PART ONE ONTOLOGY OF THE FILM ACTOR Introduction Almost as soon as cinema began, and certainly as soon as staged or fictional events were filmed, ( ntics and theorists began to question the ontological status of film acting. Initially, film acting hid to be differentiated from stage acting. As I discussed in the General Introduction, early film theorists grappled with the status of film acting not just from within the context of silent cinema but continuing into the sound era, when the nature of film acting, now supplemented with dialogue, altered again. Interestingly, however, as sound became dominant and film acting would seem to have stabilized, theorists in the classical sound era and beyond have still sought lo appraise the elemental qualities of film acting. The essays in this section each attempt to ili'lini- fundamental features of film acting, approaching the subject from three distinct viewpoints. Siegfried Kracauer's "Remarks on the Actor" is excerpted from his broad Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, which was first published in i960 but was written over roughly a iwcntyyear period in both Marseilles and the United States, after Kracauerfled Germany. In his / /n dry of Film, Kracauer argues that, as an extension of photography, the essence of cinema lies ni |ti ability to record and reveal reality. In particular, as Miriam Hansen points out, he views cinema as both an expression of and medium for modernity, especially in its ability to stage encounters with contingency and chance (Hansen 1997). Kracauer's views on acting thus engage questions of realism and material aesthetics, unlike Miinsterberg and Balazs, each of whom privilege film's ability to distort rather than record reality. Kracauer argues that the stage actor and the film actor differ in two key ways: first, in terms of the "qualities they must posses to meet the demands of their media," and, second, in terms ■ •I 'the 111 r 11 tions they must assume" 111 their respective media. Under the rubric of "qualities," i' 1.11 aui'i 1 l.nms lli.it the film ai toi differs from the stage actor in his "emphasis on being," by whir h he means that the film actor must ai t as if lie is not |< ting, but just exists as his character. AI»o, in line with his emphasis on the element of contingency and chance in realism, Kracauer argues that film actors, unlike their theater counterparts, should appear casual, "fortuitous," and on the "fringe of indeterminacy," rather than seeming deliberate or purposeful. Additionally, Kr ,11 auei suggests, ill trims similar to I lie Soviets, lli.il unlike the stage- ai lor, who i an resort to llloir e.heme , osliiilli' anil m.ikf 111■. If"' film a. toi will be dependent upon Ins physique, and his "lf.ll" appeal.mi r will Irr symptiimatn of Ins i liai.u In 16 ONTOLOGY ()l (Ml IIIMACIOI* As for "function," Kracauer argues that theatrical plays revolve around character almost exclusively, whereas films are not exclusively human, but place the actor in the context of other props, landscapes, and images, so that he stands as an "object among objects." Nonetheless, while seeming to reproduce earlier arguments about the actor as mere effect of editing, Kracauer attributes different functions to different kinds of actors. He links the use of non-actors in film to the recording function of cinema, and suggests that they lend a documentary touch to narrative films. Ratherthan functioning as individuals, the non-actor represents a whole group of people, such as a class or segment of society. While both the star and the non-actor function as types defined by their physical appearance, Kracauer claims that the star stands out as an individual, not a member of a large category of people. He contrasts both types with the professional actor who requires training in order to sustain characterization, and can disappear into a role. Stanley Cavell's comments on acting in the two brief excerpts here touch upon similar themes but diverge from Kracauer in a few key ways. Approaching the subject of acting from a literary philosophical background, Cavell, like Kracauer, links his discussion of types to his ideas about the necessities of the film medium. Like Kracauer, Cavell claims that humans are not "onto-logically favored" in photographs and thus we always view the actor in relation to a world of objects. In addition, Cavell emphasizes projection as an essential difference between stage and screen that assures the absence of both the performer and the audience. Cavell admits that someone is present in a film, if only via a photographic relay. But, whereas the character dominates the stage performance, and allows the spectator to be absorbed into the role, the actor in film "takes the role onto himself and dominates the film. Thus, Cavell suggests that all screen actors create types. Rather than merely importing types from other art forms, such as melodrama or folklore, Cavell says that film created new types, combinations of types, and/or modifications of types. Whereas Kracauer differentiates between the non-actor and the star as type, Cavell differentiates between stereotypes, which would be linked to large categories of people, and the actor as individual type: "For what makes someone a type is not his similarity with other members of that type but his striking separateness from other people." The screen actor, then, including character actors as well as stars, represents actor, character, and individual at once. Like Kracauer and Cavell, John O. Thompson considers features of screen acting related to type. But rather than compare stage and screen, Thompson applies the semiotic technique of commutation to the analysis of screen acting in order to denaturalize the assumed fit between actor and role that both Kracauer and Cavell describe, and to open a potential space for ideological critique. Commutation in linguistics makes a substitution between words or phonemes to determine whether the substitution at the level of signifier makes a correlative change in the signified. In applying this to actors—substituting Shirley Temple for Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, for instance, or switching the roles of Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—Thompson aims to consider not merely if a difference results, but which difference. He considers film performance as a bundle of distinctive features, each potentially distinguishing, that include the particularities of individual performances, such as a character's smile or gait, as well as the actor's physical type and general persona. Thompson acknowledges a hierarchy in film among stars, character actors, extras, chorus girls, and stuntmen—a pecking order reflected in how commutable the individual person is in a role—but, with his emphasis on aspects of performance, he opens up ways of talking about the lower oiders of actors and even non-actors, as well as stars. INTRODUCTION 17 Since the publication of these essays, the ontological status of film acting has undergone further changes. Future theorists may wish to consider whether and how changing technologies li.ive .i|"..im altered the nature of film acting; 01 the difference between film and television acting; or the ways in which stage acting has become more cinematic as theater has progressively adopted more multimedia technologies; and how actors from stage and screen—both film and TV—become less distinguishable from one another as they increasingly cross over from one medium to the other. Remarks on the Actor SIEGFRIED KRACAUER The film actor occupies a unique position at the junction of staged and unstaged life. That he differs considerably from the stage actor was already recognized in the primitive days when R£jane and Sarah Bernhardt played theater before the camera; the camera let them downj pitilessly. What was wrong with their acting, the very acting which all theatergoers raved .ibout? Stage actor and screen actor differ from each other in two ways. The first difference concerns the qualities they must possess to meet the demands of their media. The second dillerence bears on the functions they must assume in theatrical plays and film narratives respectively. Qualities i low can the stage actor's contribution to his role be defined in terms of the cinema? To be Mile, like the film actor, he must draw on his nature in the widest sense of the word to render i In' i h.ir.ic tor he is supposed to represent; and since his projective powers are rarely unlimited, i iih\isure of type-casting is indispensable lor the stage also. But here tlie similarities end. i.....to the conditions of the theater, the stage actor is not in a position directly to convey i' ■ i he audience the many, often imperceptible details that make up the physical side of hit Impersonation; these details cannot cross the unbridgeable distance between stage Ifld spectator. The physical existence of the stage performer is incommunicable. Hence iIm' necessity for the stage actor to evoke in the audience a mental image of his character. This i" n hn -v. s by means of the theatrical devices at his disposal—a fitting make-up, appropriate i'i'.Iiiii", and vou e inflections, etc ' .if.inlii ,11 illy, when lilm critics compare the screenactOf With the Stage actor they usually fcpr.ik ol the hitler's exaf.c.ei.itions, overstatements, amplifications.1 In fact, his mask is as "llliti.itut.il" as his behavior, lm otheiwise he would not be able to create the illusion of li. it Utah less Instead ol < 1 r. i w 111 . i tme to I lie poll i, nt which would be inelfec live on the si ace, lir wi ilk'. Willi '.ii;',::.