict is rendered, her identity preserved from the young lawyer, her long-estranged son, appointed to defend her. But in all three cases, the trial scene not only confirms maternal guilt, but also interrogates the law itself, revealing its limitations when it is confronted with an agent whose sacrificial motive for violence cannot be accommodated to it, but to which it must accommodate itself if justice is to be served. These films are thus oddly reminiscent of the ‘double-trial structure’ discussed by Carol Clover, in which the ability of the legal system to serve female victims of crime is always an unofficial defendant.3 Each of the trial scenes in the films addressed here presents the contest between the rival ethics of maternity and civil society in terms that draw explicitly on the performative aspects of melodrama, and its association with the principle of excess. For as Peter Brooks observes, melodrama ‘at heart represents the theatrical impulse itself, the impulse toward dramatization, heightening expression, acting out.’4 The excessive presence in each case is the accused mother, who is excessive first in her murderousness, then in her silence, and finally in her expressiveness. In all three films, the mother’s speechlessness or refusal to communicate erupts in a passionate outburst: of words in Confession and Madame X, and of gesture/signing in Johnny Belinda. Mise en scène reinforces the sense of the courtroom as a theatrical space. As such, these films literalize the theatricality of justice making already addressed by R.J. Tougas earlier in this book, by foregrounding the actual courtroom as stage. And on this

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stage, the accused mother is compelled to perform. All three films present the woman on trial as a figure pressured to act in accordance with conflicting identities as mother and as law-abiding citizen. In Madame X, for example, the mother must act as if she does not recognize her defence lawyer as the son she has killed to protect, while in Confession the performativity of the mother is literal: she works in a cabaret as a singer. Finally, in all three films, the courtroom is a theatre where each woman is judged according to her performance, her convincing portrayal of someone who is not really a violent threat to social order, but is, in her self-sacrificing maternity, its most sublime expression. In this way the trial scene of the filmic maternal melodrama acknowledges its theatrical provenance. The melodramatic content and mode of these films can claim ancestors in the eighteenth-century dramas that form the heart of Peter Brooks’s study The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (1985). Like the plays of Pixérécourt from which Brooks derives the elements of melodrama that structure his book, these films make use of features such as the ‘aesthetics of astonishment’ in their staging of recognition scenes between characters, of extreme emotional states of grief and rage, and of plots that stir the hearts of viewers through their depiction of victimization and injustice. More directly, several melodramatic Hollywood woman’s films were based on stage adaptations of nineteenth-century novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and East Lynne. E. Ann Kaplan’s study of motherhood and representation in melodrama has traced, from Rousseau to Freud, the romantic view of motherhood held by philosophers, theologians, and physicians. By the time of Hollywood’s Golden Age, she argues, the Symbolic Mother of self-sacrifice held cultural sway, in symbiotic relationship with the Phallic Mother of cruelty and control. Examples of the former dominate maternal melodramas such as Stella Dallas (1937) and Mildred Pierce (1945), in which women give up marriages, jobs, and even surrender a daughter to a wealthier woman, all for the good of a child. These films rely on ‘the East Lynne paradigm’5 that ‘represents the mother as a paternal function, and addresses a male spectator.’6 The latter, ‘bad mother’ can be found in the chilly matriarch of a film such as Now, Voyager (1942). For all their differences, both figures embody the ‘dominant complicit maternal melodrama.’7 The other type, ‘The Maternal Woman’s Film,’ contains ‘resisting’ elements and ‘speaks from the mother position and about its pleasures and oppressions.’8 But in Confession, Johnny Belinda, and Madame X motherhood takes a physically violent turn, one that does not

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quite fit into Kaplan’s typology of complicit or resisting melodramas – those that either present the mother from a patriarchal point of view as helpless and passive, or that expose the limiting conditions of traditional mothering roles to critique. Kaplan, like other scholars of the melodramatic woman’s film, focuses on the sentimental and affective features of the works she studies, which is consistent with contemporary understandings of what melodramatic films are largely about. But as Ben Singer has pointed out, the term ‘melodrama’ was used in the early part of the twentieth century (and into the 1950s, according to Steve Neale) in reference to so-called blood and thunder melodramas, films brimming with daring adventures, brave rescues, and heart-pounding thrills. In contrast to melodrama was the ‘sob-story,’ the movie of domestic tribulation and martyrdom.9 Short serial melodramas from the early 1900s such as The Perils of Pauline and The Adventures of Dorothy Dare preserved the violent action, thrills, and danger common to other melodramas of the period, presenting ‘serial queens’ in starring roles as brave and adventurous women. Gradually, however, the generic marker ‘melodrama’ disengaged itself, like one of the runaway trains that might have featured in its early sensational versions, from a reliance on the cliff faces and waterfalls from which the heroine inevitably dangled before her timely rescue. By the 1930s, the physical calamities that threatened the female protagonists of serial melodrama had migrated inward, transmuted into the storms of anguish that provoked her to floods of tears. The traces of melodrama’s various sensational events – its cataracts, fires, abductions, and fights – took up residence in both the psyche of the female protagonist of the melodramatic woman’s film (registered through lingering takes on her suffering visage) and in extra-diegetic components such as music. The films discussed here are examples of this later form of melodrama, though in their depiction of female killers brought to justice, they pay homage to their sensational theatrical forbearers. The relationship between trial scenes and theatrical melodrama is one of the insights offered by Brooks in The Melodramatic Imagination, where he notes the frequency with which the rehabilitation of virtue in eighteenth-century stage melodrama requires ‘a full-fledged trial, the public hearing and judgment of right against wrong, where virtue’s advocates deploy all arms to win the victory of truth over appearance and to explain the deep meaning of enigmatic and misleading signs.’10 The end of this process of trying the accused in the works Brooks studies is that virtue is ‘brought into the sphere of public recognition and celebration.’11

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These melodramas most often conclude with the ‘confirmation and restoration’12 of virtue’s place in the dramatic world. The trial scene, then, is a mechanism whereby the recognition of virtue qua virtue is effected, and the signs of innocence and evil are rendered unambiguous. The courtroom trial is thus a significant feature of the maternal melodrama, concentrating as this genre does on the private anguish of the domestic sphere, which is made public only through the legal transgressions of the murdering mother. For there to be melodrama there must be suffering, and the trial scenes of maternal melodrama make the heroine’s suffering both a public and a performative event. In the spectacle of a woman subjected to intense interrogation and the threat of execution, the trial scene thus enacts Victorien Sardou’s famous exhortation to ‘Torture the women!’13 Secrets concerning either paternal or maternal identity structure Johnny Belinda, Confession, and Madame X, and the revelation of these relationships, the stock-in-trade of melodrama, gives the trial scenes in these films much of their emotional power. In each, the trial scene is the high point of the film, providing the dramatic setting in which the arraigned mother must reconcile her murderous actions and her motherhood on the stand through a public performance that redeems her violence as a legitimate act. In Johnny Belinda, for example, a young deafmute woman named Belinda MacDonald lives on a farm in Cape Breton and is treated by her father and aunt as little more than a pack mule. They are, therefore, sceptical when Dr Robert Richardson, new to the community, begins to teach Belinda sign language. Blossoming under the doctor’s tutelage, Belinda attracts the gaze of a local ne’er do well, Laughie McCormick, who corners Belinda one evening in a barn and rapes her. She gives birth to a boy she names Johnny. Laughie meanwhile marries Stella, the doctor’s assistant. Soon enough, Laughie decides that he wants the baby and, still hiding his paternity, convinces the town that Belinda is an unfit mother. Enraged by Stella’s reluctance to wrest the child away from Belinda when they arrive at the farm to take possession of it, Laughie announces to his horrified wife that he is indeed the baby’s father. He forces his way into the house just as he had earlier forced his way into Belinda’s body. Having just fended off Stella, Belinda has locked the infant in his room and comes downstairs to confront Laughie. They struggle briefly, but Laughie throws Belinda to the floor and bounds up the stairs. We see Belinda from a high angle shot from the stairway, as if we were peering through the spindles of the banister. She rounds the corner of the staircase, a rifle in her hands.

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Cut to a long shot of Belinda at the foot of the stairs, taking aim. She fires, and Laughie tumbles to the bottom, dead. At the ensuing trial Belinda, ignoring the prosecution’s questions, repeatedly signs ‘I want my baby; please, tell them to give me my baby,’ in poignant desperation. Her organic speechlessness and her repetitiveness link her to the impugned heroines of eighteenth-century stage melodrama who become, in Peter Brooks’s terms, ‘texts of muteness’ in both their wordlessness and in the inability of witnesses to comprehend their strange cries, broken sobs, and dramatic gestures. Their speechlessness becomes a sign of something other than guilt, as those in the courtroom can sense, but not prove. Johnny Belinda, for example, emphasizes Belinda’s connection to her natural surroundings, depicting her in intuitive communion with young animals and the changing seasons. She is characterized as obedient, passive, and childlike, her simplicity guaranteeing her spiritual purity, even as she is mocked by the townspeople, who call her ‘the Dummy.’ The guileless presence of Belinda in the courtroom, too selfless even to identify Laughie McCormick as her rapist, or to think of anything but her baby even as she sits in the dock, is a stereotype of besieged innocence. She is the only one of these protagonists to be acquitted, but her release depends upon someone else’s testimony. Though Belinda is saved from a guilty verdict by Stella’s last-minute testimony on her behalf, in Kaplan’s terms, Johnny Belinda comes closest to a complicit maternal melodrama, as its essentialized heroine is easily reconciled to the varieties of abuse that come her way. Even her rape is given a positive spin by the doctor, who tells her that her loneliness will soon come to an end because she is about to become a mother. Her murder of Laughie McCormick is emotionally satisfying, but justified, at the film’s conclusion, by the judge’s remarks about the sanctity of individual privacy. Nevertheless, viewers recognize not only her innocence, but also her superiority to all who claim to judge her. We are encouraged as well to realize the moral paucity of the verdict, which, though it leaves her free, is unable to do real justice to Belinda, for it has no words with which to describe her true motives. A more florid example of the theatrical performance of motherhood is the 1937 film Confession, directed by Joe May, and starring Kay Francis and Basil Rathbone. The first part of the film recounts the advances made by a persistent older male concert pianist towards a young woman conservatory student. On an evening date at the cabaret, they sit watching the performance of the female singer who is dressed in a lavishly

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sequinned outfit. The song she sings as she makes her way between the tables, sitting on laps and swigging brandy from the glasses of customers, is a cynical lament for a lost love, ‘One Hour of Romance,’ sung in a husky, Dietrich style. As she sings, the camera cuts to the couple in a booth, where the man brings the young woman’s hand to his lips, and then the two share a kiss, as the spotlight following the performer suddenly illuminates them. The singer glances towards their hidden seats, sees them, starts in recognition, and faints. In the same instant the man, catching sight of the singer, stands up, while the camera, rather than holding the man in its gaze, dollies in swiftly to focus on the face of the young girl, who looks up to her companion, who stands motionless, staring out at the cabaret floor. The moment is a perfect rendition of the ‘pause of mutual agitation’ common to early stage melodrama that ‘can be said to show the body in relation to knowledge.’14 Instead of relying on the spectator to take in the full significance of the scene, though, the camera provides aid in the rapid dolly shot that cues us in to the unclear but somehow crucial presence and identity of the young woman. The singer’s knowledge – in this case, that the man in the booth is the same man who brought her to social ruin, and that the woman he is with is her long-lost daughter – is somatically registered in her start, her frozen stance, and then her collapse, as the revelation of the couple overcomes her. Hers is ‘a body seized by meaning,’15 who sees in an instant that her own sad and sordid history is in danger of repeating itself in the life of her daughter. The next shot makes it clear that the older pianist has recognized the singer as well, and rushes with the young woman to leave the cabaret. As they leave, we hear that another act – one that presents a man shooting real bullets – has taken the stage, and the sound of shots follows the retreating couple as they mount the stairs to exit. Suddenly the singer, now recovered, calls out to the man from the bottom of the staircase. He turns back to face her from near the top of the stairs, but quickly turns away. The sound of shots continues, masking the shots then fired by the singer, and folding her murder of the pianist into the sequence of performances at the nightclub. The man freezes, and drops out of the frame, echoing the singer’s earlier faint. There is a look of mounting horror on the face of his companion. A cut shows his body rolling from the last steps to the feet of the cabaret singer, and a pistol drops to the floor in front of her. A lap-dissolve from his fallen body then introduces the courtroom scene.

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This first shot of the courtroom is worthy of remark, as the camera focuses on the murder weapon lying on a table in front of the judge’s bench, tilts up to the face of the young woman who witnessed the killing as she stands facing the judge, and then dollies back and up in one long, slow theatrical flourish to reinforce the expanse of the room. Clearly, the trial is nearing its conclusion. The voice of the young witness, speaking on behalf of the prosecution, echoes slightly as the camera reveals more and more of this enormous room, its banks of seats for members of the public sloping upward like seats in an amphitheatre. The darkness of the walls and spectator galleries are emphasized by lighting, while character blocking places Vera, the accused woman, above and behind her lawyer, as if to indicate her spiritual elevation and her isolation from those who would judge her. The effect is epic, as if the scene had been composed by Leni Riefenstahl. The connections between trial films and theatre have been recognized for quite some time,16 and David Ray Papke describes the explicit evocations of the stage typically made by the ‘popular culture courtroom’ of television and film: Instead of the peeling paint, plastic chairs, and bright fluorescent lighting so common in contemporary urban courtrooms, the pop cultural courtroom is customarily wood-paneled, well-upholstered, and soothed in soft light from ornamental lamps attached halfway up the walls. In the background huge wooden doors stand ready to swing open and shut for dramatic entries and exits. Local and national flags and also stern-faced men in uniform fill out the scene. The judge’s bench stands like an altar at the exact centerfront and rises above, suggesting something higher and truer. Defense and prosecution tables are symmetrically stationed, and the jurybox and rows of seats behind the bar, respectively, are the balcony and orchestra seating.17

Vera, the cabaret performer, her blonde hair starkly contrasted with her black dress, stands with downcast countenance in the dock, and refuses all entreaties to speak in her own defence, declaring to the judge ‘I have nothing to say.’ Even as the judge warns her, ‘It is a question of your very life,’ he tells her that the court is willing to ‘perhaps’ alter its sentence if she will only yield up the secret of her motive. This she refuses to do. Her silence connects her to ‘the moral occult’ Brooks writes of,18 the realm of the sacred obscured by the forces of modernity – in particular, by the law – and to which the silence, gestures, cries, and tears of melodrama

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aspire. It is this moral realm that generates the ethics of maternal murderousness that Vera eventually claims as her motive, revealing to the court that she killed in order to save her daughter from degradation. A plot device in the form of a suitcase discovered at a rail station provokes a reaction from Vera, who requests that the court be closed to all spectators and witnesses before she will tell her story. The granting of her wish authorizes an extended flashback that explains the circumstances of her fall from the glories of the concert hall to the vulgarities of the cabaret stage, a descent precipitated by the pianist who had sought the attentions of Vera’s daughter, the conservatory student. From time to time during the flashback that structures the film – and that animates the tale Vera recounts to the judge of her mistreatment, degradation, and sacrifice – we return to the present of the courtroom, each time to focus on the dramatically pale face, kohl-rimmed eyes, bleached hair, and dark dress of the defendant. The courtroom becomes a space of almost spiritual, rather than merely legal, conflict, in which the woman on trial defends herself only to save her daughter from discovering her real identity. To this end she pleads not for her life, but rather for the court to protect her secret from her daughter, her testimony itself a performance of sacrificial motherhood. The climax of the film thus comes not from the passing of the final verdict, which is the commuting of a death sentence to a prison term, but from the judge’s last-minute acquiescence to sharing Vera’s silence when he announces the nature of the mitigating circumstances to the reassembled court. Having just told Vera that he cannot grant her demand that the court keep her secret – the law, he argues, ‘must rule objectively’ and the ‘truth must be revealed’ – he is finally complicit with her wish to remain unknown to her daughter. The effect is to create from the tension between legal truth and maternal desire a verdict that sides with desire. The court’s response to Vera’s tale engages richly with the multiple roles of confession as autobiography, analysis, and self-expression explored by Brooks in Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (2000) extending Vera’s performance to that of a storyteller.19 The trope of maternal murderousness persists in the 1966 version of Madame X. Holly Anderson, played by Lana Turner, is the society wife of a career politician. Involved in the accidental death of a local Lothario, Holly is pressured by her disapproving mother-in-law to fake death and disappear in order to avoid bringing dishonour to her husband and young son. Onscreen we see Holly’s twenty-year descent into dissolution and absinthe addiction, the nadir reached in Mexico, where she falls in

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with a man who intends to use his discovery of her identity to blackmail her husband. She thwarts his plan, but when he announces that instead he will confront her son with the truth of what has become of her, she grabs a gun lying on the table between them and kills him. Almost catatonic when she is picked up by the police, Holly refuses to give her name, signing her confession with an ‘X.’ It is as ‘Madame X’ that she is brought to trial, represented by a court-appointed lawyer on his first case. As in the trial scenes in Johnny Belinda and Confession, the courtroom in Madame X is once again the stage for the clash between two ethical regimes, one predicated on the rule of law, the other represented by Holly’s refusal to defend herself. Holly’s silence at first seems to have no meaning other than as a marker of her despair, and the depiction of the courtroom seems to stress its disconnection from any exalted struggle over moral orders. Unlike the courtroom in Confession, it is brightly, even garishly lit, and the prosecution, the defence, and the spectators occupy the same level, suggesting the banality of the contention and the inevitability of the outcome. As is Vera in Confession, Holly is warned in Madame X that her life is at stake, and her young lawyer begs her to tell him what made her commit the crime. Holly’s muteness is suddenly broken by a passionate outburst brought on by a witness’s testimony about her absinthe addiction. Rising from her chair she cries, ‘Take my life! The sooner the better!’ and is led away from the court to recover. The breakdown brings her to the attention of her former husband, who is a spectator in the court watching his son defend her. Returning to the court, Holly recognizes her husband, and in a series of eye-line shots, realizes the identity of her attorney. Torn between her desire to remain silent and accept death, and her desire to help her son succeed, Holly decides to speak up, taking the stand in her own defence. Her speech is thus shot through with strategic silences, as she offers enough testimony to support her son’s case, but suppresses the words and gestures that would give away to him the truth of her identity as his mother. She is fatally weakened by the ordeal, though her success is registered in the content of her son’s closing argument, in which he emphasizes the mother’s willingness to sacrifice her own life, rather than taking another’s. Although this is in one sense a clever tactic on the part of a smart lawyer to deflect attention from the fact that his client is indeed still alive, the question seems eerily to predict, even to require, Holly to die in order to complete the sacrificial act she has begun by killing for her child. After collapsing on the stand Holly does indeed die outside the courtroom, offstage as it were, her son standing beside her. Immediately after her death he himself

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testifies to the mysterious power she represents for him. Turning to his father he says, ‘I don’t know why, but I loved her. From the moment I saw her, I loved her.’ In this instinctive recognition of mother love on the part of her son, the embodiment of the law which seeks her punishment, Holly’s violence is validated, though this recognition takes place outside the physical space of the court, and there is no onscreen confirmation that the jury would have responded to her mystic appeal. All three of these films partake of the ‘honour-based’ ideology of the law films studied by Orit Kamir in her book Framed: Women in Law and Film, described therein as films that ‘tend to subject sexual women protagonists to honor-based cinematic judgement, in which they are found to have always already been guilty objects responsible for the destruction of men, though themselves denied full subjecthood and agency.’20 Kamir contrasts honour-based films, focused as they are on the guilt of the woman, the damage done to men, and the threat and shame of women’s sexuality to patriarchy, with dignity-based law films, that ‘tend to treat women who have been mistreated by men or social systems as victimized subjects and agents, respecting their plight as well as their survival and undefeated subjecthood’ (Preface, xiii). However, Kamir’s criticisms are directed at honour-based films in which women’s oppression, torture, and especially, rape, are effaced, ignored, or otherwise set aside in favour of the ‘unwritten law,’ the social belief, echoed in jurisprudence, which upholds a man’s right to kill in order to avenge an injury to his honour. None of the films discussed by Kamir are maternal melodrama law films, in which the social expectations of women to ‘act’ in motherly ways result in the exquisite paradox of maternal violence as the highest form of maternal sacrifice. Holly escapes civil judgment in Madame X, but only by dying before a verdict is rendered. It is Vera, the cabaret singer, whose performance on the stand is in the end the most successful. Her understated presentation of herself as a ‘victimized subject’ in Kamir’s terms, allows those in the court, and those watching the screen, to witness and understand the sexual manipulation, emotional intimidation, and abandonment that she has suffered. As her narration takes possession of the screen, we see the terrible damage done to her by an honour-based social system, and we understand also why she acted the way she did, to protect her daughter from sexual exploitation. Brooks remarks that none of the melodramatic texts he is concerned with can conclude ‘until the virtuous bodies have been freed.’21 His remark brings to mind the closing shots of Confession, in which the still

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unknowing daughter and the longing mother meet, in the moments after the trial has ended and a pardon has been promised. Vera’s daughter, Lisa, approaches her to thank her. The two stand facing each other in silence. Then a superimposed shot frees the mother’s image – her true, protective, and desiring self – from its physical bonds, and pictures her crossing the distance to spectrally embrace her child once more before relinquishing contact forever. ‘In all creation, is there the female of the species who will not sacrifice her own life to protect the life she has conceived?’ asks Holly Anderson’s son near the end of Madame X, wrapping up his defence of the woman he doesn’t recognize as his own mother. His rhetorical question applies to all three of these films, in which the unwritten law of masculine privilege is upstaged by a higher claim that justifies maternal violence for the sake of a child. The law in these films is radically flawed in its misperception of maternal sacrifice as maternal selfishness and its misreading of the signs of the sacred in both the silence and performativity of the accused woman. The violence of these female protagonists expresses the contradictory ideals of maternal love as both sacrificial and vehement, a seeming split that the essential trial scene attempts to recuperate. The actions of these women are justified not only by the trial scene, but also by excessive emotional appeals to viewers, who are urged by what Robyn Warhol calls the ‘technologies of affect’ – close-ups of stricken faces, the sound of swelling violins – to shed tears of sympathy for the heroine.22 The violence of the mother thus extends into the narrative and formal devices of the film itself, saturating the features of a genre notorious for its forceful ‘tear-jerking’ qualities. Nor, it is worth mentioning, do the judges, lawyers, and juries in these fictions display any reluctance to prosecute women. Rather, they appear to relish the opportunity to punish these deviant women, and the sentence that hangs over the head of the accused is always death. In this way, the trial scene takes the place of the menacing mill saws and train tracks to which the heroine is bound in early sensational film melodrama. We watch in suspense to see if the defendant will be rescued from the jaws not of villainy, but of the law. The emotional and ethical appeal of the maternal melodrama to its viewers becomes that much more intense precisely through the genre’s dramatization of the law’s blindness not to undue influence, but rather to motherhood as a reason to kill. The trial scene in these maternal melodramas thus reenacts the search for Brooks’s ‘moral occult,’ and finds it in the murdering mother.

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NOTES 1 Mary Ann Doan, The Desire to Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 73. 2 See Thomas Elsasser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,’in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43–69; and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ‘Minelli and Melodrama,’ in ibid., 10–14. 3 Carol Clover, ‘Judging Audiences: The Trial Movie,’ Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), 244–64. 4 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xi. 5 E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (New York: Routledge, 1992), 149. 6 Ibid., 69. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 See Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); and Steve Neale, ‘Melo-Talk: On the Meaning and Use of the Term “Melodrama” in the American Trade Press,’ Velvet Light Trap 32 (Fall 1993): 66–89. 10 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 31. 11 Ibid., 32. 12 Ibid. 13 Alfred Hitchcock famously quoted the saying credited to Sardou while filming The Birds. See William Hare, Hitchcock and the Methods of Suspense ( Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2007), 319. 14 Simon Shepherd, ‘Pauses of Mutual Agitation,’ in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 27. 15 Peter Brooks, ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution,’ in Bratton et al., eds., Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, 18. 16 See, e.g., Milner S. Ball, ‘The Play’s the Thing: An Unscientific Reflection on Courts under the Rubric of Theater,’ Stanford Law Review 28/1 (1975): 81–115. 17 David Ray Papke, ‘The American Courtroom Trial: Pop Culture, Courthouse Realities, and the Dream World of Justice.’ South Texas Law Review 40/4 (1999): 921.

The Ethics of Murder: The Maternal Melodrama 115 18 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 5. 19 See Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 20 Orit Kamir, Framed: Women in Law and Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), xiii. 21 Brooks, ‘Melodrama, Body, Revolution,’ 18. 22 Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003), 7.

6

Theatricality in the Cleopatra Films: Women (or We Men?) of Power1

S A R A H H AT C H U E L

As André Loiselle and Jeremy Maron point out in the introduction to this volume, Patrice Pavis defines ‘theatricality’ as ‘the specific enunciation, the movement of words, the dual nature of enunciator (character/ actor), and his utterances, the artificiality of performance (representation).’2 In this view, theatricality is defined as a self-referential, metatheatrical form of stylization. Roland Barthes’s definition emphasizes the extra-textual – the audio-visual elements of the performance – as theatrical by essence: ‘What is theatricality? It is theatre-minus-text, it is a density of signs and sensations built up on stage starting from the written argument.’3 Barthes stresses the polyphonic aspects of theatricality: ‘at a certain point in a performance, you receive at the same time six or seven items of information (proceeding from the set, the costumes, the lighting, the placing of the actors, their gestures, their speech), but some of these remain (the set, for example) while others change (speech, gestures).’4 Theatricality is thus closely associated with a form of visual and auditory display that self-referentially foregrounds its artificiality, a form of exhibition where the character is, more often than not, unveiled as an actor being watched by spectators. The notion of theatricality, paradoxically, is not foreign to the cinema, but is intrinsically linked to it. Though the action of a film does not take place ‘live,’ in the same space and time as the audience, the conditions are met for a form of self-referential and artificial display, often tending towards spectacular extravagance. The Cleopatra films (notably those directed by J. Gordon Edwards in 1917, Cecil B. DeMille in 1934, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz in 1963) all embrace the notion of theatricality quite liberally in their visual and aural/musical excessiveness; their profligate display of sets, stars, and costumes; the commercial hype that

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has traditionally accompanied their making and their release; and their enticement to indulge in expansive (expensive), monumental works of cinema. The films involve many situations in which metanarrative spectacles are looked upon, both by the diegetic characters and by the film audience – imposing entrances and majestic processions, orgiastic spectacles, and sexually suggestive ballets – all in which the female body tends to be theatrically displayed to the film audience as well as voyeuristically appropriated through the gaze of the (male) characters in the stories. This chapter will attempt to show how theatrical sequences, spectacular effects, and metafilmic moments in the Cleopatra films take part, at the same time, in an elevation and a downgrading of the female character. The films all present the Egyptian queen as an inset double of the movie director inside the film diegesis – she is seen giving orders to her slaves as well as directing orgiastic shows. However, this domination has often been curtailed by Orientalist spectacles that also qualify or diminish her supremacy. Even though the Cleopatra films cast the Egyptian queen as central and powerful, they do not completely liberate the female character, but tend to restrain her within exotic and imperialistic constructions. The Cleopatra films are set in the Orientalist tradition which attempts to initiate the (Western) audience to (a construction of) the Orient and, as such, claims to lead naive gazes through the discovery of a new, exotic world. From the early days of cinema, the Orient (or, rather, the Western idea of it) has been turned into an object of spectacle. Egypt, in particular, has been connected with early cinematic forms (from panoramas to lantern shows). The ‘first feature-length, British-made panoramic river trip’ was, for instance, a transparent panorama of the Nile, which was projected at the Egyptian Hall in London in 1849.5 The Egyptian Hall had been opened in 1812 to exhibit ‘curiosities,’ which included the plunder of Egyptology, before becoming a cinema house in 1896 (when it started to show Edison films). The thriving of film images displaying the marvels of Egypt thus participated in a colonialist and imperialist enterprise whose aim was to photograph and map territories (as well as men/women) to be conquered. As Antonia Lant argues, ‘Photographic images taken (an operative word) outside Europe and exhibited within Europe functioned as symbols for taking possession.’6 This imperialistic Western vision appropriated (and consumed) the East, allowing for the display of eroticized situations in puritanical contexts (notably during the Victorian era).7 The female body became safely available, almost pornographically, by being placed in ‘a distant yet compelling culture,’ ‘channeled . . . through the imperialism of Egyptology, Roman Egypt,

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and ideas about the harem, the sheik, Arabian nights, and the vamp.’8 Associated with artificial role playing and with material possession (mirroring her political conquest and appropriation by the West), the figure of Cleopatra has been, from the outset,9 articulated in these exotic, Orientalist terms. As Edward Said has shown, ‘European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.’10 Cleopatra has been presented as an exotic commodity displaying her charms in magnificently staged shows, which has served to reinforce the European and American sense of self by constructing differences with the Orient. In this context, Cleopatra’s body becomes the dark, Oriental land that the Romans want to invade and subdue – a body that takes part in the ‘construction of the East as Other and the West as (Ideal) Ego.’11 The Cleopatra icon was given the opportunity to display spectacles of seduction and conquest at the same time, in which the Orient, seen as female, is to be saved from her own ‘madness,’ ‘backwardness,’ ‘irrationality,’ and ‘debauchery.’ Cinema only took over what was already an established trend on the stage of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.12 As early as 1759, actor-manager David Garrick undertook a policy of providing more scenery and pageantry on the London stage. He started with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra for which he attempted to find visual equivalents to the poetic language. Garrick offered grand spectacle for the lovers’ entrance (with trains of exotic extras), for the banquet scene on Pompey’s galley, and for Antony’s return after his temporary victory. At the Covent Garden theatre in 1813, John Philip Kemble mounted a production with both spectacular and antiquarian ambitions, introducing the tradition of adding as many Egyptian motifs as possible. This urge to recreate past ages as exactly as possible was typical of romantic longings as well as colonial aspirations – the representation of Rome being most appealing during England’s own imperial century. The production’s high points were the visual additions of the sea fight at Actium and a musical funeral procession after Cleopatra’s death. The set pieces were already so large and heavy that the actors had difficulty moving about on the stage. In 1833, at the Drury Lane theatre, William Macready also illustrated the Shakespearean text with astonishing scene paintings that displayed dark, romantic seascapes and sweeping cloud effects. For the battle of Actium, a diorama13 showed the two fleets actually moving and some of Antony’s ships burning. Actors-managers aimed at historical verisimilitude and authentic archaeological reconstruction. Three-dimensional sets were built to materialize Egypt and Rome as naturalistically as possible and

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were changed out of the audience’s view to increase illusion. However, the set changes made the play drag terribly, as the numerous intervals took more and more time. The reviewers often came to the conclusion that the play was beautiful but unstageable. However, the tradition of lavish spectacle was not abandoned. Frank Benson directed extravagant productions of the play in 1898, 1900, and 1912, which all featured the now traditional visions – Cleopatra’s palace, Pompey’s galley, Antony’s triumphal return, an amazing sea fight with Egyptian ships burning at sunset, and Cleopatra’s elevated monument all painted with hieroglyphics. Originality could especially be found in the added music, inspired by Bedouin tunes, which was played during the various processions and the exotic ballets of Cleopatra’s dancing attendants. The highest point of the pictorial tradition and realistic illusion was eventually reached with Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1906 production at His Majesty’s Theatre. It relied on impressive costumes and a massive number of extras. The performance opened and closed on a dissolving vision of the Sphinx projected on a screen while Oriental, voluptuous music was played. Trompe-l’oeil pictures and three-dimensional sets created the locations in Rome, Athens, and Egypt, but also Cleopatra’s barge drifting onstage in front of a painting of the Nile; extraordinary tableaux revealed excited crowds, marching soldiers, processions, and exotic dancers. A scene was added to show the coronation of Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Egyptian queen, all dressed in silver, made her way to a high throne in a street of Alexandria, while the screaming populace acclaimed her. Though spectacularly impressive, the production was condemned for the intruding sounds made by the behind-the-scenes operations and for its slow pace, as the intervals for the set changes took sometimes one-third of the evening. After the First World War, the staging of Antony and Cleopatra came back to a simplicity that attempted to reproduce the original conditions of Elizabethan performance, while the exotic and extravagant trend continued in the cinema, a medium that could accommodate enormous, spectacular sets without marring the show through the disclosure of the behind-the-scenes, cumbersome machinery. Cinema appropriated the Orientalist pageantry and theatricality of the Cleopatra story. In 1917, Theda Bara, the silent-screen star (who became known as ‘The Vamp’), played Cleopatra in a film directed by J. Gordon Edwards and produced by William Fox (which would merge with Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures to form Twentieth Century Fox in 1935). Theda Bara, an anagram of ‘Arab Death,’ was publicized as the ultimate

