Moment of Action

Murray Pomerance

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813575179
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

There are hundreds of biographies of filmstars and dozens of scholarly works on acting in general. But what about the ephemeral yet indelible moments when, for a brief scene or even just a single shot, an actor’s performance triggers a visceral response in the viewer?    Moment of Action delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles while examining films as varied as Bringing Up Baby, Psycho, The Red Shoes, Godzilla, and The Bourne Identity, Murray Pomerance traces the common dynamics that work to structure the complex relationship between the act of cinematic performance and its eventual perception.     Mining the spaces where subjective and objective analyses merge, Pomerance offers both a deeply personal account of film viewership and a detailed examination of the intuitive gestures, orchestrated movements, and backstage maneuvers that go into creating those phenomenal moments onscreen. Moment of Action takes us on an innovative exploration of the nexus at which the actor’s keen skills spark and kindle the audience’s receptive energies.  

1

Fantastic Performance

Many who think and write about screen acting want to demystify it, turn a light on the dark workroom where it is born. In their many ways they ask, What is this behavior being played at by otherwise ordinary people? Or: How through acting is wool being pulled over our eyes?

Following from the groundbreaking 1950 work of Hortense Powdermaker, for example, Danae Clark examines the economic logic of actors’ labor in the context of capitalist production: who controls and molds it, who profits from it, who is exploited when actors act, and how? Peter Krämer and Alan Lovell ask different questions: “What do actors do to create a performance? What are their specific skills? What are the general ideas which inform the use of those skills?” (1). Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke look at the process whereby screen performance is fashioned and crafted in the context of studio filmmaking. James Harvey analyzes the prevailing cultural context as it informs performance. Andrew Klevan, Vivian Sobchack, and Stanley Cavell devote themselves to thinking about rather than of acting, Cavell, for instance, meditating on the fact that screen actors are projected but cannot really project (qtd. in Klevan 3). But this book emerges from quite another wellspring of curiosity.

At its best, the work of the actor is and must be mysterious and unclear. The critical question is thus not what acting is—what actors are paid for; what the critic takes them to be doing; what password was whispered to make it possible for some persons to slide through the gate and become screen actors—but what acting can be as we watch it; how it works upon us and we upon it: a meditation on the acting effect.

When we consider performances that have touched and provoked us, we call up biography, memory, desire, feeling, and orientation—in short, the self. Since cultural studies began to exert its hegemony over intellectual life it has seemed unfashionable, even futile, to enunciate the self. One’s point of view might establish one’s socioeconomic status, point to the thrust of procedural movement or alignment, or articulate some brief and curtailable reaction, but it should not, apparently, be thought to emerge from a deep sense of being, memory, and experience. Indeed, in some circles “self” has become a dirty word, and the idea that experience is in important ways personal, idiosyncratic, and ineffable is treated as old-fashioned, uninformed, and unperceptive. Individual expression and sensitivity are taken to gain currency, to achieve value, only when they are based on systematically rationalized expertise, credit, or method. Thus is the System made the basis of all that we see and know, and the contradictory, offbeat, or uncohering perspective outlawed and finally lost.

Style and Culture

If performance is universally attractive and revealing, the nuances of acting style vary culturally, so that as audiences from different parts of the world look at film acting they find local characteristics. With stage performance this has long been well known: the stolid, gestural, masked Kabuki style differs from Indonesian dance-acting, French declamation, and British spoken stage work. But screen acting is no less variant. Hollywood production fosters certain recurrent patterns of augmented physical posture, enunciatory emotionalism, and declarative body movement all seen under typically unrestrained lighting. Here, actions are central to filmic structure and bodies are doted upon as formal objects. Consider Elizabeth Taylor, lithe as a flickering ray in A Place in the Sun (1950) and then chubby and flamboyant (in the role Bette Davis said she would have killed for)1 in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). Or Jerry Lewis, contortional and artfully poised in The Nutty Professor (1963) and then depressive, withdrawn, and sedate in The King of Comedy (1982).

