The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film

Paisley Livingston, Carl Plantinga, Paisley Livingston, Carl Plantinga

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135982744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film is the first comprehensive volume to explore the main themes, topics, thinkers and issues in philosophy and film. The Companion features sixty specially commissioned chapters from international scholars and is divided into four clear parts:

• issues and concepts
• authors and trends
• genres
• film as philosophy.

Part one is a comprehensive section examining key concepts, including chapters on acting, censorship, character, depiction, ethics, genre, interpretation, narrative, reception and spectatorship and style. Part two covers authors and scholars of film and significant theories Part three examines genres such as documentary, experimental cinema, horror, comedy and tragedy. Part four includes chapters on key directors such as Tarkovsky, Bergman and Terrence Malick and on particular films including Memento.

Each chapter includes a section of annotated further reading and is cross-referenced to related entries.

The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy of film, aesthetics and film and cinema studies.

Part I Issues and Concepts

1 Acting

Johannes Riis

DOI: 10.4324/9780203879320-1

The centrality of acting to film narratives raises several issues, some related to the ontology of actors and characters, others to realism and the role of acting styles, and others pertaining to the performance’s contribution to a film’s artistic merit. This entry surveys some of the most influential and pertinent ideas and issues related to these topics.

Acting in images

In film, the value of acting depends on the abilities of others, such as cinematographers and editors; to probe deeper into the nature of acting’s contribution we need to see performances relative to images and the sound track.

First, our experience of a performance as a part of the film implies that acting causally affects the image and sound track. Computer-generated images, which are based on motion or performance capturing, illustrate even more pointedly the relation of acting to images. Andy Serkis' performance as Gollum in the trilogy of The Lord of the Rings is a case in point. Even though we look at a fantasy creature with an outward appearance created from scratch at a computer, not unlike the object of a painting, Gollum’s quirky movements and gestures and his uncanny postures all rely on Serkis' acting technique.

The idea that photographic pictures are fundamentally different from other pictures has been highly contested, and it is clear that moving pictures share with other pictures many aesthetic properties. A painter and a film director who wish to depict a certain posture will face similar decisions concerning, for example, how to frame, compose, and light the figure, and the painter may instruct a model to hold a certain pose, not unlike the director who asks the actor to behave in a certain manner. We are looking at images in both cases, and they both rely on the techniques of a painter and a director; yet one of them also relies on acting technique as the actor moves within the picture frame.

Kendall L. Walton’s concept of transparency may shed light on the kind of causal relation that is possibly at work in images of a performance (Walton 1984). Elaborating upon an idea first expressed by André Bazin, Walton points out that photographic pictures will show what happened in front of the camera and thereby manifest a counterfactual dependency between the content of the picture and the objects in front of the camera, whereas a painting depends on what the painter believes he or she has observed and what he or she intends to be the pictorial content.

Second, acting implies that someone plays a role as part of a fictional narrative. It may be defined, as James Naremore has put it, as “a special type of theatrical performance in which the persons held up for show have become agents in a narrative” (Naremore 1988: 23). Other kinds of performances, such as singing on stage, might also entail a narrative function, but acting entails that the person “held up for show” tries to enact the role of agent in a narrative. What acting shares with other kinds of performances is the evaluation by the audience: the question is whether the claim to center stage, as it were, is justified by the performer’s abilities.

Third, the performance is carried out for the purpose of a film audience. Public service television is in some countries used to broadcast successful stage performances at large theaters, but this is an example of performance as an object of distribution in an audio-visual medium. In film performances, we have distinct expectations concerning the relation of acting to film technology. Comparative studies of scenes which are based on the same play and use cinematography in similar ways show that a performance can be more or less “calibrated” to framing and camera movements (Jacobs 1998), and small nuances of performance can alter a remake (of an earlier film) in thematically important ways (McDonald 2004: 27–32). Acting is an integral and distinct part of the work in question.

