Where we can begin to make headway in the area opened up in the previous para-graph is in the different kinds of performance tradition that (Hollywood sound) cinema has used. (For accounts of different performance traditions in the cinema as a whole see Raymond Durgnat 'Getting Cinema on the Right Wavelength' and James F. Scott, Film - the Medium and the Maker.)
Different types of performance can in principle be described in formal terms. I shall try to do this in a moment, but two points should be made about it first.
First, very little work on formal description of the differences between perform-ance traditions has been done, and what follows is not based on any very pro-longed analysis or research. Second, it may be a characteristic of performance signs that how they are read depends importantly on what we know of how they are produced. That is, there may in some instances be little formal difference between given performance traditions, yet the theory of performance that informs them may be sufficiently widely known for this to inform in turn how they are read. I am thinking particularly of the widespread ideas about the Method that arose in the 50s. It may be that the formal differences between the Method and, say, the repertory/Broadway style are less clear than the known differences between how the performances were arrived at. (Brando, Dean and Steiger all constitute a distinctively, formally different tradition, but the Method also covers Woodward, McQueen, (Jane) Fonda and Keir Dullea, all much more 'ordinary' performers.) Part of what follows them necessarily deals with the assumptions that were made about the different ways performers work.
The different types of performance I am going to suggest all fall within the broader historical category of the novelistic conception of character, with the qualifications to it in terms of film noted above. I have named them according to their origin outside film. This is partly for convenience, but partly because the study of signs needs to be rooted in the specific history of signs at their point of production. (I have elaborated this point with reference to tap dance in an article on 'Entertainment and Utopia'.)
Vaudeville and music hall
These styles operate chiefly in the realm of comedy ('business', 'patter', 'timing') and song and dance. Their stylisation, their use of non-realist, even distanciating, devices aimed at 'pointing' a gag or a number tend to render them problematic in relation to novelistic character. Even in comedies and musicals they are virtually used only to be actually funny or for numbers. Thus there are shifts of perform-ance gear between comic and/or musical sections of a film and the rest of it. (It is particularly interesting to study such shifts of gear for the mischief they may do to the assumptions of the non-comic or non-musical aspects of a film. The havoc wreaked by the Marx Brothers on the conventions of their MGM films is the most obvious example.) It should be added that comedy and song and dance can be 'naturalised' by abandoning vaudeville performance traditions (e.g. the singsong in Rio Bravo); and that there are other comic styles; cf. Robin Wood's comparison of the aristocratic performance style of To Be or Not to Be with the vaudeville style of Once Upon a Honeymoon (Acting Up', pp. 23^1).
Melodrama
The importance of melodrama in the early development of the cinema has been discussed by several writers including Vardac, Fell and O'Dell (see Bibliography).
Thomas Elsaesser in 'Why Hollywood?' and 'Tales of Sound and Fury' has shown how this influence helped define what kind of cinema Hollywood was and traces its continued importance well into the 60s. Lev Kuleshov's description of how Griffith expanded the gestural repertoire of film also shows how this remained within the aesthetic of melodrama:
With Griffith, actors did not merely bulge their eyes, say, in terror, but created other movements, which communicated their states of being more truthfully. Lip biting, fidgeting, wringing of hands, touching of objects, etc. are the characteristic signs of Griffithian acting. It is not difficult to surmise that they are approaching moments of extreme emotion and even hysteria. (Kuleshov on Film, p. 94)
Melodramatic performance may be defined as the use of gestures principally in terms of their intense and immediate expressive, affective signification. In melodrama, these emotions are also moral categories, and it is this that sets melodramatic performance apart, at the level of meaning, from Method acting, although both give primacy to a character's emotional life.
The development of a repertoire of gestures in melodrama was such that Francois Delsarte was able to build a whole theory of expressive performance on it. He described a limited vocabulary of melodramatic signs (e.g. hand signals for 'simple affirmation', 'emphatic declaration', etc.; see Fig. 35) as well as analysing
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35 TTze Delsarte codification of melodramas repertoire of gestures.
posture and gesture in terms of certain expressive norms, e.g. a 'normal' upright position as compared with an 'eccentric' (active or forward) and 'concentric' (passive and backward) position. The interest of Delsarte is, as E. T. Kirby points out in 'The Delsarte Method: Three Frontiers of Actor Training', partly his attempt to systematise performance signs, and partly the record it constitutes of melodra-matic performance practice.