- .11. .if. i all iil.it«-. I lo make I he spec lalois belli've lliat I hey ate III I he ple-.el......I Ills i h.ll.h lei I llu |e| I hi' llnp.ii I > > 1 11 n -,i h;i;i ".I h ■! r. I In 'V vl'.ll.lll/e what Is ac 111.111 y tint given thrill I ll i ulllse I lie play IIsell Mlppnlls I he ,ii lul s i i UI|Ulrl elli ills The >,||il.ll li ill*. .'li ',11 i .1 l.'ll 11 KUAl Alll \i in which he appears and the verbal references to his motives and fears and deslrtl help the audience to complement his own definitions so that the image he projects gains In scope and depth. Thus he may attain a magic semblance of life. Yet life itself, this flow of subtle modes of being, eludes the stage. Is it even aspired to in genuine theater? Emphasis on being Leonard Lyons reports the following studio incident in his newspaper column: Fredric March, the well-known screen and stage actor, was making a movie scene and the director interrupted him. "Sorry, I did it again," the star apologized. "I keep forgetting—this is a movie and I mustn't act."2 If this is not the whole truth about film acting it is at least an essential part of it. Whenever old films are shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the spectators invariably feel exhilarated over expressions and poses which strike them as being theatrical Their laughter indicates that they expect film characters to behave in a natural way. Audience sensibilities have long since been conditioned to the motion picture camera's preference for nature in the raw. And since the regular use of close-ups invites the spectator to look for minute changes of a character's appearance and bearing, the actor is all the more obliged to relinquish those "unnatural" surplus movements and stylizations he would need on the stage to externalize his impersonation. "The slightest exaggeration of gesture and manner of speaking," says René Clair, "is captured by the merciless mechanism and amplified by the projection of the film."3 What the actor tries to impart—the physical existence of a character—is overwhelmingly present on the screen. The camera really isolates a fleeting glance, an inadvertent shrug of the shoulder. This accounts for Hitchcock's insistence on "negative acting, the ability to express words by doing nothing."4 "I mustn't act," as Fredric March put it. To be more precise, the film actor must act as if he did not act at all but were a real-life person caught in the act by the camera. He must seem to fee his character5 He is in a sense a photographer's model. Casualness This implies something infinitely subtle. Any genuinely photographic portrait tends to sustain the impression of unstaged reality; and much as it concentrates on the typical features of a face, these features still affect us as being elicited from spontaneous self-revelations. There is, and should be, something fragmentary and fortuitous about photographic portraits Accordingly, the film actor must seem to be his character in such a way that all his expressions, gestures, and poses point beyond themselves to the diffuse contexts out of which they arise. They must breathe a certain casualness marking them as fragments of an inexhaustible texture. Many a great him maker has been aware that this texture reaches into the deep layers of the mind. René Clair observes that with screen actors spontaneity counts all the more, since they have to atomize their role in the process of acting;6 and Pudovkin says that, when working with them, he "looked for those small details and shades of expression which . reflect the inner psychology of man."7 Both value projections of the unconscious Wh.it I hry w.int toget ,it, 11,inns S.ii lis, ,i liltn minded dis( iple ol Freud's, spells < .ill in p-.y. In '.iii.ilylli nl leims he 1)1 MAHKS ON fME ACTOR 21 lequests I he III in ,n h 11 in ,n Iv.im e t he ii.im.iI ive by embodying "such psychic events as are beloiem beyond sp.....h above■ ill those . , unnoticed ineptitudes of behavior described by I lend ,is symptom.ilic ,i< lions."" The film actor's performance, then, is true to the medium only if it does not assume the •Irs of a self-sufficient achievement but impresses us as an incident—one of many possible Incidents—of his character's unstaged material existence. Only then is the life he renders truly 1 inematic. When movie critics sometimes blame an actor for overacting his part, they do not necessarily mean that he acts theatrically; rather, they wish to express the feeling lh.it his acting is, somehow, too purposeful, that it lacks that fringe of indeterminacy nr Indefiniteness which is characteristic of photography. Physique For this reason the film actor is less independent of his physique than the stage actor, whose |i face never fills the whole field of vision. The camera not only bares theatrical make-up but reveals the delicate interplay between physical and psychological traits, outer movements and Inner changes. Since most of these correspondences materialize unconsciously, it is viy difficult for the actor to stage them to the satisfaction of an audience which, being in a position to check all pertinent visual data, is wary of anything that interferes with a character's naturalness. Eisenstein's 1939 claim that film actors should exert "self-control... to the niilliinelei ol movement"" sounds chimerical, it testifies to his ever-increasing and rather nil. inematic concern for art in the traditional sense, art which completely consumes the given raw material. Possessed with formative aspirations, he forgot that even the most arduous "self-control" cannot produce the effect of involuntary reflex actions. Hence the common I.....irse to actors whose physical appearance, as it presents itself on the screen, fits into the plot—whereby it is understood that their appearance is in a measure symptomatic of their nature, their whole way of being. "I choose actors exclusively for their physique," declares Rossellini.1" His dictum makes it quite clear that, because of their indebtedness to phnloe.i.iph\ him productions depend nine li more than theatrical productions on casting .m i Hiding In physic al aspects Functions II.....Ihe viewpoinl ol < inein.i l he Iuik l ions of the stage actor are determined by the fact that I he I healer exhausts itself in representing inter-human relations. The action of the stage pl.iy Mows through its characters; what they are saying and doing makes up the content of the play—in fact, it is the play itself. Stage characters are the carriers of all the meanings .1 llic.itric.il plot involves Tins is confirmed by the world about them, even realistic .'•lime/, miisi lie .uliiisted to stage conditions and, hence, are limited in their illusionary powei II may be doubted whether they are intended at all to evoke reality as something Imbued wit h meanings of its own. As a rule, the theater acknowledges the need for stylization.' In III'. Sill,).' to Sii.vii V.n.l.i. .ill uiiir. Ih.il llir i.mIi'.IIi ex, ,.•.•,<••. , ,| Id, ninrteentli i cut my I lie.it. •! .inlli ip.ili'il I lie i.....in.i I. tllie extent tli.it the th.-.ilei tlien tiled toddy '.t.ie.e i ondllions In- .irfturs II w.....ilir.idy pii'Kii.nil Willi the new ..till milium medium 22 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER REMARKS ON THE ACTOR 23 Realistic or not, stage settings are primarily designed to bear out the characters and their interplay; the idea behind them is not to achieve full authenticity—unattainable anyway on the stage—but to echo and enhance the human entanglements conveyed to us by acting and dialogue. Stage imagery serves as a foil for stage acting. Man is indeed the absolute measure of this universe, which hinges on him. And he is its smallest unit. Each character represents an insoluble entity on the stage; you cannot watch his face or his hands without relating them to his whole appearance, physically and psychologically. Object among objects The cinema in this sense is not exclusively human. Its subject matter is the infinite flux of visible phenomena—those ever-changing patterns of physical existence whose flow may include human manifestations but need not climax in them. In consequence, the film actor is not necessarily the hub of the narrative, the carrier of all its meanings. Cinematic action is always likely to pass through regions which, should they contain human beings at all, yet involve them only in an accessory, unspecified way. Many a him summons the weird presence of furniture in an abandoned apartment; when you then see or hear someone enter, it is for a transient moment the sensation of human interference in general that strikes you most. In such cases the actor represents the species rather than a well-defined individual. Nor is the whole of his being any longer sacrosanct. Parts of his body may fuse with parts of his environment into a significant configuration which suddenly stands out among the passing images of physical life. Who would not remember shots picturing an ensemble of neon lights, lingering shadows, and some human face? This decomposition of the actor's wholeness corresponds to the piecemeal manner in which he supplies the elements from which eventually his role is built. "The film actor," says Pudovkin, "is deprived of a consciousness of the uninterrupted development of the action in his work. The organic connection between the consecutive parts of his work, as a result of which the distinct whole image is created, is not for him. The whole image of the actor is only to be conceived as a future appearance on the screen, subsequent to the editing of the director."" "I mustn't act"—Fredric March is right in a sense he himself may not have envisaged. Screen actors are raw material,12 and they are often made to appear within contexts discounting them as personalities, as actors. Whenever they are utilized this way, utter restraint is their main virtue. Objects among objects, they must not even exhibit their nature but, as Barjavel remarks, "remain, as much as possible, below the natural."13 Types The non-actor because of their spontaneous actions.14 And Epstein says: "No set, no costume can have the aspect, the cast of truth. No professional faking can produce the admirable technical gestures of a topman or a fisherman. A smile of kindness, a cry of rage are as difficult to imitate as a rainbow in the sky or the turbulent ocean."15 Eager for genuine smiles and cries, G. W. Pabst created them artificially when shooting a carousal of anti-Bolshevist soldiery for his silent him, The Love of \eanne Ney. he herded together a hundred-odd Russian ex-officers, provided them with vodka and women, and then photographed the ensuing orgy.16 There are periods in which non-actors seem to be the last word of a national cinema. The Russians cultivated them in their revolutionary era, and so did the Italians after their escape from Fascist domination. Tracing the origins of Italian neorealism to the immediate postwar period, Chiaromonte observes; "Movie directors lived in the streets and on the roads then, like everybody else. They saw what everybody else saw. They had no studios and big installations with which to fake what they had seen, and they had little money. Hence they had to improvise, using real streets for their exteriors, and real people in the way of stars."17 When history is made in the streets, the streets tend to move onto the screen.' For all their differences in ideology and technique, Potemkin and Paisan have this "street" quality in common; they feature environmental situations rather than private affairs, episodes involving society at large rather than stories centering upon an individual conflict. In other words, they show a tendency toward documentary. Practically all story films availing themselves of non-actors follow this pattern. Without exception they have a documentary touch. Think of such story films as The Quiet One, Los Olvidados, or the De Sica films, The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D.: in all of them the emphasis Is on the world about us; their protagonists are not so much particular individuals as types representative of whole groups of people. These narratives serve to dramatize social conditions in general. The preference for real people on the screen and the documentary .ipproach seem to be closely interrelated. The reason is this: it is precisely the task of portraying wide areas of actual reality, social or otherwise, which calls for "typage"—the recourse to people who are part and parcel of thai reality and can be considered typical of it. As Rotha puts it: "Typage' .. . represents the least artificial organisation of reality."1* It is not accidental that film directors devoted to Hi" tendering of larger segments of actual life are inclined to condemn the professional actor for "faking." Like Epstein, who turns against "professional faking," Rossellini is said to believe that actors "fake emotions."19 This predilection for non-actors goes hand in hand with a vital interest in social patterns rather than individual destinies. Bunuel's Los Olvidados Inchlighls the incredible callousness of despondent juveniles; the great De Sica films focus on the plight of the unemployed and the misery of old age insufficiently provided for. Nun ,i( I (its ate chosen because ol their authentic looks and behavior Their major virtue is to figure in a narrative which explores the reality they help constitute but does not culminate iii then lives themselves i.iw lll.llell.ll, ii i'. .....Irlsl.illtl.lhlr lll.ll in,my liliu in.ik.