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Oriental femme fatale, embodying all the fears linked to the mysterious and dangerous otherness of Egypt and womanhood.14 No prints of the film seem to have survived, but we know that the film focused on its star (in extravagant dress and undress) and featured many spectacular scenes displaying magnificent costumes,15 the elaborate reconstruction of Rome and Alexandria, and dozens of galleys burning during the battle. The first part of the film was devoted to the affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, and ended with the murder of Caesar, probably followed by the battle of Philippi. The second part moved on to the affair with Antony until the couple’s suicide.16 Many of the intertitles used Shakespeare’s text, but the film was not marketed or even received as Shakespearean. It was viewed, to use Robert Hamilton Ball’s words, as ‘an eye-filling recreation of glamorous pseudo-history.’17 In 1934, Cecil B. DeMille directed Claudette Colbert as the Egyptian queen, Henry Wilcoxon as Antony, and Warren William as Julius Caesar, in a camp and grandiose Hollywood fantasy that once more reshaped the historical facts. The film presented Colbert as a flirtatious and scheming Cleopatra, while Caesar and especially Antony were revealed as selfish and childish men, sometimes even bringing unintentional comic aspects to their characters. DeMille skilfully mixed eroticism and sin, in a notable ‘show of skin’ involving scantily clad girls performing exotic choreographies.18 This Cleopatra is essentially remembered for two moments – Cleopatra resting on a great dais with silk draperies, falling rose petals, and dancing girls aboard her swan-necked barge; and the elaboratelystaged sea battle of Actium, which notably reprocessed some stock footage from DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923). Spectacular scenes were too costly not to be reused, but could ultimately introduce a metanarrative awareness through a recycling practice in which films fed on previous works. The genre of the Roman epic, which evolved in the wake of the Second World War, was a result of two contemporaneous pressures on North American filmmaking: the need to compete with the new rising medium of television and the desire to rival the Soviet Union. The aim of the Roman epic, as a result, was both aesthetic and ideological, and the spectacle it presented was hyperbolic to reveal American power. The epic film metafilmically turned into the very symbol of what it dealt with – the more the film had to evoke magnificence, pomp, greatness, and excess, the more the budget had to rise to pay for the stars’ extraordinarily costly contracts and to finance state-of-the-art film techniques (such as Cinemascope), and the more the Hollywood producers appeared as

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Roman emperors themselves, offering spectacular entertainment to the masses in order to better channel and control them. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the Hollywood studios competed in their search for lavishness and extravagance, with producers spending higher and higher sums on films such as Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951), Ben Hur (William Wyler, 1959), or Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960). The audience’s attention was refocused on anecdotes about the shootings and the astronomical amounts of money spent on the productions, rather than on the cinematic works themselves.19 According to Maria Wyke, ‘spectators of Hollywood’s widescreen epics were invited to position themselves . . . as Romans luxuriating in a surrender to the splendour of film spectacle itself.’20 Film audiences were, therefore, encouraged to identify with the onlookers inside the story; they were incited to adopt a gaze that turned the spectacles into double theatrical situations – into shows for two sets of voyeuristic and appraising gazes. The most famous – or infamous, rather – version of the Cleopatra story was filmed in 1963 by director Joseph L. Mankiewicz and has to be understood in the context of the Hollywood epic. While, in Shakespeare’s play of Antony and Cleopatra, the character of Enobarbus evokes Cleopatra’s arrival at Cydnus on her majestic barge in a speech, this verbal summary is turned, in Mankiewicz’s film, into a lavish, visual sequence in which the Egyptian queen enters the harbour on her floating palace and entices Antony to join her in an orgiastic feast. Where Shakespeare preserves ambiguity and works through suggestion, Mankiewicz’s film is based on full-blown realism and the display of spectacular images. The stars, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, echoing their screen romance, ignited a scandal by having a torrid affair during the shooting, although they were still both married to other people at the time. The film cost $44 million, (the present-day equivalent would be approximately $270 million). Adjusted for inflation, Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra may still be the most expensive film ever made. Edwards’s 1917, DeMille’s 1934, and Mankiewicz’s 1963 films are narratively similar in their combination of three plots: the affair between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, the murder of Caesar in the Senate, and the love story (followed by the deaths) of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. By constructing Cleopatra as the pivotal character in the story, the films adopt a specifically female viewpoint. This can readily be seen from the main poster advertising Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra, which reveals the queen in the central position and in the foreground, while Caesar and Antony are positioned on either side of her and pushed into the background.21

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Contrary to, say, the titles of Shakespeare’s and George Bernard Shaw’s plays (Antony and Cleopatra, Caesar and Cleopatra), the names of the men have been suppressed from the titles of the 1917, 1934, and 1963 films, simply leaving the name of the Egyptian queen. Spectators are invited to consider Caesar and Antony through Cleopatra’s eyes. These filmic rewritings thus participate in the elevation of the Cleopatra icon within a patriarchal world. The figure of Cleopatra (notwithstanding the name’s etymological meaning of ‘glory of her father’) has never connoted patriarchal authority, but rather the combination of public authority and an active female sexuality. We may recall Mary Hamer’s contention that Cleopatra’s name ‘locates political power in a body that cannot be coded as male. In any patriarchal system, it speaks of the transgression of the law.’22 The three films reinforce this view. DeMille’s 1934 Cleopatra shows the Egyptian queen as a figure of economic and sexual independence, thus offering to the American ‘New Women’ a figure with whom to identify. Claudette Colbert, who played the enticing queen, brought the echoes of her previous roles as energetic, witty, modern women in control of their lives, while Elizabeth Taylor’s 1963 performance took part in a trend that presented women as even more autonomous and sexually liberated. The 1934 and 1963 Cleopatras, moreover, present the queen as a double of the film director within the films’ diegeses. For Francesca T. Royster, Claudette Colbert in the 1934 film becomes a kind of ‘surrogate for DeMille’s powers of discipline and direction.’23 She is seen giving orders to her many slaves and courtiers, and controlling the orgiastic spectacle that she has choreographed for Antony. Cleopatra’s manipulative skills as well as her distance from the pageant shows she organizes are also particularly emphasized in Mankiewicz’s film. At the end of her colossal, spectacular entrance into Rome, Cleopatra descends from her majestic throne pulled by hundreds of slaves, only to wink at Caesar and let him know that the show has been a carefully planned illusion to please the masses. Through this wink, Elisabeth Taylor metafilmically discloses the construction of this highly theatrical situation, partly deconstructing its imperialistic and Orientalist connotations. It is as if, in this film, Cleopatra was astute enough to know that she was acting in a Hollywood Epic. However, if summoning the image of Cleopatra calls the patriarchal system into question and underlines the position of women in the social order, this subversion has often been downplayed in theatrical sequences that weaken her domination. Even though the Cleopatra films cast the

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Egyptian queen as central and powerful, they do not completely liberate the female character. They still tend to present her within a patriarchal hierarchy in which the sensual woman has to be punished or, at least, excluded from the realm of power. Through the use of Roman antiquity and its seeming historical ‘truth’ (which provided the Hollywood films with cultural prestige and authority), the cinematic Cleopatras conveyed the vision of a dangerous (yet defeatable) woman, infusing this representation with an air of venerability and truth.24 The female character may claim political and sexual freedom, but she is eventually led to segregation, failure, and death. For Wyke, Cleopatra is ‘marked as doubly Other – both Egyptian and woman – and, therefore, doubly deserving of defeat by an Octavian who represent[s] the restoration of the authority of Rome, the West, and the Male principle.’25 This may be true already in Shakespeare’s play of Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, but the film narratives, by conflating three dramatic plots – the affair between Caesar and Cleopatra, the murder of Caesar, and the love story between Antony and Cleopatra – lay even more stress on this double Otherness. This increased emphasis on Cleopatra’s difference, I want to argue, is effected through the crucial inclusion of a highly theatrical episode that can only appear when the plots of the Shakespearean plays of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are merged. This episode involves the sequences in which Cleopatra joins Julius Caesar in Rome. Just as Caesar visits the Egyptian world at the beginning of each Cleopatra film, the Egyptian queen visits the Roman world when Caesar is about to be killed. In these sequences, Caesar narratively invades the world of Antony and Cleopatra, while Cleopatra penetrates the world of Julius Caesar. In Mankiewicz’s 1963 film, this episode goes from Cleopatra’s famously spectacular arrival in Rome perched upon a giant Sphinx (preceded by an incredibly long succession of exotic shows and ballets), to her forced flight from the city after Caesar’s murder. Although Cleopatra is never captured by the Romans, her entrance may be viewed as the triumphal procession of the Roman victor, displaying his exotic conquest to the citizens’ view. Shots of the judgmental and self-righteous Roman wives intercut the images of Cleopatra’s arrival, as if the Egyptian woman were a dissolute prisoner deserving disdainful looks. The Roman citizens in Mankiewicz’s version appear as doubles of the audience in the cinema, and invite the spectators to cast an ambivalent gaze before such an excessive display of orgiastic wealth. In DeMille’s 1934 film, Cleopatra’s opulent entrance into the city is also received with

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opprobrium and envious looks from the citizens present at the ‘show,’ who cannot abide her difference: Rome cannot accept to be ruled by a frivolous queen. In both films, the audience is reflexively encouraged to cast the same kind of gaze, both filled with admiration and revulsion, over the Egyptian intruder. It is thus in a highly theatrical and voyeuristic situation (in which the onlooking characters mirror the spectators) that Cleopatra is both elevated and downgraded. The double gaze that is created on the aesthetic level finds its reflection in the ideologically ambivalent presentation of the female character. This theatrical invasion of the Roman world by the Egyptian Cleopatra is seen as a form of dangerous contamination. When she enters Rome, she is filmed as a female foreigner in a place ruled by men where the woman’s part is limited to that of the domesticated wife. Almost insensibly, the Egyptian queen as Roman immigrant comes to represent the anxieties surrounding the perceived threat to national ethnic composition and moral values associated with newcomers arriving in the United States. Wyke explains that emancipated women, as well as new immigrants, ‘were often figured cinematically in Orientalist terms. As the collective urban Other, they were set in an exotic mise en scène and characterized as having a taste for sybaritic luxury or depraved sex.’26 Royster concurs: ‘The fluidity of white identity for non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants in the early twentieth century is central to our understanding of the Cleopatra icon’s importance in the birth of film. With her already vexed racial history, the Cleopatra icon was well positioned to exploit such anxieties.’27 In DeMille’s film, as soon as Julius Caesar is murdered, the Romans threaten Cleopatra with death, thus forcing her to go back to Egypt. They act as the Founding Fathers or as the old Anglo-aristocracy of America, defending their values against a Cleopatra who, because she is both a foreign woman and a ‘modern’ one, is perceived as frightening and tyrannical. In the second part of the film, Cleopatra manipulates Antony in the sake of her country’s interests. But at the very moment when she is about to poison him to please Octavius, she sees that Antony is ready to fight enthusiastically against all the Roman armies to be able to cherish her and, finally, she falls in love with him. She recognizes his authority and kneels before him with the words ‘I am no longer a queen. I am a woman.’ Antony thus manages to domesticate her and turn her into a submissive wife. DeMille’s version thus keeps a tight rein on Cleopatra as a New Woman by eventually presenting her affair with Antony in the conventional terms of romance. Viewed as a sinner and

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condemned for promiscuousness and Otherness, Cleopatra can only be redeemed through her total surrender to a husband-like Antony. This submission of the female character is to be considered within the general framework of the glamourized display of sets, costumes, and bodies which has implicitly encouraged consumerist behaviours for Cleopatra’s cosmetics, dresses, and household furnishings, and which has privileged ‘the model of a woman who subordinates independence and autonomy,’ Margaret Malamud claims, ‘to what is most important and essential to female identity – her role as wife.’28 The Cleopatra films have participated in a Western, commercial trend in which the Cleopatra icon is generally produced by male stage directors or film producers, while encouraging women to consume this male-constructed icon. Barbara Hodgdon claims that female consumption of Cleopatra was already urged in 1897, when women from the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie appeared at fancy dress balls as Cleopatra, sporting very costly and extravagant costumes.29 By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Cleopatra icon was well ‘dispersed into mass culture’: in 1907, one of the first fashion exhibitions, at John Wanamaker’s New York department store, openly advertised ‘The Egyptian Tendency,’ publicizing its inspiration from ‘the flowing draperies of Cleopatra’ and ‘the graceful dress allurements of those old days that ring of Caesar, Ptolemy and Antony.’30 At the release of the 1934 film, in a context where strong economic links had developed between the cinematic industry and general commerce, American women were encouraged to equip themselves as Claudette Colbert in the role of Cleopatra, through the purchase of promoted goods – jewellery, shoes, hair curlers, ‘negligees, cosmetics, and Palmolive soap, whose ad . . . proclaimed, “Age cannot wither, nor custom stale, her infinite variety.”’31 The film had become a vitrine displaying consumer goods to be desired and then bought. Such a consumerist trend reached its peak after the release of the 1963 Mankiewicz film, when female spectators were invited to consume the image of Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra through the adoption of her dresses, hairdos, and make-up.32 Women were told to take up the constructed filmic role of the Egyptian queen and were taught, as Hodgdon argues, ‘that seduction is a matter of consumption and that how a woman looks is (still) who she is.’33 Though the films are rooted in exoticism, Cleopatra has always been played by white actresses, thus guaranteeing that the middle-class female spectators would identify with the heroine and consume her image. Pleading for a black actress in the role, Carol Rutter claims that because

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‘Rome cannot absorb Egypt into its imperial system and remain itself [ . . . Egypt’s] blackness is unassimilable’ and, thus, not conquerable.34 As a black woman, Cleopatra is thus much more powerful politically. She appears as the dark threat to the Roman males who try to protect their whiteness from being tainted by miscegenation and foreign influences; but, through her unexplored and mysterious ‘darkness,’ she also symbolizes the object that can make the Romans prove masculine and sexually conquering.35 Denied a black skin in the films, she thus loses any ability to ‘darken’ and erase Roman whiteness even if she were to be dominated. Far from a powerful black figure, Cleopatra is depicted on screen as an exotic, powerless, ‘black’ woman in her representation as a slave or an immigrant, whose body is always made available or containable within exotic mises en scène. In DeMille’s film, Cleopatra’s Otherness as a woman is stated in Antony’s own words. He tells the Egyptian queen that, in order to be less besotted with her, he should see another woman, but immediately admits that this will be impossible since she is already ‘another woman, a completely other woman.’ Cleopatra’s sexual difference, in fact, is emphasized from the very start of DeMille’s film: the parting of stone walls evokes a curtain unveiling a show, but also conjures an image of the vagina, opening up on Cleopatra herself, tied up with chains. Femininity is thus closely related to the ideas of sadistic display and containment. The sign of sexual difference, which pervades DeMille’s film through images of burning hoops or open shells, turns Cleopatra into a scapegoat for the destructive civil war between Octavius and Antony. Images of Cleopatra’s face are actually superimposed on images of battles, thus stressing the queen’s heavy responsibility for the absence of order. For the social fabric to be restored, DeMille’s film shows that the powerful woman must die. Cleopatra’s suicide is performed as the battering ram of Octavian’s army bursts into the room, thus linking the queen’s death with the restoration of phallic strength. The end of the film reiterates the image of the walls, but this time shows them closing, as if female desire had finally been tamed. The containment of the female character that closes DeMille’s film is heralded from its outset. We are introduced to Cleopatra as, kidnapped by her brother Ptolemy, she is being taken far from Alexandria into the desert, gagged, hooded, and tied up, fighting desperately, but vainly, to break free. Iconographically, Cleopatra is linked in this opening sequence to black female slaves. Denied a black skin that could have been a sign of political strength, Cleopatra is yet coded black in scenes that present

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her as slavish, physically weak, and ‘rapable.’ Like a black female slave, Cleopatra’s body is made available to the gaze and turned into a show, while being restrained and tortured. Her position of power is thus diminished from the start. Unlike in the horror films that Loiselle discusses in his chapter, where ‘theatrical hyperboles [are] used to create an aesthetics of terror that declares its own inauthenticity,’ the spectacle of Cleopatra’s enslavement has very real political implications. DeMille’s film has participated in constructing Cleopatra as a black whore or, at least, a traitor to the white race, capitalizing on a market of spectators revelling in racial difference, indeterminacy, and liminal status. This is emphasized by the scene of Calpurnia’s party, at which a young ingénue asks whether Cleopatra is black. The question makes everyone laugh heartily, pleased as they are to all be ‘pure’ white Roman citizens. Cleopatra, though as strikingly fair-skinned as she is in the films of Edwards, DeMille, and Mankiewicz, is here turned into a black woman through the availability of her body and her open sexuality that feeds upon the men she meets and lures. In DeMille’s film, when Antony and Enobarbus admonish Julius Caesar for having fallen in love with Cleopatra, they state their rebuke in these terms: ‘That woman is making an Egyptian out of you’ and ‘[You are] an Egyptian lover.’ Royster cogently notes that ‘the delivery of the line echoes the syntax of the slur “Nigger lover.”’36 Moreover, Cassius, Brutus, and Casca plot against Caesar because they cannot stand Caesar’s attraction to a foreigner and cannot accept the possibility of being ruled by an Egyptian. DeMille’s film thus plays with the fear of racial blending and adulteration, explaining the murder of Caesar by asserting the Roman disgust for outsiders and interracial marriages. Cleopatra, however white, is thus raced ‘black,’ while her lascivious poses and enthralling costumes furthermore make her oscillate between the vamp and the vampire. In each case, the spectators are reminded that she preys upon her lovers and is even ready to poison them. Cleopatra’s liminal status between human being and monster, between same and other, has, in the history of her representation on film, also been conveyed through her casting. In 1917, Theda Bara’s Jewishness was first hidden in a story elaborated by the film studio that constructed her screen persona as exotic, Arabian, and incapable of speaking a word of English. But this very Jewishness, through its otherness, white indeterminacy, threatening invisibility, as well as its link with vampirism in anti-Semitic mythology, was precisely what was capitalized on by Fox Studio when the film was made and promoted.37 Cleopatra’s ‘infinite

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variety,’ her never-ending capacity to mutate, was connected to the demonizing vision of the dangerously mutable Jew. In DeMille’s 1934 film, though Claudette Colbert was a brunette, she ‘looked and acted very much like those blonde Hollywood sex goddesses – Jean Harlow [or] Mae West . . . – who tempted men with their beauty.’38 Their predatory sexuality was seen as dangerous and destructive, and their strength and success were considered evil and unnatural. In the words of Erika L. Doss, Colbert was classified the ‘prototypical Hollywood Bitch.’39 In Mankiewicz’s 1963 film, the body of Elizabeth Taylor became the symbol of every excess, from her extramarital affair with Richard Burton during the shooting, to her enormously costly contract that was blamed for the near bankruptcy of Twentieth Century Fox. The sequence in which Cleopatra, having been informed of Antony’s marriage with Octavia, starts madly ripping her lover’s uniforms and her own gowns, can be read metafilmically as the destruction of studio property and as a metaphor for Taylor’s so-called responsibility in the financial difficulties of Fox.40 Taylor was soon to be labelled a woman who lacked control over her health, weight, and sexual life, and her affair with Burton was much publicized by the studio in order to capitalize on a scandal that could appeal to the spectators’ voyeuristic curiosity. But Taylor was not only perceived as sexually and financially wild, she was also seen as a ‘race traitor’ through her famous conversion to Judaism following her marriage to Mike Todd in 1957, just a few years before the filming of Cleopatra. Though, at the start of the film, Cleopatra seems in complete control of herself, shrewdly staging her nakedness to entice Julius Caesar, her sexual freedom is still related to a body made available to the male gaze and possession, recalling Hodgdon’s contention that Antony and Cleopatra ‘tells a story of imperial appetites and a rage for possession that was played out and made readable on Cleopatra’s body.’41 The different cinematic presentations of Cleopatra, relying on various theatrical devices, thus oscillate between the controller and the controlled, the majestic conqueror and the unwanted immigrant, the gorgeous vamp and the threatening vampire. In these various filmic contexts, the image of the mighty woman becomes blurred and contained, as if power bestowed to women could only have disastrous consequences or, at least, could only be considered as a threat to harmony and purity.42 The pivotal place that Cleopatra has acquired has been regularly undermined, to the point that one can wonder if Cleopatra’s centrality is not, in effect, a position in which she is surrounded, framed, and contained by the patriarchal system. A poster for Mankiewicz’s film underlines the

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paradox that imbues all the versions: Cleopatra, in the centre, seems to dominate; but she may also be seen as enclosed and tamed by Caesar and Antony who are keeping watch over her as if she were their prisoner.43 Though it has become the focus of the story, Cleopatra’s life is still presented as demarcated by the fates of men. The films choose to start with her meeting with Caesar and end with her death just after Antony’s, always displaying her as the object one has to appropriate in order to reach supreme power. Her Otherness has been emphasized in reflexive Orientalist pageants that are watched by spectators inside and outside the story. As an Egyptian, she is considered to be a danger to purity and is cast away from Rome; as a woman, she is always defined through the gaze of men as a prize rewarding political power. Nevertheless, the films have made her the unmovable star of the show, continually resurrecting the idea of female power, while men gravitate around her before disappearing and being replaced. Every time the Cleopatra story is remade or even parodied, it seems to be over; but every time, it is in fact over and over and over again on stage, on screen, and in our minds.

NOTES 1 I am extremely grateful to Pascale Aebischer, University of Exeter, who gave precious advice during the research for this chapter. 2 Patrice Pavis, Dictionary of the Theater: Terms, Concepts, and Analysis, translated by Christine Shantz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 395. 3 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 26; emphasis added. 4 Ibid., 261–2. 5 Richard D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 206. 6 Antonia Lant, ‘The Curse of the Pharaoh, or How Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,’ October 59 (Winter 1992): 96. 7 See Ella Shohat, ‘Gender in Hollywood’s Orient,’ Middle East Report no. 1962 ( Jan.–Feb. 1990): 40–2. 8 Lant, ‘The Curse of the Pharaoh,’ 109. 9 Five Cleopatra films were made between 1908 and 1918: 1908 by J. Stuart Blackton and Charles Kent, 1910 by Ferdinand Zecca and Henri Andréani, 1912 by Charles L. Gaskill, 1913 by Enrico Guazzoni, and 1917 by J. Gordon Edwards. 10 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 3.

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11 Shohat, ‘Gender in Hollywood’s Orient,’ 40. 12 See Margaret Lamb, Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 72–97. 13 The diorama was a set fixed to a moving wall in the background, which unwound vertically or horizontally according to the actors’ movements, providing the feeling that the characters were walking or running. 14 See Lucy Hughes-Hallet, Cleopatra: Queen, Lover, Legend (London: Pimlico, 2006), 330–1. 15 On costumes, Vivian Sobchack comments: ‘the Hollywood epic shows us that the people – most particularly, the women – living History almost always wore extravagant clothes and spent a good deal of History changing them’ (25), in ‘“Surge and Splendour”: A Phenomenology of the Hollywood Historical Epic,’ Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 24–49. 16 See Robert Hamilton Ball, Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), 253. 17 Ibid. 18 Erika L. Doss, ‘Images of American Women in the 1930s: Reginald Marsh and “Paramount Pictures,”’ Woman’s Art Journal 1/2 (1983/1984): 2. 19 See Frédéric Martin, L’Antiquité au cinéma (Paris: Dreamland, 2002), 10–11. 20 Maria Wyke, Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History (New York: Routledge, 1997), 31–2. 21 See the poster available at www.imdb.com/title/tt0056937/posters, accessed 9 Dec. 2010. 22 Mary Hamer, Signs of Cleopatra: History, Politics, Representation (London: Routledge, 1993), xix. 23 Francesca T. Royster, Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2003), 86. 24 See Wyke, The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 292. See also Projecting the Past, in which Wyke explains why the reconstruction of Roman history is so important in American culture: ‘The United States had constant recourse to an invented tradition of romanitas in the early years of the nation’s foundation . . . Classical antiquity readily supplied America with a usable past – instant, communal history and cultural legitimacy in the eyes of Europe. America was thus created according to the model of an ideally conceived Roman republic [with] Roman republican ideals of liberty [and] civic virtue’ (15). 25 Wyke, Projecting the Past, 75. 26 Ibid., 95. 27 Royster, Becoming Cleopatra, 69.

The Cleopatra Films: Women (or We Men?) of Power 131 28 Margaret Malamud, ‘Swords-and-Scandales: Hollywood’s Rome during the Great Depression,’ Arethusa 41 (2008): 165. 29 Barbara Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 92. 30 Ibid., 95. 31 Ibid. 32 See Maria Wyke, The Roman Mistress, 281. 33 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, 101. 34 Carol Chillington Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), 101. 35 For a discussion of these masculine tensions, see Rutter’s reading of Richard Dyer’s White, ibid., 67. 36 Royster, Becoming Cleopatra, 90. 37 Ibid., 71–82. 38 Doss, ‘Images of American Women in the 1930s,’ 2. 39 Ibid. 40 For a development of this point, see also Royster, Becoming Cleopatra, 93–4, 104–8. 41 Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, 75. 42 By contrast, the 2005 TV series Rome follows the plot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in that the character of Cleopatra is absent from (or is not seen in) Rome at the time of Caesar’s murder. The conspiracy is spurred only by political motives: Brutus, Cassius, and several other senators fear that Caesar has become a tyrant and resent his policy of wanting Plebeians to be accepted as senators. In the series, Cleopatra appears only in Episode 8, entitled ‘Caesarion,’ when Julius Caesar chases after Pompey in Egypt. Cleopatra is performed as an extremely thin, drug-addicted young woman. Though she is not seen as the outcast, foreign whore who is expelled from Rome because she appals the patricians (leading them to conspire against Caesar), she is certainly depicted as a woman who is incapable of governing her country alone. She is also shown as dishonest since the series strongly implies that Caesarion is not the son of Caesar, but of a Roman soldier who was summoned to make love to her, thus guaranteeing that her seduction of the elderly Caesar would bear its fruit immediately. 43 See the poster available at www.imdb.com/title/tt0056937/posters, accessed 9 Dec. 2010.

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PART THREE The Politics of Cinematic Theatricality

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7 Committed Theatricality sylv ie bissonnette

The commercial and artistic success of Being at Home with Claude ( Jean Beaudin, 1992) has contributed to a renewed interest in the filmic adaptations of Quebec plays. Indeed, the decade that followed was particularly prolific in this type of adaptation.1 Many recent films of this kind employ explicit references to the stage, feature characters that directly address the camera, and include dialogue from canonical plays – all of which bring the theatricality in these films to the fore. The past decade has also witnessed a renewed interest in the concept of theatricality in the fields of Film and Theatre Studies.2 Scholarly work in these areas has explored the concept of theatricality in film, but only a few studies have focused on the discursive and political potential of theatricality. This chapter does not further explore the problematic of adaptation tackled by Sylvain Duguay and Billy Smart in their contributions to this anthology,3 but examines instead how theatricality, as an aesthetic strategy, can challenge social conventions and may even invite viewers to take up positions on social issues. For this type of filmic theatricality, I coin the concept of ‘committed theatricality’ and consider its relevance in the recent filmic adaptations of Quebec plays Being at Home with Claude, Cabaret neiges noires (Raymond Saint-Jean, 1997), Nô (Robert Lepage, 1998), Matroni et moi ( Jean-Philippe Duval, 1999), and Les muses orphelines (Robert Favreau, 2000), all of whose elements of theatricality stress a particularly political agenda. For example, lyrical speeches that highlight the power of words, when interpreted symbolically, may underline the political significance of the French language for the Québécois people. In addition, tormented characters that double as other characters in order to liberate themselves from alienating social conventions may suggest the desire for emancipation of marginalized communities.4

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Since theatricality can take on an extraordinary range of meanings, it is important to consider related theories and practices of theatricality before concentrating on its political potential. As noted by Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait, the idea of theatricality can be used to describe ‘everything from an act to an attitude, a style to a semiotic system, a medium to a message.’5 Davis and Postlewait explain that although this term was first used in English in 1837, it derives from earlier concepts such as the Greek idea of mimesis and the Latin idea of theatrum mundi.6 Theatricality, in relation to mimesis, ‘has been used to describe the gap between reality and its representation.’7 Theatrum mundi, a popular concept that joins life and stage, periodically reappears in medieval, Renaissance, and seventeenthcentury literature.8 Even today, references to theatricality are still imbued with the images and ideas conveyed in these concepts. In addition to studying the direct influences of theatricality on cinematic language, as in theatricality in the era of the cinema of attractions, I will look at the discursive influences of theatricality, including critiques voiced by modern theatre practitioners and art historian Michael Fried.9 These voices, which have generated polarities and divisions among aesthetic judgments throughout diverse social spheres, also constitute the conscious and unconscious context for filmmakers and playwrights. For instance, the modern concepts of theatricalism and anti-theatricalism studied by Martin Puchner in Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama, relate to older prejudices against theatricality, such as religious and moral prejudices against theatre and its agents in the Elizabethan era.10 Puchner’s study of the motivations that support these prejudices enables a better understanding of the actual positions for or against theatricality, as well as the ways in which these attitudes are still present in cinema and in film studies today. As theatricality invites people to take up, or think through, positions in social spheres, it also informs spectators’ experiences. From a perspective that takes into account the role of spectators, my approach evaluates whether theatrical effects are solely aesthetic and reflexive, or whether they also participate in filmic discourse (as distinct from plot).11 In this latter case, my approach assesses whether these effects can contribute to raise awareness, stimulate resistance, and incite viewers to question the hegemonic power of classical cinematic narrative. Defining Cinematic Theatricality The search for the meaning of cinematic theatricality can begin by looking at its theatrical origins. In ‘Les modèles de théâtralisation dans le théâtre

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contemporain,’ Michel Bernard examines the concept of theatricality from a formal and lexical point of view,12 and defines possible types of relations between theatricality and theatre, with the latter standing as an aesthetic, historical, and social reality. My chapter focuses on three of these relations and applies them to theatricality in film. The first relation is the essential or substantial adherence to theatre as a genre or aesthetic discipline. In this context, ‘theatrical’ signifies that ‘which reflects or manifests what we believe as being the essence of the art designated as “theatre.”’13 As I will discuss in more detail in the next section, when this type of relation is adapted to cinema, the theatricality in question derives from references to theatre in the content or the form of the film. Because theatre and cinema do not share the same history or the same conventions, the discursive and aesthetic effects of theatricality in these media necessarily differ. While theatricality in theatre follows from a reflexive approach, in cinema it is often the product of crossings, although references to the stage can also suggest a discourse on spectatorship.14 For instance, theatricality is experienced when a spectator realizes that he or she participates in an event in the social field, an experience that can be shared by both cinema-goers and theatre-goers. The relation between theatricality and spectatorship will be examined in more detail in the section about committed theatricality. Bernard also mentions a type of relation between theatricality and theatre that suggests a process of production or construction that is specific to theatre. In this case, the adjective ‘theatrical’ is aimed at ‘the process and the creative dynamic.’15 In this context, ‘the word “theatricality” designates the specificity of this process or the nature or finality of this dynamic.’16 In film, this process or creative dynamic resides in attracting spectators into the web of the theatrical universe. This process is similar to the one studied by the art historian Michael Fried for whom theatricality is associated with the beholder’s physical and psychological confrontation with a kind of stage presence of a work of art whose demand consists in ‘being aware of the work and, so to speak, [in] acting accordingly.’17 Works that enable a theatrical effect, for instance, minimalist works of art, increase beholders’ awareness of sharing the same space as the works, install a physical and psychological distance, and ‘must somehow confront the beholder.’18 By contrast, works that invite the beholders’ absorption, an effect privileged by Fried, avoid the beholders’ conscious and discerning gaze and rather attempt to persuade them that what they see corresponds to a realist representation of the world.19 The same film can alternate between one pole and the other, as Rushton has argued in ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality.’20

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Throughout film history we can observe diverse stances towards theatre and theatricality. Notably, many filmmakers who have explored the theatrical potential of cinema had to cope with the various pejorative connotations linked with theatricality, including Cocteau (Les parents terribles, 1948), Bergman (The Seventh Seal, 1957), Dreyer (Gertrud, 1964), and Cassavetes (Opening Night, 1977). In the context of a third type of relation between theatricality and theatre, ‘theatrical’ designates ‘a positive or negative value attributed to a phenomenon by a personal or collective judgment [ . . . ,] ‘theatricality’ becomes a form of aesthetical appreciation which implicitly refers to normative judgments that were originally and radically directed toward theatre as an art or as an institution.’21 In different periods of the history of cinema, filmic strategies enabled various types of relationships between spectators and the cinematic spectacle. During the silent film era, ‘the cinema of attractions directly solicited spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself.’22 Moreover, ‘making use of both fictional and non-fictional attractions, its energy moves outward towards an acknowledged spectator rather than inward towards the characterbased situations essential to classical narrative.’23 These ‘theatrical’ films often included staged performances, such as Méliès’s films on magicians. However, studies of silent films also emphasize ‘theatrical’ concepts such as actors’ recurrently looking at the camera, as well as exoticism and exhibitionism, manifest in erotic films that were popular at that time.24 In this case, the adjective ‘theatrical’ included in ‘theatrical display’ designates a specific type of spectacle, since direct address to the audience and exhibitionism are not common to all theatre genres. While cinema got progressively institutionalized, looks at the camera were evacuated (although not totally) and the ‘transformation of filmic discourse that D.W. Griffith typifies bound cinematic signifiers to the narration of stories and the creation of a self-enclosed diegetic universe.’25 Once it became taboo for actors to look directly at the camera, ‘theatricality’ took on a negative connotation. Soon after, avant-garde filmmakers (Futurists, Dadaists, Surrealists) expressed enthusiasm for the possibilities of this new medium while deploring the excessive faithfulness of cinema to traditional art forms, more specifically theatre and literature.26 This movement against theatre and other traditional art forms strove to define cinematic specificity and wished to explore in a radical way the potential of the film medium.