In Italian film we see the body and persona of the actor highlighted (Marcello Mastroianni, Anna Magnani, Monica Vitti) but the moment of action is scenic, not personal. Look at Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) and the way Guido (Mastroianni) finds and expresses himself in terms of the balletic action and elaborate locations behind him; or Roberto Rossellini’s L’Amore (1948) with Nannina’s (Magnani) passion on the mountainside; or Vitti’s obsessive meandering around her estate in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961).

If we look in depth at the work of Yasujiro Ozu we find an obsessive formality about cinematic space, stasis, and etiquette: frequently his actors express characterization by the angles at which they sit in relation to one another, or by the length of the silences between their statements, elements of performance masterfully articulated in Tokyo Story (1953; see Desser). Or consider the angular and energetic lateral movement through the forest of Toshirô Mifune in Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon (1950).

In French screen performance much attention is turned to the way actors vocalize tonally and rhythmically (the bold and golden grammar of Philippe Noiret in Coup de torchon [1981]; the slur of Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle [1960]; the crisp silences of Marcel Dalio in La règle du jeu [1939]). The moment in François Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968) when Jean-Pierre Léaud stares into a mirror and vocalizes repetitively, and more and more rapidly, the name of his own character, “Antoine Doinel Antoine Doinel Antoine Doinel,” that of his girlfriend, “Christine Darbon Christine Darbon Christine Darbon,” and that of an older woman who has captured his fancy, “Fabienne Tabard Fabienne Tabard Fabienne Tabard,” is a kind of critical discourse about conventional French performance of the 1940s and 1950s, a statement of Truffaut’s affiliation with the nouvelle vague.

The British actor’s extraordinary capacity for playing with language—dialects, vocal amplitude, diction—structures much performance as a type of geographic evidence: where exactly a characterization is set in terms of social and topological space (no clearer examples being available than the work of Roger Livesey, Deborah Kerr, and Anton Walbrook in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp [1943]; Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter [1945]; or David Warner, Vanessa Redgrave, and Robert Stephens in Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment [1966]).

If we look at the Burkinabé films of Idrissa Ouedraogo (such as Tilaï [1990]), we find relatively little facial or bodily expressivism on the part of the actors. More is achieved by way of interactional posture, directionality of movement, the body positioned against natural space, and (as in Hitchcock) the use of color design to variably separate the characters from their surround. In the work of Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for instance Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), the actors frequently work by waiting, holding back speech or gesture, as though receiving guidance from another dimension.

A notably forceful concentration on the delicacy and depth of physical gesture is evident in the work of Scandinavian actors such as Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow (for example, in The Passion of Anna [1969]) or even of the American actor Elliott Gould, reducing his American-star facial work to become tenderly gestural, in tandem with Bibi Andersson and Von Sydow, in The Touch (1971). Here, gesture and silence play significantly, particularly in a series of linked vignette shots as, after her morning coffee, Andersson tries on various dresses and accouterments to see if she looks right before going off to meet her American lover.

For commercial reasons, performance in Hollywood film has a glittering surface appeal, so that it is easily apprehended, digested, and evaporated (making room for new consumption). It requires little thought, recapitulating today what Goethe noticed already in the late eighteenth century, that flattering the audience, catering to their weakness, would bring popular success (64). Yet it is a mistake to simply summarize Hollywood screen performances as thin and inauthentic, as though no rich experience lies in wait for the viewer who patiently reflects on them. Hollywood cinema can be penetrating, moving, and revolutionary even in its glitz and gleam, as believed the Cahiers du cinéma critics of the 1950s, today often snidely denigrated by “aficionados” of cinema whose devotions affix to esoterica and recursive image analysis. Scholars and critics now often choose to fashionably spurn the commercialized Hollywood style. Thus, insufficiently elevated and insufficiently attractive for them is run-of-the-mill Hollywood product, for example, the sort of rhythmically recurring physical movement we can see in Harry Horner’s flashy black-and-white B-film The Wild Party (1948)—where, first, Anthony Quinn affectionately catches Nehemiah Persoff’s throat in his bent arm; then later Persoff seizes Quinn by the shoulder; then still later Jay Robinson throws his arm around Arthur Franz’s throat and half-strangles him in a car. But even in our age of aggravated capitalist merchandizing, in which movie screens of all sizes are flooded with imagery that we are meant to consume rapidly and quickly before passing on to something new, new, and everlastingly new, patient reflection remains possible and worth striving to achieve—especially reflection upon performance.