-l-. h.ivr IHM.....ilnl In iHy oll lion • a iml.ilil,. m. .-pl.....w.r. lli.-( ..i in.in . In.mim .itl.-i w.nld w.n i ii ..Imunní i min t.-.illl v wIIIkIi.iwIiih ,K lo|>, li il lli.-ll tiiill.ltIvr Fl.ihrll v . .lil', i hlldtrli .111(1 .tllllimU lIlP flIIMl lil .Iii,iii i reck in in.ikmu |>.m>|>Ic who licvcl ,i, led hrlnlr |»>ltlrty uilirMdil hum.ill I ■• -l r !(.•.■■ 1 'Id llinlirlli 11) , .1 K illlldrtl (Mil i Ilill.K Irr Willi .1 wlilf tilllgPtil »Mlliilli i|.....In n t It »11-. REMARKS ON THE ACTOR 25 Is all the more memorable since his whole past seems to come alive in his intensely touching presence. But one should keep in mind that the Italians are blessed with mimetic gifts and have a knack of expressive gestures. Incidentally, while producing The Men. a film about paraplegic veterans, director Fred Zinnemann found that people who have undergone a powerful emotional experience are particularly fit to re-enact themselves.23 As a rule, however, sustained characterization calls for professional actors. Indeed many starsare. Paradoxically enough, the over-strained non-actor tends to behave like a bad actor, whereas an actor who capitalizes on his given being may manage to appear as a candid non actor, thus achieving a second state of innocence. He is both the player and the instru- .....nt; and the quality of this instrument—his natural self as it has grown in real life—counts (is much as his talent in playing it. Think of Raimu. Aware that the screen actor depends Upon the non-actor in him, a discerning film critic once said of James Cagney that he "can coax i ihove a director until a scene from a dreamy script becomes a scene from life as Cagney irh ol that human •.. .in. Ilni it: .r. Ill mil plesclic e while we.....not iii his (plesenl ill hi in I ii'. , 11 r.i ■ 11 ii >hl it: al him bill i ml plesrlil In lllltl | and '.till ,11 i olllll lol | he ill Hen i n i ■ 30 STANLEY CAVELL ONTOLOGY OF FILM 31 between his live presence and his photographed presence to us. We need to consider what is present or, rather, since the topic is the human being, who is present. One's first impulse may be to say that in a play the character is present, whereas in a film the actor is. That sounds phony or false: one wants to say that both are present in both. But there is more to it, ontologically more. Here I think of a fine passage of Panofsky's: Othello or Nora are definite, substantial figures created by the playwright. They can be played well or badly, and they can be "interpreted" in one way or another; but they most definitely exist, no matter who plays them or even whether they are played at all. The character in a film, however, lives and dies with the actor. It is not the entity "Othello" interpreted by Robeson or the entity "Nora" interpreted by Duse, it is the entity "Greta Garbo" incarnate in a figure called Anna Christie or the entity "Robert Montgomery" incarnate in a murderer who, for all we know or care to know, may forever remain anonymous but will never cease to haunt our memories.3 If the character lives and dies with the actor, that ought to mean that the actor lives and dies with the character. I think that is correct, but it needs clarification. Let us develop it slightly. For the stage, an actor works himself into a role; for the screen, a performer takes the role onto himself. The stage actor explores his potentialities and the possibilities of his role simultaneously; in performance these meet at a point in spiritual space—the better the performance, the deeper the point. In this respect, a role in a play is like a position in a game, say, third base: various people can play it, but the great third baseman is a man who has accepted and trained his skills and instincts most perfectly and matches them most intimately with his discoveries of the possibilities and necessities of third base. The screen performer explores his role like an attic and takes stock of his physical and temperamental endowment; he lends his being to the role and accepts only what fits; the rest is nonexistent. On the stage there are two beings, and the being of the character assaults the being of the actor, the actor survives only by yielding. A screen performance requires not so much training as planning. Of course, both the actor and the performer require, or can make use of, experience. The actor's role is his subject for study, and there is no end to it. But the screen performer is essentially not an actor at all: he is the subject of study, and a study not his own. (That is what the content of a photograph is—its subject.) On a screen the study is projected; on a stage the actor is the projector. An exemplary stage performance is one which, for a time, most fully creates a character. After Paul Scofield's performance in King Lear, we know who King Lear is, we have seen him in flesh. An exemplary screen performance is one in which, at a time, a star is born. After The Maltese Falcon we know a new star, only distantly a person. "Bogart" means "the figure created in a given set of films." His presence in those films is who he is, not merely in the sense in which a photograph of an event is that event; but in the sense that if those films did not exist, Bogart would not exist, the name "Bogart" would not mean what it does. The figure it names is not only in our presence, we are in his, in the only sense we could ever be. That is all the "presence" he has. But it is complicated. A full development of all this would require us to place such facts as these: Humphrey Bogart was a man, and he appeared in movies both before and after tlie ones ih.it created "Ho^arl "Someof them did not create a newst.it (say I he stable «room In Dark Victory), some of them defined stars—anyway meteors—that tn.iy he Incompatible With IW..UI |e II I Hike M.i I Iter ,il ll I lied (' I)(il ills) bill t ll.ll ale trial ei I 111 I Iml ll||l llr illll I III. IV ' ni''' ml" "in l.itei expei tem rul II Ami Humphrey liogart was both an accomplished actor nnil a vivid sub|erl lor a camera Some people are, just as some people are both good pitchers •nd good hitters; but there are so few that It is surprising that the word "actor" keeps on being UNd In place of the more beautiful and more accurate word "star"; the stars are only to r i/e .il .illei the I,ii I, .nid then .i« lions divine out projects. Finally, we must note the sense 111 which the creation of a (screen) performer is also the creation of a character—not the kind i h.iracter an author creates, but the kind that certain real people are: a type. i vi >es; cycles as genres nul ihis point our attention turns from the physical medium of cinema in general to the i ■ 1 illc forms or genres the medium has taken in the course of its history. Moth I'anofsky and Bazin begin at the beginning, noting and approving that early movies iilapl popular or folk arts and themes and performers and characters: farce, melodrama, Il ui, music hall, romance, etc. And both are gratifyingly contemptuous of intellectuals win i (i mId not come to terms with those facts of life. (Such intellectuals are the alter egos of 1'" Him promoters they so heartily despise. Roxy once advertised a movie as "Art, in every e ol I he word"; his better half declaims, "This is not art, in any sense of the word.") Our |ii Hon Is, why did such forms and themes and characters lend themselves to film? Bazin, in wh.il I have read of him, is silent on the subject, except to express gratitude to film for Ifylng these ancient forms, and to justify in general the legitimacy of adaptation from .......o.inoi her. Arnold Hauser, if I understand him, suggests wrong answers, in a passage ".......11 ides the remark "Only a young art can be popular,"4 a remark that not only is in itself 1 iffllng idid Verdi and Dickens and Chaplin and Frank Loesser work in young arts?) but • uuumts that it was only natural for the movies to pick up the forms they did. It was natural— \\ ii happened fast enough—but not because movies were destined to popularity (they at first no more popular than other forms of entertainment). In any case, popular arts Ikfly to pick up the forms and themes of high art for their material—popular theater .......•»• IV burlesques. And it means next to nothing to say that movies are young, because we i mil know what the normal lifespan of an art is supposed to be, nor what would count as i measure. Panofsky raises thequestion of the appropriateness of these original forms, Iml hi', answer is misleading. I he I e j; 11 m i a i e paths of evolution | for the film| were opened, not by running away In mi the folk art character of the primitive film but by developing it within the limits of in. own possibilities. Those primordial archetypes of film productions on the folk art l«vel—success or retribution, sentiment, sensation, pornography, and crude humor— i oiild lili issi .in forth into genuine history, tragedy and romance, crime and adventure, ■nd comedy, as soon as it was realized that they could be transfigured—not by an nilllli i.il i ni' lion ol literáty values but by the exploitation of the unique and specific I" isslliilllles ol the new medium '' 11.....Mílu t heie Is sound, hut the legion is lull ol traps What are "the unique and specific i 11 ill il ii", 111 I lie new medium ■ Pannlskv del mi", i hem as ilyn.imi/.itioii nl sp.n e ami •I'll I.ill/, ill......11 line t lial I*. In a in. 