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After the Second World War, modernist cinema seemed to reconsider the medium’s affinities with theatricality by challenging the classical dramaturgic model and by opening the representational space to the spectator’s gaze.27 As classical cinema had excluded looking at the camera from its vocabulary, this renewal of the gaze enabled the creation of subversive effects. However, the subversive character of certain effects varies in relation to established norms, and these norms necessarily evolve. Some films find ways to exploit subversion to their own ends, as we can observe in Hollywood films today, which recycle the rebellious theatricality of modern cinema in order to establish a tacit complicity with spectators now familiar with the tropes of modernity. The ‘normative judgments’ (Bernard’s term) directed against theatre and theatricality by practitioners and historians of cinema recalls the opposition to theatre that appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century. Puchner claims that ‘Wagner’s pivotal role with respect to modernism [in the arts] was transforming the concept of theatricality from a description of theatre as an art form – defining what happens onstage – into a value that must be either rejected or embraced.’28 Wagner and his conception of theatre aroused an anti-theatricalism movement, which criticized Wagner’s fixation on gestures in his operas, both on stage and in his music. From then on, exuberant gestures became associated with theatricality, creating a divide between people who were for this practice and those who were against it. In opposition to Wagner’s theatricalism, Brecht ‘called for a theatre that indexed its own features in order to subvert role-playing and mimesis so that actors could signal the falsity or duality of their own acting, selectively helping spectators to reject empathy and identification.’29 Through his criticism of role playing, Brecht ‘shares his mistrust of the theater with the modernist antitheatrical tradition [in the arts], and the central concepts of his reform – the estrangement effect, the epic theater, the gestus – come directly from this anti-theatrical heritage.’30 Anti-theatrical strategies in cinema, such as alienating effects, in attracting the attention of spectators and breaking up their narrative absorption, are currently associated with theatricality and are generally appreciated by film critics. 31 Indeed, many film scholars criticize absorptive narratives for their lack of transparency and remain wary of the ways in which they disseminate ideologies. However, the purpose of the marks of theatricality also depends on the production context of the film and the sociopolitical context depicted. This information enables viewers to determine whether a film offers a direct critique of theatricality or uses marks of theatricality as a means of criticizing something else.

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Whether categorized as absorptive or as theatrical, a film can display its marks of theatricality in a subversive or non-subversive way. In the sections that follow, I will consider whether theatrical effects, either formal, contextual, or sensorial, can initiate a discourse on cinematic conventions, criticize theatricality, and even suggest a rejection of heteronormative standards. Before exploring whether subversive aspects of cinematic theatricality can elicit a questioning of social conventions and encourage committed responses from spectators, however, I will first explore the aesthetic of theatricality in cinema and forms of spectatorship. Emphasizing the Theatrical Origins of Film Modes of Theatricality in Film As mentioned above in respect to Bernard’s first type of relation between theatre and theatricality, theatricality denotes the nature of what is theatrical. In ‘Lever de rideau,’ Jacques Gerstenkorn explores the ways in which theatre infiltrates the filmic text by examining its levels of intervention. First, the crossings between theatre and cinema can be expressed through style: ‘among the parameters of the cinematic language that are the most frequently mobilized, we can note the framing (the famous point of view of the orchestra man, characterized by its fixity, frontality, and a long shot), the scenography, acting, lighting, sets and costumes, or the mise en scène of speech.’32 In addition, ‘theatricality can shape, in a less conspicuous way, narrative structures and dramatic forms, particularly by referring to the division into acts, the functions of dialogues, the delimitation of space or the organization into scenes.’33 Filmmakers interested in adapting theatrical approaches to film form and narrative can choose between many options. Rather than listing all the possible manifestations of theatricality, Gerstenkorn distinguishes three principal modes of theatricality in film: modelling, recycling, and explicit reference to theatre. The process of modelling happens when a film ‘copies its mise en scène, its narrative development or its generic conventions on rhetorical patterns borrowed from theatre.’34 The aside, when a character breaks the ‘fourth wall’ to address the audience, as Woody Allen’s Alvy regularly does in Annie Hall (1977), illustrates perfectly the recycling process, which consists in adapting a theatrical form to assimilate it to the rhetoric of film.35 Explicit references to theatre, which are very common in the cases I will study below, imply a diegetization, partial or complete, of the theatrical apparatus.36 In the analysed

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films, theatrical performances integrated into the diegesis, the acting style, and the presence of characters playing actors highlight their theatrical influences. Viewers can learn about the style of a film or its aesthetic influences by examining its theatrical marks. Indeed, an analysis of both the effects of theatricality and the filmic signs enables a more detailed reading of the filmic discourse. In the case of filmic adaptations of plays, theatricality can originate in a reflexive intervention.37 The adaptations studied in this chapter refer to the production process in cinema, emphasize the theatrical origins of the film, and underline the presence of the audience.38 Rather than erasing their marks of theatricality, these adaptations remind us of their theatrical origins by underscoring the presence of the dramatic text and the tension between cinema and theatre. The dramatic tension at the heart of many filmic adaptations of Québécois and Canadian plays mirror the creative conflict, which consists in preserving the theatrical particularities of the play while trying to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the cinematic medium during the adaptation process.39 The mises en abyme of theatrical representations, ‘in addition to mirroring the utterance of the framing film, [ . . . ] refer also, by their structure, to the spectacular nature of cinema.’40 Moreover, the spectatorial allegories, as the ones studied by Robert Stam in Reflexivity in Film and Literature, can relate to the nature of the cinematic experience, underline the artificiality of the filmic representation, draw the viewers’ attention to the necessity of their complicit participation in the reading of the film, or can also suggest a critique of voyeurism.41 Perception and connotation are essential stages in the process of recognition that enable the interpretation of the effects of theatricality. Distinguishing among the scattered elements within the image, elements that may in fact present a reflexive trait, is an accomplishment that requires a connotative stage. Discovering the double sense of clues inserted in the image composition necessitates an increase in attention on the part of spectators, and often requires broad cultural and historical knowledge. Reflexivity not only underlines cinematic conventions and emphasizes the constructed nature of systems of representation, it also foregrounds ‘the doxa, the unacknowledged politics, behind the dominant representations of the self – and the other – in visual images or in narratives.’42 In studying the manifestations of theatricality in the selected films, I will evaluate whether these works tend to promote a discourse of resistance or whether they erase their marks of utterance and focus more on telling a story.

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Embedded Performances Staged performances and explicit references to spectatorship within the diegesis, which are recurring motifs in the films studied, often propose a discourse on spectatorial relations.43 The main action in Cabaret neiges noires occurs on the stage of a cabaret that presents satirical and singing shows. The audience in the film, shot while watching a show, double the action of the viewers watching the film. This strategy blurs voluntarily the limits between filmed theatre and cinema, emphasizing the crossings between media. Moreover, a clever parallel between life on the stage and life outside the stage is established and conflates both. This parallel blurs the distinction between theatre and everyday life and alludes to the idea of the theatrum mundi. Similarily, Nô invites us to the staging of a French play written by Feydeau for a Quebec theatre company that is on tour in Osaka for the 1970 World’s Fair. Through the figure of mise en abyme, the film reproduces certain aspects of this play and multiplies features borrowed from farce comedies, including a series of misunderstandings, farcically confused timing, and bedroom confusion.44 In addition, the caricatured way with which Lepage represents the instigators of a failed bombing accentuates the parallel between this farcical incident in Montreal and the Feydeau play staged in Osaka, thereby reinforcing the modelization process. Theatrical Characters Many of the characters in the films studied borrow the traits of theatre characters, or their behaviour in everyday life resembles staged performances. In the films that foreground actual staged performances, the actors alternate between their characters on and off stage. The exploration of this double life can become very complex, as in the case of Cabaret neiges noires. For example, the acting of the lovers, Maria ( Julie Castonguay) and Mario ( Jean Petitclerc), is emphasized in their ‘everyday life’ and in their stage performance. Because we usually expect a difference between these two styles of acting, the similarity is surprising. For instance, a still sequence shows the couple talking while lying in bed. After a moment, Maria starts unexpectedly to sing while looking at the camera. Then, suddenly, Maria is standing on the stage of the cabaret, continuing her singing. The lack of spatial continuity between the bedroom of the couple and the stage of the cabaret surprises the

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filmic spectator by its suddenness. Another character in this film, Martin (Didier Lucien), a black teenager whose mother wishes that he resembled Martin Luther King, feels the need to become a transvestite. The costume that he wears becomes an integral part of the ‘character’ he plays offstage. Alternatively, when he performs on the stage of the cabaret, he adapts events that happened to him offstage: the stage becomes a dramatic reconstruction before the audience. Les muses orphelines offers a reflection on the roles we play in everyday life and suggests that acting may be cathartic. Isabelle (Fanny Mallette), the youngest sister of a family of four children abandoned by their mother, after having discovered that her siblings had been lying to her for years about their mother’s past, decides to get her revenge. She organizes a meeting between her brother and her sisters, giving as a pretext the return of their mother. Commenting on directing the actors in this film, Robert Favreau notes: ‘The place where theatre manifested itself the most forcefully is during the final scene in which Isabelle, the youngest, decides to play the role of her mother. The actress, Fanny Mallette, and I, repeated this scene many times, without being able to find the right tone [because] playing a character looks theatrical, because this situation in which an actor plays the role of a character who plays a role is based on an eminently theatrical convention.’45 Matroni et moi combines archetypal characters from both film and theatre. Gilles, the loquacious intellectual, interpreted by the playwright Alexis Martin, plays the type of character that a spectator may expect to find on a stage. When listening to him, the spectator is inclined to locate him at the centre of the frame, imagining him on a virtual podium. By contrast, Guylaine (Guylaine Tremblay), his girlfriend, resembles the waitress of a café with whom a spectator would see himself or herself talking about the latest news, a character closer to the ones we usually see on the television screen. The spectator’s relation with the ‘theatrical’ character suggests a distance, similar to the distance created by a character standing on an imaginary stage. However, the acting of the cinematic character attracts the spectator closer into the action, often through the process of spectatorial identification. The contrast between Gilles and Guylaine, representing the tension between theatre and screen, also symbolizes two universes in constant dialogue – social and mediatized. To sum up this section, although the filmic and theatrical universes may appear to be in opposition, these three films suggest that, in fact, they are constantly getting inspiration from each other.

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The Mise en Scène of the Dialogues In addition to drawing viewers’ attention to the theatrical origins of the films through theatrical characters and the foregrounding of acting, these films also stage long dialogues. Moving away from narrative practices common to certain popular cinema genres that privilege the spectacular image over dialogue, many of the selected films are centred on speech. In these films, long monologues and voluble speeches focus on the present time, the moment when words are uttered, shifting viewers’ usual focus on action and the frenzy of images to the power of verbal language. In sequences centred on dialogues, the speech becomes the driving force behind the utterance. This emphasis on speech was a tendency also observed in the theatre of the 1980s in Quebec. According to Louise Ladouceur, a specialist on Quebec theatre, since the defeat of the independence project in the referendum of 1980, Quebec theatre has entered into a ‘stage of exploration of speech.’46 Many plays of this period demonstrate a verbal exuberance and privilege an unbridled speech. In the adaptations studied, this emphasis on speech appears in long verbal jousting. However, this ‘theatrical cinema’ does not look for the actuality of the real. The speech is motivated by the text and not improvised or natural, as in ‘oral cinema,’ a type of filmmaking that includes direct cinema and the ‘spectacles bonimentés’ of the silent era.47 Despite few action-oriented sequences and a spirited prologue, we witness instead the theatrical mise en scène of speech in Being at Home with Claude. This film, a long conversation on camera between an inspector ( Jacques Godin) and a young homosexual prostitute, Yves (Roy Dupuis), who is accused of having murdered his lover, focuses on his version of the events. The inspector repeatedly urges the young man to focus on the facts, whereas the young man prefers to lose himself in the details of his moods. Despite his tendency to digress, Yves explains, details and repeats the events of his evening to satisfy the insistent inspector, who is determined to find the clues of this mystery somewhere within the overwhelming stream of the prostitute’s words. In Matroni et moi, Gilles, a young idealist and voluble intellectual, tries with rhetorical ability to convince Matroni (Pierre Lebeau), a dangerous gangster, to stop his fraudulent activities. Matroni, rather laconic like any good cinematic mafioso, ironically answers him back: ‘Do I look like a librarian?’ In these two films, the contrast between ‘theatrical’ characters and the more cinematic ones draws the viewers’ attention to speech

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and theatricality in sequences that emphasize dialogue. Like in Being at Home with Claude, rather than being absorbed in the twirl of the diegesis, the spectator takes a pause to listen to the oral feats between Gilles and Matroni. Matroni et moi demonstrates its interest in exploring the cinematic possibilities of the dramatic text through the mise en scène of speech. In one sequence, Gilles and the mafia boss discuss together while crossing a car dump at night. Following Matroni, Gilles bombards him with his moralist rhetoric against corrupt business. During this conversation, which resembles an oratorical debate, various sizes of framing punctuate the dialogue, and close-ups underline the crucial moments of the discussion. When the mafioso explains his technique to get rid of undesirable collaborators, the film recycles the concept of the antique chorus to illustrate his words.48 As defined by Gerstenkorn, this strategy is part of the third mode of theatricality, the recycling, because this sequence alters and distorts this dramatic practice. Moreover, this film chooses not to simply use a flashback to narrate a past event. Instead, the boss narrates in present time a past action that is simultaneously staged in the background, accompanied by pompous opera music. This playful disruption of usual cinematic conventions reveals a form of theatricality that suggests a crossing between theatre and cinema. Moreover, the comical treatment of a tragic subject and the direct address to the spectators creates a tension that invites them to question Matroni’s code of ethics. Matroni et moi uses a variety of accents and levels of language as enunciative strategies. Michel Serceau explains how the unique phonetic status of orality in cinema is not neutral, because ‘the specific characteristics of the lexicon, of the syntax, the accents and accentuations, possible or fortuitous, which modulate it, enable the filmic speech to become not only a generic marker of realism but also a mode of characterization (social, cultural, psychologic) of the character.’49 In Matroni et moi, the variety of characters’ accents enhances the realism of the film and helps delineate the social classes. The exaggerated articulation of Gilles, a doctoral student, contrasts with the vernacular language of his girlfriend, who has a strong Quebec accent, and underlines the difference in their levels of education. The theatricality in these films comes from the presence of theatrical characters, the phenomenon of a complex crossing, and a celebration of speech, as the dialogue gets a large share of the cinematic time. These cinematic adaptations of Quebec plays can also be understood as constituting a specifically ‘theatrical cinema’ because they emphasize their

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modes of production, recalling their theatrical origins and thereby the process of adaptation. In ‘theatrical cinema,’ the alternating between monstration50 and dialogue favours speech, as in ‘oral cinema.’ However, if ‘oral cinema’ emphasizes the marks of the real in its modes of expression, ‘theatrical cinema’ chooses mise-en-scène strategies to highlight the filmic nature of the speech. The mise en scène of speech in both films produces a crossing between theatre and cinema and invites viewers to question filmic conventions. Moreover, the unexpected recycling of the antique chorus in Matroni et moi calls viewers’ attention to ethical questions. Theatricality in these films may draw viewers’ attention to social and representational politics, but viewers’ interpretations of theatricality also depend on the context of enunciation and spectatorship, as we will now see. The Context of Enunciation and Spectatorship As we have discussed so far, many contemporary scholars attribute ‘conscious mimeticism, audience presence, and behavioral resemblance to stage genres or styles as “theatrical” characteristics and called them “theatricality.”’51 Alternatively, Tracy Davis stresses the difference between the theatrical and theatricality, arguing that ‘theatricality is not likely to be present when a performance is so absorbing that the audience forgets that it is spectating.’52 Davis’s view suggests that conditions of enunciation and spectatorship may influence the emergence of theatricality. In Quebec, ‘theatrical cinema’ alternates between an abstract type of enunciation, which is usually found in classical narratives, and a more direct type of enunciation, which also characterizes ‘oral cinema.’ First, I will examine how spectators experience the effects of this alternating. Then, I will demonstrate how specific films, by directly addressing spectators, enable the manifestation of a committed cinematic theatricality. Tension between Theatre and Cinema To return to Bernard’s second type of relation between theatricality and theatre, narrative films can alternate between modes of absorption and theatricality, according to Fried’s definition of these concepts. Variations in the spectators’ quality of attention and in the levels of intensity of the action can allow this alternating between modes. In addition to these effects, a spectator can feel contradictory forces when he or she watches a film that highlights its theatrical origins, not unlike the viewer

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in Aaron Taylor’s chapter in this volume, who feels unsettled by Daniel Day-Lewis’s ostentatious performance in the final scene of There Will Be Blood. Because there is an explicit difference between the concept of space for a theatre character and for a cinematic character, the combination of different ways to treat space can produce a tension between cinema and theatre. The fluidity of cinematic space enables characters to escape from the frame while the space of the stage tends to physically confine their action. According to André Bazin, this dichotomy allows viewers to perceive the centrifugal and centripetal forces that distinguish cinema from theatre. For instance, the nature and function of the set are different in theatre and cinema. Bazin defines the decor of the theatre as ‘an area materially enclosed, limited, circumscribed, the only discoveries of which are those of our collusive imagination.’53 This circumscribed space by which the drama takes place is centripetal. Bazin contrasts this with the centrifugal space of the screen: ‘It is not the same with cinema, the basic principle of which is a denial of any frontiers to action [ . . . ] The screen is not a frame like that of a picture but a mask which allows only a part of the action to be seen [ . . . ] In contrast to the stage the space of the screen is centrifugal.’54 The dramatic energy is therefore subjected to opposite effects in cinema and theatre. On this subject, Bazin explains that ‘what is specifically theatrical about these tragedies is not their action so much as the human, that is to say the verbal, priority given to the dramatic structure.’55 By contrast, on screen, the human is not necessarily the focus of the drama, and the dramatic energy does not converge on a unique point. However, these effects are not so clearly distinguishable in the films studied because many of these films alternate between different types of space. Loiselle notes that in filmic adaptations of Canadian plays ‘the tension between centripetal theatre and centrifugal film parallels the structure of the dramas themselves, as we see characters torn by conflicting forces that push them out and pull them in simultaneously.’56 The characters in these adaptations are attracted by both the closed spaces of theatre and the open spaces of cinema. These attractive forces also influence filmic spectatorship. When the location and the characters within the film recall a staged play, the spectator is inclined to ‘look in the centre’ as in ‘oral cinema,’ a type of cinema that stresses its enunciation.57 Films of this type seem to create a distance between the spectator and the character, maintaining the spectator outside the diegetic space. For instance, in Cabaret neiges noires and in Nô, when the filmic spectator watches staged plays embedded in the

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diegesis, he or she stands by the spectators in the diegesis and ‘looks in the centre.’ By contrast, classical narrative cinema usually seeks to integrate the spectator into the space of representation, thus encouraging his absorption. When editing strategies and causal links between shots attract the spectator to the cinematic world, in identifying with the characters, the spectator feels ‘at the centre,’ as in narrative cinema, a type of cinema that favours psychological realism.58 The alternating between modes that maintain the spectator outside the diegetic space and modes that favour his or her absorption can disrupt expectations and underline the tension between theatre and cinema. In Being at Home with Claude, for instance, the dramatic energy emerges primarily from the acting. A camera positioned externally to the conflict between the inspector and Yves records their discussion. The film avoids shot/reverse shot editing – the characters are instead filmed side by side or face to face. Moreover, Yves declaims long speeches facing the camera, without having the inspector in front of him, as if he were addressing an imaginary audience. Such strategies hold spectators at the periphery. In contrast, the film encourages spectator projection into the cinematic world when Yves relates events that happened at a gay bar as a subjective hand-held camera shows us these jerky and exciting moments, following Yves into the bar and occasionally adopting his point of view. Committed Theatricality Committed cinematic theatricality invites spectators to acknowledge the presence of a social message and elicits their committed response. Depending on active spectatorial involvement, committed cinematic theatricality draws inspiration from Davis’s definition of theatricality. According to Davis, theatricality emerges from a ‘spectator’s dédoublement 59 resulting from a sympathetic breach (active dissociation,60 alienation,61 self-reflexivity) effecting a critical stance toward an episode in the public sphere, including but not limited to the theatre.’62 Since theatricality manifests itself differently in various media, it is necessary to adapt this definition for cinema. Indeed, different production modes, conventions, and forms of spectatorship require different analytical tools. Jacques Araszkiewiez distinguishes three levels of theatricality. The first level, theatricality in theatre, recalls the possible relations between theatricality and theatre as previously defined by Bernard.63 The second level, theatricality in cinema, relates with cinematic theatricality as previously studied by Gerstenkorn.64 The third level of theatricality applies

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to modes of representation and refers to a managing principle of reality. In this context, theatricality stands as a theatrical framing or a canvas that can be extended to visual arts, literature, or society.65 Samuel Weber studies this form of theatricality and refines this concept by drawing from the military sense of ‘theatres of operation.’ Theatre, in this context, is considered ‘a medium in which conflicting forces strive to secure the perimeter of a place in dispute.’66 From this conception of theatre, Weber defines theatricality as ‘a problematic process of placing, framing, situating rather than as a process of representation.’67 When the framing or elements in the image recall a proscenium, the scene of the film evokes theatre, but not necessarily a theatre of operations. Similarly, the presence of marks of theatricality does not necessarily bring forth a critical stance in the spectator. However, theatrical motifs integrated into the network of significations of the film can sometimes suggest a rejection of established norms in subverting cinematic conventions and/or underlining a conflict between classes. Nevertheless, to be subversive, a theatrical effect depends on the spectator’s interpretation, notably on his or her knowledge of filmic and theatrical codes (which evolve and influence each other) as well as on anti-theatrical prejudices. Once detected, a disruptive strategy can provoke a suspension of sympathy from the spectator towards the depicted situation or can break his or her state of absorption, to employ the term used by Fried. Theatricality emerges as the spectators dédouble themselves to realize their role as spectators. Davis summarizes Adam Smith’s words for whom ‘we are compelled to imagine ourselves before spectators as in dédoublement’s witnessing to one’s own spectacle.’68 Moreover, ‘such a spectator, who distinguishes between actor, role, and situation; self and other; and between self and self-as-actor, creates theatricality.’69 Ultimately, when the mise en scène suggests a place of conflicts and tensions, thus revealing conflicting ideas, this situation becomes favourable to the emergence of a committed cinematic theatricality. In Nô, Lepage uses formal strategies to encourage a political reading of his film, such as alienating effects to stress social class differences. This film portrays the nationalist aspirations of the Québécois people in the 1970s and recalls their colonial origins. It highlights ideological constructions with the use of various strategies, including parody, reflexivity, and theatricality. In the sushi restaurant of Osaka, for instance, the theatricality of the scene accentuates the difference of class and culture between Sophie (Anne-Marie Cadieux), the Québécois actress, and the Canadian diplomats, Walter (Richard Fréchette) and Patricia (Marie Gignac). Sophie and Patricia are both from Quebec, but

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Patricia lived in France when she was a teenager. This past experience explains her French intonation, while Sophie speaks with a rather strong Québécois accent. Throughout the conversation, Patricia adopts a condescending attitude towards Sophie, telling her without tact that she abandoned a career as an actress because ‘the exhibitionist aspect of the career’ deterred her.70 She never misses an opportunity to display her cultural knowledge and imply that Sophie is ignorant, repeatedly correcting her assertions, without any courtesy. After an ellipsis, during which the spectator assumes that Sophie has drunk a lot of sake, she decides to rebel against Patricia’s repeated attacks. She unveils the hypocrisy of Patricia’s pretending to like the Feydeau play in which she was playing. Sophie tells her how she disliked the play herself, showing her disgust by pretending to vomit, conspicuously pointing towards her mouth and making a loud gagging noise. In infringing upon the rules of conduct, this gesture underlines the difference of class, opposing the vulgarity of the actress to the diplomats’ conservatism. With her excess of ‘naturalness,’ this gesture accentuates Patricia’s dissembling dishonesty. Moreover, this sequence directly refers to the normative prejudice associated with theatricality. Following Patricia’s expression of disapproval towards the exhibitionist aspect of acting, Sophie’s excessive acting, though motivated by her excess of alcohol, recalls modern anti-theatrical prejudices against actors’ exaggerated gestures, and against acting in general. In its exploration of themes related to social roles, social conventions, and anti-theatrical prejudices, this sequence incites spectators to dédouble themselves so that they realize their role as active spectators, thereby constructing theatricality. Later in the scene, Sophie asks Patricia and Walter: ‘Why did we bring a French director to Montreal so we’d use a French accent in a lousy French play to represent Canada at the World’s Fair? I’ll tell you why. We’re colonized.’71 Sophie then shifts the site of struggle from the personal level to a political struggle at the national level. Her commentary suggests that the reproduction of traits and behaviours from French culture is inscribed in the dominant culture of Quebec. At this moment, the conflict of ideas between nationalists and those in favour of the status quo enables the emergence of a committed theatricality. However, a historical and cultural knowledge of the present ideologies is necessary to understand their relationship. We also assume that the spectator recognizes that this film depicts a limited perspective and a stereotypical image of the characters coming from these cultures. From then on, this conflict of ideas creates a distancing effect that incites spectators to

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question themselves before they feel included in the ‘we’ mentioned by Sophie. In revealing the present ideological mechanisms, Lepage invites spectators to adopt a critical stance in relation to the political debate depicted. Attempts to resolve the dialectic of cinematic realism and dramatic convention, combined with the presence of conflicting political views, encourage spectators to actively participate in a social debate. Unstable situations that favour sound argumentations incite us to take a position, and this is when it becomes possible to find our own voice. In brief, when committed theatricality emerges, it disrupts stability, questions absolute certainties, and unveils prejudices. Finding One’s Own Voice In the films studied, the presence of committed theatricality is associated with characters struggling to be heard and understood. The playwrights and directors of the period studied chose themes that emphasize feelings of isolation and depict characters striving to escape from their tragic destiny. Marginal characters tormented by internal conflicts, whether linked with their sexuality or their oppressive past, appear frequently in the corpus. This section explores the particularities of these tormented characters with the intent to understand whether their situations evoke the reality experienced by actual members of marginalized communities, or if their anguish rather symbolizes a general uneasiness within Quebec society. Many of the selected films give a voice to marginalized characters tormented by personal conflicts. Martin, the transvestite in Cabaret neiges noires, Yves, the homosexual in Being at Home with Claude, and Isabelle, the youngest child in Les muses orphelines, all live a personal crisis and feel trapped in a universe in which they are misunderstood. These films offer them a cinematic form of escape that enables them to break free from a tragic destiny and the centripetal forces that condemn them to revolve around themselves without end. The importance of text and words is a central motif in Les muses orphelines. The play from which the film was adapted is set in Quebec in 1965. It stages a fragile character, Isabelle, who strives to have command of the French language and wishes to break free from the yoke of her protective older sister. Her determined learning of new words, which she cultivates and collects in a small booklet, will allow her to overcome her disability and to acquire her freedom. Although at the time the play was

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first produced, in 1987, the 1960s language wars were already over, language was still an important motif in the theatre of the 1980s, as previously mentioned. This was not the case for post-referendum Quebec cinema and the allegory of the Québécois people fighting to find their voice (voie) can appear outdated in a film set in the 2000s.72 However, the topic wins in universality what it loses in specificity, since, in every society speech remains an essential resource for communicating and asserting one’s own rights. Cabaret neiges noires, which relates the story of Martin, a black teenager in search of his identity, also echoes the dialectic between cinematic realism and dramatic conventions. Martin stays isolated in his bedroom all day and withdraws into himself while his mother, in the adjacent room, watches tapes of Martin Luther King’s speeches over and over again. His mother’s obsession with this political personality weighs heavy on Martin’s morale, as he cannot live up to her expectations that he will one day resemble this man. The ‘televisual’ character of Martin Luther King, his overwhelming influence over the mother, and his image as a man of action, contrasts with Martin himself who lazes around and cuts himself off from the world. Progressively, the teenager attempts to break free from the role his mother would like him to play. His personal quest leads him to become a transvestite as a means to escape from the closed universe of his home, into the hostile streets. Unfortunately, he ultimately suffers a terrible death in an act of gratuitous violence – he is burned like a martyr. Although this death recalls more the dramatic finale of a tragedy than the happy ending of a Hollywood film, the emancipation of this character from his oppressive universe is enabled by a cinematic mise en scène, even though this liberation is granted at the cost of his life. In Les muses orphelines, Robert Favreau wanted to ‘get rid of the theatrical aspect of some dialogues which had resisted the adaptation process.’73 To this end, he ‘decided to film the characters’ eyes using close-ups in order to fragment some of the speeches and show expressive looks,’74 that is, to reduce theatricality. However, he also acknowledged that he could not totally avoid theatricality, because ‘contrary to most films in which the acting is secondary and the focus is on action and adventure, the focus of Les muses orphelines is primarily, as in the original theater production, on performance.’75 One of the dramatic conflicts resides in Isabelle’s ineptitude to express herself correctly and the impossibility of gaining her independence. She succeeds in overcoming her psychological incapacity by improvising a play in which she acts the role of her mother, a woman with a sophisticated vocabulary, and frees herself from

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the role of the incapable youngest child in which she took refuge. A character’s desire for emancipation, which echoes a filmmaker’s desire to escape from theatricality, can also apply to other films in our selection. The filmic adaptation of plays, victim to anti-theatrical prejudices, must still fight for recognition in the Québécois cinematic landscape. The filmic adaptation of plays, a practice still marginal in Quebec, gives a voice to characters who look for a path (voix) while exploring a hybridized cinematic language. The selected films distinguish themselves from classical narrative cinema with formal elements that emphasize their theatricality, as well as their will to use theatricality for discursive purposes. Committed theatricality, as a strategy of emancipation, indicates an intention to give a voice to the other, the ones who have been marginalized, victims of prejudices, or the ones whose difference prevents them from finding a place within society. Conclusion Committed theatricality does not only occur when the film compels spectators to dédouble, or split, themselves to reflect on their role as active viewers; it also requires that a debate of ideas confront the social equilibrium present in the diegesis or in the spectators’ own beliefs. In the films studied, the emphasis on speech can support a political discourse that favours the defence of the French language in Quebec in the context of globalization. However, in other contexts, theatricality may be used for different reasons, such as in Hollywood films that use theatrical strategies to make the audience laugh.76 Therefore, if committed theatricality is to emerge, it must be integrated into a filmic fabric that portrays conflicting forces and invites viewers to take a position on social debates. In the context of recent Québécois filmic adaptations of plays, theatricality as a marginalized aesthetic has been taken up by marginalized subject positions. In this ‘theatrical cinema,’ which explores a theatrical aesthetic against the current of classical narrative cinema, antihegemonic tactics seem to testify to the filmmakers’ desire to give a voice to marginalized subjects, including people of colour, homosexuals, people with learning difficulties, and colonized subjects. In contrast to classical narrative cinema, which favours action and narrative continuity, these films focus on speech by celebrating long dialogues and voluble characters. Moreover, by inviting viewers to feel the tensions between centripetal theatre and centrifugal cinema, these films compel viewers to empathize with theatrical characters torn by conflicting forces that push

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them out and pull them in simultaneously, mirroring their feeling of alienation. Whether characters in these films express the concerns of members of marginalized communities or evoke the anxiety of Quebec society faced with an uncertain future, their presence reminds us of the importance of diversifying the Québécois cinematic landscape and of giving a voice to these representatives of spheres of the society that are too often neglected. In conclusion, if the Quebec ‘theatrical cinema’ is searching for ways to leave its mark, it has certainly found its voice!77

NOTES 1 André Loiselle devotes the last chapter of his book to theatricality in film adaptations since the 1990s. See André Loiselle, Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003). Other filmic adaptations have been made since 1990, e.g., Le polygraphe (Robert Lepage, 1996), Les sept branches de la rivière Ota (Francis Leclerc, 1996), Possible Worlds (Robert Lepage, 2000), Mambo Italiano (Émile Gaudreault, 2003), La face cachée de la lune (Robert Lepage, 2003), Aurore (Luc Dionne, 2005), and Roméo et Juliette (Yves Desgagnés, 2006). 2 For instance, see Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Samuel Weber devotes one chapter to filmic theatricality in Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). The journal SubStance published two issues on the concepts of theatricality and performativity. See ‘Theatricality and Performativity: A General Bibliography,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 280–7. In addition, Cinéma et théâtralité (Lyon: Aléas, 1994), edited by Christine Hamon-Siréjols, Jacques Gersternkorn, and André Gardies, specifically explores the concept of cinematic theatricality. 3 For general investigations of the issue of stage-to-screen adaptation in general, see André Helbo’s L’adaptation: Du théâtre au cinéma (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997) and René Prédal’s Le théâtre à l’écran (Paris: Cerf, 1999). 4 That such a perspective offers a useful framework for considering ‘theatricality’ beyond questions of adaptation is clear given the shared emphasis between my concern with the political potential of theatricality in Québécois films and Jeremy Maron’s emphasis on the political commentary behind performance in his chapter on Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful. 5 Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, ‘Theatricality: An Introduction,’ in Davis and Postlewait, eds., Theatricality, 1. 6 Ibid., 2.