Radio
I do not know that the radio had a direct influence on performance in the cin-ema, but it seems likely and a subject worth researching. Radio developed in America between 1919 and 1922, and by the coming of sound in the cinema had already established a number of distinctive kinds of programme without any real precedent in the history of the arts. These included soap opera, the interview and programmes such as the enormously popular Fibber McGee and Molly, who just chatted over breakfast every morning. One of the most important stars of the radio (and of stage and screen) was Will Rogers, who just talked ex tempore
about what he thought about the world. (See Llewellyn White, The American Radio.)
The mode of performance thus developed by radio was characterised by three things: (i) domestic immediacy, radio seen as just another member of the family;
(ii) instantly recognisable characters, recognisable that is both as types and as individuals; and (iii) the use of people playing 'themselves', and themselves being plain ordinary folk.
In sound cinema, performers nearly always played characters, yet with stars (and even arguably with character actors) the tendency also at the same time to play 'themselves' was equally strong. A style of performance that seems more like day-to-day interaction and the adaptation to social types facilitated this process.
(That radio performance could be described as formally as melodrama is almost certainly the case, cf. Merton's discussion in Mass Persuasion of the sincerity 'register' used by performers.)
It is from this style of performance, which James F. Scott in Film - the Medium and the Maker identifies as 'the Hollywood studio style', that the notion of film per-formance not being 'acting' stems. Scott quotes Henry Fonda's words, that in film acting, unlike theatre, 'You do it just like in reality' (p. 241). Although Scott does not appear to believe this is the case, he does not in so many words define what this style consists in other than the combination of'stereotypic appearances with per-sonalised speech and manner' (p. 240). However, his discussion of Humphrey Bogart and Greta Garbo suggests that the style consists in the repeated use, within films and through the films of a star's career, of certain mannerisms, which do the job of personalising the type the performer plays. These may be relatively 'natu-ralistic' mannerisms, but they are different and repeated enough to constitute idio-syncrasies. These form the basis of the individual star's performance style.
'Radio' or 'Hollywood Studio' style meshes with the various star/audience relationships to construct performances which we experience analogously to our relationship to others in everyday interaction. (Cf. the discussion of Shaffer above.) There has been no charting of the rules that govern this. Perhaps the nearest to it, though in a very different field, is Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Although not providing descriptive tools comparable to Delsarte's, Goffman does detail some of the assumptions we use to decipher others in face-to-face interactions, and it would be interesting to see how these relate to the presentation of character through 'radio' performance in films. Of particular interest here is Goffman's distinction between signs that we 'give' and those that we 'give off (p. 14). The former are what we want people to think, the latter are what we betray about ourselves. (We may, however, be adept at manip-ulating the latter.) In film, both these kinds of signals are used consciously to construct character. It may, however, be that the signals a star gives off are some-times not deliberate (on her/his part and/or on the part of whoever selects the shots of him/her in a particular film), and yet constitute a major part of her/his interest and image. Monroe's parted lips give the signal 'yielding sexuality', but the quivering upper lip (in fact quivering to hide her high gum line) may also be read as giving off the signal 'vulnerability'. (On the link between sexuality and vulnerability in female star images, Susan Brownmiller has some thought-provoking words in Against Our Will, pp. 333-6.)
36 The archetypal Marilyn Monroe pose.
Repertory/Broadway
With the coming of sound, many performers were recruited from the 'straight' theatre. As Scott's example of Henry Fonda shows, most of these stars unlearnt their theatrical performance style in accord with what I have called the radio style:
Henry Fonda claims he learned his lesson about film acting the day director Victor Fleming accused him of'mugging'. Shocked and hurt, he says 'I then realized that I was giving a stage performance that I had been giving for months in New York'. After that, apparently, Fonda knew that in film acting, 'You do it just like in reality'. (Film - the Medium and the Maker, p. 241)
However, certain stars - Paul Muni, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn - were able to draw on their theatre background, and Lee R. Bobker stresses the importance of British stage actors in Hollywood in the 50s [Elements of Film, p. 190).