'Vie Illing, tnovr, am I you can he moved Instantaneously 32 STANLEY CAVELL from anywhere to anywhere, and you can witness successively events happening at the same time. He speaks of these properties as "self-evident to the point of triviality" and, because of that, "easily forgotten or neglected." One hardly disputes this, or its importance. But we still do not understand what makes these properties "the possibilities of the medium." I am not now asking how one would know that these are the unique and specific possibilities (though 1 will soon get back to that); I am asking what it means to call them possibilities at all. Why, for example, didn't the medium begin and remain in the condition of home movies, one shot just physically tacked on to another, cut and edited simply according to subject? (Newsreels essentially did, and they are nevertheless valuable, enough so to have justified the invention of moving pictures.) The answer seems obvious; narrative movies emerged because someone "saw the possibilities" of the medium—cutting and editing and taking shots at different distances from the subject. But again, these are mere actualities of film mechanics: every home movie and newsreel contains them. We could say: To make them "possibilities of the medium" is to realize what will give them significance—for example, the narrative and physical rhythms of melodrama, farce, American comedy of the 1930s. It is not as if film-makers saw these possibilities and then looked for something to apply them to. It is truer to say that someone with the wish to make a movie saw that certain established forms would give point to certain properties of film. This perhaps sounds like quibbling, but what it means is that the aesthetic possibilities of a medium are not givens. You can no more tell what will give significance to the unique and specific aesthetic possibilities of projecting photographic images by thinking about them or seeing some, than you can tell what will give significance to the possibilities of paint by thinking about paint or by looking some over. You have to think about painting, and paintings, you have to think about motion pictures. What does this "thinking about them" consist in? Whatever the useful criticism of an art consists in. (Painters before lackson Pollock had dripped paint, even deliberately. Pollock made dripping into a medium of painting.) I feel like saying: The first successful movies—i.e., the first moving pictures accepted as motion pictures—were not applications of a medium that was defined by given possibilities, but the creation of a medium by their giving significance to specific possibilities. Only the art itself can discover its possibilities, and the discovery of a new possibility is the discovery of a new medium. A medium is something through which or by means of which something specific gets done or said in particular ways. It provides, one might say, particular ways to get through to someone, to make sense; in art, they are forms, like forms of speech. To discover ways of making sense is always a matter of the relation of an artist to his art. each discovering the other. Panofsky uncharacteristically skips a step when he describes the early silent films as an "unknown language . . . forced upon a public not yet capable of reading it."6 His notion is (with good reason, writing when he did) of a few industrialists forcing their productions upon an addicted multitude. But from the beginning the language was not "unknown"; it was known to its creators, those who found themselves speaking it; and in the beginning there was no "public" in question; there were just some curious people. There soon was a public, but thai just proves how easy the thing was to know. If we are to say that there was an "unknown something, it was less likea language than likea fact—in particular, the lac I ih.it something is intelligible So while it may be true, as Panofsky says, that "for .1 S.ixnn piwMht of around MOO it w.is not e.isy to understand the meaning ol ,1 pic lure '.In .wing .1 in.111 ,i>. hi - pours w.itel "Vi-i the he.11I ol .iimthri man. this has nothing spn 1.1I to 1I11 with III* problems of a ONTOLOGY OF FILM 33 inoviegoei The meaning ol that act ol pouring in certain communities is still not easy to understand, il was and is impossible to understand for anyone to whom the practice ot baptism is unknown. Why did Panofsky suppose that comparable understanding is essential, 1.1 uniquely important, to the reading of movies? Apparently he needed an explanation for i In' persistence in movies of "fixed iconography"—"the well-remembered types of the Vamp ind the Stiuight Girl the Family Man, and the Villain." characters whose conduct was I'ii'determined an ordingly"—an explanation lor t he persistence ol an obviously primitive ' i' 'Ikloristic element in a rapidly developing medium. For he goes on, otherwise inexplicably, InKiiy that "devices like these became gradually less necessary as the public grew accustomed i11 interpret the action by itself and were virtually abolished by the invention of the talking Him In lact such devices persist as long as there are still Westerns and gangster films ni. I . i unedies and musicals and romances Wiiidi specific iconography the Villain is given will alter with the times, but that his iconography remains specific (i.e., operates according fixed attitude and attribute" principle)7 seems undeniable: if lack Palance in Shane is not Main, no honest home was ever in danger. Films have changed, but that is not because we don't need such explanations any longer; it is because we can't accept them. 111.-.r facts are accounted for by the actualities of the him medium itself types are exactly ■ 11 ii carry the forms movies have relied upon. These media created new types, or combi-n hi..us and ironic reversals of types; but there they were, and stayed. Does this mean ili.it movies can never create individuals, only types? What it means is that this is the movies' way ol creating individuals: they create individualities. For what makes someone a type is '.' i his similarity with other members of that type but his striking separateness from other I in iplc Until recently, types of black human beings were not created in film: black people were ......i vi ies—mammies, shiftless servants, loyal retainers, entertainers. We were not given, vere not in a position to be given, individualities that projected particular ways of mil ibltlng a social role; we recognized only the role. Occasionally the humanity behind ■If would manifest itself and the result was a revelation not of a human individuality, i .ni ■ il .in entire realm of humanity becoming visible. When in GoneVJith the Wind Vivien Leigh, inied on Butterfly McQueen's professed knowledge of midwifery, and finding her ,ni as herself, slaps her in rage and terror, the moment can stun us with a question: Vlinl w is I he white girl assuming about blackness when she believed the casual claim of ii him k till, younger and duller and more ignorant than herself, to know all about the mysteries i lulilliiiih? The assumption, though apparently complimentary, is dehumanizing—with Hi h . leutures knowledge of the body comes from nowhere, and in general they are to i" ini'.i.'.l absolutely ol not at all, like lions in a cage, with whom you either do or do not hi..w how to deal Aftet the slap, we are left with two young girls equally frightened in a i,inn.inly despeiate situation, one limited by a distraction which expects and forgets that it Ik In be bullied, the other by an energetic resourcefulness which knows only how to bully. Ai Ihr end ol Mu hael c'urti/.' Wreaking Point, as the wounded |ohn Garfield is carried from his I.. ..it 11. tin' .1. ii i awaited by his wile and < hi Id ten and, |ust outside the ( itcle, by the other Woman in his hie (Putin ia Neal). the i ameia pulls away, holding on the still waiting child nl Ills bl,ii k pall nei, who only I he urn olisi urns (..II held knows has been killed The poignam e I I he silent and in ninth ed bl.ii k ( hi Id nvel whelms the yam we had I.....n shown Is he • llppi met I In syinln >ll/r I lie l.n I ol i.......il hum, in Isolation and .ib.iiidonmei il ' < )i I he lac I lhal i'veiy ai Unii h.r......., i|iielic i". Ii H In in h nil I >y.l. unlets ' < ll I hal c lillilirn ate Ihr leal 34 stanii y cavi 11 ontology of him 35 sufferers from the entangled efforts of adults to straighten out their lives? The Hire t here is to rebuke Garfield for attaching so much importance to the loss of his arm, and generally to blot out attention to individual suffering by invoking a massive social evil about which this film has nothing to say. The general difference between a film type and a stage type is that the individuality captured on film naturally takes precedence over the social role in which that individuality gets expressed. Because on film social role appears arbitrary or incidental, movies have an inherent tendency toward the democratic, or anyway the idea of human equality. (But because of film's equally natural attraction to crowds, it has opposite tendencies toward the fascistic or populistic.) This depends upon recognizing film types as inhabited by figures we have met or may well meet in other circumstances. The recognized recurrence of film performers will become a central idea as we proceed. At the moment I am emphasizing only that in the case of black performers there was until recently no other place for them to recur in, except i ust the role within which we have already met them. For example, we would not have expected to see them as parents or siblings. I cannot at the moment remember a black person in a film making an ordinary purchase—say of a newspaper, or a ticket to a movie or for a train, let alone writing a check. (Pinky and A Raisin in the Sun prove the rule: in the former, the making of a purchase is a climactic scene in the film; in the latter, it provides the whole subject and structure.) One recalls the lists of stars of every magnitude who have provided the movie camera with human subjects—individuals capable of filling its need for individualities, whose individualities in turn, whose inflections of demeanor and disposition were given full play in its projection. They provided, and still provide, staples for impersonators: one gesture or syllable of mood, two strides, or a passing mannerism was enough to single them out from all other creatures. They realized the myth of singularity—that we can still be found, behind our disguises of bravado and cowardice, by someone, perhaps a god, capable of defeating our self-defeats. This was always more important than their distinction by beauty. Their singularity made them more like us—anyway, made their difference from us less a matter of metaphysics, to which we must accede, than a matter of responsibility, to which we must bend. But then that made them even more glamorous. That they should be able to stand upon their singularity! If one did that, one might be found, and called out, too soon, or at an inconvenient moment. What was wrong with type-casting in films was not that it displaced some other, better principle of casting, but that factors irrelevant to film-making often influenced the particular figures chosen. Similarly, the familiar historical fact that there are movie cycles, taken by certain movie theorists as in itself a mark of unscrupulous commercialism, is a possibility internal to the medium-, one could even say, it is the best emblem of the fact that a medium had been created. For a cycle is a genre (prison movies, Civil War movies, horror movies, etc.); and a genre is a medium. As Hollywood developed, the original types ramified into individualities as various and subtle, as far-reaching in their capacities to inflect mood and release fantasy, as any set of characters who inhabited the great theaters of our world. We do not know them by such names as Pulcinella, Crispin, Harlequin, Pantaloon, the Doctor, the C'.ipl.im Columbine, we call them the Public I'.liemy, I he Priest, lames Cagliey I'at ( VBl leu I he I i .!.