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7 Ibid., 6. 8 For further details about the concept of theatrum mundi, from its Greek origins to the seventeenth century, consult Lynda G. Christian, Theatrum Mundi: The History of an Idea (New York: Garland, 1987). 9 Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Dutton, 1998), 148–72; originally published in Artforum 5 ( June 1967): 12–23. For more information on the reciprocal influences between theatre and cinema, see e.g., Robert Knopf, ed., Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 10 Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). For additional information about the origins of anti-theatricality, see also Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 11 For explanations about this distinction, consult e.g., Sébastien Fevry, La mise en abyme filmique: Essai de typologie (Liège: Éditions du Céfal, 2000), or André Gaudreault, Du littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989). 12 Michel Bernard, ‘Les modèles de théâtralisation dans le théâtre contemporain,’ Revue d’esthétique 26 (1994): 95–106. I translate ‘théâtralisation’ into ‘theatralization,’ which designates the visual or aural configuration of the exhibiting. 13 Ibid., 97. Original text: ‘ce qui reflète ou manifeste ce qu’on croit être l’essence de l’art appelé “théâtre.”’ 14 Jacques Gerstenkorn, ‘Lever le rideau,’ in Hamon-Siréjols et al., eds., Cinéma et théâtralité, 15. 15 Bernard, ‘Les modèles,’ 97. Original text: ‘le processus, la dynamique créatrice.’ 16 Ibid. Original text: ‘le nom “théâtralité” identifie la spécificité de ce processus, ou encore la nature ou la finalité de cette dynamique.’ 17 Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood,’ 155. 18 Ibid., 154. 19 Michael Fried, Manet’s Modernism, or, the Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 200. 20 Richard Rushton details Fried’s theories on theatricality and absorption in order to adapt them to film. However, his distinction between non-theatrical cinema, theatrical cinema, and anti-theatrical cinema is too specific to be applied to this study. See Richard Rushton, ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality,’ Screen 45/3 (2004): 226–44. 21 Bernard, ‘Les modèles,’ 97. Original text: ‘une valeur positive ou négative attribuée à un phénomène par un jugement personnel ou collectif [ . . . ]

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“théâtralité” devient une catégorie d’appréciation esthétique par référence implicite au jugement normatif porté originellement et radicalement sur le théâtre soit comme art, soit comme institution.’ Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde,’ in Knopf, ed., Theater and Film, 40. Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions,’ 41. See, e.g., ibid., 39. Ibid., 42. See e.g., Germaine Dulac, ‘The Avant-garde Cinema,’ in P. Adams Sitney, ed., The Avant-garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism (New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978), 43–8. Michèle Garneau, ‘Effets de théâtralité dans la modernité cinématographique,’ L’Annuaire théâtral no. 30 (2001): 33. The cinematic modernity starts after the war, ‘approximately with Orson Welles in the United States, Jean Renoir in France and Roberto Rossellini in Italy’ (27). Original text: ‘grosso modo avec Orson Welles aux États-Unis, Jean Renoir en France et Roberto Rossellini en Italie.’ See also John Orr, Cinema and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). Between 1958 and 1978, according to Orr, ‘we reach the true moment of the modern in the Western cinema,’ 2. Ibid., 31. Davis and Postlewait, Theatricality, 14. Puchner, Stage Fright, 140. Rushton compares the divergent views on absorption and theatricality in film in ‘Absorption and Theatricality in the Cinema: Some Thoughts on Narrative and Spectacle,’ Screen 48/1 (2007): 109–12. Gerstenkorn, ‘Lever le rideau,’ 15. Original text: ‘parmi les paramètres du langage cinématographique les plus fréquemment mobilisés, mentionnons le cadrage (le fameux point de vue du monsieur de l’orchestre, caractérisé par la fixité, la frontalité, et le plan d’ensemble), la scénographie, le jeu d’acteurs, l’éclairage, les décors et les costumes, ou encore la mise en scène de la parole.’ Ibid. Original text: ‘la théâtralité peut aussi affecter, d’une manière peutêtre moins spectaculaire, les structures narratives et les formes dramaturgiques, notamment à travers la division en actes, les fonctions des dialogues, la clôture du lieu ou le découpage en scènes.’ Ibid., 17. Original text: ‘calque sa mise en scène, sa conduite narrative ou son contrat générique sur des patrons rhétoriques empruntés au théâtre.’ Ibid. Ibid.

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37 Robert Stam, in Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985), defines reflexivity as ‘the process by which texts, both literary and filmic, foreground their own production, their authorship, their intertextual influences, their reception, or their enunciation’ (xiii). 38 According to Neil Sinyard, the most interesting and rewarding adaptations are either those films that make you forget the stage altogether or those that make you hyperaware of it. See Neil Sinyard, Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 182–3. 39 Loiselle, Stage-Bound, 11. 40 Fevry, La mise en abyme filmique, 65. Original text: ‘en plus de réfléchir l’énoncé du film cadre, renvoient également, par leur structure, à la nature spectaculaire du cinéma.’ 41 Stam, Reflexivity, 30–69. 42 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2002), 37. In the chapter ‘Postmodernist Representation,’ Hutcheon examines the politics of representation and the ways in which self-reflexivity of postmodern fiction foregrounds narrative conventions and challenges the realist notion of representation that presumes an immediate and direct access to reality. 43 Monique Carcaud-Macaire and Jeanne-Marie Clerc propose a detailed analysis of the nature of spectatorial relations in cinema, notably of an audience watching a show, in ‘Le Carrosse d’or, de Jean Renoir, ou le théâtre relu par le cinéma,’ in Hamon-Siréjols et al., eds., Cinéma et théâtralité, 108. 44 For a more exhaustive description of the parallels between the playwithin-the-film in Nô and the film plot, see Aleksandar Dundjerovic, The Cinema of Robert Lepage: The Poetics of Memory (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 108–13. 45 Favreau quoted by André Loiselle in ‘Les Muses orphelines du théâtre au cinéma: En conversation avec Robert Favreau,’ L’Annuaire théâtral no. 30 (2001): 97–106, 104. Original text: ‘Là où le théâtre s’est imposé avec le plus de force, c’est lors de la scène finale où Isabelle, la plus jeune, décide de jouer le rôle de la mère. L’actrice, Fanny Mallette, et moi l’avons répétée plusieurs fois, sans jamais trouver le niveau juste, car “imiter un personnage” fait théâtral [, car] cette situation de l’acteur qui joue le rôle d’un personnage qui joue un rôle repose sur une convention éminemment théâtrale.’ 46 Louise Ladouceur, ‘Speak up: Les mots pour faire parler la langue sur les scènes francophones du Canada’ (paper presented at Colloque de l’ACQS, Quebec, Canada, 2004). Original text: ‘phase d’exploration de la parole.’

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Ladouceur mentions Jovette Marchessault, Normand Chaurette, RenéDaniel Dubois (playwright of Being at Home with Claude), le théâtre Ubu, Larry Tremblay, and Daniel Lanis as representative playwrights of this trend. Germain Lacasse explains the concept of ‘cinema oral’ in Quebec in ‘L’accent aigu du cinéma oral,’ in Stéphane-Albert Boulais, ed., Le cinéma au Québec: Tradition et modernité (St Laurent, Que.: Fides, 2006), 47–60. In the antiquity, the choir explained the action while it is was being performed on the stage. Serceau, L’adaptation, 129. Original text: ‘les particularismes de lexique, de syntaxe, les accents et accentuations, possibles ou accidentels, qui la modulent, font de la parole filmique, non seulement un indice générique de réalisme, mais un mode de caractérisation (sociale, culturelle, psychologique) du personnage.’ See André Gaudreault on monstration. Du littéraire au filmique: Système du récit (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1988), 120–3. Tracy C. Davis, ‘Theatricality and Civil Society,’ in Davis and Postlewait, eds., Theatricality, 128. Ibid. André Bazin, ‘Theatre and Cinema,’ in What Is Cinema? Translated by Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 104–5. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 106. Loiselle, Stage-Bound, 160. In his article, Lacasse analyses the differences between enunciation in narrative cinema and oral cinema. See Bill Nichols’s overview of psychological realism in Bill Nichols, Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). Davis, ‘Theatricality and Civil Society,’ 141. Using Adam Smith’s theory as a source of inspiration, Davis explains that ‘a superlative actor may elicit a response that is like (sympathetic) while a lesser actor or other factors may elicit a response that is unlike (dissociative)’ (ibid., 140). Davis argues for enabling effects of active dissociation, or alienation, or self-reflexivity in bringing into being the self-possession of a critical stance. According to Davis, ‘Brecht (1977) and Boal (1979) base twentieth-century dramaturgies on a similar idea, relying on alienation from character and circumstances to bring about political critique as an affect of viewing’ (ibid., 153. Ibid., 145.

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63 See Jacques Araszkiewiez, ‘La genèse de la théâtralité,’ in Hamon-Siréjols et al., Cinéma et théâtralité, 22. 64 Ibid., 22–4. 65 Ibid., 22–5. 66 Weber, Theatricality, 315; original emphasis. 67 Ibid., original emphasis. 68 Davis, ‘Theatricality and Civil Society,’ 141. 69 Ibid. 70 Original words: ‘l’aspect exhibitionniste de la profession.’ 71 Original words: ‘Vous allez m’expliquer ça comment ça se fait qu’on fait venir un metteur en scène français à Montréal pour nous apprendre à parler avec l’accent français dans une mauvaise pièce française pis que c’est ça qui représente le Canada à l’Exposition universelle d’Osaka? Mais je vais vous le dire pourquoi moi. Parce qu’on est un peuple de colonisés.’ The Feydeau play has never been performed at the World’s Fair in Osaka in 1970. This event is fictive. 72 After the failure of the 1980 referendum on independence, Quebec cinema has also turned away from the nationalist aspirations. See Michel Euvrard, ‘Quand la mer se retire,’ CinémAction no. 40 (1986): 27–34. 73 Favreau quoted by Loiselle, ‘Les muses,’ 104. Original text: ‘débarrasser de l’aspect un peu théâtral de certains dialogues qui avaient résisté au tamis de l’adaptation.’ 74 Ibid. Original text: ‘décidé de filmer en gros plan les yeux des interlocuteurs pour fragmenter certaines tirades et avoir des regards expressifs.’ 75 Ibid., 105. Original text: ‘contrairement à bien des films où le jeu des acteurs est secondaire et où ce sont l’action et les péripéties qui prédominent, Les muses orphelines reposent d’abord, comme dans la production théâtrale originale, sur l’interprétation.’ 76 Obviously, theatricality is not limited to cinematic adaptations of Quebec plays. Many ‘theatrical characters’ and theatricality are often present on television, e.g., in the television series Ramdam in Quebec. In film, the three following films present different types of theatrical characters: Being Julia (István Szabó, 2004), Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006), and Shrek the Third (Chris Miller, 2007). 77 I wish to thank Lynette Hunter, Sylvain Duguay, and Germain Lacasse for their generous comments on the French version of this text: ‘La théâtralité cinématographique engagée,’ Nouvelles « vues » sur le cinéma québécois no. 8 (2008): 1–29. I am also particularly grateful to Elizabeth Constable for her valuable comments on this chapter.

8

Theatrical Games and the Gift of a Fable: Performance vs. Reality in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful

JEREMY MARON

In many ways, the world of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful (La vita é bella, 1997) functions as a stage upon which the affable Guido Orefice (Benigni) attempts to impose his fantasies on reality through performance. In the film’s ‘romantic comedy’ first half, Guido playfully feigns the role of a royal prince in order to win the heart of Dora (Nicoletta Braschi) from her boorish and Fascist fiancé. Guido’s surroundings seem kind to him in this regard, as he stumbles into luxurious rolled-out red carpet and a white horse that fill out the fairy tale constructed by him for his princepessa. In the latter half – which has attracted much more critical attention than the former, both positive and negative, given its Holocaust subject matter – set five years later, after the birth of their son Giosué (Giorgio Cantarini), Guido attempts to resignify his family’s imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp by pretending that it is an innocuous game for Giosué’s benefit. Although Guido is eventually killed by a Nazi guard as the camp is being liquidated, this performance is also somewhat successful. Like Guido’s ability to win Dora by acting out a fairy tale in prewar Fascist Italy, Guido’s theatrical construction of the concentration camp experience as a game leads to Giosué’s survival. After being rescued by American liberators and reunited with Dora on the road away from the camp, Giosué jumps into her arms with a victorious, ‘We won!’ As the film ends with a freeze-frame of this mother-son reunification, Life Is Beautiful seems to conclude with affirmation of its implicit moral that even in the most trying circumstances, ‘life is beautiful.’ But to what extent does the film actually render the Holocaust – or at least the life of an imprisoned Jew during the Holocaust – beautiful? Behind Guido’s garrulous performances the danger of the political and practical realities of Fascist Italy and a Nazi concentration camp persist.

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Yet many critical responses towards the film relegate these realities to its periphery, viewing them as displaced by its narrative emphasis on Guido’s ability to supposedly manipulate them to his ends. In Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (2001), Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer suggest, ‘What makes [the film] so palatable, so consumable, is the way in which it “reintegrates” the crisis of the Holocaust within a “transformed frame of meaning,” a family narrative that binds the child together with a loss that is seemingly forever deferred.’1 More specifically they argue that this ‘[family] narrative . . . is so prominent as to divert viewers’ and critics’ attention from the ways in which the narrative’s failure is due to the structure of the film’s status as testimony.’2 David Denby makes a similar accusation in the New Yorker, chiding the film as ‘a benign form of Holocaust denial [from which] the audience comes away feeling relieved and happy and rewards Benigni for allowing it, at last, to escape.’3 In the broadest sense, the aim of this chapter is to counter the notion that Life Is Beautiful offers an ‘escapist’ treatment of the Holocaust by interrogating that which lurks behind the film’s bittersweet narrative of familial formation, separation, and reunification. While Guido’s performances seek to hide or divert attention from the dangers that surround him and his family, such efforts are continually challenged as glimpses of these dangers continually emerge. Rather than acting to evade history, then, Life Is Beautiful’s historiographical methodology is rooted precisely in this tension between Guido’s performances and that which they seek (and ultimately fail) to hide. These moments where the artificiality of performance is exposed must also be considered relative to the subjectivity of the film’s narration which, as Bernard-Donals and Glejzer suggest, is revealed to be a testimony from the now-grown-up Giosué, whose perception of his Holocaust experiences was shaped by his father’s performances. The emphasis of this chapter, then, is not on the qualities of the narrative that supposedly function to divert attention from the dangers of Fascist Italy or the atrocities of the Holocaust, but to suggest that any diversion attempted through Guido’s performances self-consciously fails – at the level of the film’s status as a historical representation – to mask these dangers and atrocities. To dismiss the film as ‘escapist’ or diversionary without considering the presence of what lies behind its family narrative is to misrecognize Guido’s performances as reality with the same credulity as Giosué. And as I will demonstrate by looking to the political commentary that consists in the tension between performance

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and reality, the film intimates that such misrecognition carries with it certain dangers on very practical levels. My perspective on the politics of theatricality is thus somewhat different from that which is discussed in Bissonnette’s chapter in this volume. While her contribution foregrounds the potential effects of committed theatricality on spectators as a means to challenge their prejudices and unquestioned beliefs in filmic and social conventions, my approach focuses primarily on the diegetic use of theatricality as a gesture of realpolitik. As a reactionary position, realpolitik is performed in response to concrete, practical, and immediate considerations rather than in accordance with moralistic principles and personal values. Political theorist David Robertson also suggests that realpolitik can be understood in terms of ‘game theory’ as a means to minimize the risk of catastrophic loss.4 From such an angle, Life Is Beautiful can be read as a complex reflection on the performance of realpolitik as a game, where a deeply flawed but seemingly necessary strategy is staged to manage the consequences of an unbearable reality. My consideration of the theatrical game as a partial mask of reality in Life Is Beautiful will be comprised of four sections. First, I will suggest that much criticism levied against Life Is Beautiful’s historical artificiality stems from the fact that part of the film’s historiographical impetus focuses on the Holocaust – a historical event that many writers approach as carrying with it certain criteria of representation that persist beyond any given treatment. Second, I will explore specifically how performance functions in the film, emphasizing the interrelationship between Guido’s attempts to resignify reality through performance, that which lurks behind his performances, and the danger of misrecognizing performance as reality. Third, I will consider how these inconsistencies between performance and reality interrelate with the film’s declaration of itself as a subjective recollection rather than a historical representation whose objectivity is feigned by the absence of an identifiable narrative source. I will conclude by arguing that the film’s emphasis on the artificiality of performance and the self-reflexive declaration of its own representational artifice critically engages with such qualities of artifice that have informed Italy’s postwar intellectual history of the Holocaust. Here I will draw on: (1) The scholarly and popular conception of a comparatively ‘mild’ Holocaust in Italy that was aided, among other factors, by certain historiographical emphases and governmental initiatives, and (2) Benigni’s own comments that relate Guido’s attempts to protect Giosué through the use of humour to how his own father told his family about his imprisonment in a concentration camp by using

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similar devices. By considering the mediation of history at the level of testimony (both in the film, and in terms of Benigni’s father) the film’s blurred distinction between reality and a performance clarifies as a commentary on how history is disseminated collectively and, importantly, trans-generationally. In short, Life Is Beautiful’s historiographical mode lies precisely in its invocation of representational artifice that may appear evasive, but has the potential to interrogate history, and the problematic of representing it, if the artifice is recognized and considered as such. The Challenge of Representing the Holocaust through a Lens of Artificiality Thematically, this chapter’s emphasis on the utility of Life Is Beautiful’s artificiality (both in terms of the fragility of Guido’s performances and the revelation of Giosué as the source of the film’s narration) borrows from Marcia Landy’s The Folklore of Consensus (1998). Landy’s study examines the trope of ‘theatricality’ in Italian cinema during the Fascist period, and she takes issue with the ‘continuing disregard for the Italian films of the 1930s and 1940s by many international scholars [and] its dismissal as vacuous and pernicious in its vacuity.’5 While my focus on the fragile qualities of Guido’s explicit performances differs from Landy’s emphasis on a ‘theatricality [that is] less about spectacle in a monumental sense and more about the everyday aspects of performance,’6 it echoes her concern with interrogating representational forms that may, through overtly theatrical qualities of performance or representational self-reflexivity, appear to evade such commentary via what is perceived as an apolitical ‘escapism.’7 However, considering the artifice of Life Is Beautiful faces particular challenges that stem from two important factors. The first factor is rooted in a basic and rather overt disparity between the history that informs the film’s narrative (pre–Second World War and Holocaust-era Italy) and how this history is treated in the film. As Linda Holt suggests in an ultimately positive review, any historical value to be found in Life Is Beautiful cannot be localized in its adherence to the Holocaust’s historical record. In regards to the film’s narrative portrayal of Guido as an altruistic father who attempts to shield his son from the horrors of a concentration camp, Holt writes, ‘Despite its historical backdrop, its characters and plot are historically neither true nor possible . . . Guido, Benigni’s hero, displays such compulsive anarchism and comic irreverence that no totalitarian regime would have tolerated him for more than five minutes. Nor do

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the records support the film’s central story, in which Guido successfully hides his five-year-old son in a death camp.’8 Such inaccuracy at the level of historical detail is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. Holocaust survivor and author Imre Kertész specifically lauds Benigni’s film for its failure to convey a sense of authenticity relative to the Holocaust as a more honest approach to the problems of ‘getting at’ the truth of an event that is available only to those who experienced it directly.9 It is for this reason that Kertész, as a survivor, professes his preference for Life Is Beautiful over what he perceives as the feigned (and failed) authenticity of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).10 Yet Kertész’s praise of the film notwithstanding, the challenge of establishing the historicity of artifice in Life Is Beautiful goes beyond merely accommodating its historical inaccuracies, to the fact that these inaccuracies are set, at least in part, within a Holocaust framework. In the introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (1992) Saul Friedlander suggests that representations of the Holocaust are often considered as though they are operating within ‘intangible but nonetheless perceived boundaries. The dilemma we are identifying is not one of gross transgression (the denial of the Holocaust for instance). The intractable criterion seems to be a kind of uneasiness. The problem is neither narrowly scientific nor blatantly ideological: one cannot define exactly what is wrong with a certain representation of the events [the Holocaust], but . . . one senses when some interpretation or representation is wrong.’11 This idea about sensed responses as to whether a Holocaust representation is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ conveys an ethical judgment that moves beyond whether or not the Holocaust can be represented, and asks instead ‘Ought the Holocaust be represented?’ or more accurately, ‘Ought the Holocaust be represented this way?’ That a comedic film about a father who is able to save his son from the Holocaust through deception would engender such questions is explicitly articulated by Kertész who writes, after seeing the film prior to its release in his home country of Hungary, ‘I haven’t read the criticism and don’t know the specific reproaches levelled against the film, and – truth to tell – I can’t well imagine what it is in the film that has provoked such debate. I suppose that once again a choir of Holocaust puritans, Holocaust dogmatists and Holocaust usurpers is being heard, asking: “Can, should the Holocaust be treated in this way?”’12 In her essay ‘The Seriousness of Humor in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful,’ Millicent Marcus begins with the implication that such a

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question applies certain representational conditions to the historical treatment of the Holocaust specifically, against which she wishes to defend the film. She argues that these constraints have been seized by a historical bias that she terms ‘Holocaust fundamentalism,’ an approach ‘insist[ent] that historical accuracy be the principal criterion for judging representations of the Shoah.’ According to Marcus, strict adherence to such a documentary approach to the Holocaust threatens ‘to consign it to the archives, to embalm and distance it in a way that will deprive the history of its urgent moral claim to our attention.’13 I would go one step further and suggest that not only does a ‘Holocaust fundamentalist’ perspective threaten to constrain analysis of a film like Life Is Beautiful by marginalizing what lies behind its refusal to adhere to certain historical facts through the dismissal of the narrative as escapist, but it also invites evaluative perspectives that fault the film for its refusal to commit to inexplicable and emotionally subjective criteria (hence Marcus’s apt choice of the term ‘fundamentalism’). Such criteria emanate rather innocently in Denby’s invocation of the term ‘benign Holocaust denial’ to describe the film, and find a much more explicit manifestation in Kobi Niv’s extremely critical book Life Is Beautiful, But Not for Jews, which accuses the film of, among other things, positing the Holocaust as a divine punishment against the Jews for deicide and an absolution of Christian responsibility for the Holocaust.14 While Niv’s close reading offers certain insights that can illuminate Benigni’s film, such examples like those that I just mentioned suggest how a ‘fundamentalist’ approach to Holocaust representation can easily slip into accusations rooted in moral nitpicking that stem from an individual’s conception of how the Holocaust should be treated rather than how the Holocaust is treated in a given work. It is for this reason that I want to explore, following Marcus, how Life Is Beautiful self-consciously breaks away from a ‘monolithic approach to Holocaust representation’15 by calling attention to the inconsistencies between performance and reality, between history and its representation. For it is only in these inconsistencies, which are right there in the film but need to be recognized as such, that the film’s method of historical representation begins to clarify. Performance vs. Reality (and the Danger of Confusing the Two) The most overt example of a theatrical performance that carries with it a political commentary occurs in Life Is Beautiful’s first half, when Guido

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poses as a Fascist official in order to gain access to the school in which Dora teaches. The official is meant to be giving the children a speech on the superiority of the Italian race. As Guido stands on a table, in ridiculous garb, extolling the biological perfection of his perfect ‘Italian’ ear and belly-button, the ludicrousness of the Nazi and Fascist racial policies is palpable. Like Charlie Chaplin before him in The Great Dictator (1940), who reduced totalitarian goals of world domination to childish bickering and a food fight between dictators Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin) and his equally buffoonish ally Napaloni ( Jack Oakie), this scene intimates a subversive jab at the racial policies of Mussolini’s dictatorship through the use of humour. But also like Chaplin’s film, whose final soliloquy acknowledges the seriousness of the threat that the film heretofore had been undermining, the danger behind that which Guido mocks in the guise of a Fascist official is present, even if the film’s engagement with this danger lacks the overt anger and desperation of The Great Dictator’s closing moments. And it is the persistence of these threats, which continuously lurk behind Guido’s performances, that calls attention to the film’s representational artifice via the inconsistency between performance and reality in the film’s story, and the testimonial form of its subjective narrative source. Although the delineation between reality and its distortion through performance is most consistently at the fore in the film’s latter half, during the concentration camp ‘game,’ Life Is Beautiful highlights the misrecognition of performance for reality, and vice versa, throughout its entire duration. For example, in one of the film’s first sequences, Guido and his friend Ferruccio (Sergio Bustric) are driving on a country road towards Arezzo to work for Guido’s Uncle Eliseo (Giustino Durano). As Guido naps in the passenger seat, Ferruccio recites a poem as he drives before realizing that the brakes have failed. Guido initially misrecognizes Ferruccio’s expression of panic as merely a part of the poem, failing to comprehend the severity of their predicament until the car is completely out of control. This misrecognition of reality and performance quickly assumes a political stance as the two men careen towards a Fascist celebration. Guido madly gestures for the participants to get out of the way of the car, which they do, but mistakenly perceive Guido’s arm movements to be a Fascist salute, which they return. After their car finally stops and Ferruccio attempts to fix the breaks, Guido meanders away and lightheartedly tells a young girl that he is a prince, and that the land they are on belongs to him. He then alludes to Mussolini’s brutal 1935 invasion of Ethiopia by playfully telling the girl that he will rename the area Addis

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Ababa, and replace the cows with camels and hippopotamuses. Guido’s make-believe adoption of a royal stature is the first explicit example of how his good-natured performances throughout the rest of the film serve to distort the brutality of the danger that surrounds him. As such, Guido’s desire to resignify his environment via a playful performance is evident even in the film’s first half in which the narrative trajectory is not concerned with survival in the Holocaust, but rather the romantic formation of the couple. While Guido’s reference to Addis Ababa suggests that the racialized colonialism of Italy’s recent past is not completely lost on him, the fanciful rhetoric that he uses to present himself as royalty hardly captures the severity of Mussolini’s totalitarian regime. In the film’s first half, a degree of obliviousness to the political threats that exist outside of his focus for Dora is certainly ascribed to Guido. After his Uncle Eliseo’s house is ransacked, Guido responds with humour and does not entertain the possibility that the attack may have been racially motivated. Guido’s Jewish race is revealed almost accidentally, after Eliseo’s white horse is painted green with the words ‘Jewish horse’ written on it, and Guido jokes that the same people might paint him yellow and write ‘Jewish waiter’ across his chest. As such, while Guido may very well be aware of the racist intent of this attack, he remains oblivious to the ominous threat that it suggests. To return to Guido’s donning a Fascist disguise to come to lecture on the superiority of the Italian race at Dora’s school, his use of physical comedy suggests that though he is aware of the racism of Italy’s Fascist government, he is unable to anticipate how such ideological motivations, which he initially treats with subversive imitation, could have very pragmatic effects on him (and the family he seeks to build with Dora). Moreover, his endearing performance in front of the children seems motivated more by a desire to see Dora again rather than to criticize the racist policies of Mussolini’s regime. Guido’s implicit denial of the very real threat of anti-Semitism is especially obvious in the climax of the film’s opening half, when he successfully steals Dora from her Fascist fiancé using Eliseo’s desecrated horse. The image of the couple trotting out of the engagement party on horseback suggests an icon familiar to fairy tales, a fitting conclusion for the romantic trajectory of the film’s first half. However, this same image also serves as a visual reminder (via the desecrated horse) that coinciding with the fairy-tale romance is the reality of Italian anti-Semitism, which will loom large during the film’s second half. Furthermore, Guido’s initial playful invocation of Addis Ababa is contrasted in this scene by the

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presence of Ethiopian performers and an Ethiopian cake on display for the gaze of the Fascist audience. I have already explored instances that suggest that despite Guido’s performances for Dora he has a passing awareness of Italy’s prewar political reality, but does not comprehend the practical danger that the anti-Semitism he observes poses to him, a ‘Jewish waiter.’ And while this oblivious quality may seem charming (if irresponsible) as Guido tries to woo his soon-to-be-wife, and despite the fact that Guido knows he is performing the game once they are in the camp, such obliviousness persists and carries with it more dangerous connotations after his family’s deportation. Guido’s continuing failure to comprehend the dangers of the camp’s reality is most obvious, and most ominous, when Giosué appears as Guido is performing manual labour, hauling heavy anvils as he fulfils his actual role within the camp while pretending his torturous actions are a part of the game. After Giosué tells his father that all the other children in the camp have been rounded up for the ‘showers,’ Guido scolds his son for not accompanying them. This instance of paternal authority, however, demonstrates an egregious lack of judgment and reflects Guido’s failure to recognize that which persists behind the mask of his own performance. In the preceding scene, Dora learns from another female inmate the true purpose of these showers. At the moment when Guido instructs Giosué to go with the other children, the word ‘showers’ symbolizes the actual exterminationist intent of the camp, which Guido fails to recognize as such. It is only Giosué’s stubborn demeanour that saves his life in this case rather than the symbolic fiction of the game, rendered useless in this instance by Guido’s misrecognition of what the ‘showers’ actually are. The ultimate fragility of the game’s ability to ‘mask’ the Holocaust comes to the fore immediately following a sequence in which the tenuous delineation between the game and that which it seeks to disguise threatens to collapse, and Guido’s naive belief in his own fictions is revealed and destroyed. In this sequence, Guido and Giosué are seen outside of their barracks by a German guard. Since Guido’s clothing identifies him as a prisoner, there is no mistaking his national identity, but she mistakes Giosué to be German and approaches to collect the boy for a dinner for which Guido has been recruited to work as a waiter. As the guard approaches, Giosué’s father instructs him, under the guise of the game, of course, to remain completely silent, thus incorporating the child as an unknowing performer within the reality that the game performs to distort, as opposed to a performer within the game’s fiction.