Working actors openly regard their performing as performing. The rest of us, who surely perform in everyday life, do not regard what we do as being neatly staged for a view (although anyone surveilling us might not agree). We know we can be watched but we do not assume that we are. As Alfred Schutz noted: “I, you, we, are . . . carried from one moment to the next in a particular attentional modification of the state of being mutually oriented to each other” (156). In watching screen acting we explicitly tag the performer, make him into a supremely valued thing. Every celebrity actor was once only an unadorned citizen (aging, indeed, he might become one again). That the biggest stars in Hollywood were once unrecognized as such shows the power of our recognition in denoting and contributing prestige.

Innocent and Scientific Watching, and “Falling In”

Discussing 1950s art criticism in The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe implicitly warned that one could no longer see without a theory. Writers about cinema have often subordinated deeply rooted sensations and responses to canonized grids of thought, categorizations, typifications, linguistic models, or magical incantations reified and accorded dignity, with the overriding result that discussion about cinematic performance has aimed to explain, context, and demystify actors’ work as though nothing could be more important about it than what can be catalogued.

As science encroaches upon experience, the world becomes, as Max Weber taught us, rationalized. Dreams, myths, wonderments, suppositions—all these diminish in the face of factuality and data collection. On the hunt for indications, some viewers labor in front of the screen to assemble an index of some reality. Instead of “What is going on in front of my eyes?” to ask, instead, “How might it be if . . .” is a profound philosophical step, to be moved to wonder about conditions presently invoked, their implications, their origins, their peculiar flavor and affective qualities. Such reflection has come to seem a waste of time as we press forward to watch more images every day, often through devices that preserve the pixels of indication while erasing aesthetic provocation. Decoding has become a principal piety. Analysis triumphs.

Most casual viewers of film employ an “innocent” practice: technically uninformed, conventional, and sincere. Things are taken as they seem, and the narrative is treated as a window onto some (entertaining) world. The “innocent” watcher accepts performances completely, as though they are “just there” to be seen. Actors not well known enough to be identified as stars are closely aligned with their characters, even absorbed into them. The “innocent” viewer doesn’t think about actors working to repeat themselves in take after take, or waiting for the lighting to be set and reset, or having their hair or makeup touched up, or quickly studying a script, or chatting about the news with one another. “Innocent” film viewing is so culturally diffuse it can be taken for granted as a “natural” way of watching, and is thus invisible.

The scholar and critic, by contrast, do not adopt an “innocent” perspective in watching. Even very astute scholarship is prone to swinging to the radically “scientific” end of the spectrum. In From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer describes Emil Jannings’s performance as the old hotel porter (in F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh [1924]), proud of his position in his grand uniform but who learns one sad day that he has been replaced by a younger man. Having noted that the porter’s work involves “not only usher[ing] the guests through the revolving door, but also offer[ing] candies to the children in the yard of the tenement house where he lives with some relatives,” Kracauer moves on to archly point to the Weimar social context:

All the tenants, in particular the female ones, are awed by his uniform which, through its mere presence, seems to confer a mystic glamour upon their modest existence. They revere it as a symbol of supreme authority and are happy to be allowed to revere it. Thus the film advances, however ironically, the authoritarian credo that the magic spell of authority protects society from decomposition. (100; my emphasis)

Adducing broader, extra-filmic social issues (in this case, structures of authority and tradition in Weimar Germany), Kracauer peers far beyond the Jannings performance, finding the actor only a kind of game piece, the movement of which promotes a tacit authoritarian credo. Through a similar critical distancing, Barbara Stanwyck in Stella Dallas (1937) and Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945) were linked as self-sacrificing mothers in feminist theories arguing Hollywood’s collusion in sustaining female powerlessness (see Cook; Williams “Something”); and during the 1980s, performances by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, and Chuck Norris came to be typified as examples of the Reaganist military-conservative type thanks to the influence of Susan Jeffords’s groundbreaking book Hard Bodies.