(■•. I..... -1' V the Army Scout k'atidi ilph Scott, GatyCoi ipet, Gable, Paul Muni. I he |.V|« ■ 11 • i 11" u- -nil I he Slid ill, 1 "'PHlV Ihe I) A theOllai I. i he Shyster, i he ()t hei Woman, the Fallen Woman, i he Mol I. Hie Dance Hall Hostess Hollywood was the theater in which they appeared, because the lllmsol Hollywood constituted a world, with recurrent faces more familiar to me than the faces I I the neighbors of all the places I have lived. I he nn mi m. .vie c .medians—Chaplin. Keaton, W. C Fields—form a set of types that could i have been adapted from any other medium. Its creation depended upon two conditions il die film medium mentioned earlier. These conditions seem to be necessities, not merely i .Ibllltles, so I will say that two necessities of the medium were discovered or expanded m 'he creation of these types. First, movie performers cannot project, but are projected, md photographs are of the world, in which human beings are not ontologically ied over the rest of nature, in which objects are not props but natural allies (or enemies) i 'he human character. The first necessity—projected visibility—permits the sublime ■mprehensibility of Chaplin's natural choreography; the second—ontological equality_ .....'•■ llls Proustian or lamesian relationships with Murphy beds and flights of stairs and with wises on runners on tables on rollers: the heroism of momentary survival, Nietzsche's is a tightrope across an abyss. These necessities permit not merely the locales of 1 ion's extrications, but the philosophical mood of his countenance and the Olympic lurcefulness of his body; permit him to be perhaps the only constantly beautiful and "......."Is|y hilarious man ever seen, as though the ugliness in laughter should be redeemed. permit Fields to mutter and suffer and curse obsessively, but heard and seen only by ' 1 "-cause his attributes are those of the gentleman (confident swagger and elegant ......tfloves, cane, outer heartiness), he can manifest continuously, with the remorseless- .....1 nature, the psychic brutalities of bourgeois civilization. Notes i i ills Idea is developed to some extent in my essays on Endgame and King Lear in Musi We Miwi What We Say? (New York: Scribner's, 1969). In Ua/.in, What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 97 i I iwin Panofsky, "Style and Medium in the Moving Pictures," repr. in Daniel Talbot, ■•d I dm (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), 28. I Arnold i lausei, "The Film Age," repr. in Talbot, Film, 74. .....Isk\ Style and Medium In the Moving Pictures,'' 18 f. Ibid 1\ 7 Ibid. 25. Screen Acting and the Commutation Test l< >IIN O. THOMPSON I "• moment, only those who oppose the semiotic study of the cinema seem to want to ihout screen acting. Since a good deal of the meaning of the fiction film is borne by its I if. .ind their performances, this amounts to leaving an important territory in the hands 11 In-enemy (to put it over-belligerently). And some of the standard doctrines and endlessly li i ivc 'ted truths' about actor and role, screen vs stage and so on may be inhibiting not rltlcal but also creative practice in the cinema. Yet it is understandable why this gap ' i"' somiotic programme remains. Performances seem ineffable, and thinking about them u. In,. . h'vcrie rather than analysis. In 11 us essay I want to propose the controlled extension of one semiotic technique as a i| rehabilitating one mode of reverie. The technique is called the commutation test in i in structural linguistics. I hope it will be plain that I do not believe that importing the i.....|ih' will suddenly make our discourse about acting 'scientific': any advantage it brings lie modest. However, I do think we need to start prompting a more methodical and iv.' discourse in this whole area, and here the (est may help. N ' 1" "in wiili, here is a quotation from a recent essay by David Thomson which exemplifies, Hi ■■ 11 >Iv and intelligently, the reverie approach to screen acting. The point the quotation iitakes Is a familiar one. Brecht, summing up a conversation with Adorno in his diary in 1 ' rtiierted that 'the theatre's first advantage over the film is ... in the division between ind performance', and continued the mechanical reproduction gives everything the 11 Hn iii • it ,i u ".nil unlii■(■ .ind in.illri.il)lr Thomson s.iys the same thing, and then - but Iita«l1 rtiii I v. 'is il lire rxrii isr hr proposes is somehow methodologically indefensible -.........'i i v 11". . 111 ii 11 ii I I his .ipp.ilenl I ili ii k.ige ,il I he hi silt nl the < i ileum's n, it lire' ' .1 .i|'i ■ 11. ill s .in - hi r i i 11 ii oil. is I hry .lie supple, Ii illy ,ini I llnpri-.i ni.il riioiii'Ji Ii i t.ike on till i i il I iris I III I p. 111 -. I u 111111 s 11 vr i it 11 v I it Ir 11V Ilk"' vl mill My, "IK e l.lkeli, I hry ,He In i| I heir 38 JOHN O. THOMPSON to be inhabited again. Before shooting, all manner of choices may perplex the filmmakers and keep the part blurred: Kim Novak's part(s| in Vertigo were designed for Vera Miles; Shirley Temple was first choice to play Dorothy in The Wizard ofOz- imagine how Over the Rainbow' might have been cosy and wistful instead of the epitome of heartbreaking dreams. . . . Once a film is made no one else can play the part. . . . the text in movies is the appearance. All credit then to Andrew Sarris ... for indicating the waste in arguing over Vivien Leigh or Merle Oberon in Wyler's Wulhering Heights. And yet . . . the critic can usefully learn things about film through such speculations. . . . If Vertigo had had Vera Miles then the girl might have been as near to breakdown as the wife in The Wrong Man, and not the numb pawn of the plot that makes Novak pathetic and touching. ... Or - think how sentimental Kane might be if Spencer Tracy had been the tycoon. That is useful if only to show how little conventional feeling the film has.2 What I am struck by is an analogy between 'such speculations' and an 'operative concept . . . already found in Trubetzkoy, but. . . established under its present name by Hjelmslevand Udall, at the Fifth Congress of Phonetics in 1936'.3 The name given was commutation, a word with unfortunate penal implications in English but originally synonymous with 'substitution'." Roland Barthes discusses the commutation test in Elements of Semiology, but in a very compressed manner: The commutation test consists of artificially introducing a change in the plane ol expression (signifiers) and in observing whether this change brings about a correlative modification on the plane of contents (signifieds). ... if the commutation of two signifiers produces a commutation of the signifieds one is assured of having got hold, in the fragment of syntagm submitted to the test, of a syntagmatic unit: the first sign has been cut off from the mass.5 Giulio Lepschy puts it even more briefly: By the commutation test we can check whether an exchange of elements on one plane entails a corresponding exchange on the other plane: if so we have two different elements; otherwise we have two variants of the same element.6 What do these formulations mean? Some differences in language make a difference semantically; others don't, though they are perceptible and may bear information about the speaker's region, social class, sex, and so forth; still others are imperceptible save by means of sophisticated measuring instruments. The difference between p and b is of the first sort (path and bath are different words), while that between a higher a as pronounced in the north ol England and the lower a of the south is of the second sort (bath is the same word with eithei a). The commutation test strictly speaking simply involves trying out a sound change ami observing whether a meaning change is produced or not. Which meaning change may be irrelevant, because of the arbitrary, unmotivated linkage in langu.ige between sound and meaning ' Thus, .it the phnholnKir.ll level, there is no refill.nlly In the shllt o| meaning pi oil IK ed I ly ,1 (.'.i Veil Mil i'.I It III I. .11 /Mill IS hot lo ImIIi iii ,11iv lel.lt loll Ml. Ii I li.it /'le.lu'il. IIiiI I'le.li. j .IK' Hi tin ...Hlie n l.illoli hut .it the lnolphollitili.il level I he level 11| Mllllllli.il IHiMMIMil unit' SCREEN ACTING AND THE COMMUTATION TEST 39 - some such alternations show significant regularities: e.g. ride-.rode-, stride.strode. This takes us 11 iio,in area in which Saussure was prepared to speak of the linguistic sign's relative motivation I Ii iw does this compare with what Thomson is doing? He is proposing the substitution in i In night of one actor for another, in order to observe not merely if a difference in meaning lesults but which difference results. And he is doing so in a context in which we naturally feel thai motivation of the sign is important: our sense of whether X is 'right for the part'9 depends upon canons of suitability governing the signifier(actor) - signified(role) link which we generally assume to be non-arbitrary. One useful effect of thinking about commutation wllh the phonological analogy in mind is that it encourages us to query these assumptions il ii nit suitability, which turn out to be suffused with ideology and to shift with history. But Ihi re is no reason to believe that somehow with analysis all motivation should be shown to i» illusory (reduction of cinema to language): ideology is not illusion. :;ht seem that testing for whether substituting one actor for another makes any difference i" .1 film's meaning would be pointless: 'Of course it must!' But this is not so. The stuntman, instance, or the nude-scene stand-in both supply presences to the screen which have to . .in indistinguishable from those of the actor or actress who is being stood in for here inn. 11 trouble is taken to ensure that the actual substitution of one body for another makes .....Illleieni e to the text Extras may generally be commuted with little if any change of .....nlng resulting. It's interesting to find that Equity's agreement with Thames Television i'hi illy defines an extra as 'a performer who is not required to give individual charac-ilIons'10 - that is, a performer who need not, indeed should not, distinguish himself or i 'II It isnotsurprisingthatoneun-distinguishedfigurecan be indistinguishably replaced i', in. ithei What constraints there are on meaning-preserving replacements seem tooperate ii Mi. level ol the crowd (or a more abstract unit such as the set of passers-by through i he whole film): we would notice if everyone on the streets happened to be female, or to be bald, in. I so forth. There is an intermediate range of quite minor characters where the situation Ik blurred, but since the more films one has seen the more subtle individuations one up in the minor roles, it might be safest to treat them as functioning distinctively for iIm ideal viewer'. But occasionally indistinguishability is sought deliberately for the sake of ill. en i.ii ive In Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train the promiscuity and vulgar funlovingness of wile Miriam is in part established by having her taken to the amusement park by two hi,in.I young men who remain indistinguishable from one another over repeated viewings. IV ill i in ul i it ton is .1 devit e wliu Ii is designed to allow us consciously to grasp UMits which were pii'vioi|..