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But, of course, the only way for Giosué to perform as though he is not performing as a German child who is supposed to be at this dinner is to remain silent. Given the cultural dichotomy of the camp whereby the Italian prisoners are subservient to their German masters, Guido perceives that language is intimately bound to the nature of the subject. In other words, he fears Giosué’s Italian utterances will invariably compromise the performance that seeks to convey that Giosué belongs among the German children. Unsurprisingly, Guido turns out to be correct when Giosué accidentally utters ‘Graci’ as a server places food in front of him, thus allowing his true Italian self to peek through the guise of his performance as a (muted) German. Anticipating the consequences of Giosué’s revelation of his Italian self, Guido quickly has the rest of the children in the room mimicking his son’s utterance by the time the waiter returns with a German guard. Because all of the children are now speaking Italian, the symbolic function of language once again lacks a clear correlation between the spoken word and the revelation of an inherent racial identity. But despite Guido’s quick thinking in this case, the dinner sequence also corresponds to a crisis in the protective fiction that Guido has staged for himself. The most significant example of Guido’s own failure to recognize his performance for the mask that it is stems from his relationship with Dr Lessing (Horst Buchholz). After Guido recognizes the Nazi doctor during an inspection from his time as a waiter in Arezzo, and Lessing recruits Guido to work as a waiter at a dinner for the Nazi guards and their children, he tells another inmate that the doctor is his ‘friend’ and believes this connection might enable him, Dora, and Giosué to escape the camp. This misattribution of benevolent intent to Dr Lessing reveals that to some degree Guido has bought into his own performance. As such, his misconception of his rapport with Lessing exposes the limits of theatricality itself as a political gesture. As Melissa Matthes argues in her comments on the ‘theatricality of republican politics,’ to be effective politically one must recognize ‘how and when to assume the position of the actor . . . and how and when to assume the role of object.’16 Guido’s tragic flaw, as it were, was to misrecognize his role as a mere object in Lessing’s own stage production. During the dinner service, when Guido discovers the doctor’s interest in him extends only so far as his ability to solve riddles, it collapses his perception of a possible means of escape. It is immediately following this sequence, which features the near-dissolution of the opposition between the reality and performance through Giosue’s Italian utterance of ‘Graci,’ and the complete

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dissolution Guido’s constructed hope of rescue, that the tangible reality of the Holocaust comes to loom large before him. As the dichotomous relationship between the reality of the camp and the fictions constructed via his performance blurs, Guido leaves the dinner and walks through a nebulous fog, telling Giosué to sleep, wondering aloud whether what they are experiencing is a dream. In this instance, Guido desperately evokes a more primitive (Freudian) means of contending with the unfathomable nature of their imprisonment rather than the symbolic fiction of the game. At this moment of desperation, Guido stumbles onto the abject pile of bodies which is the film’s only visualization of the Holocaust’s murderous conclusions. This moment thus suggests the emergence of precisely what Guido’s performance of a game was meant to hide. Because Guido discovers these bodies while Giosué is asleep on his shoulder, this scene could easily be read as reduction of the film’s overall arc – the father shielding his son from the horrors of the Holocaust. However, its placement immediately after Guido’s belief in his own fictions has come crashing down suggests that this visualization of death holds a greater significance. By affording Guido this experience of seeing, the film visually fulfils what was narratively fulfilled in the preceding sequence – the destruction of Guido’s desperate hope that the horror of the camp that he has aimed to disguise is simply imaginary. Since Guido has been blinded by his own performance to an extent, the revelation of the corpses serves dually as a testament to the presence of the reality that it has failed to fully mask, but also as a reminder that the fictions constructed by Guido’s performances are themselves ‘dreams’/imagination. It is the horrors that he aims to disguise that are real. The film thus suggests that Guido must ‘awake’ from these dreams in order to maintain the fictions for Giosué’s sake, even to the point of sacrificing his own life.17 In this regard, the final wink that Guido gives to the hiding Giosué immediately prior to being executed assumes a self-reflexive quality. Since the wink is also directed towards the viewer, as Guido looks directly into the camera, it suggests the father fully comprehends the necessity of his ultimate sacrifice in order to pursue his role in the reality behind the game to its tragic and logical conclusion. The Self-Reflexive Implications of Giosué’s Narration The dichotomy between ‘seeing’ and ‘not seeing’ that is evident in Guido’s posture when he discovers the pile of bodies, from which Giosué

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is turned away, is a graphic reminder of what is implied by the film’s closing voice-over that reveals Giosué as the source of the film’s narration as he declares, after Guido’s death and as he reunites with Dora, ‘This is my story. This was the sacrifice my father made. This was his gift to me.’ This revelation of Giosué as the film’s narrator also reveals that the film’s narrative itself is a recollection not only of a subjective experience (this is his [Giosué’s] story), but one shaped by Giosué’s misperception of Guido’s performance as reality. This perception thus carries with it those moments that this performance fails and the glimpses of the Holocaust peek through (such as when Giosué sees Guido performing his actual task in the camp carrying anvils, or notices that the camp’s children have disappeared). Even prior to their deportation, Guido’s attempts to shape Giosué’s perceptions of his surroundings are only partially successful. As they walk the streets in Arezzo, Giosué observes clear examples of anti-Semitism. But like the ‘game’ in the camp, these instances are resignified by Guido in an attempt to mask the sinister reality in which the Jewish father and his family live. Guido’s own bookshop is marked as a ‘Jewish store,’ and a sign on another business forbidding Jews and dogs from entering prompts Giosué to ask his father why they are not allowed inside. Guido tells Giosué that the signs simply reflect the subjective preferences of that shop’s particular owners, a response that echoes Guido’s earlier invocation of humour to mollify the ramifications behind the attacks on Eliseo’s home and horse. To ‘prove’ his point, Guido tells Giosué that they will put up a sign on their store reflective of his son’s own ‘prejudice,’ barring ‘spiders or Visigoths’ from entry. It is essential to note, however, that the presence of anti-Semitism (or that which signifies antiSemitism) is not lost on Giosué, and that even before the deportation to the camp and the commencement of the ‘game,’ Guido attempts to craft not what his son sees, but rather his son’s understanding of what he sees. After their deportation, the delineation between Guido’s performances and what Giosué perceives becomes more overtly tenuous. To be sure, the film goes out of its way to retain a theatrical quality in the concentration camp setting. Life Is Beautiful not only refuses to name the camp that Guido’s family is brought to, thus denying it a historical situatedness, but the camp also lacks any discernible sense of spatial continuity, which lends the buildings and the general camp environment a centripetally and self-consciously two-dimensional quality. And, of course, Guido’s irreverent histrionics, which he retains up until the moment he is killed, intimates the camp as a site of theatrical performance rather

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than an attempt to historically represent a Nazi camp as it was. But unlike his theatrics in the film’s first half, like sweeping in to rescue Dora on a white horse or performing a satire on the Fascist notion of Aryan purity, Guido’s attempts to control the stage of the concentration camp universe become more difficult as glimpses of the Holocaust repeatedly peek through the guise of the game. For example, at one point, Giosué notices that suddenly there are far fewer children in the camp than before, even if he does not fully understand the ramifications of the ‘showers’ to which they were sent. He also tells Guido that ‘they make buttons and soap out of us,’ and ‘they burn us in the ovens,’ which signals an emergence of the Holocaust’s reality that Guido must resignify by using humour to refer to the horrific possibility of using people to wash his hands or button up his shirt as ludicrous. These moments of distorted recognition thus create fissures in both Giosué’s experience of the Holocaust as a fictional performance that he misperceives as reality, as well as the film’s story told by Giosué that is informed by this misperception. In other words, the ‘innocence’ of the film’s narrative, like the performative game, acts as a mask that only partially covers the Holocaust because it incorporates the narrator’s distorted perception of his experiences. In The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, Slavoj Žižek thus suggests that Guido’s performance strategy is far more complex than simply ‘hiding’ the Holocaust from Giosué. Žižek observes, ‘The father does not protect the son from the harsh reality of the camp, he just provides the symbolic fiction that renders this reality bearable.’18 Even without the psychoanalytical ramifications that Žižek ascribes to this, the fact that the realities of the camp are still present behind a fictional guise is essential to the film’s representational mode. As such, Guido’s strategy at rendering the Holocaust bearable through performance must be more complex than ensuring his son remains completely ignorant of what surrounds him, since Giosué still perceives his environment. This is why I have been discussing Guido’s performance of the game (and of himself as a ‘prince’ in the first half ) as one of resignification. In his staging of the game, Guido temporarily succeeds in turning real objects into props. But every so often, Giosué and the audience perceive the actual object that is resignified as prop. The theatre – the space where objects are positioned in a meaningful arrangement – is like politics insofar as its mise en scène serves to give a sense, a signification, a direction to concrete material. But the materiality of the object always remains and always threatens to seep through and undo its fictional composition.

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To return to the scene where Guido almost unknowingly sends Giosué to his death in the ‘showers,’ when Giosué sees Guido performing the task of carrying anvils, he is witnessing the actual commission of a task that would be carried out by a slave in a work camp. Guido’s strategy for contending with this observation of reality is one of resignification, rendering the mundane performance of an everyday task (at least in a concentration camp) into a theatrical performance in which the hauling of an anvil becomes a task within the game. In other words, the ‘harsh reality’ of the camp repeatedly emerges, in spite of Guido’s efforts at hiding it, thereby creating fissures in the symbolic fiction that he must fill in order for this distortion to continue. And while he fills them by continuing to perform the game for his son’s benefit, these moments where the game breaks down constitute part of Giosué’s experience of the Holocaust. It is thus useful to consider how the film’s moment of ‘revelation’ in which the horrors of the Holocaust are most clearly evident to Guido is also a moment in which they are still unseen by Giosué. Despite the sequence’s logic relative to Guido’s awareness of the fallibility of his performance, the swirling fog and haziness that permeate it evoke an imaginary quality. Given Giosué’s status as the source of the film’s narrative, the dreamlike opaqueness of this moment can be understood as the point in the narration where an attempt is made to imaginarily visualize the synergistic sum of all that was distorted by the game – the Holocaust itself. This particular moment of the narrator’s inexperience is thus much more difficult to produce cogently as ‘imagined’ than those other moments in the film that are included in Giosué’s ‘recollection’ that he did not experience directly – like the film’s entire first half that preceded his birth. For Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, such gaps in the film’s narrative (or more accurately perhaps, narrational) logic – that is, a narrator whose testimony includes moments that he did not experience and thus should not logically be able to testify to – suggest that the film ultimately fails in its assumption of a testimonial form; a failure that the film’s ‘family narrative’ seeks to divert attention from.19 Yet how can one suggest that the film deflects attention from its testimonial form when the film opens with a voice-over declaring that the film is a subjective recollection? That we do not discover that this voice belongs to Giosué until the end is a moot point, as the presence of a voice-over declaring that it is a story about to be presented acknowledges that the story is being told from a perspective. Moreover, the opening voice-over calls attention to the limits of testimony by stating,

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appropriately over the visuals of the ‘unimaginable’ fog sequence (prior to the visualization of bodies) that returns towards the film’s conclusion, ‘This is a simple story . . . but not an easy one to tell.’ Such testimonial limits have been explored by many trauma scholars, most notably perhaps in the work of Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, in relation to Holocaust testimony itself.20 Bernard-Donals and Glejzer themselves discuss the challenges of testifying even about one’s own experience during the Holocaust given the ‘sublime’ nature of the event that lends it a quality that a ‘witness’ sees but cannot say.21 As such, the nebulous quality of the only moment in which the film visualizes ‘the Holocaust’ in the form of the bodies enacts the difficulty, if not impossibility, of articulating that reality which Guido’s performance aimed to hide. This challenge simply does not apply to the narrator’s imaginational articulation of something as qualitatively distinct from the Holocaust as his parents’ romantic formation as a couple. But the most important function of these book-end voice-overs is that they call attention to the film’s status as a historical representation that cannot be isolated from the voice that presents the narrative, whose source experienced the history comprising it largely through an indirect and/or distorted perception. The mediation implicitly declared in Life Is Beautiful’s opening voice-over pre-emptively counters any reading that fails to acknowledge that the film declares itself as mediated and whose narrative is, and is presented, ‘like a fable.’ In other words, the film’s narrative does not conform to the Holocaust fundamentalist ideology, but instead operates dually as a memorial recollection and testimony that, as the film intimates, was shaped by a distorted experience of the past. It is for this reason that the distortion manifest in the tension between performance and reality in the film transcends its narrative, into the narrative structure itself. The ‘glimpses’ that Giosué gets of the reality that persists behind Guido’s performance – the presence of anti-Semitic signs in Arezzo even prior to their deportation, the eventual lack of children in the camp, of Guido performing actual slave labour, of the knowledge that parts of Holocaust victims’ bodies were to become commodities – are presented in the film as Giosué perceived them, without a clear understanding of the relationship between these glimpses and their resignification in the mediations of his father. Hence, there are no scenes of violence in the film. Both Guido and Eliseo, not to mention the rest of the camp’s elderly and child inmates, are killed ‘offstage,’ if you will, and the only explicit image of death in the film is stylistically distinct from the rest of the film. If Life Is Beautiful is, in the words of

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Linda Holt, an ‘old-fashioned, innocent piece of work,’22 it is because the narrator experienced it from a perspective of innocence, not because it is a (‘benign’) denial of the Holocaust’s severity. Contending with the Reality of the Fable To reiterate, as Life Is Beautiful’s entire narrative is revealed to be Giosué’s recollection, the distorted quality of his Holocaust experience remains intimately bound to the testimonial nature of the film’s representational mode. In this regard, a correlation emerges between Giosué (the author of the narrative within the film) and Benigni (the author of the film). Some critics have pursued this correlation by arguing that Benigni’s fabulist film mirrors Guido’s construction for Giosué, whereby the film’s (read: Bengini’s) refusal to visualize (outside of the nebulously framed wall of corpses) atrocities as they actually occurred in Nazi concentration camps aims to treat/protect the audience much like Guido treats/protects his son.23 Implicit in such responses is that the film adopts Guido’s strategy of distortion rather than Giosué’s perception of this distortion. These readings thus fail to acknowledge that the film makes very clear that the distortion in its treatment of the Holocaust is not an evasion of history, but manifests the distortion of the narrator’s experience of his imprisonment as conveyed through Guido’s performance of it as a game. The film does not attempt to shield viewers from history as Guido attempts to shield his son, but allows its narrative structure to reflect Giosué’s perception of this history. As such, the film offers useful observations regarding not only the representation of history, but how the perception and experience of history itself is a construction that can have important ramifications regarding how this history is disseminated. Moreover, this tendency towards the revelation of subjective historical mediation does not end with the film itself. I would thus like to conclude this chapter with the contention that the play between reality and performance that constitutes the narrative of Life Is Beautiful can actually be mobilized as a heuristic device that reveals the putatively ahistorical and theatrical quality of Benigni’s film as a commentary on the distortion of Holocaust memory in postwar Italy – a distortion that was passed down to Benigni’s generation from his father’s. In other words, not only does the performance/reality dyad of Life Is Beautiful lend the film’s fabulist historiography a logical explanation (i.e., the narrative distortions manifest the distortions of Giosué’s perception of his experience), but it also functions as a historiographical method that transcends the filmic text.

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As Benigni was born after the Second World War, in 1952, his relationship to and understanding of the Holocaust was dependent on stories about the war that were told to him by his father Luigi, a former Fascist soldier who was imprisoned in a German concentration camp for two years.24 The use of humour throughout Life Is Beautiful reproduces the protective denial that Luigi Benigni employed to censor the horror of the stories that he told his family, as various commentators have suggested, including Roberto Benigni himself. Benigni recalls that the story of his father’s imprisonment in a Nazi camp was told ‘like in the film, like a fable. He was afraid to make us fearful. He was protecting us like I am protecting the son in the movie.’25 Although his father’s history was peppered with fellow prisoners dying around him night and day, Benigni remembers that ‘he told us about it in an almost funny way – saying tragic, painful things but finally his way of telling them was really very particular. Sometimes we laughed at the stories he told.’26 Given Guido’s efforts to make reality ‘bearable’ for the sake of Giosué, a clearer connection can be ascertained between Guido and Luigi Benigni, with both Roberto Benigni and Giosué left with the legacy of the fables constructed by their fathers, rather than Benigni-as-filmmaker mimicking the protective strategies of Guido. But Luigi’s and Guido’s strategies of protective denial transcend the boundaries of mediation within a family history. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, Life Is Beautiful is ‘a text founded on the tension between family memory and public history.’27 Just as Luigi and Guido aimed to distort certain realities for the sake of shielding their families from the true horrors of the Holocaustic experience, so too were the experiences of Italian soldiers like Luigi Benigni glossed over as part of a collective evasion that was essential to building a postwar conception of a less-than-horrific Holocaust in Italy. Italy’s Fascist soldiers underwent a transformation from conquerors ‘who were groomed for war from birth on and sent to fight alongside Hitler for a new rightist Europe,’28 to captives after Marshall Pietro Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, ‘instructed the Italian army to lay down its arms before the Allies but to “react” to attack “from any other quarter.”’29 In other words, Italian soldiers were left to fight against their former Nazi allies, who were already present in many parts of Italy, without any leadership, and in these circumstances, many were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. After the war, these soldiers were seen as shameful indications of Italy’s involvement in the Second World War: ‘Their haunted air and their often-mutilated bodies, they stood out even

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among Italy’s landscape of devastation as disturbing reminders of the abyss between expectations and outcomes . . . between the past ideal of the fascist conqueror and the present reality of national impotence.’30 The cultural consciousness of postwar Italy was thus ripe for attempting to evade the traumatic memory of the nation’s recent past that was manifest in the presence of these defeated soldiers. This evasion was also aided by postwar historiographical emphases that posited the Holocaust as it occurred in Italy – and hence Italian complicity in the Holocaust – as comparatively benign or mild. One important factor in this distortion was the emphasis on the small number of Italian Jews actually killed during the Holocaust (both in terms of actual numbers and of the percentage of the Italian Jewish population).31 Luigi Benigni’s private realpolitik, aimed at managing (his)story to protect those he loved from the cruel realities of the war, thus mirrored the public realpolitik of the entire nation. A second factor is the critical tendencies in early historiographical treatments of Italy during the Second World War that emphasized differences between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.32 Such instances highlighted Fascist refusal to cooperate with Nazi demands for Jewish deportation in Italy until the government’s collapse,33 emphasized the comparatively philo-Semitic qualities of the Fascist government, at least until 1936/37,34 or suggested that prior to and even following the German occupation of Italy in 1943, ‘the population, the church, and the Fascist government were either indifferent or actively friendly toward the small Jewish minority.’35 In terms of the cinema, a desire for such an evasive perspective was reflected in both the rapid waning of domestic interest in Italian neo-realist cinema, which ‘advocated an engagement with contemporary social problems’ that Italians could see first-hand without being reminded of it in their cinema, as well as the ‘economic encouragement of and support for films that promoted positive images of Italian life’ offered by the Christian Democrat government that assumed political power in 1948.36 As a result of this reluctance to face the actual consequences of Italy’s past, which was viscerally embodied in soldiers like Luigi Benigni, the histories of such soldiers were kept out of the public sphere. Ben-Ghiat notes that ‘of a total of 526 full length (Italian) POW diaries and memories that had appeared as of 1997, only 35 were published in the years 1945–1950.’ Furthermore, in the postwar period, no political party advocated on the behalf of soldier issues, and public commemorations focused on the (victorious) Resistance partisans rather than the former Fascist soldiers.37 While the experiences of Italian soldiers remained unspoken

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in the public arena, ‘a culture of victimization – which extended to civilian populations as well due to Italy’s postwar diplomatic ostracism and material devastation – also mitigated any coming to terms with Italy’s own identity as a country engaged in anti-Semitic persecution.’38 The strength of this distortion that glossed over Italian complicity relative to the Holocaust and during the war by positing the nation as victimized only began to lose hold in the early- to mid-1980s.39 Specific reasons for this shift are, of course, only speculative, but of particular significance was the bombing of the Rome synagogue in 1982. Milena Santerini suggests that this terrorist attack dispelled any notion of a dearth of Italian anti-Semitism and marked the beginning of a concerted effort at Holocaust education within the nation.40 Joshua Zimmerman suggests that as the fiftieth anniversary of Mussolini’s 1938 imposition of the antiSemitic Racial Laws approached, a ‘new postwar generation of scholars began to reevaluate the existing sources, uncover new ones, and raise new questions.’41 A clear example of this new critical impetus is Susan Zuccotti’s 1987 study, The Italians and the Holocaust, in which she invokes the large number of Italian Jews that survived the Holocaust – previously seen as indicative of a ‘mild’ Holocaust in Italy – but recontextualizes the numbers to ask quite the opposite question . . . About 15 percent of the Jews in Italy during the German occupation did not survive the Holocaust. This book asks how more than 6,800 people could have been rounded up and deported to be gassed from a country that, despite its nineteenth century ghettos and the promptings of Fascist rulers, had no significant anti-Semitic tradition . . . [Italian Jews] lived in the shadow of the Vatican, in close proximity to the moral and spiritual leader of the Catholic world and the supreme teacher of Christian precepts of brotherly love and the sanctity of human life. And the Holocaust began much later in Italy than in most other European countries, so that Jews should have been aware of the danger and quick to flee. In Rome the danger period from September 1943 to June 1944 lasted only nine months; in most of central Italy, it continued three or four months longer; in northern Italy, it existed until April 1945. A maximum of twenty months, yet 15 percent of Italy’s Jews were destroyed. How could this have happened? 42

In her essay, ‘Return of the Repressed: Italian Film and Holocaust Memory’ (2005), Millicent Marcus notes that it is only in the midst of this re-examination of the history of the Holocaust in Italy that the Italian Holocaust and Italian anti-Semitism have found explicit manifestation

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in Italian films with any degree of regularity.43 And it is within these ‘new configurations of national memory’44 that Life Is Beautiful’s postulation of a ‘beautiful’ perception of the Holocaust as a mistaken distortion must be read. By calling attention to the tension between performance and reality, and by mobilizing the narrative strategies used by his father, Roberto Benigni’s film points to the ramifications of a historical construction dependent on a refusal to contend with the legacy of the Holocaust in Italy that relegated personal testimonies to the realm of the private, or familial sphere. In the film, one aspect of such representational distortion is the artificial quality of the Nazi camp that masks its true purpose. The historical distortion of the Holocaust in postwar Italy is manifest in the inability for soldiers like Benigni’s father to find a place in the public sphere to speak their experiences until long after the war was over. Life Is Beautiful must not be conceived of as a historical representation apart from its self-conscious commentary on the artificiality of its own historiography. The reality of the Holocaust lurks behind this artificiality, at times peeking through to Giosué, and as such, the viewer. This presence must be recognized in order to understand how the act of mediation – that the film makes explicit – exposes the theatricality of realpolitik as a stratagem employed to craft a Holocaust in which ‘life is Beautiful.’ If the distortions within Life Is Beautiful ’s structure are not recognized, then the symbolic fiction assumed by the film’s fabulist form is mistaken for reality, just as Giosué mistakes for reality the symbolic fiction of the game. Like Benigni, whose own exposure to the Holocaust was dependent on his father’s mediations due to a societal unwillingness to face the difficult history of Italy’s past, Giosué’s historical understanding is shaped by his father. As much as his life, what Giosué is left with then, the ‘gift’ given to him by his father referenced in the film’s closing voice-over, is a distorted, but bearable view of a horrific history. Life is only beautiful if memory allows for it to be constructed as such. But in this case, the legacy that remains is a narrative that must be confronted and understood not as a purported representation of history ‘as it was,’ but as a performance.

NOTES 1 Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 128–9.

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2 Ibid., 125. 3 David Denby, ‘In the Eye of the Beholder: Another Look at Roberto Benigni’s Holocaust Fantasy,’ New Yorker (15 Mar. 1999): 96. 4 David Robertson, A Dictionary of Modern Politics, 3rd ed. (London: Europa, 2002), 420. 5 Marcia Landy, The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in Italian Cinema, 1930– 1943 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), xiii. 6 Ibid., xi. 7 Ibid., xiii. 8 Linda Holt, ‘If All This Were Nothing but a Joke,’ Times Literary Supplement (12 Mar. 1999): 20. 9 Imre Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’ Translated by John MacKay, Yale Journal of Criticism 14/1 (2001): 271. 10 Ibid., 269. 11 Saul Friedlander, ‘Introduction,’ in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3–4. 12 Kertész, ‘Who Owns Auschwitz?’ 270. 13 Millicent Marcus, ‘The Seriousness of Humor in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful,’ in After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 268–9. 14 Kobi Niv, Life Is Beautiful, But Not for Jews: Another View of the Film by Benigni, translated by Jonathan Beyrak Lev (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003), 85–101. 15 Marcus, ‘The Seriousness of Humor,’ 269. 16 Melissa M. Matthes, The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 12–13. 17 In this sense, Life Is Beautiful echoes the critique of wilful naivety in Vittorio de Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1970). In de Sica’s film, a father (Romolo Valli) attempts to convince his son Giorgio (Lino Cappolicchio) that their lives and statuses as middle-class Jews in Ferrara, Italy, are comfortable, even as Mussolini’s imposition of the anti-Semitic Racial Laws in 1938 gradually deteriorate their rights as Italian citizens. Like Guido, who must face the reality behind that which he sought to hide before he can sacrifice himself for his son, Giorgio’s father must confront the ramifications of his own ignorance relative to the pragmatic threats facing Jews in their hometown, including his earlier membership in the Fascist party. And like Guido’s revelation that comes too late to save himself, Giorgio’s father tells his son that it is ‘too late’ for him. A more

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implicit indictment of the dangers of misperception is further evident in the conflict between the film’s beautiful visuals and the bleakness of its subject matter (Charles Thomas Samuels, Encountering Directors [New York: Putnam, 1972], 161), which again speaks to Life Is Beautiful’s partial ‘masking’ of the Holocaust’s atrocities. For a more in-depth consideration of de Sica’s moral indictment of wilful naivety and the moral complicity of Italy during the Holocaust, see Jeremy Maron, ‘Illusions of Gardens, Conformity and Beauty,’ M.A. thesis, Carleton University, 2006), 19– 45. Slavoj Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000), 29; original emphasis. Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony, 125. Dori Laub, ‘Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle,’ in Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 61–75. Bernard-Donals and Glejzer, Between Witness and Testimony, xi. Holt, ‘If All This Were Nothing but a Joke,’ 20. Denby, ‘In the Eye of the Beholder,’ 99; Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, 29. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Secret Histories of Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful,’ Yale Journal of Criticism 14/1 (2001): 255. Benigni, quoted in Ben-Ghiat, ibid., 259. There are certainly questions that could be raised about Benigni’s choice to draw on the story of his father, who was interned as a Fascist soldier, to tell the story of a father imprisoned as a Jew. These are, however, beyond the scope of this chapter’s emphasis on the textual interrelationship of explicit mediation and representation. Benigni, quoted in Marcus, ‘The Seriousness of Humor,’ 271. Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Secret Histories,’ 259. Ibid., 256. Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 6. Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Secret Histories,’ 258. Joshua D. Zimmerman, ‘Introduction,’ in Joshua D. Zimmerman, ed., Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1. Michael A. Ledeen, ‘Preface,’ in Renzo de Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, translated by Robert L. Miller (New York: Enigma Books, 2001), vii–viii. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), 290.

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34 Renzo de Felice, The Jews in Fascist Italy: A History, translated by Robert L. Miller (New York: Enigma Books, 2001), 58–9. 35 Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), 67. 36 Marcia Landy, Italian Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 149. 37 Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Secret Histories,’ 258. 38 Ibid., 256. Vittorio de Sica’s Two Women (La ciociara, 1960) exemplifies this ‘culture of victimization’ in its presentation of wartime Italy first as a victim of aggressive Allied bombing, and then of a barbaric Nazi occupation after the armistice. The question of Italian wartime complicity, which de Sica explored in some detail ten years later in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, is not raised. 39 Alexander Stille, ‘The Double Bind of Italian Jews: Acceptance and Assimilation,’ in Zimmerman, ed., Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 19. 40 Milena Santerini, ‘Holocaust Education in Italy,’ Intercultural Education 14/2 (2003): 226. 41 Zimmerman, ‘Introduction,’ 7. 42 Zuccotti, The Italians, xvi–xvii; emphasis added. 43 Millicent Marcus, ‘Return of the Repressed: Italian Film and Holocaust Memory,’ in Zimmerman, ed., Jews in Italy, 321–3. Marcus expands greatly on this idea in Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), the first book-length treatment of the Holocaust in Italian cinema which considers, among other factors, the repression of the Holocaust in postwar Italian culture and its effects on the nation’s cinema. 44 Ben-Ghiat, ‘The Secret Histories,’ 258.