Beyond “innocent” and “scientific” viewing, or somewhere between them, is what could be called “falling in.” One viewer typified this to me with a passionate account of having watched Mads Mikkelson, an actor whose work was very familiar to him, as, at the beginning of Nicolas Winding Refn’s With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II (2004), he ambled down a street with his back to camera and a tattoo at the rear of his head. “Oh, Mads has a tattoo!” he began saying to himself. But then, quickly, he changed his view. “Oh, that’s not Mads. That’s a thug.” A kind of transformation occurred, certainly a movement into the diegetic sphere but one that was initiated and energized on a platform outside, in the everyday. Is this movement not something like what happens as, relinquishing the world of our quotidian concerns, we fall asleep, entering a journey we cannot predict or hope to understand? Marcel Proust wrote of “thoughts of the future which would carry me, as on a bridge, across the terrifying abyss that yawned at my feet” (28). When we are positioned and prone to falling in, the difference between the actor and the character perhaps evanesces, so that indeed, as William Rothman has suggested, it is only as a result of a dedicated labor on our part that the difference can be composed again and made relevant. In falling in, my interlocutor praised Mads Mikkelson for his power as an actor. Perhaps one thing an actor accomplishes is ceding over to his audience the permission and opportunity for falling in—giving them the necessary space and time. As much of the responsibility again goes to the viewer, who takes the opportunity to release his knowledge and his coordinates, so that he may enter the sacred territory.

Predictive and Transcendent Acting

Watchers of screen performance can find it variably fresh. It can be spontaneous, unheralded, even shocking and unheimlich; or, alternatively, repetitive, familiar, packaged, and recognizable. Acting designed to be immediately and perduringly recognizable I would term “predictive.” At stake here is the identity of the star, not the characterization. Audiences pay for the pleasure of seeing once again star figures they know and value in advance. The viewer may even have a sense of the actor giving a “default” performance; but the repetition of appearance and manner are central to the capitalization of films. The market value to studios and producers of the star identity lies principally in its consistency over time and thus its marketability as product. “Economically,” writes Janet Staiger, “the star may be thought of as a monopoly on a personality” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 104), a monopoly, one might add, temporally extended through calculated reiteration in a chain of identifiable performances. Thomas Schatz has shown how because of its recognizability the star identity formed a distinctive part of the genre formula, by which in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s studios were able systematically to engineer stylized films guaranteed in advance to please the public. With predictive acting the viewer has a distinct sense of facing prior experience. The present case thus offers the chance to renew earlier pleasure (and look forward to similar pleasures to come). Predictive performance summons and addresses recognition.

Recognition can seem confining. When predictive experience is subjected to a long process of socialization, when marketing and media coverage “teach” young viewers to see film acting this way, it becomes a much-rehearsed activity in itself, an experience one knows in advance. No matter what the film or what the performance, it is known “already” how to receive and digest it. In this way it can be difficult even to detect the acting, however skillful, of strangers who do not fit the star formula that repeated moviegoing has taught us to relish. With genre filmmaking, for example, when studios had stables of star and character performers who appeared repeatedly in film after film—at MGM in the 1940s Edward Everett Horton, Eugene Pallette, Edward Arnold, Alice Brady; at Paramount in the 1950s Kathleen Freeman, Millard Mitchell, Harry Carey Jr.—it was especially difficult for newcomers to break in, except as “renovations” of already-accepted personalities. Carol Ohmart, to name but one such actor, was cultivated to be competition for Marilyn Monroe but didn’t succeed. She was too spontaneous on camera, too variant to be labeled.

Predictive performance seems canned, not fresh: Clint Eastwood pointing his gun inexpressively ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preamble: Saw the Air
• Chapter 1. Fantastic Performance
• Chapter 2. Beaux Gestes
• Chapter 3. Curtains
• Chapter 4. “It’s Not a Man, It’s a Place!”
• Chapter 5. Acting Intimate
• Notes
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Index
• About the Author