|y invisible, suhtneiged i m 11 le situ h it 11 op,,i ion ol the sign system in question. This 1« why it i an work Introspectlvdy one asks oneself if .1 change in the signifier would make a lllllelelli e, , II u I I lie . iliswel i .ill suipilseolie To le|ei I sill hdeviies.is IIMIiei essaiy Isloi l.ilin 1,1 11 I" '•'■' .llle.uly liolh .1 1 oliiprlelK e Ml the l,ili«ll.iHe in i|iieslloli .11 id .1 w. uking IhPolV'il Hi,......up, nil, ,• Wl„i,' pl„ ,1,1,l,,gy 1-, ,,„„,,,„, I ll,.' I. m,. 1 1 I,mi, |,, unlikely lo lie 40 john o. thompson justified, because we devote so little attention ordinarily to observing minutely the sounds of our speech. But if all that the commutation of actors reveals is that Cary Grant is not Gary Cooper, it certainly isn't worth the trouble: our existing grasp of that gross difference is adequate enough already. If commutation is to justify itself in screen acting analysis, it must reveal something more delicate and less obvious. Why shouldn't we think of a screen performance as composed of 'finer' elements, features in the linguistic sense? Each of the segments in a word can be described as being the sum of a number of components or features. Thus the consonant m at the beginning of the word man can be said to have the feature of being voiced, the feature of being made at the bilabial place of articulation, the feature of being a nasal, and so on.11 The obvious answer is that lohn Wayne is more complex than a phoneme: whereas a phoneme can be characterized exhaustively in terms of a restricted number of features ((akobson and Halle manage with twelve),12 such an analysis is out of the question for the actor's rich and shifting screen presence. But if we move from phonological features to semantic features, the suggestion may not seem so wild. While no one could claim that we are even near to a generally acceptable account of natural language semantics, it can at least be said that: most current semantic theories, and many traditional ones too, analyze meaning into 'smaller' component meanings, and assign to a lexical item a semantic representation consisting of a complex of semantically primitive elements.11 Here a typical feature would be not ±voiced or ±nasal but ±abslract or ±animate or ±male. How far decomposition into semantic features can be taken is currently a highly controversial question1" but it seems undeniable that componential analysis captures many necessary generalizations about the meaning relations between a word and the rest of the lexicon. Let us see how far the notion of a film performance as a bundle of distinctive features can take us. Each feature functions as a potential distinguisher both within the film itself and in the indefinitely-extending space established by viewers' familiarity with cinema in general. For instance |ohn Wayne's features contrast not only with lames Stewart's in the films they both appear in but with lean-Paul Belmondo's, even if the two actors have never in fact been textually juxtaposed. Texts leave some features and feature-contrasts wholly unthematized and others only implicitly thematized in order to concentrate explicitly on comparatively few. Unthematized features could be altered or redistributed without any change in the meaning of the film resulting. Members of a chain-gang or a chorus-line are distinguished from one another, like the rest of us, by the colour of their eyes; but switching eye-colours around would generally make no difference to the text Perhaps most feature-contrasts are only lightly or implicitly thematized: switching features turns out when one thinks about It to make some diHerein e perhaps a gieal ile.il a w. miali In the chain- C.anc ' but I he lllm opetates in silt h a w. ly as not to out oiliac.'...... Inthllik about this Here I In- . < >It>111111 1111 .ii I. - I 11.r. , i iim'IiiI i le naliii.ill/lli).>. Iiiiii t li hi H" - >>'......I vi-11-.ir■ 11lit nile. scui in aciing and till commu1a1ion test 41 plausibility, lelerent lal It y and soon that ,ne t ipei.it inc. suddenly become visible: of course there aren't co-ed chain gangs, the athletic hero can't be a dwarf, the Western hero can't have a I ivi ■ 11 >< '"I accent. In every him certain contrasts become highly thematized, presenting themselves as what the him is about'. Two or more characters are set up as rivals, as alternative love- or hate-objects (for other characters or the audience or both), as debaters, as couples, eti Tin' Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Wayne and Stewart in Tde Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Bogart and Bacall passim, Ava Gardnerand Grace Kelly in Mogambo; the cousins in Les Cousins. ~ heie and everywhere in the < inema the audience is explicitly called upon to compare and contrast. it - lar we have been talking about features as they pertain to actors as nouns', but there i', i......asi mi in piiiK iple not to extend the programme to the analysis of characters actions (tO I he enacted equivalents of 'verb' or'adjective' predicates) and to the manner in which the i. 11- 'tis are performed ('adverbial' features). For critical and pedagogical purposes it is - 'ineliiiies helpful to restrict oneself to, or at least to set out From, contrasts explicitly 11".....tized in a particular him; this guarantees the pertinence of the features scrutinized ind keeps the set of possibilities to be commuted finite. Since, for example, we have no iti.i.i. ti 'iy finite list ol types ol smile (although we car assign smiles to categories fairly pin Isely thin lipped, crazy, timid, etc ), running through smile-types at random can seem i" intless But the contrast between the smiles of Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly in Mogambo is p.ill ol the system of that him. Imagining switching the smiles around, so that the young, Inexperienced blonde has the sensual, shrewd, good-humoured smile while the older, I" m.-.....il brunette has the repressed, seldom-used smile, teaches us a good deal about lhe system ol assumptions about types of women which Ford is working within here '? Yet it would be wrong always to limit commutation to contrasts embodied in the text. Commuting mile-, in Mogambo with smile-types wholly foreign to the hint (a crazy smile ora cruel smile - i might or might not be unprofitable depending on the investigation in hand. Such a 11.1111 n tit .it 1 on might be pertinent to an examination of the bounds of decorum within whii h women in a him like Mogambo must keep if the overall good-humour of the action is to I'i .usI. n iied and the audienc e remain unthreatened When the teat are m question is part of it t Ir.iily limited paradigmatic set, we need worry even less about applying commutation hull i a. I. hi Iv "I the film's own themat i/.ed contrasts Peiliaps the most obvious example of a set is the male-female opposition: commutation here almost always has dramatic Id i -\lm Ii get us to the heart of 'ordinary sexism' very quickly. . ,,f i&iM mjdi osf-w VI lines line test by commuting whole a< tors or [USJ features? This will depend Commuting 1 in may be wasteful and lead to blurry intuitions: if it is already clear which feature is pertinent, manipulating it on its own may be indicated And what presents itself as a whole-•Ctot commutation may really be a single-feature commutation in disguise. Take the following • hitip i iiiiiineiil by Mai|otie HiIIiow, reviewing {Miking for Mr. Goodbar. A woman seek inc. the release nl sex wit In ml love will st ill alt t.n t uioial judgements when Minis .i I tin il men < Ii iing ex.it I ly I lie si tine I lit ug .tie taken It >i gi, inlet I In I. it t, il makes a '..ill 11. II v 111 e 111.11 fuel i I'.e I. . i I. III'. | " i'.e i lie ll'.lll I 11.11,II i el'. Ill Ml ' uHuil'lll ,1111 i Tl I ill,III i S 42 JOHN O. THOMPSON TheMan VJho LovedVJomen, which is primarily a light comedy. Both die sudden and violent deaths at the end; which of the two would you then say is being punished for sinning?16 Clearly Marjorie Bilbowis not actually proposing that we check the differences between Diane Keaton and Charles Denner (or between the roles they play) feature by feature as we transpose them. The relevant feature - gender - is already obvious. The use of speaking of the whole roles here is that it points up that not only sexual behaviour but ultimate fate stays constant under transposition; what varies as gender varies is the moral evaluation of that fate. Thus the unexpected 'unit' that the commutation isolates lies on the plane of the film's ethical signifieds. In general, whole-actor commutation is useful when it is not yet clear which feature(s) will turn out to be pertinently differential, or how one feature aligns itself with others to effect a single thematized contrast. One feature of Diane Keaton as Teresa in Mr. Goodbar is her hair colour; but how this operates as a signifier in the him comes into focus less when we commute just hair colours - can she be a red-head? - than when we commute Keaton with Tuesday Weld as the blonde older sister, whose dyed-blondeness goes with only-apparent innocence in her father's eyes but with real dumbness, contrasting with Teresa's educatedness, sincerity, guilt in her father's eyes. VII The sort of 'units' that commuting actors isolates - features or traits-are themselves clearly not unanalysable primitives: a tempting but very ambitious programme would be to aim at a decomposition of physiognomies, smiles, gaits, and similar behaviours into distinctive features specified in physiological terms in the same way that phonological features are specified in terms of the mechanisms of the mouth, throat and tongue Someone with a penchant for rigour might claim that characterizations such as 'nervous smile' or 'crazy smile' are hopelessly imprecise and impressionistic ('tight-lipped smile' being closer to a satisfactory description). However, there are good reasons for not taking the rigourist too seriously, though students of the cinema probably should pay more attention to recent advances in the study of non-verbal communication than we usually do.17 One trouble with the rigourist's programme is that for many inquiries it would be diversionary: the level of codedness one is interested in is more 'macro', more capable of being related to economic, political and ideological structures. But there is also a problem in principle about the search for primitive elements of behaviour: we have no guarantee that concepts such as 'suave, sophisticated manners', 'crazy smile', 'dizziness' (as in 'dizzy blonde') group together behaviours which are physiologically unitary. That is, there are almost certainly a number of muscularly distinct smiles which in this culture we would group together as 'crazy', and this would be even more true of what 'sophistication' or 'ruggedness' collect; yet it is at the level of these cultural groupings that we need to operate. Too micro' an analysis can destroy the object we are concerned with. Commutation does respond to one element in the rigourist's reproach, In that Its effect is in keep before i >ur, it tent ion how problematic the terms we use to i h.u.n teii/e dilleienc es ,1111011« pet lot m. II11 es .lie Thete seem In be different es wit In nit lei lie, In . .ipllllr I hem..11111 leltlin Willi ll bundle |i>||ellirl .111 indefinite laliyc , .1 dllleieii. en llllll In llllx lespei I mil — - '"■-----......