PART FOUR Performance, Voice, Movement, and the Theatricality of Cinema

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9 Playing to the Balcony: Screen Acting, Distance, and Cavellian Theatricality A A R O N TA Y L O R

The infamous final fifteen minutes of There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007) have presented a number of critics with a puzzling dilemma. During this sequence, Daniel Day-Lewis’s character – the monstrous, early twentieth-century oil baron, Daniel Plainview – ritually humiliates and eventually murders his old nemesis, a faith-healer named Eli Sunday (played by Paul Dano). Day-Lewis’s performance in these climactic moments has struck some as bizarrely faustian. Voiced in numerous critical reviews, blogs, chat forums, and other online discussions of the film, the problem with the actor’s performance choices can be paraphrased as follows: why does Day-Lewis suddenly veer so wildly from the conventional dramatic principles of moderation, plausibility, and coherence to modes of behaviour that have been evaluated as excessive, unrealistic, and even farcical? Undoubtedly, the cult status of the so-called Milkshake scene (named after the flamboyant metaphor that Plainview uses to explain the concept of oil drainage) has much to do with this ostensibly unmotivated shift in performance styles. Put simply, the actor abruptly abandons the absorptive restraint of a classical realist performance for the disruptive ostentation of theatricality.1 For voting members of the Academy, Day-Lewis’s blackly comic grotesqueries are the climax of an Oscar-worthy achievement. For his detractors, DayLewis is at his most unhinged here: his overripe histrionics bring about an unwarranted shift in tonal register that destroys the film’s stylistic and emotional continuity. Indeed, more than one writer has pejoratively likened Day-Lewis’s take on Plainview to a ‘hammy pantomime pirate.’2 Obviously, the dilemma is not specific to There Will Be Blood. Indeed, theatricality is frequently construed as a problematic concept. To describe a film performance as ‘theatrical’ typically entails a concomitant

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evaluation – most often a negative one. Certainly, the most venerable of hams – Emil Jannings, George Arliss, post-1950s Bette Davis, Charlton Heston, Robin Williams – have received their share of such backhanded compliments. In a consideration of the merits of screen acting, then, why should theatricality as such be perceived as a problem? As a rejoinder to critics from the School of Less Is More, I would suggest that Day-Lewis’s performance in There Will Be Blood is a sustained exercise in theatrical alienation, befitting the film’s insistence on the irredeemable separateness of an other. To be sure, however, such an effect is not always warranted. As a tribute to Day-Lewis’s histrionics, then, I would like to draw upon Stanley Cavell’s conception of theatricality in order to propose a reconfiguration of ostentatious performance: that it is as much an experience of self-consciousness on the viewer’s behalf as it is a deliberate rhetorical strategy undertaken by an actor. By offering this alternative conception, I aim to clarify what is at stake in positing theatricality as the antithesis of dramatic absorption. Absorption and Theatricality Let us be clear about how the term ‘theatricality’ is to be understood with regards to the description and assessment of a sound film performance. ‘Theatrical’ is a descriptive adjective often attributed to film performances that are perceived as excessive or sensationalistic. At best, the term indicates a proclivity for baroque flourishes and grand gestures; at worst, it is a euphemism for self-indulgent ‘overplaying.’ It is not always a mere synonym for ‘bad’ acting – one can recall memorably poor performances whose failings were not the result of inflated grandiloquence. Rather, it is the very brazenness of the performance style itself that is the source of potential disquiet. The discomfort produced by such grandeur is due to its presentational character – the attention it calls to the aesthetics of a body and voice in creative motion. Why should this presentational quality be unsettling? After all, are we not accustomed to a substantial degree of protrusive behaviour in our everyday interactions? Erving Goffman uses the term theatricality to identify a condition whereby an individual establishes a front that creates a specific frame of public engagement. A theatrical subject becomes a subject that intends to be looked at, and in turn, this presentation establishes the grounds of interaction with his or her audience.3 But theatricality in the cinema is a rhetorical effect that is not nearly as neutral as the theatricality of social relations. For viewers who are

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predisposed to regard an actor’s performance as the representation of a fictional character, the situation defined by theatrical acting is a potentially troubling one. Under the dictums of classical realism, actors are said to represent possible people rather than figures presented to our look – subjects-to-be-looked-at. There has long been an assumed correlation between the classical realist style, medium specificity, and quality acting. Indeed, the illusionist principles of absorption, plausibility, representation, and verisimilitude are frequently the normative ideals by which a ‘good’ performance is measured. These qualities can be regarded as the touchstones of what Richard Maltby describes as an ‘integrated performance’ – one that tends towards the erasure of the distinction between actor and role, and the emulation of psychologically credible action and feelings.4 Furthermore, despite Richard Dyer’s linkage of this naturalist conception of acting to the ideological preoccupations of individualism, a number of theorists have suggested that the integrated performances of classical realism are distinctly ‘cinematic.’5 Leo Braudy, for example, contrasts film’s apparent exploration of the private and authentic feelings of individual persons with the exposure and acting out of social roles in the theatre.6 Similarly, James Naremore suggests that cinema privileges a ‘representational’ form of acting due to the ‘closed boundary’ of the screen that separates audience and actors.7 Above all, the representational tendencies of the integrated performance can be said to be in the service of classical realism’s efforts to establish the illusion of a self-contained world. Hollywood illusionism follows the principles of absorption in the visual arts, whereby an artwork strives to ‘evince awareness’ from a beholder and then ‘neutralize or negate the beholder’s presence.’8 Performances should not seem to be intended towards a viewer; actors comport themselves in a manner that suggests that their characters exist in a possible world independent of the camera’s gaze. Such an absorptive illusion, however, is never completely realized. Richard Rushton has astutely argued that this aspiration for absorption is an impossible ideal and that a classical realist film is ‘non-theatrical’: it oscillates between the neutralization of the spectator and an acknowledgment of his or her absorptive desire.9 Star performances are instrumental to this vacillating dynamic: both the film and the viewer are occasionally cognizant of the actor’s publicly known persona and their embodied character simultaneously. This dual consciousness can certainly be prompted by the chameleonic virtuosity of certain celebrity character actors. On some occasions,

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it may overwhelm an audience’s absorptive desire altogether. In such obtrusive, ‘actorly’ performances, a player foregrounds his or her exceptional technical skill. Theatricality here can be aligned with what Richard Maltby terms an ‘autonomous performance’ – one that emphasizes distraction, excess, presentation, and spectacle.10 Performances that tend towards autonomy from narrative integration thus emphasize rather than diminish one of acting’s fundamental tensions: the gap between the actor’s body and the virtual text that she or he inscribes upon it. For Eli Rozik, stage actors imprint images of indexes upon their own body. These indexes refer to and describe a character within a textual world, rather than an individual within a possible world. Therefore, theatrical acting would remind us that what we see on stage ‘is not a world, but a description of a world.’11 There is a degree of reflexivity to theatricality, then, insofar as a performance (intentionally or not) serves to display its own constructedness. We should be clear that this reflexivity should be understood expansively as a resistance to the classical realist principles of diegetic absorption, rather than a revelation of the cinematic apparatus or the mechanics of spectatorship. Following Michael Fried, theatricality establishes the performer as a subject who is presented to our look. We are acknowledged as beholders by ‘an artificial construction in which persuasiveness [is] sacrificed and dramatic illusion vitiated in the attempt to impress the beholder and solicit his applause.’12 In its hailing of the viewer as viewer, the reflexive tendencies of theatricality are not inherently political. Although theatricality can be used for political purposes, as Sylvie Bissonnette, Jeremy Maron, and Billy Smart discuss in their respective contributions to this book, theatricality does not necessarily call for the viewer’s critical evaluation of a scenario (as in Brecht’s alienation effect), nor does its exhibitionism necessarily seek to disrupt or question the viewer’s ‘voyeuristic ambitions’ (as in Godard’s ‘anti-theatrical’ modernist cinema).13 Rather, a theatrical performance is reflexive insofar as it emphasizes dramatic fiction’s ‘performant function’ – a term Marvin Carlson uses to refer to a key aspect of theatre’s non-mimetic role as ‘an arena for the display of creativity.’14 Theatricality, therefore, is a ‘presentational’ style that emphasizes the ‘ostensiveness’ of a performance: the degree to which it signals the contextual bracketing of a subject as an object for our regard.15 Such presentational ostentation typically occurs in classical realist fictions during moments of ‘expressive incoherence’: metaperformative instances in which an actor signals that she is enacting a character who is acting.16

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Typical examples are instances of deception (such as Plainview’s various expedient false promises to Eli) or repression (such as Plainview’s efforts to contain himself after sending his troubled adopted son away on a train bound for San Francisco). These are opportunities for the performers to showcase their technical skill by manifesting conflicting emotions or demonstrating the simultaneity of the characters’ opposing private and public selves.17 It should be noted, however, classical realism recuperates the ostensiveness of this moderate theatricality by contextualizing an actor’s expressive incoherence within the demands of the narrative. Plainview’s forced smile and paralytic grimace are intended to register as diegetically motivated instances of a character’s emotional responses to given situations more than they are to be appreciated as exemplars of Day-Lewis’s considerable performative talents. In other moments, however, the ostensiveness of a presentational style becomes much more pronounced. The reflexivity of such moments occurs when the narrative itself brackets a situation as theatrical – that is, during a performance-within-a-performance. Characters might explicitly comment upon the front established by another character, or dramatic action is literally centred upon a performative context. There Will Be Blood, for example, stages a number of extensive performative circumstances involving both Sunday and Plainview. During a service held at Eli’s Church of the Third Revelation, Sunday enacts a particularly dramatic laying on of hands, which director P.T. Anderson stages frontally in a single long take. A bemused Plainview calls it ‘one goddamn hell of a show.’ Similarly, pivotal scenes of ritual humiliation involve the declamation of painful personal confessions, which both characters are forced to perform with quasi-religious zeal in order to secure personal business interests.18 At Plainview’s forced baptism, Sunday urges Plainview to admit to the abandonment of his deaf son, and he eventually complies apoplectically. In turn, Plainview later forces Sunday to repeatedly proclaim, ‘I am a false prophet. God is a superstition,’ as if he were preaching to his congregation. The ostensiveness of these sequences and the presentational acting styles of the performers within them thus serve as adumbrations of the histrionics enacted during the final sequence. At the impressionistic level of tonality, then, Day-Lewis’s final ‘display of creativity’ is not entirely out of keeping with the theatrical register of these earlier moments. Thus, a film actor’s theatricality offers dramatic potentialities that are both exciting and repellent. On the one hand, performative bombast is engagingly sensational in that its ostentation calls attention to the

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exhilarating aesthetics of a creatively dynamic body in motion. On the other, an aggressively presentational style can be regarded as thoroughly alienating. Rupturing the illusion of diegetic absorption, it discomforts or aggravates, rather than provokes critical contemplation. For all its exuberance, the distancing effect produced by pronounced artifice is not inherently ideologically progressive, nor is it experienced as such; rather, it is experienced affectively by some as a mere irritant, or aesthetic failure – especially when judged against the absorptive ‘norms’ of classical realism’s integrated performances. I would argue that a theatrical performance by a screen actor is potentially troubling because it may reinforce a spectator’s awareness of herself as a viewer. If theatricality is a self-referential effect whereby one becomes conscious of the exhibitive condition of a dramatic work, then it follows that one also becomes cognizant of one’s presence before a film as a beholder. This perception differs in kind from our hyper-consciousness of an actor’s persona or technical skill. Instead, the discomforting theatricality of an ostensive performance triggers an intensified self-awareness. It is this acknowledgment that is at the root of a viewer’s discomfiture – even more so than the perceived incommensurability of theatrical ostentation in a classical realist film. Other Minds, Scepticism, and ‘Presentness’ If we are to accept that Day-Lewis’s presentational bombast brings about a theatrical effect whereby one recognizes that his performance is intended towards oneself as a beholder, what kind of pronounced self-consciousness is being experienced? Furthermore, why might one experience this self-consciousness as an unsettling acknowledgment that obstructs the aesthetic pleasure one might otherwise take in a film? The problem can be cast in the philosophical difficulties presented by otherminds scepticism, particularly in Stanley Cavell’s account of how cinema contends with the solipsistic limitations of our modern subjectivities. Simply put, theatricality is an aesthetic effect that exhibits (or externalizes) our isolation from direct encounters with the world and those within it. In essence, it re-establishes and proclaims an insurmountable epistemic distance between beholder and beheld – a hyperbolic separateness in which one’s subjectivity interposes itself between one’s experience of presentness to an other. What is this ‘presentness’ and why should subjectivity be construed as an interposition, or barrier? These concepts, or themes, are at

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the heart of Cavell’s account of the problem posed by other-minds scepticism – the question of how one comes to acquire knowledge of an other’s mental state in the absence of certainty. The problem is treated most explicitly in a number of essays collected in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), The Claim of Reason (1979), and In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), and it informs his various meditations on the cinema in The World Viewed (1979), Pursuits of Happiness (1981), Themes Out of School (1984), and Contesting Tears (1996). For Cavell, our modern subjectivity is felt to prevent us from becoming present to the world. One can liken modern subjectivity to a veil of sorts that separates us from a direct (read: objective) experience of the world. As he puts it in The World Viewed, our consciousness at some point became ‘unhinged’ from the world and thus ‘interposed our subjectivity between us and our presentness to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is present to us, individuality became isolation.’19 All that we have to rely upon is the certitude of our own experience – our endless presence to ourselves – which is to say that we apprehend our own subjectivity rather than the world itself. Moreover, we have become habituated to this distance. ‘Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind the self.’20 The distance from the world effected by our subjectivities has come to be normalized and results in a resignation to our own impotency. Alienated from ourselves and others, our scepticism ‘produces and is in part produced by a certain distance from the world . . . in which we are to be characterized as powerless to alter the world, or in which our alteration of the world would be irrelevant or contrary to our real need.’21 The crux of the dilemma is that we no longer trust our subjectivity; it is perceived to be fundamentally unreliable. We can be fooled about the truth of a situation, or misconstrue how things ‘really’ are for others. Because of this unshakeable doubt about the trustworthiness of our subjectivity, we yearn for certainty instead: the purity of objective facticity, which gives us empirically verifiable data about the observable world without the interposition of unreliable subjectivity. However, our yearning for objective verification about the reality of an other’s mind is impossible, for ‘certainty is not enough.’22 Not only would a world of certainty or objective fact be unable to account for my specific, personal, subjective experience of others, but a pure generalized knowledge about others cannot be obtained independently from my claims about them and expressions of their situation. We yearn for certainty about others, but

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this certitude cannot be expressed except by way of our (untrustworthy) subjectivity. A viewer may wish to make a claim about Plainview – to know with certainty that his diabolical mania for competition cannot tolerate those who oppose or seek to profit from his ambitions – but she cannot be sure that these expressions are not the products of her own mind. Cavell dubs this hesitancy ‘the moral of scepticism, namely, that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing.’23 What the sceptic refuses to acknowledge are the very limits of knowledge – what it is possible for us to know – which she perceives to be a limitation instead of a natural inevitability. What are the origins of this modern scepticism – this ‘unhinging’ of our consciousness from the world? One might connect it to the Cartesian conception of mind: a solipsistic characterization of consciousness as a disembodied awareness (res cogitans) that is separate from the reality of corporeal substance (res extensa). Following Descartes, one’s mind only has direct knowledge of itself and cannot be known by, nor can it know, other minds except through inferences it makes based on observing the behaviour of others.24 Alternatively, one might take the problem further and suggest that scepticism of other minds is fundamental to human development, unconsciously stemming ‘from imaginary conditions of infantile omnipotence.’25 From a psychoanalytical standpoint, scepticism is based on a misplaced investment in certainty – a fantasy whereby the other is absolutely present to the self – and results from a residual disavowal carried over from pre-Oedipal stages. Like the infant who only recognizes the separateness of the world based on its failures to meet his or her needs, the sceptic does not acknowledge the externality of the other – the other’s autonomy from him or her.26 Thus, we remain ever at a distance from others, unable to accept their separateness from us. In turn, we experience a feeling of isolation from – of being unknown to – others, whose humanity we disavow. It is for this reason that Cavell reconfigures our struggle to attain selfhood (to acquire self-knowledge) as a struggle to make ourselves present to others, and to make our experience of others and the world present to ourselves. By ‘present’ we mean the recognition and avowal of an other’s separateness from one’s self, and hence, the acceptance of the claim that this autonomy makes upon us. As Cavell puts it, ‘what scepticism suggests is that since we cannot know the world exists, its presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.’27 For example,

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in granting that your suffering is your own – regardless of certainty that it is genuine and not something I alone attribute to you – you become present to me and I do not withhold a response to your pain, but submit to my responsibility towards you. The acceptance of an other’s separateness – that individual’s presence – requires one’s responsiveness to him or her. Acquiring knowledge about an other, then, is not about insisting upon certitude, but requires one’s acknowledgment of the other: coming to an awareness of an other’s situation without recourse to certainty. Moreover, one’s attainment of selfhood is actually contingent upon one’s acknowledgment of others: accepting and affirming their autonomy from me, being responsive to their claims on me. The lack of acknowledgment of an other results in a repudiation of one’s own existence within a human community, which is why foregoing acknowledgment of others for a desire for certainty about them renders us unknown to and isolated from them. Indeed, we perceive isolation to be inherent to the human condition – that our subjectivities inherently alienate us from others. But to label our distinctness as ‘isolation’ misconstrues the nature of our separateness from others, and the autonomy of others from us: separateness becomes perceived as alienation, or distance – a state of unknownness – rather than being acknowledged (i.e., being accepted and affirmed). We believe and perceive ourselves to be closed and inscrutable to others, just as they are believed and perceived to be closed and inscrutable to us. And just as external-world scepticism ‘involves a failure to acknowledge the world’s claim on us, a failure to open ourselves to what it expresses,’ so too do we fail to open ourselves to what is expressed by a performance that we disavow as theatrical.28 Does film have the capacity to challenge scepticism – to overcome the endless presence of our subjectivity? Cavell answers with a reserved affirmative. In one sense, film as a photographic art is able to restore reality’s presence automatically without the need of the artist’s subjective consciousness. Movies are said to overcome our subjectivity ‘by automatism, by removing the human agent from the task of reproduction.’29 Further, film’s material basis as a series of mechanically produced worldprojections makes present a past reality, and simultaneously screens us from that reality, which is to say that we view the world as if unseen by it. Insofar as movies are able to project images on the screen that appear real, yet do not really exist now in our presence, and insofar as they also answer our wish to view the world unseen (to exist in a state of isolated anonymity within it), they offer ‘a moving image of scepticism.’30 How is

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this to be understood? Cavell writes, ‘In viewing films, the sense of invisibility is an expression of modern privacy or anonymity. It is as though the world’s projection explains our forms of unknownness and of our inability to know. The explanation is not so much that the world is passing us by, as that we are displaced from our natural habitation within it, placed at a distance from it. The screen overcomes our fixed distance; it makes displacement appear as our natural condition.’31 By automatically displacing us from our presentness to the world, film absolves us from our own usual responsibility of self-displacement, acts as a relief from the way we make a fantasy of our own distance from others. Plainview may abjure his ties to community and family by disavowing the claims they make upon him, but the fact that it is the camera that makes Plainview present to me takes the ordinary distance I must assume from such an unfathomable creature out of my hands. Through automatism, Plainview is mechanically presented to me (he is projected) as an other, and I am now in a position to acknowledge his unique way of inhabiting the world. The ‘naturalness’ of displacement that film automatically evokes is paradoxical: it expresses the subjectivity that we hope to escape, even as we desire to be unknown and unacknowledged. And yet, it is crucial to note that film has the potential to overcome not just our subjectivities that make a fantasy of isolation, but scepticism itself. Film ‘permits the self to be awakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longings further inside ourselves.’32 That is, film’s automatisms have the capacity to awaken us to the condition of isolation that has come to be felt as natural. How does this absolution work exactly, and why is it unique to film? In the existing world, to know that someone has a mind – to know that individual is in a state of suffering, for example – is to acknowledge the claim that person’s separateness makes on us. ‘It is not enough that I know (am certain) you suffer. I must do or reveal something (whatever can be done). In a word, I must acknowledge it.’33 However, when we regard fictional scenes of human suffering in the theatre, we are helpless before them. In watching a tragedy on stage – say, the ravings of Lear on the heath – we do not intercede. But our inaction is not simply because it is a convention of theatre to sit and watch, or because the enormity of Lear’s suffering is too monumental; rather, our helplessness before him is actually a form of acknowledgment. Our acknowledgment of his suffering lies in our understanding that we cannot take on another’s suffering for him.34 Our helplessness towards filmic characters, however,

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is different from our distance from the characters in a play. In film, ‘my helplessness is mechanically assured: I am not present at something happening, which I must confirm, but at something that has happened, which I absorb, like a memory.’35 Because a figure on screen exists in a past that is brought into our presence by projection, he cannot be said to make the same claims upon us as a character in the theatre. We are ‘present at him, because looking at him, but not present to him,’ that is, our space and time is not continuous with his even though we still have a view of him.36 But does this mean that the character that the film actor performs makes no claim on me at all? If that were the case, how could it be that my view of him might ‘permit the self to be awakened’ and lead to an acknowledgment? I believe that it is possible to regard an enacted character as a subjectivity that requires responsiveness from viewers, and that we can and do yield to the claim that a performance makes on us. Acting and Acknowledgment Although it is ontologically misleading to describe the presence we see on a screen as an actor (in the same way that we can claim that the person who is present to us on stage in the theatre is an actor), there is still a projected figure visible to us. How might we define this figure? Instead of working his own self into a role, Cavell claims that a film actor ‘lends his being to the role and accepts only what fits; the rest is non-existent.’37 If this description is somewhat obscure, we might speak of the ideal inseparability of film actor and character. This is not at all to suggest that an actor’s body must be subsumed by the body of the character.38 Rather, a film character ‘cannot be separated from, has no existence apart from, the movies in which she or he is present.’39 In a great star performance, character and actor are indivisible on screen: a cinematic figure is fashioned by the actor’s craft but also created and projected by the camera. A star seems to have no existence outside of the film in which she or he exists. For example, the entity ‘Bogart’ on screen is distinct from Humphrey Bogart the man, who is ‘only distantly a person.’40 And yet, a star is not a mere persona (a discursive construct), because she or he still resembles – is physically related to – an actual person, regardless of how distant she or he might be. The crucial point in this discussion of film actors is that movies do not simply provide us with objects to gaze at; stars present characters as ‘individualities’ in ways that allow us to acknowledge their subjectivities.

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The most memorable stars are mythic types: ‘individualities that project particular ways of inhabiting a social role.’41 Cavell uses the term type in a counterintuitive fashion: not to assign a figure anonymous membership within a larger social category, but rather to indicate his distinctness. ‘For what makes someone a type,’ he claims is not his similarity with other members of that type but his ‘striking separateness from other people.’42 Star performance is thus given a crucial role in ‘permitting the self to be awakened.’ It constructs a character whose subjectivity paradoxically becomes present to me, and makes claims upon me, despite my mechanically assured absence from her. The most accomplished stars bestow upon the camera seemingly fully present possible people whose projected individualities offer poignant opportunities for our attunement. What is most important about their singularity is that it ‘mak[es] their difference from us less a matter of metaphysics, to which we must accede, than a matter of responsibility, to which we must bend.’43 It is not that the best film performances are ‘realistic’ – that Day-Lewis’s devout adherence to the Method produces plausible human figures. Rather, Day-Lewis’s cinematic stardom asserts an individuality whose unique way of inhabiting a social role allows me to acknowledge him as a distinct (and distinctly unforgettable) subject to whom I owe a degree of responsiveness. This brings us back, then, to the discomfort one might take in a theatrical performance. For those heavily invested in classical realism, performative theatrics threaten one of the most fundamental attractions of cinema: the possibility of intersubjective connectedness established between audience and represented subjects. If classical realism is said to aspire towards diegetic absorption, it is not to promote the illusion of an unmediated reality for its own sake. Rather, at an epistemological level, it aims for an empathetic contiguity between performers (as characters) and viewers. An actor’s naturalistic performance style serves as a bridge traversing the distance between character and viewer, and further, clarifies the nature and quality of their difference. Such is the imperative behind the directive of ‘believability’ that unifies representations of performative instruction as varied as Stage Door (Gregory La Cava, 1937), All about Eve ( Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), and The Libertine (Laurence Dunmore, 2004). In these films, acting coaches – performed by Constance Collier, Bette Davis, and Johnny Depp respectively – coax their charges into discovering ways of becoming present to their audiences, and to us as well. In coming to appreciate the magnificence of their unique inhabitation of the world, their audiences

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(both diegetic and actual) will grant them their responsiveness. Perhaps this responsiveness might take the form of empathy – ‘I know how she feels,’ or, ‘Yes, that would be the case,’ – but more fundamentally, it is an acknowledgment of their humanity: ‘I am moved to recognize that she alone is feeling this way and in this manner.’ In these cases, through the achievements of Katherine Hepburn, Anne Baxter, and Samantha Morton, the separateness of a character is acknowledged – her autonomy from me is accepted and affirmed. But if naturalistic acting serves the interests of diegetic absorption and functions as a metaphorical bridge between irredeemably separate subjects, then for some, theatricality re-establishes an insurmountable barrier. The problem with a theatrical performance is that it evokes a response in which I cease to acknowledge the character that the actor performs as an individual about whom I might come to know or believe something. What do I refuse to acknowledge about theatrically exhibited characters? I disavow attributing an other mind to them, and thus disavow their very humanity (their autonomy from me). What do I view instead? I am confronted by an incomprehensible, unknowable character whose interiority is denied and from whom I withhold my response. Or, I behold a mere actor who offers only performance signs, and who is in turn equally inscrutable as a ‘distantly knowable’ person. The end result is distance, or estrangement, if you will. Again, this experience is not to be confused with so-called politically progressive alienation; rather, it is a withholding of acknowledgment altogether. Theatricality, then, in a Cavellian sense is ‘the condition in which the fact of exhibition takes precedence over the quality and meaning of the thing exhibited.’44 The mere act of exhibition for its own sake is an act that is unresponsive to our need for acknowledgment. Moreover, theatrical performances only inescapably exhibit our isolation and thus reinforce it. Day-Lewis’s portrayal of Plainview becomes an exhibitionist presentation rather than an embodiment. Its presentational aspects are similar to the theatricality of posed photographs that impose a ‘foreign animation’ on their subjects’ bodies, denying them spontaneity and freezing them in a life that is not of their own.45 Plainview is not permitted ‘candidness’: the sense of his subjectivity being revealed on its own accord. Cavell remarks that ‘candidness in acting [can be] achieved by the actor’s complete concentration within the character, absolutely denying any control of my awareness upon him.’46 Conversely, Day-Lewis bestows a ‘foreign animation’ on the potentiality that is Plainview: the character is intended towards a beholder, or exhibited, rather than

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having the sense of emerging autonomously and independently of my beholding. More precisely, Day-Lewis’s presentational animation of Plainview’s potential subjectivity becomes an exclusively self-referential gesture that is merely an exhibition of the actor’s intention to perform. Such an exhibition denies the character’s subjectivity and the means by which we might acknowledge him. As Stephanie Zacharek laments, ‘Day-Lewis may have located what he thinks is the heart of Daniel Plainview, but he has forgotten to take us with him on the journey . . . What I long for in the character of Daniel Plainview, and don’t get, are contradictions, elusive trails that might lead us into some hidden cave of thought, memory or desire. The performance is all intention, no exploration – a conclusion instead of a set of questions.’47 Instead of establishing a situation whereby a subject can reveal himself or herself for our acknowledgment, Day-Lewis’s theatrical performance – with its belletrist emphasis on technique, vocal dexterity, and gestural protrusiveness – creates a forum for senseless exhibition. A viewer’s sense of theatricality, then, is her coming to an awareness that a performance is intended towards her. As a result she becomes conscious of herself as a viewing subject – an embodied subjectivity that only indirectly perceives an other’s provisional individuality. She comes to feel her subjectivity as a constraint – an imposition to certainty – that needs to be transcended, rather than as an opportunity to come to acknowledge the separateness of an other; to recognize and respond to the other’s situation (to be attuned with him or her). Thus, Day-Lewis’s theatricality reinforces certain viewers’ sense of distance from the world viewed, and foregrounds (rather than transcends) their mechanically assured helplessness towards Plainview and his situation (to say nothing of the situation he places others in – hence, the potential for laughter instead of horror at Eli Sunday’s final predicament). One might counter this proposition by pointing out that instances of theatricality are typically cited when an actor conveys the extreme emotionality of a character. During such moments, characters seem to be at their most honest, raw, anguished, defenceless, or ‘open’ to our acknowledgment. Shouldn’t these histrionics provide us with an ideal opportunity for responsive attunement? The simple answer is no, as hyperbolic displays of emotion are not inherently theatrical; they are usually only perceived as such when the character’s emotional intensity is incommensurable with the situation or is expressed in a highly unorthodox fashion (hence, ‘overplaying’

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as a common euphemism for ‘theatrical’). A performance is theatrical when it overtly intends towards us an artificial (seemingly mindless) construct that does not awaken us to an acknowledgment of an individuality’s unique and distinct subjectivity. Instead, the performance creates a rift between the indivisible actor and character so that either only the distantly related actor is visible, or that we perceive no subjectivity with which to engage at all other than one that merely intends a character, and nothing else. Thus, the temporal and existential distance between us and the figures on screen becomes a gap that cannot be traversed. I am aware that There Will Be Blood has been somewhat of a convenient case study for this configuration of theatricality. The film itself can be characterized as theatrical in both content and style. That is, it seems to expressionistically represent ‘our response to this new fact of our condition – our terror of ourselves in isolation.’48 To that end, Plainview can be perceived as a surrogate for our experience of an alienating subjectivity. The character is fundamentally misanthropic and will not acknowledge others. As such, Plainview is not unlike the depthless theatrical villains that Loiselle describes in his chapter on Grand Guignol cinema. ‘There are times when I look at people,’ Plainview professes, ‘and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone . . . I see the worst in people. I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need.’ In this regard, Plainview’s reunion with his long-lost half-brother Henry becomes a potential for acknowledgment, an occasion for misanthropy’s defeat. During his brief relationship with Henry, he finds that there is an other whose separateness he can acknowledge, and to whose needs he can respond. ‘To have you here gives me a second breath,’ he admits in a rare moment of explicit introspection. But when Henry turns out to be an impostor, Plainview’s only response can be a hysterical eradication of that other. His isolating scepticism returns: the man is not Henry, not his blood, but a stranger with no claim on him at all, and so he puts a bullet in the man’s brain, and mourns his irrevocably lost brother. Similarly, he eventually disowns his adopted son, H.W., when the young man asserts his autonomy from Daniel in the form of financial independence. ‘There’s none of me in you,’ Plainview pronounces, proclaiming H.W. a ‘bastard from a basket’ whose separateness he will neither accept nor affirm. But it is Plainview’s second killing, the climatic murder of Eli that proves to be the inevitable end result of a lifetime spent continually denying others’ claims upon him (there will be blood, indeed). During the protracted final scene of sadistic humiliation, Plainview consigns

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Eli to a sort of half-life (‘You’re the afterbirth that slithered from your mother’s filth,’ he hisses), and finally condemns him to non-existence (‘I told you I would eat you up,’ he roars like some nightmarish bogeyman fulfilling a nightly promise). It is his psychopathic lack of acknowledgment that transmutes Sunday’s pathetic plea for help into a catalyst that incenses Plainview to murder. So sociopathic is Plainview’s solipsism that his only response to the butler who observes the bloody aftermath of the murder is an irreverently nonchalant, ‘I’m finished.’ The utterance is not only a perverse parody of John 19:30 (in a final scene rife with biblical inversions), but it reduces Sunday to a meal devoured by a cannibalistic ogre. These final words also mark Plainview’s complete retreat into solipsistic isolation, and his self-removal from all ties with family and community. It is little wonder that the film itself is almost entirely focused upon Daniel. There is little evidence in There Will Be Blood of a broader social order and its workings; it reflects only a solipsistic consciousness that will not acknowledge others. In this regard, the film’s theatrical alienation is deliberate, as its metaphysical subject is the inability to affirm the separateness of an other. Just as Cavell maintains that cinema must always screen the audience from a staged reality, theatrical screen acting similarly obstructs intersubjective connectivity between viewer and viewed. On film, ostentatious presentational acting reinforces the insurmountable separateness of individuals. Theatricality reinforces our sense of the viewing situation as one that is fundamentally removed from the world viewed. This reinforcement prompts a concomitant recognition of our status as spectators – viewers of events to which we cannot contribute, proceedings with which we cannot interfere, circumstances that we cannot alter. In other words, some viewers may view theatrical screen performances in a negative light because such deliberate artifice tacitly indicates our helplessness before cinematic figures. Theatrical screen actors do more than present us with a set of stylized gestures; they speak of a perceived epistemological dilemma. Hailing us as viewers rather than confederates, far removed from any possibility of proximity or shared subjectivity, their radical otherness does not permit intimacy, only helpless scrutiny.

