Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros(eds.),
Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance.
Sydney: Power Publications, 1999.
ISBN 1 86487 025 7 (pb)
314 pp.
A$19.95

(Review copy supplied by Power Publications)

Uploaded 30 June 2000

Raymond Bellour once pointed out that the chief difficulty facing anyone who writes about film is an inability to quote. A literary critic who analyzes Paradise Lost can blend her words with Milton’s, and an art historian who discusses The Mona Lisa can employ a color reproduction of DaVinci; but writers of books and essays about movies need to translate their subject into a completely different and less semiotically rich medium. The problem is exacerbated whenever we try to discuss a film not simply as a narrative construction or a photographic image but as a performance, involving acting and theatricality. Thus, in their fine introduction to Falling For You, an anthology of eight original essays on film performance, Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros remark that their project is haunted, at least retrospectively, by the desire for “a more ostensive and demonstrative mode of description”. (17) Their initial aim was to discover “how the semantic and the somatic are linked” (2); but any speculation along such lines was complicated by film theory’s general lack of attention to “the practice of description and to the rhetorical” (6), and by the need to achieve a “rhetorical refiguring of particular forms of corporeal presence”. (14) Given this situation, it’s hardly surprising that most of the contributors to the volume don’t use a great deal of descriptive language. The introduction nevertheless does a service by calling attention to the problem of description, and the anthology as a whole gives us some fresh approaches to the analysis of performance. The collection is especially interesting because it avoids the binary of identification (Stanislavsky) and alienation (Brecht) that guides most of the discourse on acting, and because many of the contributors make us aware of “bodily affect circulating between performer and spectator”. (21)

Where the art of verbal description is concerned, the most intriguing contribution is Ross Gibson’s lead essay on “Acting and breathing”, which provides an eloquent account of the way a spellbinding performer can affect us physically as well as emotionally. “Performers with a strong presence,” Gibson argues, “can get us breathing (and blinking also) in synch with them”. (41) As a case in point, he describes the moment in The Lady from Shanghai when Orson Welles/Michael O’Hara delivers a close-up monologue about blood-crazed sharks. Welles’s performance provokes a brilliant response from Gibson (one small error is that Welles is speaking of a Brazilian seacoast town named Forteleza – not “Port Eleza.”), who notes that the monologue “is an oasis of stillness and lucidity in a maddening, hyperactive film,” and that Welles’ exit line (“I’ll be leaving you now”) is accompanied by the “whooshing sigh” of a wave on a beach, “as if the world has just realized that it has been holding its breath”. (47) This essay tells us rather little about such technical matters as Welles’s unique style of speaking for the microphone, but it splendidly translates the moods and rhythms of the scene into written syntax, achieving a very high order of critical impressionism. The remaining papers treat a miscellaneous set of performances from a variety of angles. George Kouvaros debunks the conventional notion that the films of John Cassavetes rely upon improvised and naturalistic acting. As Kouvaros shows, Cassavetes is a highly theatrical, even operatic, director whose carefully organized scripts involve “a series of disjointed and non- resolved encounters”(58) and whose work with actors creates a “hystericisation of expressive elements” (63). Jodi Brooks continues this discussion, viewing Love Streams in the context of a presumed “catastrophe of the gestural sphere”(79) brought on by industrial modernity. The theme of gestural “crisis” is further elaborated by Laleen Jayamanne, who uses Chaplin’s comic performances to illustrate the modern “collision between technology . . . and the human sensorium”. (108) Chris Berry provides an intriguing paper about the paradoxical performance of loneliness in Ts’ai Ming-Liang’s Vive l’amour(1994); Pamela Robertson Wojcik analyzes Barbara Streisand’s performance style and star persona; Lisa Trahair appropriates Georges Bataille’s notion of “sovereignty” (as opposed to mastery) to explain the comic effect of Buster Keaton’s relationship to the world of objects; and Sophie Wise shows how the pleasure she derives from Hal Hartley’s films owes something to Hartley’s ability to turn the spectator into a kind of performer–or, as she puts it, into a “spect(actor)”. (246)

Finally, Leslie Stern writes a characteristically witty and insightful commentary on Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy(1982), showing how the film involves a “histrionic” transfer of energy from star to character to audience. Stern makes a number of important points about the film, but it seems to me she is especially good on the performance of Sandra Bernhard as the “flagrantly dysfunctional” Masha, whose gawky body echoes Jerry Lewis in The Disorderly Orderly(1964). (296) Stern wisely notes that Bernhard’s work has something in common with James Dean’s Method- inspired emotionalism, except that Bernhard implies no psychological backstory for the character, and her behavior takes the form of acting “out” rather than “in”. During the course of the film, Stern argues, Bernhard “shows off” what she has learned from Lewis, Dean, and Lucille Ball; and yet, both she and Masha also show what they have not learned, or will not learn: “certain procedures for seduction, for domestication.” (301). Here and elsewhere, Falling For You contains incisive observations about cinematic bodies and voices. Perhaps more importantly, the volume as a whole enables us to understand a seldom acknowledged phenomenon: that scriptwriters, directors, actors, and critics are all embroiled in what Stern calls “a type of mimetic acting: each repeating and exchanging certain rhetorical moves, gestures, and strategies”. (247) By focusing on this imitative process, and by emphasizing the ways in which energy is transferred from players to viewers, Falling For You performs the valuable function of reminding everyone – audience and critics included – of how they get in on the act, becoming an essential part of the show.

James Naremore