-iu,ui .v.i wihuiM alaa, it 1» l.mgi SCREEN ACTING AND THE COMMUTATION TEST 43 language operates.) This allows for considerable mobility over time in the conceptualizing of Performances and their details: to recapture the terms that would have been used to 1 Iwiracterize features of a silent film performance, for instance, often requires a considerable ■ H< 'it of historical imagination. VIII ' n .ily.mg .in advert iscmcnt lor Chanel No *> perfume consisting of a close up of Catherine Deneuve, a picture of a bottle of the perfume, the brand-name in large letters at the bottom I- page and 'Catherine Deneuve for Chanel' in small letters just above this, Judith Williamson sees Chanel as using what Catherine Deneuves face means to us' already to 1 .I illth 'what Chanel No. 5 is trying to mean to us, too': 11 li only because Catherine Deneuve has an 'image', a significance in one sign system, thai she can be used to create a new system of significance relating to perfumes. If she were not a film star and famous for her chic type of French beauty, if she did not mean something to us, the link made between her face and the perfume would be meaningless. So it is not her face as such, but its position in a system of signs where it signifies ll.iwless French beauty, which makes it useful as a piece of linguistic currency to •.ell Chanel.'" nlnt in a sign system depends on difference; Williamson chooses as a differing woman-.......lei who appears in the ad campaign for Faberge's Babe perfume: 1 .ilhenne Deneuve has significance only in that she is not, lor example. Margaux in 11 itngway. . . . The significance of |the latter'sl novelty, youth and'Tomboy' style, which lii-- value only 111 relation to the more typically feminine' style usually connected with ......I.'Mm,", is i arried over to the perfume: which is thus signified as new and 'fresh', in e lalion to other established perfumes There would be no significance at all in the fart 1I1 ii Margaux Hemingway is wearing a karate outfit and has her hair tied back to look .1......1 I ike,1 man's, were it not that other perfume ads show women wearing pretty dresses in I with elaborately styled hair.20 1 think Williamson's discussion may overstate the ultimate reducibility to difference of this • I ."I. le.ilin n| sign 1 fu at inn. but this is not to say t hat difference is not immensely important ■"I to use Deneuve as an example of the operation of the formal relations of pre-existing ins nl dilleienc es lie. ause the systems are not only what 'advertisements appropriate'21 ......e In the cinema important determinants of casting Willi.111 is. his argument is that we have a much more secure grasp of the difference between I ininiive and I leiunigway lli.111 have, nt . mild ever have ('perfumes can have no particular -itiiiili. .1111 !•' 1" - with respect to the product; so that transferring the former difference to the Ul lei |e.ill 11 has .1 1 mi si las1 v. • I.e. aii'.e 1 . ignilive ellei I '' The quest li hi is 111 what sense (In III ' I.....hiii. live I lelnlnnway dllleiei....., exlsl befnte ntie makes thai spei ill. rnuipallsnii 1 It »ll»e'. Int me wllh '.pei lal Int. e III till', pall h 111.11 1 a'.c liei ause il was |>i iv.lhlc I. H me hilly " wWIIIUilumiliMllmim-liilinllhiiuulilknewunlhlniiwIial'.....v-i nl M.i.u.iux Ileinl.iuw.iy 44 JOHN O. THOMPSON lit.HI IN ACIIN(, AND IHI CUMMUIAMON IfcSl 4b before reading it. In effect. Williamson has performed a Deneuve-Hemingway commutation, and my prior ignorance of one element in the commutation has not prevented it from 'working'. How can this be? Actually, the significances which Williamson ascribes to Deneuve - 'famous for hereto: type of French beauty ... flawless'-are not in an uncomplicatedly differential relationship to those of the Hemingway 'image'. Logically enough, but also as if to compensate for Deneuve's +fame, Hemingway has +novelty whereas Deneuve has -novelty (the link between her and Chanel has been maintained for an unusually long time). But one would hardly assign -chic to Hemingway (although the type of chic shifts); her -French trait is not unequivocal ('Margaux' vs 'Margo',24 and perhaps a whiff of American-in-Paris'-ness left over from another Hemingway); and while someone engaged in karate seems unlikely to maintain 'flawless beauty', one clearly could not speak of a 'flawed beauty'. The underlying contrast seems to involve something like ±mobilily. Hemingway can retain her sort of beauty in motion, whereas one cannot imagine the Chanel Denueve being able to move much without her beauty becoming flawed. What seems to happen is that such individual images as Deneuve's or Hemingway's find or make their place(s) within a network of differences already provided for by the language, it is within language that the contrast 'feminine'/'Tomboy' is kept 'in place', and this is a necessary condition for that contrast's embodiment both in the real and in image-deployment within specialized discourses like advertising. At this level, the same contrast ±feminine could be embodied by an indefinite number of different figures. But conversely each individual figure is a composite of an indefinite number of determinations, and while only a subset ot these will be highlighted by any given commutation, it will still put into play contrasts involving more than a single feature. This means that a contrast on ±mobiliiy will always involve more than just that once the specific feature-bundle 'Margaux Hemingway' is chosen to embody one pole, even when the other pole is left general I 'other perfume ads show women wearing pretty dresses and with elaborately styled hair'); and it will become even richer once the specific feature-bundle 'Catherine Denueve' is installed at the other pole. This detailed richness is what could not have existed before I knew about Margaux Hemingway, and each new bit of data 1 acquire about the image enriches the contrast further. But the concepts to illustrate which Williamson posed the contrast of the two images are not dependent upon this richness: many models and actresses could have been chosen who would have embodied any one feature contrast just as well. The main difference between choosing a model for an advertisement and casting) for a film is that the requirements of narrative structure in film, however constraining oTrtheir own level, put the features of the actor into play more actively than advertisements do. If there is a single image of Deneuve at work in the Chanel ads and in her films, it is presented and developed more unpredictably where narrative brings out its potential ambiguities. When Burt Reynolds asked Robert Aldrich to direct him in Hustle, Aldrich said: 'I'll do this picture on one condition: that you help me get Miss Chanel.' Because the woman's part had been written for an American, and I didn't think it worked that way I think our middle-class mores just don't make it credible that a policeman can have .1 love relationship with a prostitute. Because of some strange quirk in out backgrounds the mass audience doesn't believe it. It's perfectly,ill right .is I. nig .is she •. m.i American So Burt accepted this as a condition, and we put upoui m......v Mid VMM to I'.iris, and w.ntrd mi thf gn-ai l.idv Iih .1 wrrk .md she .....I n mIi 1 tin 11I1..... Hfic Ihc lolc 111 Ihc s( up.....111. In I I he Iciliiic t Aim-tumi, .md the director modified this to - Ami-ricmi on credibility grounds Whether or not Aldrich's unacceptability intuition about the (luster f American +proslilute Moved by policeman was idiosyncratic26 (the casting of Deneuve laems to me to be splendid, but I wouldn't have thought credibility was its strong point), cnrtalnly underdetermines the choice of Deneuve from the very large set of un-American actresses, The associative leap to 'Miss Chanel' shows that more of the 'Deneuve' feature-linndlc was involved, and the tone ot the remark about 'waiting on the great lady-'7 might '•st that part of this might be a certain wish to flaw the 'unflawed', to exploit the possi-I illltles of the Miss-Chanel-as-prostitute twist. But there must be something about the bundle whii h facilitates this twist anyway, since any specification of Deneuve's image in terms of Mm toles would have to take Bunuel's Belledu \ouras a central text. While it and Hustle draw "Mir features that make Deneuve an appropriate signifier for Chanel, both films in different Ways put these features at the service of narratives which draw out their darker implications In Billedu lour the - mobility feature is used to connote both frigidity and corpselikeness; in 1 Mi ||»the '(lawlessness' is made to begin to crack around the edges. A Catherine Deneuve ad and a Catherine Deneuve film clearly both operate as closed lo .1 neater or lesser degree (both Belledu lour and Hustle being more open than many, ■ ii happens, whereas a more conventional film such as Terence Young's Mayerling might ■ 11 exceed Chanel ads in closure): but the mechanisms by which they achieve their closure Ifl different, and are themselves made visible by the commutation we achieve by holding 111 11. uve constant while changing the textual practices which serve as the context of her 1 n,it ion. The ever-open possibility of doing this leaves the Chanel advertisements open ' 1 crtain subversion. So does the way that the Deneuve image is built up from appearances ■ 'I which some are so narratively charged: Chanel cannot prevent us from thinking of the I nils I icncuve has played for Bufiuel and Aldrich, with their unwanted, unsettling features IX ■ Is room for a great deal of detailed research on the history of casting. The breathless ..... ihrough of casts once contemplated for well-known films given in a recent article by I in l.i Rosencrantz2" illustrates the sort of material which could be of great use in determining Ii stai images were contemplatable for which roles at a given time. It would be good to ......mts ol actual casting practice detailed enough to serve as a control on the intuitions inul.it ion affords us about possible and impossible matchings of actor to role. Clearly, ' ''!':'■ 1'• ■. 11 (111'. 1 10 powerful ideological constraints, A given role must be filled by someone possesses or can assume the features felt necessary to sustain it, and both the 1 MriMiin.ition ol the features in the script and the organization of their textualisation in 11......uisrol Miming will be governed by ideological assumptions about what is'natural'and Hi .(•■. willii ml saying In I ion Siegels The Shootisl, lohn Wayne plays an aging gunfighter dying of cancer and I uiics Ni.-w.irl plays the do. toi who diagnoses ih, disease I have never met anyone who mid imagine the Listing n-versed, yet it's hard to sec why. Most people, after some thought, My th.il I hey ..in imagine Slcw.nl 111 the Wayne lole (it helps lo Hunk Kick to Stewart's llltln,limned peil,.1111......... 111 Anllioiiy Mann Westerns) WI1.1t ■.....tie. 