NOTES 1 For negative or ambivalent assessments of There Will Be Blood’s theatricality, see the various essays, reviews, and blogs including the following, all most

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2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

recently acced on 10 Dec. 2010: Mike D’Angelo, ‘One Fine Ham,’ Esquire, 26 Dec. 2007, available at http://www.esquire.com/features/ the-screen/danielday lewis0108; David Denby, ‘Hard Life,’ New Yorker, 17 Dec. 2007, available at http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/ cinema/2007/12/17/071217crci_cinema_denby; Tom Gilatto, ‘The Method of Daniel Day-Lewis,’ Huffington Post, 3 Jan. 2008, available at http://www. huffingtonpost.com/tom-gliatto/the-method-of-daniel-dayl_b_79580. html; Charles Maclean, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ Channelblog, 6 March 2008, available at http://channel.typepad.com/channelblog/2008/03/therewill-be-b.html; Sean O’Connell, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ bc Magazine 249, 1 Feb. 2008, available at http://www.bcmagazine.net/hk.bcmagazine.issues/ bcmagazine_webissue249/13-blood.html; Theo Panayides, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ Theo’s Century of Movies, available at http://leonardo.spidernet.net/Artus/2386/therewill.htm; Brent Simon, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ ReelzChannel, 28 Dec. 2007, available at http://www.reelzchannel.com/ movie/231230/there-will-be-blood/reviews; Stephanie Zacharek, ‘Too Great to Be Good,’ Salon, 20 Feb. 2008, available at http://www.salon.com/ent/ movies/feature/2008/02/20/daniel_day_lewis/index.html. For examples, see the following: Daniel Bradshaw, ‘Daniel Day-Lewis: Godlike Genius or Hammy Panto Pirate?’ guardian.co.uk, 21 Jan. 2008, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/jan/21/danieldaylewisgod likegenius; Joe Griffin, ‘2008 in Film,’ Moviedrome, 13 Dec. 2008, available at http://joegriffinwrites.blogspot.com/2008/12/2008-in-film.html; AnimalStructure, posting to There Will Be Blood discussion forum, Ain’t It Cool News, 7 Jan. 2008, available at http://www.aintitcool.com/talkback_display/ 35168 ; accessed 20 Feb. 2010. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Anchor, 1959), 22. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 399. Richard Dyer and Paul McDonald, Stars, 2nd ed. (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 101. Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame, 25th anniversary ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 196–7. James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 30. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 108. Richard Rushton, ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality,’ Screen 45/3 (2004): 234. Maltby, Hollywood Cinema, 389.

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11 Eli Rozik, ‘Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 123. 12 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 100. 13 For more on ‘anti-theatricality,’ see Rushton, ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema,’ 239–44. 14 Marvin Carlson, ‘The Resistance to Theatricality,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 246. 15 Naremore, Acting in the Cinema, 22. 16 Ibid., 72. 17 Ibid., 76. Interestingly, Paul Dano also literally plays two opposing characters: the religious opportunist, Eli Sunday, as well as his enterprising twin brother, Paul, who alerts Plainview to the presence of oil in Little Boston before leaving his family’s homestead altogether. 18 Plainview requires the permission of property owner William Bandy to build a pipeline through his acreage. After Plainview murders an impostor who claims to be his half-brother and buries him on Bandy’s tract, Bandy implies that he has witnessed the killing and insists that Plainview be baptized into Eli’s church before he grants Plainview the lease. Eli’s own enforced proclamation is a sadistic condition of the business arrangement he later attempts to establish with Plainview. Rendered destitute by the stock market crash of 1929, Sunday visits the manor of a drunken Plainview and offers to sell him Bandy’s land. Eli is first forced to perform a cruel inversion of the degrading baptismal confession he demanded from Plainview, only to be informed – in spectacularly hyperbolic fashion – that the tract is now worthless. 19 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed, enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 22. 20 Ibid., 102. 21 Timothy Gould, ‘The Names of Action,’ in Richard Elridge, ed., Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 53. 22 Stanley Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging,’ in Stanley Cavell, ed., Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 258. 23 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 241. 24 This inferential assumption of the reality of the other minds is referred to as the argument from analogy: you infer that others have the same mental states as you based on their exhibition of behaviour resembling yours in similar circumstances. For example, I observe that my behaviour results from particular mental states, ergo, others who exhibit the same behaviour in these circumstances must also have the same mental states as I do. See

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

John Stuart Mill, An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, vol. 9, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 191. Richard Allen, ‘Hitchcock and Cavell,’ Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64/1 (2006): 46. Stanley Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 216–17. Stanley Cavell, ‘‘The Avoidance of Love,’ in Cavell, ed., Must We Mean What We Say? 324. Allen, ‘Hitchcock and Cavell,’ 46. Cavell, World Viewed, 23. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 40 –1. Ibid., 102. Cavell, ‘Knowing and Acknowledging,’ 263. Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love,’ 339. Cavell, World Viewed, 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 28. See, e.g., the viewer’s impossible desire for the actor’s body to disappear in Jean-Louis Comolli, ‘Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much,’ translated by Ben Brewster, Screen 19/2 (1978): 50. William Rothman and Marian Keane, Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 75. Cavell, World Viewed, 28. Ibid., 33. Ibid. Ibid., 35–6. Ibid., 122; emphasis added. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 111. Stephanie Zacharek, ‘Too Great to Be Good.’ Cavell, World Viewed, 22.

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Bullet-Time, Becoming, and the Sway of Theatricality: Performance and Play in The Matrix

B R U C E B A RT O N

The emergence of the future is not that which the possible, a plan, blueprint, or algorithm, prepares us for. It is not a step-by-step process, reproducible through computation (computational simulations are fundamentally reconstructive projects). There seems to be a confusion between the simulation of life, for which we can plan and prepare and which we can program, and life itself, which always unfolds without a ready-made script, with no program, goal, or aim, though it can be retrospectively interpreted as following a plan or path. – Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time 1

Do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in this place? – Morpheus, in The Matrix

It is a familiar cliché that begins ‘Few motion pictures have so completely captured the popular imagination as . . . ’ It is only appropriate, therefore, that a film that manages to incorporate so very many clichés into a product so utterly innovative as The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999) should be introduced here in this manner. Like only a handful of other Hollywood franchises in recent memory, the Matrix films are a bona fide phenomenon that has resonated throughout the labyrinthine corridors (and nooks and crannies) of late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century popular culture. Bruce Isaacs considers the franchise ‘a selfaware exploration of the postmodern consciousness, schizophrenic and fragmentary, vacillating between political and social conservatism and romantic radicalism, realist authenticity, and simulacral reproduction.’2

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A small library’s worth of scholarly (and not-so-scholarly) studies have scrutinized the trilogy from philosophical, sociological, theological, neurobiological, and aesthetic perspectives. Further, the relevance for theatre and performance studies of many of the issues explored in the Wachowski brothers’ films is not a novel assertion. As the editors of the recent essay collection Performing the Matrix: Mediating Cultural Performances observe, ‘The matrix incorporates strong antagonisms: [c] haos versus organization, organic potency versus biomorphic structure, dynamic power versus regulation, incalculable potency versus calculated formal structure. These dynamic oppositions form the fascinating body of the matrix and fuel the need to connect it to the contested concept of performance.’3 Inspired by the ‘multilayered process’ of the film, the collective effort of that volume charts a diverse range of cross- and interdisciplinary connections with The Matrix as both construct and concept. My approach here is, ultimately, more narrow; while drawing on many of the existing entries into the matrix of The Matrix, my intention is to eventually arrive at a highly specific point of intermedial focus. Perhaps audaciously, this essay sets out to argue that a focus on the defining rhythms of theatricality provides a novel and mutually illuminating perspective on the developments in computer-generated imagery (CGI) commonly identified as ‘bullet-time.’ Most famously (and, arguably, most effectively) introduced and developed in The Matrix series of motion pictures, this now ubiquitous manipulation of spatial and temporal representation foregrounds other, more subtle, but pervasive changes in perceptual registers in cinematic and otherwise mediated experience. At the same time, it also engages directly with the practices, principles, and priorities articulated within dominant investigations of theatricality, conspicuously integrating issues of materiality, fictionality, subjectivity, the construction of ‘reality,’ and the rhythms of appearance. Whether this, in fact, justifies the declaration of the ‘triumph of theatricality’ in current mainstream cinematic evolution, however, likely depends on whether you choose the blue pill or the red pill. Beyond ‘Staginess’ Some of us do things, while others watch. – Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theater 4

There is no shortage of available definitions of theatricality. As Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait point out in their impressive 2003 overview of the topic,5 the term has been applied to a broad and often intentionally

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contradictory spectrum of characteristics, approaches, experiences, methodologies, aesthetic systems, and moral frameworks. Called upon to describe sets of conventions ranging from utter realism to pronounced anti-realism, ‘theatricality’ has served a plethora of cultural, ideological, and ethical agendas – and has been twisted about rather mercilessly in the process. In particular, as Shannon Jackson, among others, has noted, the complex, elusive, and regularly contentious positioning of theatricality in relationship to its equally troublesome sibling, performativity, has yielded many volumes worth of often sophisticated analysis – and somewhat less sophisticated partisanship.6 One of the most influential definitions of theatricality – offered in early writing from Judith Butler – has contributed to this opposition between theatrical and performative acts and experiences. As Butler observes, In the theatre, one can say, ‘this is just an act,’ and de-realize the act, make acting into something quite distinct from what is real. Because of this distinction, one can maintain one’s sense of reality in the face of this temporary challenge to our existing ontological assumptions about gender arrangements; the various conventions which announce that ‘this is only a play’ allow strict lines to be drawn between the performance and life. On the street or in the bus, the act becomes dangerous, if it does, precisely because there are no theatrical conventions to delimit the purely imaginary character of the act, indeed, on the street or in the bus, there is no presumption that the act is distinct from a reality.7

This conception of theatricality as the set of conventions that isolate and legitimize dynamics that are considerably more volatile and unmanageable – that is, performative – when enacted outside of said conventions enjoys fairly widespread currency. Arguably, however (as Butler’s own subsequent writing demonstrates), it is the conceptual instability of definitions of theatricality that makes it so seductive and so fruitful as a site of interrogation. Previous efforts to explore the concept of theatricality as it relates to cinema have yielded intriguing and at times contentious results. In particular, Richard Rushton’s 2004 article, ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality,’ offers a detailed taxonomy of evolving relationships characterized by distinct ratios of theatricality, on the one hand, and ‘absorption’ on the other. Tellingly resorting to the Oxford English Dictionary for his definition of theatricality, Rushton,

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early in his article, settles on an understanding of ‘“theatrical” as that which is “extravagantly or irrelevantly histrionic; ‘stagy,’ calculated for display, showy, spectacular.” Any artwork that attempts to draw attention to itself, then, in an “exaggerated and affected manner” may be said to be theatrical. Theatrical artworks are those that attempt to attract their audience by effectively proclaiming “look at me!”’8 Thus, while Rushton goes to considerable lengths – both in his original article and in a heated ‘debate’ revisit of the issues in 20079 – to assert that the experiences of theatricality and absorption are not mutually exclusive, his highly restricted use of the term marks his project as entirely distinct from my own here.10 Rather, when I first considered the possible entry points into the subject of ‘Theatricality in Cinema,’ my own ongoing interest in the body in performance quickly led me to a slight but significant reformulation of the topic, and I began to reflect upon the possibilities to be found in the idea of the ‘theatricality of cinema.’ This, of course, runs the risk of reopening debates on the comparative efficacy of the two forms – a conversation better left to simmer on the back burner (with the lid on). But if we push past immediate disciplinary and medial territoriality into an intermedial consideration of the topic, there is considerable potential for theoretical resonance, overlap, coincidence, and complement. There are three specific takes on theatricality, spanning three decades, which I would like to sample, as it were, for the purposes of this meditation. The first is Josette Féral’s treatise ‘Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language,’ first published in French in 1988 and then in English translation in 2002. The second begins with Erika FischerLichte’s article ‘From Theatre to Theatricality: How to Construct Reality,’ which appeared in English in 1995, and follows this author’s evolving understanding of theatricality through her most recent publications on this topic. And the third is found in selected writings of Samuel Weber – most specifically his book-length 2004 offering, Theatricality as Medium. Of course, in the limited space available here I will do full justice to none of these authors’ cumulative musings or evolving positions on this topic. Further, while both the formerly named writers clearly share aspects of approach and methodology, Weber’s emphasis on the ethical and philosophical aspects of theatricality make this an admittedly rowdy and incomplete roster. However, I contend that the commonalities of concern and analysis across these perspectives are as instructive as they are surprising.

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The Rhythms of Theatricality Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at its beauty? Its genius? Billions of people, just living out their lives. Oblivious. – Agent Smith, in The Matrix

I am not the first to point out the degree to which many semiotic conceptions of theatricality share much of film theory’s preoccupation with the generative power of the spectator’s gaze.11 Féral’s avowed universalism poses no discernible obstacle to a near seamless relocation of many of her comments to a narrowly focused discussion of the cinema: ‘More than a property with analyzable characteristics, theatricality seems to be a process that has to do with a “gaze” that postulates and creates a distinct, virtual space belonging to the other, from which fiction can emerge.’12 Indeed, she concludes, ‘By watching, the spectator creates an “other” space, no longer subject to the laws of the quotidian, and in this space he inscribes what he observes, perceiving it as belonging to a space where he has no place except as external observer.’13 This ‘cleft in the quotidian,’14 Féral contends, is distinctly spatial in nature, but primarily so in the sense that it is the host of a process – specifically, ‘a process that recognizes subjects in process.’15 For her part, Fischer-Lichte extends this generative power of spectatorship by drawing both literal and metaphorical comparisons to dreams. Focusing her analysis on an early twentieth-century production of the pantomime Sumurun, staged throughout Western Europe by Max Reinhardt, she notes, ‘The dream world on stage is not to be taken and understood as a representation of an objectively given reality somewhere else, but instead, is constituted as a subjective creation of the spectator’s imagination. It is his/her reception – as perception and meaning constitution – that brings the world of the stage into being as the world of his/her own dreams.’16 Weber also calls upon the metaphor of dreams as he grapples with theatrical experience, albeit with an important shift of emphasis towards the radical unpredictability and ‘unknown’ quality of this state. In the essay ‘Taking Place’ (1984) he draws upon Freud’s conception of the ‘navel of the dream’ to conceptualize his experience of an operatic performance: ‘One notices a tangle of dream-thoughts arising which resists unraveling but has also made no further contributions to the dream-content. This then is the navel of the dream, the place where it straddles the unknown.

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The dream-thoughts to which interpretation leads one are necessarily interminable and branch out in all directions into the netlike entanglement of our world of thought.’17 As Simon Morgan Wortham notes, for Weber ‘this dislocating movement of [performance] associated with dream-thoughts plays itself out, then, through the specific form . . . of the dream-wish, the fulfillment of which both decenters and recenters, structures and destructures the dream around the “unknown” as the dream-navel, as the unconscious, as theatricality.’18 The resonance of these definitions within much early and enduring psychoanalytical film theory is unavoidable,19 and, in particular, Féral’s and Fischer-Lichte’s dependence on the etymological understanding of theatre attendance as predominantly a process of watching neatly parallels conceptions of cinematic voyeurism. Of particular relevance for this discussion, the suspended – or suspendable – temporal nature of this understanding of theatricality is easily relocated within the phenomenological – and, significantly, the material – conditions of movie watching. For Féral, ‘the tacit contract between spectator and theater . . . guarantees that what one witnesses is representation, inscribed in a time and space different from the quotidian, in which the forward march of time is suspended and thus reversible.’20 Similarly, for FischerLichte, modern theatricality ‘brought about a “subjectification” of time: it realized time as the subjective experience of intensity.’21 Weber – as, in their own ways, Féral and Fischer-Lichte – does not understand this dynamic as safely contained within the institutionalized conventions of aesthetic appreciation. Rather, with an urgency that does, in fact, represent a departure in this discussion, Weber locates the imperative for theatrical enactment squarely within social, political, and cultural spheres of exchange, arguing that theatricality as a mode of engagement is inseparable from its impetus, motivation, and potential affect. As he observes in the 1996 essay ‘Goings On,’ ‘[P]erformance’ should again not be understood to deny the ‘reality’ of power relationships that characterize the world in which we work and live. We have to make judgments, ‘take’ decisions, evaluate situations. But such efforts are not simply means to an end independent of them. They are caught up in what they seek to grasp, discern, transform; and that involvement can perhaps best be described in terms of the relation of ‘performance’ and ‘play.’ Does the theatrical perspective take reality too lightly? Or, on the contrary, does it do justice to the complexity – and indeed, to the ambivalence – of our involvement in the world?22

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For Weber, the demand and potential of theatricality involves a frontal engagement with the ‘dislocating movement’ of ‘performance’ and ‘play’ as an active stance, aesthetically, philosophically, and politically: ‘In any case, I think that theatricality excludes both radical skepticism and radical dogmatism as possible responses to such involvement [in the world].’23 For my purposes, however, one of the most important connections between all three of these arguments is found in Féral’s assertion that at the centre of this ‘space of the “other”’ one finds ‘a body in motion.’24 Similarly, Fischer-Lichte proposes that ‘to a certain extent, the body was meant to replace language’25 within modern theatricality, substituting the ‘rhythmic movement of the human body in the space’ where spoken language had once dominated. In fact, herein lies the primary source of fluid theatrical temporality, as ‘time is realized as a rhythmically structured, discontinuous sequence of discrete moments of different intensity,’ manifested in and punctuated by the ‘rhythmically structured asemantic elements’ of posture, gesture, and movement. It is at this juncture – the nature of the body’s movement within the broader conception of the rhythm(s) of theatricality – that Weber’s understanding intersects most significantly with that of Féral and Fischer-Lichte. Fischer-Lichte notes that the transition from spoken language to the communication of the expressive, moving body ‘went together with a shift from the tendency towards clarity in the signs of acting to the tendency towards ambiguity.’26 In a related observation – one even more directly relevant to a discussion of cinematic theatricality – Féral asserts that the theatrical body ‘is a locus continually threatened by a certain inadequacy.’27 She continues, ‘By definition, it is imperfect; as matter, it is vulnerable.’ What, precisely, is the source of this ambiguity, this inadequacy, this vulnerability – this instability? Fischer-Lichte’s more recent writing addresses this question through a reconsideration of an enduring central preoccupation – her own and that of much semiotics-based performance scholarship: the tension between signification-based and phenomenological perception on the part of the theatre spectator. Fischer-Lichte attributes two ‘orders’ of perception to a theatre spectator: in ‘the order of representation, everything that is perceived is done with reference to a particular fictional character. The meanings generated in their totality constitute the dramatic character.’28 By contrast, the ‘other order, which I will call the order of presence, follows completely different principles. The actor’s body is perceived in its phenomenality, as his particular being-in-the-world.’ The ‘emergence’ of this second

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order is, for Fischer-Lichte, starkly disruptive: ‘This meaning induces a number of associations, memories, imaginations, which, in most cases, are not directly connected to the perceived element. When this order of perception stabilizes, the process of perception and the generation of meaning becomes absolutely unpredictable and even chaotic . . . The process of perception turns out to be an entirely emergent process, over which the perceiving subject has no control.’29 The resulting state is what Fischer-Lichte calls ‘perceptive multistability, which takes effect in the shift from one order to another [and] is responsible for the fact that none of the two orders becomes permanently stabilized.’ This condition of being ‘betwixt and between’ is one of ‘liminality’30 and, indeed, ‘an experience of crisis.’31 There is, of course, much to take exception to here. Nearly twenty-five years ago Bert O. States proposed an understanding of theatrical experience based upon ‘binocular vision,’ in which ‘one eye enables us to see the world phenomenally; one eye enables us to see significatively,’ as ‘the abnormal extremes of our normal vision.’32 Yet what Fischer-Lichte’s ‘crisis’ prompts within her current analysis that is of immediate relevance is an altered, ‘emerging’ understanding of the body in performance: ‘The human body knows no state of being; it exists only in a state of becoming. It recreates itself with every blink of the eye, every breath and movement embodies a new body. For that reason, the body is ultimately elusive. The bodily being-in-the world, which cannot be but becomes . . . – the body happens.’33 Thus, for Fischer-Lichte, the crisis of liminality is apparently a prerequisite for the discovery of the performer’s emerging, mobile, ‘energetic’ body – and, by extension, a return of the spectator to his or her own ‘transformative’ state: ‘Through the performer’s presence, the spectator experiences the performer and himself as embodied mind in a constant process of becoming.’34 Building upon his own evolving interpretation of theatricality, in Theatricality as Medium Weber takes a distinct route to arrive at a closely related material understanding of contemporary theatricality. Drawing heavily on Derrida’s assertion of ‘the ambiguity or the duplicity of the presence of the present, of its appearance – that which appears and its appearing,’35 Weber asserts that theatricality’s perpetual phenomenological becoming generates an equally perpetual ‘saying’ (in Heidegger’s sense of this term), a ‘calling’ that ‘brings-to-appearing.’36 At the same time, however, ‘such “calling” calls forth only by also calling for a receiving, perceiving, discerning instance.’ The result, for Weber, is a theatrical event that inevitably ‘remains split, never simply taking place here

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and now’: ‘The divided character of such taking place constitutes the quintessence of the theatrical scene, which is never just a place or series of places, making room for the orderly sequence of a narrative plot leading to a meaningful conclusion. Since no narrative sequence succeeds in framing or enclosing such places it traverses . . . it gestures toward other scenes, which remain inconclusive, even and especially where the sequence ends or stops. With respect to such a sequence, it is not always easy to get one’s bearings or to take a stand.’37 To illustrate his point, Weber discusses a performance of Autumn River by the Peking Opera that he attended in 1999.38 Echoing and extending both Féral’s and, in particular, Fischer-Lichte’s emphasis upon the centrality of bodily rhythm as the central vehicle of theatricality, Weber describes the largely mimed movement of a performer as follows: The boatman seems to sway in the water, going nowhere, yet constantly moving. Such going-nowhere-while-moving constitutes much of the magic of the scene, making it an exemplary allegory of theatricality as the staging of separation. It is, in a way that Heidegger perhaps would not have endorsed, a ‘sway of being’ . . . What ensues is a remarkable ‘ballet’ of standing, swaying, and almost falling, in which the relation of land and sea, stability and precariousness, is demonstrated through bodily gestures indicating the fear of losing one’s balance. At the same time, the fear of falling (into the water) compels [the boatman] to seek a different sort of equilibrium, one that no longer looks to terra firma but rather responds to the never entirely predictable rise and fall of the waves.39

Here Weber’s comments seem to expand upon the qualities of perceptual vulnerability proposed by Féral and the process of literal destabilization identified by Fischer-Lichte, aligning both sources of explicit – perhaps definitive – anxiety with broader, philosophical considerations. Specifically, in her early discussion of Reinhardt’s performance, Fischer-Lichte discusses at length the consequences of his employment of a hanamichi – the long, bridgelike structure drawn from Japanese kabuki conventions, upon which the actors cross above the audience, often in a state of transformation, on their way to the stage. As a result, Reinhardt’s production offered multiple sites of performance with indistinct spatial and temporal relationships: ‘The spectators had two different levels of interest and

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two different perspectives.’40 For Fischer-Lichte, the result is an either/ or split, in which spectators would, of necessity, miss some aspect of the action. Further, incorporating her later discussion of perceptive multistability, the ‘transformative’ nature of the actor’s progression along the hanamichi would seem inevitably to impose a defining shift between the orders of ‘representation’ and ‘presence’ – and, thus, a crisis of destabilized liminality. For Weber, however, this ‘split’ is a more phenomenologically – and thus philosophically – complex ‘separation,’ one based less in the mutually exclusive codes of signification and presence than in the cohabitation of the ‘said’ and its ‘saying’ (‘swaying’): ‘The gestures here suggest a response to the twofold that assumes its duplicity rather than seeking to arrest or control it by assigning it a name.’41 By extension, Weber contends, this dynamic ‘demonstrates how theater can be the medium of a displacement or dislocation that opens other ways, not bound to arrive at a final destination – or, at least, not too soon.’ Thus, Weber recuperates Feral’s ‘vulnerability’ and ‘instability’ at the same time that he fully activates Fischer-Lichte’s ‘constant process of becoming.’ ‘Theater,’ he concludes, ‘thus emerges as a powerful medium of the arrivant.’42 The Other Side of Choice The cinematic body is a movement phenomenon. – Andrew Shail, ‘You Hear about Them All the Time’43

In 1998 the American visual effects company Manex organized an array of 120 still cameras in a circular pattern around Keanu Reeves and other performers on the set of what was to become one of the most successful and technologically advanced movies of the twentieth century: The Matrix. Further developing a technique known as ‘time-slice,’ which had been originated by the British filmmaker Tim McMillan in the early 1980s, Manex accomplished one of the earliest – and no doubt the most influential – instances of what has become known as ‘bullet-time.’ While, as Joshua Clover has noted, ‘it was possible to have seen things like it,’ its appearance in The Matrix was experienced as revolutionary: ‘A lesser version of bullet time, wherein the camera appeared to circle objects and bodies fully stilled in their flight, had

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already slipped without much notice into a couple other sci-fi movies by way of that nouveau hotbed of cinematic innovation, the commercial spot . . . But it wasn’t Ang Lee [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon] who first brought Wo Ping to the West; it was the Wachowski brothers, for The Matrix.’44 In this instance, as described by Richard Rickitt,45 the shot had been pre-visualized via computer modelling to determine the precise positions, aiming, and shutter intervals of the cameras in the array. Laser positioning was used to ensure that the computer model was replicated on the actual set to the most minute degree. Circular greenscreen technology around the cameras would enable the subsequent isolation and compositing of the actors’ images. As Reeves performed, each camera took its single photograph, all 120 cameras shooting in sequence in less than a second. When the resulting 120 frames were projected at the standard cinematic speed of twenty-four frames per second, the resulting sequence ‘stretched’ one second of action into a five-second shot with the camera apparently circling around a ‘frozen’ central image. Further computer manipulation enabled the duration of the sequence to be extended to ten seconds by interpolating one new digitally generated frame between each of the recorded frames, and the finalized footage was then composited into new, again computergenerated, cityscape backgrounds. As Barry Langford has noted, ‘The resulting sequences were among the most widely-discussed and celebrated effects of the decade, seeming perfectly to illustrate the film’s crypto-philosophical insights on the phantasmic and manipulable nature of what we (mis)take for “reality.”’46 Moving, for a moment, beyond the specifics of the film’s thematic or genre preoccupations (not to mention the highly problematic contextualization of this process within one of the most violent popular films of its era), The Matrix provided, as Roz Kaveny has suggested, ‘a new vocabulary for wonder.’47 It seems to me not coincidental, therefore, that Weber’s locating of what he calls theatrical ‘magic’ within a representation of ‘going-nowhere-while-moving’ uses terminology that clearly resonates with The Matrix’s cinematographic vocabulary. In relation to the theatrical bodies of Autumn Spring, Weber proposes, ‘This ability to respond to the fear of falling by a complex meshing of movements defines, not just the actions of the individual figures, but the very theater that stages them.’48 In much the same way, I would argue, the particular motion of the cinematic bodies of The Matrix both extends and deliriously complicates our conception of theatricality, in that it both reflects and contributes to the definition of not merely one motion picture’s aesthetic

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but, in fact, a contemporary understanding of spatial and temporal registers within mediatized cultures. ‘Because movement as registered by film is isolated from cause, effect, ground or force,’ Andrew Shail has proposed, ‘and because the cinematic body moves in an environment of unending movements of matter, it is experienced as gravity-irrespective.’49 Arguably, however, the inherent instability of this condition is normalized, if not neutralized, within most popular film by (at least) two factors: (1) a specifically cinematic version of States’s ‘binocular vision’ that negotiates both the fictive nature of the events and actions unfolding and the technological apparatus that makes this unfolding possible, and (2) the perceptual logic of a consistent fictive environment (the ‘world’ of the film’s narrative, akin to Féral’s ‘cleft in the quotidian’).50 However, as Michelle Pierson explains, bullet-time – or, as it is also, and less problematically, referred to, ‘flow-mo’ – seems to operate ‘in defiance of the natural laws of cinematography’ in that elements of the representation can be made to appear to be moving at different speeds.51 Even in isolation, these extremes of stillness and rapid, pivotal movement within the filmic context are disjunctive. Torben Grodal has suggested that ‘the stretch or compression of perceptual time-space will be felt as intense or saturated.’ In particular, he notes, echoing Fischer-Lichte’s description of the intense ‘dream’ space of theatrical affect, ‘The still is the extreme durative . . . the temporal progression of time is cut loose from its links to concrete places and concrete participants, and has become a “pure process” of success or failure, experienced as a partly mental process . . . [This process] destroys the viewer’s ability to anchor the motion in an exterior, objective space and, by that, induces an interior achronic “flow.”’52 Further, when combined in flo-mo technology, the temporal extremes of speed and stillness that appear within the same field of view similarly push past the two, competing points of view noted by FischerLichte and, instead, approach the ‘split’ sensibility proposed in Weber’s model of theatricality. The striking affect of flow-mo is, in fact, predicated on Fischer-Lichte’s contention that ‘it is quite impossible to let the eye rest at two different points in space at the same time.’53 But rather than a dual division of attention or two competing orders of perception, the spectator of flow-mo must deal with hundreds of separate points of view which have been seamlessly dithered into a fully continuous succession of representations and simulacra. The product utterly confounds choice and insists, instead, on – in Fischer-Lichte’s terms – an utter ‘subjectification of time’ through perceptual agility and cognitive navigation.