Historically, a prevalent use of film technology has allowed for counterfactual dependency on acting, but only empirical study can reveal the extent to which acting accounts for valuable properties such as character expressiveness. Nevertheless, the pictorially inclined may point out that our experience of a performance is affected, for example, by the use of editing, and that acting therefore is a kind of raw material for the editor, subject analogously to the so-called Kuleshov effect. Although the premise is true, it does not follow that editing constructs the expressive content of acting, and the Kuleshov effect should not be trusted as proof in this regard. Lev Kuleshov, an editor and director in post-Revolutionary Russia, did an experiment in which a close-up of the actor Ivan Mozhukin was intercut with various objects. The reactions of the spectators who viewed the intercut shots ostensibly showed that it was the editing, rather than Mozhukin’s acting, that created meaning. The footage used in the Mozhukin experiment has been lost, but two similar experiments of Kuleshov indicate that he used this preexisting footage for pedagogical purposes, to illustrate cutting on eye-lines, rather than to prove a theoretical point (Tsivian et al. 1996: 359). We should be skeptical of any references to the Kuleshov experiment with regard to acting and expressiveness. First, it is often assumed that Mozhukin took part in what could have been a semi-scientific experiment, when in fact, by the time the “experiment” was conducted, he had fled the country, due to the Revolution (see Albéra 1995: 76). Second, it is often assumed that Mozhukin was inexpressive and that it therefore was the editing that created the illusion that he was emoting. Yet it is rather implausible that Kuleshov would have picked an inexpressive performance by Mozhukin, even if he could find one. An inexpressive glance in a close-up does not cut easily with shots of other objects, since the spectator has no reason to ask for an offscreen cause of an expression.

We are better off with a more recent model of how acting and editing may work together, supplied by Noël Carroll in his theory of point-of-view editing. Carroll implies that facial expressions are somewhat ambiguous. To communicate emotions in a precise manner in cinema, the film structure known as point-of-view editing has been developed (Carroll 1993).

Dualism of actor and character

Acting offers spectators the pleasure of letting us see and hear the artistic agent as part of the film, but it remains unclear whether we can claim to watch an actor and a character at the same time.

According to most accounts, our awareness of the performer need not interfere with the spectator’s comprehension of or immersion in the narrative. Naremore provides a striking example from The King of Comedy (1983), in which the extras on location (or, alternatively, the fictional bystanders) stop to watch celebrity Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard (or their fictional characters). Thus, filmmakers may play upon our ability to notice nuances of role-playing to dramatize the theme of celebrity in yet another form, leaving the spectator to linger over the ambiguities of identity and role-playing (Naremore 1988: 285). This kind of experience presupposes a distinction between what George M. Wilson calls photographic and what he calls dramatic representation. According to Wilson, “there is a complex, dynamic interaction between these types of representation which makes it impossible, in analyzing a film, to unfuse the interaction, to treat them as discernibly separate and distinct” (Wilson 1986: 140).

Established practices in the film industry, such as casting according to type and the promotion of certain actors to stardom, exemplify how the interaction often works. For instance, we may analyze the role of star image in a performance by looking for a selective use, a problematic or a perfect fit (Dyer 1979: 143–9). One model for understanding type casting and star images is to assume that we form a composite or extract that finds its basis in particularly powerful roles. Thus, in a discussion of Humphrey Bogart, Stanley Cavell suggests that Bogart’s screen personality, as established across a range of roles, became so powerful as to render character names subordinate; “ ‘Bogart’ means ‘the figure created in a given set of films’ ” (Cavell 1979: 28). There may be other reasons than good acting for attaining stardom; numerous star studies have examined individual stars and their historical and industrial context (see, for example, Studlar 1996; Basinger 2007).

Underlying the actor and character dualism is a necessary distinction between two sets of actions and attitudes. Acting, as noted initially, means that a performance is carried out for the benefit of an audience, and that the performer becomes an agent in a narrative. This means that we cannot make the mistake of attributing a fictional murder to an actual actor; character beliefs and desires are kept distinct and separate. Conversely, it means that we may admire an actor’s performance, even though we do not approve of morally repulsive actions his or her character performs.

Similarly, actor and character do not share an emotional experience, even when the actor uses realist techniques. For instance, the American actor Lindsay Crouse contends that good acting occurs when “what is going on in the scene dovetails exactly with something that you [the actor] have to do … it is your life in that moment” (quoted in Zucker 1995: 20). Thus, a fictional event in a scene comes to stand for an actual event that she wishes to perform. However, that does not mean that actor and character share an emotional experience. An emotion which has the concern for role and audience as part of its content – the actor’s emotion – is most plausibly viewed as different from one that does not. An actor’s emotional experience is bound to reflect that he or she is playing a role, since what the role requires (or offers, demands, etc.) is the origin of the need for applying a realist technique in the first place.