'ungramin.ilK.il' is W.iynr .is ,11I1 it tm liui whai Is H ih.it we think wr know about doi lots thai in,ikes Wayne 46 JOHN O. THOMPSON bundle of traits incompatible with his being one? An adjective which sometimes gets used to describe Wayne is 'rugged': this is not incompatible with delicacy, as any reviewing of Rio Bravo reminds us, but it does seem incompatible with the sort of indoor and studied (the product of study! delicacy of movement that a doctor, especially a surgeon, is felt to need. Of course the frontier doctor in Westerns isn't exactly a Dr. Kildare, but his lack of polish is generally presented as a decline, however good-natured, from an earlier level of competence reached 'back East'. The frontier doctor can thus deviate in the direction of a certain ruggedness (often on account of Drink), but he generally retains such unrugged features as - tall and -athletic. A counter-example in terms of these specific features, Victor Mature's Doc Holiday in Ford's My Darling Clementine, is tall and athletic but consumptive, alcoholic and bookish; commuting Wayne with Mature here would be unthinkable. This would seem to suggest, that, outside the specific generic context of the Hospital drama, the medical profession is somehow not seen as macho enough to sustain a central position within the Hollywood narrative. (Think how impossible it is that The Shootist be about lames Stewart.) Yet this is puzzling, because the medical profession clearly does not lack prestige in America. Why should the role of gunman be worth so much more narratively? This is the sort of question that the facts revealed by commutation force us to ask. They are not easily dealt with by any 'reflection' or 'inverted reflection' model of ideology in fiction -whether what is thought to be reflected is the real or the producing culture's ideal. X 1 want to conclude briefly by returning to Brecht's 'fundamental reproach', which was that because in the cinema the role and the performer are one, there is no possibility of introducing the sorts of gap between them that promotes reflection. There is a problem here, but it does not seem to be insuperable if we are prepared to take as our unit of experience of the cinema, not just the text itself as subject to/contributor to a larger system of possibilities and impossibilities which is like, and to a large extent depends upon, our language. This involves recognizing that like language the sign systems of the cinema are never texually embodied all at once: to restrict analysis to the 'text itself, to rule out counter-factual statements on methodological grounds, would be a surrender to dogmatic empiricism. A limited gap is opened between actor and role, I think, by the star system itself, with its encouragement to the viewer to see a single figure on the screen as both role and star. What is needed to exploit that gap and open it wider is an awareness, which teaching can promote, of the dependence of both role-meaning and star-meaning upon a network of differences correlated with one another in seemingly naturalized, hence suspect, ways. My practical claim for the commutation test is that it promotes in the viewer the right sort of suspicion Notes I Ben Brewster, The fundamental reproach (Brecht)', Cine-tratly no Summer 1977, pp 44 V< .' I lavldThomsoii .The look km .in .ii inr '■• I.ii '•'. SiidKiimlSi'iiiirl v. .1 Mi mi 4 Autumn 1977. i.i. .'411 44 SCREEN ACTING AND THE COMMUTATION TEST 47 3 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, London, 1967, p. 65. 4 This is the Oxford English Dictionary's third sense for the word. The first usage it records in this sense is, as so often when concepts which will turn out to be useful to a science of signs are concerned, theological. Hooker in 1597 wrote of'a kind of mutual I commutation . . whereby those concrete names God, and Man, when we speake of Christ doe take interchangeably one anothers roome'. The legal sense arises naturally enough: commutation is 'the substitution of a lesser punishment for a greater'. 5 Barthes, op. cit. 0 GiulioC. Lepschy, A Survey of Structural Linguistics. London, 1970, p. 72. 7 Barthes, op. cit., p. 66, quotes a machine-translation expert to just this effect: "The difference between the significations |is| of use, the significations themselves being without importance" (Belevitch).' B See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, London, 1974, pp. 131-34. 9 Note that, if 'the text in movies is the appearance' and the 'result' is really 'unfree and inalterable' absolutely - i.e. if for Thomson the medium intrinsically forces actor and role to coalesce utterly for the spectator - it is hard to see how our question of 'Tightness for the part' could even be raised. 11 > ' )uoted in Manuel Alvarado and Edward Buscombe, Hazell. The Making of a TV Series, London, 1978, p. 20. i I I'eter Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics, New York, 1975, p. 235. • e Roman lakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, The Hague, 1971, or ladefoged, op. cit., pp. 240-49. I i lanet Dean Fodor,Semantics-.TheoriesofMeaninginGenerativeGrammar, Hassocks, 1977, p. 144. II See ['odor, pp 143-2 14 tor an up-to-date and detailed account Ol recent argument in the held i I he system in question is clearly rather widespread; exactly the same distribution of smile-i pes, correlated in the same way to hair-colour, turns up in Rohmer's Ma Nui'l Chez Maud. i run \nternational, no 129, 11 March 1978, p. 30. I / An especially heroic research project in this area is that of Ekman and Friesen, who are endeavouring to specify a Facial Action code by isolating minimal units of muscular ai i ivity in the face: '. . . we spent the better part of a year with a mirror, anatomy texts, and cameras. We learned to fire separately the muscles in our own faces.' So far the minimum units isolated number about forty-five, and the researchers have performed in.I photographed between fourand five thousand facial combinations' of these units. II we wish to learn all the facial actions which signal emotion and those that do not... luch a method ... is needed.' See Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, 'Measuring facial movement', Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behaviour, no 1, Fall 1976, pp. 56-75. i .iieA Nida, Componential Analysis of Meaning, The Hague, 1975, p. 19:'It would be a inn.i.il'' to think that one i.m always describe easily the relations between related meal mil's I or some sets of meanings there may be no readily available terms with which nliei ,iii talk about I he dillereni es This is line, loi example, of colors. We readily recognise I hat tin -1 olois violet, blue. guru, uellow, red, etc . clillei horn one .mother, but we do not have the kind ol mi'lalaiii'.iiap. wit ll whlc h we i an easily speak about t he dllterelic es One could employ lei hlili al ti-l ll ll i ml. r.y bases I on the w.ivele ileitis ol ilillelelil c olols, but this does Hot lepieselil I lie Mi.ilinei iii whlc h we liollli.illy c one elveol i olol cllllelenc es It would lake us i.,.. In .illelil to uo llilo the mallei hele but ll should be mrlit loligij that bull) 48 JOHN O. THOMPSON Wittgenstein and Lacan deny that there could be a true metalanguage for describing human action. 19 Decoding Advertisements, \deology and Meaning in Advertising, London, 1978, p. 25. 20 Ibid, p. 26. 21 Ibid., p. 27. 22 Ibid., p. 25. Smells may be meaningless but they are certainly evocative. For a very interesting discussion of why evocativeness may be raised by the fact that 'there is no semantic field of smells', see Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism, Cambridge, 1975, pp. 115-19. 23 '. . . this seems like the reverse of "totemism", where things are used to differentiate groups of people . . .', Williamson, op. cit., p. 27. 24 An interesting problem: is there anything 'French' about the image of Catherine Deneuve if her name is taken away? (What happens if the Chanel ad remains just as it is save for the substitution of, say, 'Shirley Saunders for Chanel?) 25 Stuart Byron (interviewing Robert Aldrich) "'I can't get limmy Carter to see my movie!'", Film Comment, no. I 3, March-April 1977, p. 52. 26 In The Choirboys the cluster reappears, but its unacceptability' now inscribed within the text itself in the form of the violence of'bad' sado-masochistic relationship leading to the policeman's shame and suicide. 27 The phrase helps clarify a second Deneuve Chanel ad reproduced by Williamson, op cit., p. 28, in which a head-and-shoulders photograph of Deneuve with Chanel bottles bears the text 'It's one of the pleasures of being a woman'. The image might be puzzling because Deneuve is unsmiling, stern-looking, not obviously enjoying any 'pleasure' -save, perhaps, that of being 'the great lady' 28 'The role that got away', Film Comment, no. 14, Jan-Feb. 1978, pp. 42-48. PART TWO II CREATION OF THE II M ACTOR i'deduction ii in.i's link to novelty and attractions, rather than narrative or theater, meant that not ■ i. from vaudeville and theater, but also non-actors caught in actualities, dancers, models, and other entertainers were put on screen. In the earliest days of cinema, an 1 i might show one film consisting of documentary footage of a train passing by or a city ' Mowed by a film of a beautiful barely clad woman dancing, followed by a muscleman '"'i' his physique, then a stage actor "performing" a monologue in costume. In these limit was not only the case that the human subjects were not "ontologically favored" by imera in relation to other objects, but also that various human subjects were of equal A, lois and non-actors were on equal footing and neither was recognizably acting, at least 11 ling to the understanding of acting developed in theater. Rather than acting perse, the • . who did participate in films were likely to be objects of display, like their non-acting iputts. Their work on film was viewed as modeling or posing, not acting. In Ii nl ol an oiganic outgrowth of stage acting, the film actor was virtually an original creation | i i"i ai ting a novel profession. Whereas the essays in the last section attempted to define ni. ii. ign ill lui.h tenstics of the film actor as opposed to the stage actor, the essays in this ......inline the transition from stage to screen historically, looking at institutional i.......i. iits. labor issues, and aesthetic transformations in light of changing technologies. h iiles Musser's essay traces the changing status of the film actor from film's beginnings ii', i le details how film acting went from being an anonymous, casual, and intermittent n.ii assumed part-time by stage actors who were embarrassed to be associated III Inn new low form—to become a full-time profession that rivaled stage acting as a source inl ion, (inaiu i.il teward, and artistic satisfaction. Musser explains how deeply imbricated lulu.11.il issues, laboi issues, and aesthetic issues were in the creation of the film actor. As ompinies increased their rate of production to meet the demands of nickelodeons for lllms, they lined permanent sloi k i ompatnes ol a< tor, I he legulai lotation of actors meant lii.il playeis, i iraling the i onditious (oi a developing, • Ul nystem I vent i i.illy I he stai system not only .illeierl the stun line ol the iiidusliy, in lei ins ol «nUiy and public ily, bill also elle. led . lunges in I he mode ol lepiesenlalion, sin h as I he use i .1 ■ lips I.. I.....s .ille......ii ..ii niilirii.e lavullles I he use ol ihe lealuie dim liioiiglil allr.li.