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Orienteering Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution . . . You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time. – Agent Smith, in The Matrix

The late twentieth century witnessed a surge of increasingly intense and darkly prophetic perspectives on the rampant digitization and mediatization of advanced societies. Echoing the equally pertinent arguments of his contemporary and countryman, Jean Baudrillard,54 Paul Virilio’s familiar and explicitly titled 1995 essay ‘Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!’ effectively captures this anxiety about the pace and pervasiveness of technological change – which, Virilio argues, is systematically and unilaterally altering human perception of both time and space. The result, Virilio contends, is ‘a fundamental loss of orientation . . . A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making . . . A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now . . . This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows.’55 Dislocated from phenomenological perceptual indexes, the common citizen is portrayed in much of this writing as being without either options or defences in the face of these destabilizing technological advances. Intriguingly, Slavoj Žižek discovers the The Matrix’s appeal – both misplaced and warranted – precisely at this juncture: ‘What is interesting is to read the Matrix movies not as containing a consistent philosophical discourse, but as rendering, in their very inconsistencies, the antagonisms of our ideological and social predicament . . . The paradox, the “infinite judgment,” of The Matrix is the co-dependence of the two aspects: the total artificiality (the constructed nature) of reality, and the triumphant return of the body in the sense of the ballet-like quality of fights with slow motions and defiance of the laws of ordinary physical reality.’56 By both extending and narrowing Žižek’s ‘antagonisms,’ a similar ‘paradox’ can be found in the film on the levels of perception and performance. For Žižek, the film’s primary relevance is in its Sisyphus-like assertion that resistance is not futile: ‘The imperfection of our world is thus at the same time the sign of its virtuality and the sign of its reality . . . reality is ultimately that which resists.’57 On a material level, the novel pleasure of The Matrix lies in the basic incompatibility of body and ground and the strenuous effort – of the actor, of the character, of the

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spectator, of the medium itself – required to retain physical and perceptual equilibrium. Following this line of analysis, the actor’s body can be seen as a site of resistance in all of its capacities: as performer, as fictional agent, and – perhaps most immediately affective – as a cinematic representation under assault by the CGI processes of virtualization that offer it mobility and power within the confines of the film’s narrative. In this context, Féral’s description of the theatrical body – ‘By definition, it is imperfect; as matter, it is vulnerable’ – holds clear resonance in relation to both Virilio’s broad-based social critique and Žižek’s specific analysis of The Matrix. Similarly, Fischer-Lichte’s assertion that ‘the infinitely reproducible images of technical and electronic media stand in opposition to the unique becoming of the human body – especially the suffering, sick, injured, or dying body’58 assumes an unintentional yet undeniable cross-media relevance. Yet much contemporary cultural analysis – building upon the work of such prescient pioneers as Marshall McLuhan59 and Donna Haraway – proposes an increasingly complex reading of this ‘interface,’ one in which there is the potential for both personal agency and autonomous affect.60 As Haraway has asserted, the deep destabilization that is threatened by cyborg culture’s brazen disregard for impermeable biological, ontological, philosophical, social, and political distinctions may be experienced by some as social and personal entropy and disintegration; for others, however, dislocated from the centres of dominant power structures, it may hold the key to unprecedented empowerment through self-authorship.61 More directly to the point, however, Petran Kockelkoren suggests that bodily disorientation is a normal and by no means new symptom of a continuous process of physical adaptation to new technologies. Drawing on a broad range of phenomenological precedent,62 Kockelkoren notes that ‘the senses are sensitive to historical fluctuations. They are constantly in motion because they are the points of anchorage of cultural re-education.’63 He cites the ‘whole battery of train sicknesses’ that were reported at the beginning of rail travel, only to disappear from medical discourse after a few decades: ‘The orientation from a moving train challenges the culturally established, previous habits of viewing. People had to appropriate a new, technologically mediated sensory regime. At first they became decentred, then they learnt to recentre themselves through the simultaneous embodiment of the train.’64 Further, Kockelkoren asserts, ‘Such stabilization processes are not once off, but keep on recurring as new technologies appear.’65

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In a sense, then, the body’s imperfection is a prerequisite qualification; its vulnerability is a necessary corollary to and gauge of its receptiveness; and its resistance is less an indication of revolution than one of earnest engagement. Kockelkoren’s contribution is in many ways representative of contemporary critical perspectives that, allowing for a wide range of theoretical bases, engage with the increasingly complex, fragmented, compromised, and contaminated ‘material nature of the body’66 in a mediatized, cyborgian age. Equally representative, and more to the point, is his use of balance and navigation in his description of the necessary skill sets and strategies of postmodern perceptual survival. In Service of Simulacra Neo: Do you know how to fly one of those things? Trinity: Not yet. – The Matrix

Sean Cubitt notes how The Matrix is structured – inevitably, if not necessarily intentionally – around an inherent tension between mobility and simulation: ‘Though the narrative wants us to puncture the illusion, it is illusion we came to witness. The film’s liquid instability enacts that contradiction.’67 Specifically, Cubitt argues, the seamless continuity of the CGI-generated perspectives necessitates a shift in understanding of depth of field from one built upon distinct planes to one of unbroken recession: ‘In this movement from plane to recession we parse in a new form that transition from tactile to visual, from the metaphysics of being to the culture of change.’ As a result, Cubitt suggests – in language familiar from a survey of Fischer-Lichte’s writings – that ‘Hollywood enters a new territory of vagueness inaugurated by doubling, encoded as illusion, and fronted as crisis: the space between material and immaterial, turbulence and the end of history.’68 Arguably, rapid advances in what The Matrix series visual effects supervisor John Gaeta calls ‘virtual cinematography’ may have moved us well along the way to ‘the end of history,’ threatening to quell much of the ‘turbulence’ in the process. For this reason, the more tentative and exploratory qualities of bullet-time in the first Matrix film arguably display an emerging cinematic theatricality at its most explicit. ‘The early version of bullet-time was not fully virtualized,’ Dan North explains, ‘because it required detailed pre-planning . . . followed by strict

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adherence to those plans at the shooting stage.’ Ironically, North continues, ‘The virtual camera was constrained by the practical procedures required for its use, its very virtuality a cunning illusion.’69 In the later Matrix instalments, Gaeta explains, ‘We wanted longer, flowing shots that built action to a level where the interactions of bodies would be so complex there would be no way that we could properly conceive of the cameras during shooting. Instead, we would create the master template for the choreography, and then have complete flexibility to compose shots in post-production.’70 In other words, Gaeta and his team aspired to solve the ‘problem’ of perception by rendering perspective ubiquitous – and thus, in a sense, a moot question: ‘We’re talking about cameras that are now broken from their subject matter, that are virtual. That’s the next phase. That’s what computers have introduced into cinematography.’71 Once the material possibility of point of view is transgressed, so too is the ‘problem’ of the body’s materiality. This becomes evident in North’s description of ‘The Burly Brawl,’ the epic battle sequence in The Matrix Reloaded (2003) in which a thoroughly ‘Virtual Neo battles virtual [Agent] Smiths in virtual backgrounds’: ‘The avatar which performs Keanu Reeves’ more grandiose manoeuvres is built from motion capture data which records the co-ordinates of key reference points placed on a performer’s body, onto which the digital form is then mapped – facial capture is also performed at very high resolution so that the image of the actor’s head can be grafted onto the shoulders of the double. Skin/fabric texture capture completes the process, dressing the rudimentary figure in perceptually realistic layers of skin and clothing.’72 However, North’s conclusion that ‘it is a cinematic prosthesis’ seems to miss the mark. The CGI component in this instance is neither a partial replacement nor an extension to the ‘actual’ actor’s body. Rather, the representational attributes of the actor – facial expressions, skin texture, a decapitated head – are, in effect, ‘grafted onto’ the avatar, effectively assuming the role of prosthesis to the virtual agent: the body’s traces put into the service of simulacra.73 By contrast, The Matrix is distinct from the later films in the series precisely because bullet-time’s early stage of development betrayed the inherent tensions of an embryonic process. Unlike the fully virtualized Neo of ‘The Burly Brawl,’ the hybrid, cyborgian figure of ‘The One’ from the first film performs his prerequisite imperfection at the level of both the film’s narrative and its narration. Stark innovation was only one of the reasons the wildly ambitious early use of bullet-time left audiences breathless – and, perhaps, not the most significant. At least equally

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important was the sheer effort – material as well as conceptual – it demanded and expresses on the level of representation and ostentation. Upon repeated viewings, the distinction between the cinematic exploration of bullet-time in the first film and the virtual realization of bullet-time in The Matrix Revolutions is conspicuous, and the ‘arc’ travelled traces a twinned evolution of technical capacity and perceptual competence. Put simply, neither bullet-time nor its contemporary viewers are quite what they used to be. However, precisely what has been gained and what has been lost in the transition is not, ultimately, my concern here. Rather, in an effort to isolate, retard, rotate, and analyse an historical moment in a temporally suspended manner both fitting and ironic, I bring us back to a particular intersection of cinematic theatricality. Becoming ‘The One’ Sooner or later you’re going to realize . . . that there’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. – Morpheus, in The Matrix

It would seem, therefore, that the dual materiality/immateriality of the cinematic body in motion – and, specifically, that of The Matrix’s flow-mo cyber-saviour, Neo – can be seen as a highly appropriate site to interrogate the contemporary nature of theatricality, in all its postmodern ‘inadequacy,’ ‘vulnerability,’ ‘ambiguity,’ and ‘instability.’ ‘You’re faster than you think you are,’ Morpheus tells Neo. For Langford, what this means is that ‘[Neo]’s been programmed to move in analogue time but he’s actually a free agent who can break the constraints of that program and reprogram himself.’74 But, as Christine Cornea has observed, ‘In fact, the apparently dynamic camera that circles Neo and captures his movement in slow motion as he dodges bullets and leaps into the air, works less as a demonstration of Neo’s transcendence than as a device to fix him in the moment.’75 Apart from the wide range of philosophical and theological implications of Neo’s status as ‘The One,’ a more practical and entirely apt interpretation recognizes him as the one character that must, like the spectator, learn from scratch how to navigate the disequilibrium of the Matrix. When he meets Morpheus, Trinity, and the others, they are already in ‘sway,’ already attuned, to the best of their abilities, with the

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Matrix’s rhythms. Like the spectator, Neo must begin to learn to regain his balance the only way possible: the hard way. He must rely upon his vulnerability, his imperfection, his engaged resistance, and, like the spectator, he must enter a state of decentring in order to acquire the skill to recentre. Towards the end of The Matrix, Neo and Trinity enter the Matrix in an attempt to rescue the kidnapped Morpheus, who is being tortured by Agent Smith. After knocking out the electrical power in the office tower where Morpheus is imprisoned (thereby setting off the sprinkler system), Neo and Trinity attack the soldiers who are standing guard on the roof. These forces are quickly dispatched, but as Trinity neatly finishes off the last opponent with a thrown knife to the forehead, we see the legs of one of the Matrix’s agents step into the foreground. Neo, his ‘spider-sense’ tingling, spins about, a pistol in each hand, and empties both rounds in the direction of the agent (and the camera). In a direct reversal of bullet-time, we see the agent twist and pivot, seemingly several places at once and nowhere at all, while the background remains perfectly still. When Neo’s revolvers are empty, he stands before the armed agent and announces his vulnerability: ‘Trinity. Help!’ Then begins one of the most famous and elaborate uses of bullet-time in the film, as Neo – with unheralded and unanticipated agility – dodges one after another of the agent’s bullets. As he does ‘a remarkable “ballet” of standing, swaying, and almost falling,’76 the film’s point of view begins a full 360-degree rotation around his teetering body, soaring up and diving low before returning to its point of departure (and absorbing the agent’s final bullet, once again, straight at the spectator). Intriguingly, the world that spins about the character is both more and less familiar than that which provides the background for the virtualized instances of the bullet-time effect in later films: less familiar because it is behaving in a way that few movie-goers had ever experienced before, yet more familiar in its not entirely seamless resistance to this unprecedented behaviour. As a spectator, particularly in repeated viewings, I sense the actor’s body, the narrative, the analogue filmmaking, and the CGI processors all being pushed to the limit, all being called upon to operate in territory none have ever ventured into before, ‘to seek a different sort of equilibrium, one that no longer looks to terra firma but rather responds to the never entirely predictable rise and fall of the [machine].’77 It is, in a sense, the composite body of the film and its reception (actor, character, spectator, technology) that performs its vital resistance/navigation of this unprecedented cinematic moment. Repeatedly, my experience

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of this scene, in an echo of Weber’s recognition of the same capacity in theatricality, is that it ‘demonstrates how [cinema] can be the medium of a displacement or dislocation that opens other ways, not bound to arrive at a final destination – or, at least, not too soon.’ Fittingly, Neo’s ‘final destination’ in the scene (which comes, but ‘not too soon’) is on his ass, and not before two bullets have left flesh wounds upon his limbs. Bruised, bloodied, and, despite his miraculous abilities, found wanting, he discovers himself at the feet of the agent. Looking down on Neo’s prone frame, the agent delivers the ultimate insult within the Matrix: ‘Only human.’ Tit for tat, making sure our shared, alltoo-embodied vulnerability does not overwhelm our ‘binocular vision,’ Trinity does what, presumably, we all, as spectators, want to do, as she places her pistol to the agent’s temple and mutters, as she pulls the trigger, ‘Dodge this.’ The moment is disturbing and exhilarating, even at the distance of a decade. Yet, as if a reminder that all acts of recentring are but brief, temporary reprieves, Neo is subdued in the face of Trinity’s emphatic ‘How did you do that?’ ‘Do what?’ he asks. ‘Move like they do,’ she responds, the spectator’s surrogate, momentarily pushed beyond her perceptual competence. ‘I’ve never seen anyone move that fast.’ Looking at the all-too-real injuries he has received within the ‘reality’ of the Matrix, Neo responds: ‘Wasn’t fast enough.’ A free agent hopelessly contained within the tacit contract of the machine, at once the author and the object of a ‘rhythmically structured, discontinuous sequence of discrete moments,’ Neo’s energetic yet fragile cinematic body performs a displaced yet determined ‘going-nowhere-while-moving,’ a dislocated yet liberating ‘sway of being,’ as a perpetually emerging yet irresolvably ‘split’ arrivant. In the realm of cinematic theatricality, it seems, choosing the red pill is only the beginning of becoming.

NOTES 1 Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 242. 2 Bruce Isaacs, Toward a New Film Aesthetic (New York: Continuum, 2008), 106. 3 Meike Wagner and Wolf-Dieter Ernst, eds., Performing the Matrix: Mediating Cultural Performances (Munich: epodium, 2008), 14.

Performance and Play in The Matrix 223 4 Paul Woodruff, The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 38. 5 Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 6 See Shannon Jackson, Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), in particular 183–92. While Jackson concedes that the distinction between the two concepts (and the debate about that distinction) is complicated and controversial, there is, she suggests, some common ground to be found in the assertion that theatre is, generally speaking, ‘“a place for viewing” [ . . . that] requires the seeability of its object’ (191). It is also, Jackson notes, ‘conceived as a space of performer agency,’ one in which ‘fragmented identities were made whole, the silent given voice, the invisible made visible’ (190). Conversely, Jackson asserts that performativity ‘identifies conventions that are unregistered and unintended rather than fully visible and willed’ (191). She applauds Peggy Phelan’s landmark text Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), which ‘theorizes performance as an ephemeral site of invisibility and disappearance rather than unproblematic visibility and presence,’ and concludes that ‘performativity thus seems to question the foundations of the theatrical’ (191). 7 Judith Butler, ‘Peformative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,’ Theatre Journal 40/4 (1988): 278. 8 Richard Rushton, ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality,’ Screen 45/3 (2004): 228. 9 Richard Rushton, ‘Absorption and Theatricality in the Cinema: Some Thoughts on Narrative and Spectacle,’ Screen 48/1 (2007): 109–12. 10 In his 2004 essay, Rushton offers the following models (230): ‘(a) Nontheatrical cinema, which is a form of cinema that has been variously theorized as “classical fiction cinema” or “classical narrative cinema,” and which is typified by Hollywood cinema. Films of this kind are characteristically beheld by the audience in a state of absorption: the characters in a classical fiction film do not acknowledge the presence of the audience and therefore the audience members can believe that they are invisibly, secretly watching events unfold before them. (b) Theatrical cinema, which includes films that are exhibitionist, that is, films that confront the audience in the form of trick effects, gripping chases, spectacular stunts, and demonstrations of events “that could only ever happen on film.” This is not in any way a new type of cinema (that of the contemporary special effects cinema); it can, in fact, be associated with the oldest type of cinema – what Tom Gunning and others have called “the cinema of attractions.” (c) Anti-theatrical cinema,

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which takes neither absorption or theatricality for granted. It is that form of filmmaking which in many circles is referred to as “modern” cinema, and which I believe is best exemplified by the films of Eisenstein and Godard.’ Scholarship that focuses on the cinematic ‘gaze’ makes up far too large a field to be appropriately referenced here, but for the uninitiated, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ Screen 16/3 (1975): 6 –18, along with its many responses and critiques, is a good place to start. For a concise but effective overview of cinema spectatorship scholarship, see Michelle Aaron, Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On (London: Wallflower, 2007). Josette Féral, ‘Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language,’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 97. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 98. Ibid. Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘From Theatre to Theatricality: How to Construct Reality,’ Theatre Research International 20/2 (1995): 103. Samuel Weber, ‘Taking Place: Toward a Theater of Dislocation,’ in D.J. Levin, Opera through Other Eyes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 133; original emphasis. Simon Wortham, Simon Morgan, and Gary Hall, Experimenting: Essays with Samuel Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 76; emphasis added. Drawing on the early work of Bertram Lewin (e.g., ‘Sleep, the Mouth and the Dream Screen,’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly 15 (1946): 419–43 and ‘Inferences from the Dream Screen,’ International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 29 (1948): 224–31), Jean-Louis Baudry’s utilization of dreams is perhaps the most influential of many related models of cinematic spectatorship. See Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The Apparatus: Metapsychological Approaches to the Impression of Reality in the Cinema,’ Camera Obscura 1 (1976): 104–28, reprinted in Philip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 299–318. Weber’s emphasis on an experience that ‘decentres and recentres’ a spectator is reminiscent of the constant process of spatial reconstitution proposed within multiple theories of cinematic ‘suture’ (e.g., Heath, Silverman). See Stephen Heath, ‘Narrative Space.’ Screen 17 (1976): 19–75, reprinted in Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, 379–420, and Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Féral, ‘Theatricality,’ 104. Fischer-Lichte, ‘From Theatre,’ 101.

Performance and Play in The Matrix 225 22 Samuel Weber, ‘Goings On: Discussion with Rex Butler,’ in Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 209–30. 23 Ibid., 230. Weber’s proposition underscores the potentially subversive politics of theatricality discussed by Bissonnette and Maron in earlier chapters in this volume [Eds.]. 24 Féral, ‘Theatricality,’ 100. 25 Fischer-Lichte, ‘From Theatre,’ 99. 26 Ibid., 102. 27 Féral, ‘Theatricality,’ 100. 28 Erika Fischer-Lichte, ‘Reality and Fiction in Contemporary Theatre,’ Theatre Research International 33/1 (2008): 88. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 92. 31 Ibid., 95. 32 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 8. 33 Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, translated by Saskya Jain (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 92; emphasis added. 34 Ibid., 99. 35 Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 16. 36 Ibid., 20. 37 Ibid., 22. 38 Can it be entirely coincidental that this is the same year that The Matrix was released? Perhaps. 39 Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 28. 40 Fischer-Lichte, ‘From Theatre,’ 103. 41 Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 29. 42 Ibid. 43 Andrew Shail, ‘“You Hear about Them All the Time”: A Genealogy of the Sentient Program,’ in Stacy Gillis, ed., The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Unloaded (London: Wallflower, 2005), 25. 44 Joshua Clover, The Matrix (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 17. 45 Richard Rickitt, Special Effects: The History and Technique (London: Aurum, 2006), 185–6. 46 Barry Langford, Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 202. 47 Roz Kaveny, From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film (London: Tauris, 2005), 73. 48 Weber, Theatricality as Medium 28.

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49 Shail, ‘You Hear about Them,’ 25. 50 Rushton’s efforts to analyse the relationship between ‘theatricality’ and ‘absorption’ in cinema provide valuable reflections on these dynamics: ‘I can begin to complicate our understanding of what absorption is, however, by first of all stating that one need not be absorbed by narrative, for one can be absorbed by spectacle as well. Or more to the point, one can be absorbed by spectacle and narrative at one and the same time’ (‘Absorption,’ 112). 51 Michelle Pierson, Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 163. 52 Torben Grodal, Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 150–1. 53 Fischer-Lichte, ‘From Theatre,’ 103. 54 For a basic primer on the key concept ‘simulacra,’ see Jean Baudrillard, ‘Simulacra and Simulations,’ in Mark Foster, ed., Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. For a discussion of the use of Baudrillard in The Matrix – and Baudrillard’s reaction – see Bruce Isaacs, Toward a New Film Aesthetic (New York: Continuum, 2008), 123–8. 55 Paul Virilio, ‘Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!’ in David Trend, ed., Reading Digital Culture (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 24. 56 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Ideology Reloaded,’ In These Times, 6 June 2003. Available at http://www.lacan.com/zizekloaded.htm; accessed 10 Dec. 2010. 57 Žižek quoted in Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 245. 58 Fischer-Lichte, Transformative Power, 93. 59 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Abacus, 1974 [1964]) and Lance Strate and Edward Wachtel, eds., The Legacy of McLuhan (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2005). 60 The next two paragraphs are drawn from my 2008 essay, Bruce Barton, ‘SubjectivityCultureCommunicationsIntermedia: a meditation on the “impure interactions” of performance and the “in-between” space of intimacy in a wired world,’ Theatre Research in Canada 29/1 (2008): 51–92. For a full consideration of this argument, see that article, particularly pages 71–3. 61 See Haraway’s surprisingly early essay, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s,’ Socialist Review 15/2 (1985): 65–107. 62 Kockelkoren primarily references the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Heideggar, and Ihde. 63 Peter Kockelkoren, Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre (Rotterdam: NAi, 2003), 16.

Performance and Play in The Matrix 227 64 65 66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 42. Féral, ‘Theatricality,’ 110. Sean Cubitt, The Cinema Effect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 230. Ibid., 230; emphasis added. Dan North, ‘Virtual Actors, Spectacle, and Special Effects: Kung Fu meets “All that CGI Bullshit,”’ in Stacy Gillis, ed., The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Unloaded (London: Wallflower, 2005), 54. Quoted in Joe Fordham, ‘Neo Realism,’ Cinefex 95 (2003): 87. John Gaeta, ‘Bullet-time,’ The Matrix, DVD (Warner Bros., 2001). North, ‘Virtual Actors,’ 57. Admittedly, a related development emerging out of a re-evaluation of both the materiality of media and the dissolution of organic/non-organic binaries is a reconsideration of the understanding of prostheses and their relationship(s) to corporeality. As, in Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), Elizabeth Grosz has asked, ‘Do prostheses function, because the body lacks something, which it uses as an external or extrinsic object to replace? . . . Or conversely, should prostheses be understood more in terms of aesthetic reorganization and proliferation, the consequence of an inventiveness that functions beyond and perhaps in defiance of pragmatic need?’ (147). But even this liberal understanding of the parameters of prostheses presents an image of utility and application that would seem to have little to do with the fully virtualized scene in question. Langford, Film Genre, 203. Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 259. Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 28. Ibid.

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Selected Bibliography

Aaron, Michelle. Spectatorship: The Power of Looking On. London: Wallflower, 2007. Artaud, Antonin. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary C. Richards. New York: Grove, 1994. Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. London: Allen and Unwin, 1968. Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Trans. Richard Howard. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. Bazin, André. ‘Theatre and Cinema, [Parts I and II].’ In What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967, 76–124. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Shoecken, 1969. Bennett, W. Lance, and Martha S. Feldman. Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom: Justice and Judgment in American Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1981. Benshoff, Harry M. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Bernard-Donals, Michael, and Richard Glejzer. Between Witness and Testimony. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Bourgaux, Jacques. Possessions et simulacres: Aux sources de la théâtralité. Paris: Epi éditeurs, 1973. Bratton, Jacky, Jim Cook, Christine Gledhill, eds. Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Braudy, Leo. The World in a Frame. 25th anniversary ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Brecht, Bertolt. Bertholt Brecht on Film & Radio. Ed. and trans. Marc Silberman. London: Methuen, 2001.

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Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. – Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. London: Routledge, 1993. – Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Carlson, Marvin. ‘The Resistance to Theatricality.’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 238–50. – Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Caughie, John. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture. London: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. – The World Viewed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Cavell, Stanley, ed. Must We Mean What We Say? New York: Scribner’s, 1969. Clover, Carol J. ‘God Bless Juries!’ In Mick Browne, ed., Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 255–77. – ‘Judging Audiences: The Trial Movie.’ In Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 2000, 244–64. Cooke, Lez. British Television Drama: A History. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Corrigan, Timothy. Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1999. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge 1993. Cubitt, Sean. The Cinema Effect. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Davis, Tracy C., and Thomas Postlewait, eds. Theatricality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Doan, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Elsom, John. Erotic Theatre. London: Secker and Warburg, 1973. Esslin, Martin. Brecht: A Choice of Evils. London: Methuen, 1993. Féral, Josette. ‘Forword’ [special issue on theatricality]. SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 3–13.

Selected Bibliography 231 Féral, Josette. ‘Theatricality: The Specificity of Theatrical Language.’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 94–108. Fevry, Sébastien. La mise en abyme filmique: Essai de typologie. Liege: Éditions du Céfal, 2000. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. ‘From Theatre to Theatricality: How to Construct Reality.’ Theatre Research International 20/2 (1995): 97–105. – ‘Theatricality: A Key Concept in Theatre and Cultural Studies.’ Theatre Research International 20/2 (1995): 85–9. – The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans. Saskya Jain. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Friedlander, Saul. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution.’ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Garneau, Michèle, and André Loiselle, eds. [Special Issue on Theatre and Film]. L’Annuaire théâtral 30 (Fall 2001). Gaudreault, André. Du littéraire au filmique: Système du récit. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1989. Gillis, Stacy, ed. The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Unloaded. London: Wallflower, 2005. Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor, 1959. Hamer, Mary. Signs of Cleopatra: History, Politics, Representation. London: Routledge, 1993. Hamon-Siréjols, Christine, Jacques Gerstenkorn, and André Gardies, eds. Cinéma et théâtralité. Lyon: Aléas, 1994. Hand, Richard J., and Michael Wilson. Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. – London’s Grand Guignol and the Theatre of Horror. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007. Hébert, Chantal, and Irène Perelli-Contos. La face cachée du théâtre de l’image. Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2001. Helbo, André. L’adaptation: Du théâtre au cinéma. Paris: Armand Colin, 1997. Hodgdon, Barbara. The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Isaacs, Bruce. Toward a New Film Aesthetic. New York: Continuum, 2008. Jackson, Shannon. Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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Jones, E. Michael. Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film. Dallas: Spence, 2000. Kamir, Orit. Framed: Women in Law and Film. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Kaplan, E. Ann. Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992. King, Stephen. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest House, 1980. Knopf, Robert, ed. Theater and Film: A Comparative Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Lamb, Margaret. Antony and Cleopatra on the English Stage. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980. Landy, Marcia. The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930– 1943. Albany: SUNY Press, 1998. – Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Loiselle, André. Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003. Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2003, 399. Marcus, Millicent. After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. – Italian Film in the Shadow of Auschwitz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. – ‘Return of the Repressed: Italian Film and Holocaust Memory.’ In Joshua D. Zimmermann, ed., Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 321–3. Martin, Frédéric. L’Antiquité au cinéma. Paris: Dreamland, 2002. Miller, William Ian. Eye for an Eye. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Mulhall, Stanley. Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Müller-Wood, Anja. The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Nussbaum, Marth C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Pavis, Patrice. Dictionary of the Theatre: Terms, Concepts and Analysis. Trans. Christine Shantz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. – La mise en scène contemporaine: Origines, tendances, perspectives. Paris: Armand Collin, 2007. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993. Prédal, René. Le théâtre à l’écran. Paris: Cerf, 1999.

Selected Bibliography 233 Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Royster, Francesca T. Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan 2003. Rozik, Eli. ‘Acting: The Quintessence of Theatricality.’ SubStance 98/99 31/2–3 (2002): 110–24. Rushton, Richard. ‘Absorption and Theatricality in the Cinema: Some Thoughts on Narrative and Spectacle.’ Screen 48/1 (2007): 109–12. – ‘Early, Classical and Modern Cinema: Absorption and Theatricality.’ Screen 45/3 (2004): 226–44. Rutter, Carol Chillington. Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London: Routledge, 2001. Shusterman, Richard. Pragmatic Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. Simkin, Stevie. Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of Violence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Singer, Ben. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature: The Art of Screen Adaptation. London: Croom Helm, 1986. Stam, Robert. ‘Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.’ In James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, 54–76. – Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. States, Bert O. Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theatre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Warhol, Robyn R. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop Culture Forms. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003. Weber, Samuel. Theatricality as Medium. New York: Fordham University Press, 2004. Woodruff, Paul. The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Wyke, Maria. Projecting the Past: Ancient Rome, Cinema and History. New York: Routledge, 1997. Žižek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seattle: Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, 2000.

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Contributors

Brenda Austin-Smith is associate professor of film studies in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba, where she has recently taught courses in Cult Film, Film and Realism, and Teen Gross-Out Comedy. Among her publications are essays and articles on Henry James and Alfred Hitchcock, Lars von Trier, Patricia Rozema, Mina Shum, Wim Wenders, film adaptation, cinema memory, and women and ‘weepie’ films. She is co-editor, with George Melnyk, of The Gendered Screen: Canadian Women Filmmakers (1999). Bruce Barton is a playmaker and scholar. He teaches devising, dramaturgy, and intermedial performance at the University of Toronto. He has published in numerous scholarly and practical periodicals, including TDR: The Drama Review, Theatre Journal, and Performance Research, as well as several international essay collections. His book publications include Developing Nation: New Play Creation in English-Speaking Canada (2009), Collective Creation, Collaboration and Devising (2008), Reluctant Texts from Exuberant Performance: Canadian Devised Theatre (2008), and Imagination in Transition: Mamet Moves to Film (2005). A former editor of Theatre Research in Canada, he is co-editor of a special issue of that journal on ‘Theatre and Intermediality’ (2011). Current research includes a three-year SSHRC-funded study on dramaturgies of the body in physically based devised theatre and intermedial performance. Current creative practice includes directing, writing, and dramaturgy for multiple devised theatre projects and the creation of aerial-based interdisciplinary performance. Sylvie Bissonnette holds a PhD in performance studies from the University of California at Davis. A specialist on Robert Lepage’s theatre

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and cinema, she has published articles in Screen, the New Review of Film and Television Studies, the Contemporary Theatre Review, Nouvelles «vues» sur le cinéma québécois, as well as the book chapter ‘Adaptation as Confession in Robert Lepage’s Le confessionnal ’ in From Camera Lens to Critical Lens (2006). Her current research interests include bodies in technology, perception in new media, spectatorship, cognitive theories, emotion in cinema, animation, video games, online social networks, science fiction films, and posthumanism. Sylvain Duguay completed his postdoctoral work at the École supérieure de théâtre (UQÀM), in Montreal. His research is concerned with the relationships of film and theatre, both on screen and on stage (film adaptation, semiotics, reception, multimedia theatre, etc.). He teaches Humanities at John Abbott College in Montreal. Sarah Hatchuel is professor of English literature and director of the ‘Groupe de recherche: Identités et cultures’ at the University of Le Havre (France). She has published several articles on the aesthetics of Shakespeare on screen and is the author of Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext: Sequel, Conflation, Remake (2011), Shakespeare, from Stage to Screen (2004), and A Companion to the Shakespearean Films of Kenneth Branagh (2000). She co-edited (with Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin) Shakespeare on Screen: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2004), Shakespeare on Screen: Richard III (2005), Television Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Michèle Willems (2008), Shakespeare on Screen: The Henriad (2008), Shakespeare on Screen: The Roman Plays (2009) and Shakespeare on Screen: Hamlet (2011); she also edited the plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra in the New Kittredge Shakespeare collection (2008). André Loiselle is professor of film studies and associate dean of graduate studies at Carleton University. He has written several books on Canadian film and theatre including Stage-Bound: Feature Film Adaptations of Canadian and Québécois Drama (2003), Cinema as History: Michel Brault and Modern Quebec (2007), and Denys Arcand’s ‘Déclin de l’empire américain’ and ‘Les Invasions barbares’ (2008). He has also edited a number of anthologies, such as Canada Exposed (2009, co-edited with Pierre Anctil and Christopher Rolfe) and Self-Portraits: The Cinemas of Canada since Telefilm (2006, co-edited with Tom McSorley). He is currently working (with Gina Freitag) on an anthology titled Terror of the Soul: Essays on the Canadion Horror Film. He also appeared as an ‘expert on zombie movies’

Contributors 237

in the documentary Zombiemania (2008, Donna Davies) along with Tom Savini and George A. Romero. Jeremy Maron is a research assistant at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He holds a PhD in Cultural Mediations from Carleton University, for which he wrote his dissertation, Unbridgeable Barriers: The Holocaust in Canadian Cinema. He has published in CineAction, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, and Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. He has also taught courses on film and the Holocaust and Canadian cinema. Billy Smart is a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded project ‘Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style’ at the University of Reading. His 2010 doctoral thesis on BBC adaptations of Galsworthy, Ibsen, Brecht, and Shakespeare is currently being developed as a book project. His work on J. B. Priestley has appeared in Critical Studies in Television (2012). As well as the televised theatrical adaptation, his research interests include British soap operas and other popular dramas, and the role and status of the television drama director. Aaron Taylor is assistant professor in the Department of New Media at the University of Lethbridge. He is the editor of Theorizing Film Acting (2012), and his publications on film performance can be found in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2012), Millennial Masculinity (2012), Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture (2012), Studies in Documentary Film (2011), and Journal of Film and Video (2007). He is currently writing a monograph on It’s a Wonderful Life and cult cinema. R.J. Tougas is a lawyer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and an independent scholar. By day, he provides claims and litigation management to various professional errors and omissions insurance programs. By night, R.J. prowls the streets examining representations of law and justice in popular culture, preparing works on films including Lady Vengeance, Kill Bill, 12 Angry Men, Miracle on 34th Street, and The Last Wave.