The question is how we may acknowledge two distinctive sets of actions, beliefs, and desires, as well as a constant interaction between photographic and dramatic representation. I suggest we distinguish between two ways of understanding the actor and character dualism and, for lack of better terms, I will call them the duck/rabbit and the realist model.

According to the duck/rabbit model, actor and character are distinct and separate because they result from mutually exclusive perspectives, and we can only see one at a time, not unlike the famous trick-drawing of a duck and a rabbit. That is, we see in parts of the picture either an actor or a character, two distinct agents: pictorial information is anchored to one agent from the very outset. The distinction between two different pictorial contents leaves unexplained how an actor’s previous roles can make themselves felt, but one might hypothesize that properties drift from one agent to the other because actor and character are identical in outward appearance in the images. For instance, Stephen Heath argues that “expression” or “figure of acting” is the result of circulation between several levels: agency of action; the actor, who supplies the body; the actor’s image; the character as a specific individual (Heath 1981: 179–82). The question, however, is whether Heath makes too much of the fact that we look at a picture, since Heath’s levels could be applied to any agent. For instance, I may describe myself as an agent; I have a body, I can pretend to be someone else, and other people form an image of me. In this case, we would not necessarily claim that meaning circulates as Heath describes it.

According to a realist model the spectator stores information watched in the film with the photographed actor. Instead of being seen as belonging to a fictional entity, an actor’s character beliefs and desires can be viewed as the actor’s pretense. In other words, acting (or dramatic representation) might be viewed as a certain mode in which actions can be carried out. Not unlike everyday life’s playful actions or use of irony, it is a benign and nondeceptive way of carrying out actions. We are unlikely to attribute what we might call pretense-actions to a nonexisting agent, for the same reason that we keep track of the agent who uses irony or does an imitation of us in everyday life.

Whereas the duck/rabbit dualism implies a kind of perceptual mistake when we are affected by previous roles or star promotional material, the realist model can view previous roles as ways of setting up expectations of the actor, given a new role and new set of circumstances. However, the realist model may face difficulties when encountering roles played by multiple actors. In, for instance, Palindromes (2004), we assume continuity of character beliefs and desires while recognizing eight distinct actresses; arguably, we assume that each actor has an intention to play the protagonist from where the previous one left off.

Technique

When trying to assess the value of actors' contributions, we are probably better off looking for performance technique rather than, for instance, asking questions about authorship. The script and the director’s choices set up a framework within which the actor works, not unlike the constraints facing, for example, musicians and ballet dancers.

Acting technique could be viewed, simply, as that which allows the actor to perform a given role, or parts of it. Admittedly, such an inclusive definition does not distinguish between roles that are demanding and those that appear easily performed. Technique, however, can be taken to mean many things. A role can showcase skills that we would not normally take to be part of a contemporary acting school’s core curriculum but are valued by spectators; this is clear, for instance, in musicals and martial arts films. A role can also entail the kind of actions that we are used to performing in our everyday life, for instance, driving a car or opening a door, and such actions can appear anything but artful. To account for the way in which mundane actions can sometimes be considered aesthetically valuable properties of a performance, we are probably best served with an inclusive and nonnormative view of acting technique.

Film performances need not be technically demanding to serve the role and the film; nonprofessional acting is a case in point. The French director Robert Bresson aimed for the portrayal of character actions as automatic and habitual – an acting style that often contrasted strikingly with what was at stake in his narratives. Bresson therefore preferred amateurs, whom he would ask to repeat an action over and over, until their relation to objects and characters “were right because they will not be thought” (Bresson 1977: 12). When a director works with child actors, Vsevolod Pudovkin recommends (drawing on his experience in cinema in the 1920s and early 1930s) that they be given a counterinstruction in the middle of a take in order to de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I Issues and concepts
• PART II Authors and trends
• PART III Genres and other types
• PART IV Film as philosophy
• Index