The key point about this style is that it stands as the very opposite of the 'radio' style, in emphasising above all that the performer should be hidden behind the character s/he constructs and in no way play him/herself. Frequently this tradition is compared to the 'classic Hollywood studio style' as real 'acting' versus just 'being', and the special esteem in which this style is held will be familiar to anyone who has got into discussions as to whether such-and-such a star can 'act'.
Acting, in the mode established by Broadway and the English repertory theatre movement, means the ability of a performer to be different in every part s/he plays. This difference is achieved, within the Diderot/Coquelin theory of performance, through observation and convention. It is the paradigm of per-formance 'from the outside in'. It is characterised, firstly, by 'careful attention to detail' (Bobker, Elements of Film, ibid.). This means both a meticulous concern with 'naturalist' accuracy over period manners, class and ethnic accents, etc. and the construction of character through the accumulation and elaboration of such details (rather than through the broad, repeated strokes of other approaches). Sec-ondly, it displays a particularly conscious aesthetic of coherence, such that every detail must tell and nothing must be redundant; in practice, this means that every performance sign must be clearly motivated and relevant to the plot (e.g. in The Heiress, left alone in the drawing room on the day of Catherine's return from France, Maurice/Cliff walks behind the sofa and looks at the walls and ceilings;
this is not just a filler, nor is it the redundant tics of Method acting, but it is rather a reminder to the audience of the suspicion of Maurice's fortune-hunting charac-ter at the point when it seems most likely he and Catherine will marry). Thirdly, a greater stress is placed on verbal fluency and articulateness than with other styles, which makes it possible for characters to speak at greater length and with greater self-knowledge or what Lukacs terms 'intellectual physiognomy' (i.e.
reflecting on the wider implications of what they are doing, feeling or thinking) than is usual with the other styles.7 Finally, in many cases, a certain detachment between the actor and her/his role is evident, as noted by Lawrence Shaffer in an article ('Some Notes on Film Acting') that attempts in part to delineate this kind of performance, which he calls 'character acting':
In the finest character acting - Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Brando in The Nightcomers, Vanessa Redgrave in The Seagull, Steiger in On the Waterfront, Olivier in The Entertainer - the audience is still vaguely aware that strings are being pulled, that the actor has concocted special traits for his role. Effort also shows when an actor tends to impose certain facial and vocal mannerisms, as is often the case with Olivier. Such mannerisms are evidence of strain and stress on the acting apparatus. The actor is not 'with it' but straining to 'do it'. Identification and involvement are at an ebb.
(p. 104)
The'Method'
'Method acting' was the name given to the approach to performance taught by the Actors' Studio in New York, which was founded in 1947. It was an adaptation of the teaching of Konstantin Stanislavsky, and involved the performer feeling her/his way into a role from the inside, temporarily identifying with a character or, in a widespread distortion of the approach, actually becoming the character while playing him/her.
Like melodrama, Method acting privileges emotional meaning over all other aspects of character (such as social behaviour and 'intellectual physiognomy'), but where melodrama returns emotions to moral categories, the Method roots them in broadly understood psychoanalytic categories. The Method constructs a char-acter in terms of her/his unconscious and/or inescapable psychological make-up.
Although in principle the Method could be used to express any psychological
state, in practice it was used especially to express disturbance, repression, anguish, etc., partly in line with a belief that such feelings, vaguely conceptualisable as the Id and its repression, are more 'authentic' than stability and open expression. (I suspect that analysis would also show a sexist bias whereby disturbance and an-guish were reserved for men and repression for women - men as the Id, women as its repression . . . ) In this perspective, character itself becomes more important than plot or structure, and as a result much of the performance is 'redundant' in these terms. Scott's description of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire indicates these elements: the reduction of performance to a given 'basic' psychology, the accumulation of redundant performance signs, the emphasis on raw and violent emotion which is further validated as 'authentic' in this case by its opposition to the falsity of Blanche (both as played by the British repertory actor Vivien Leigh and as the denouement 'proves' her to be):
In Streetcar Brando evidently built the part around his sense of Stanley Kowalski's animal aggressiveness. Sometimes this is innocently canine, as when his incessant scratching of back and belly remind us of a dog going after fleas. But the Kowalski char-acter is also destructive, as we are told in Brando's use of the mouth: he chews fruit with loud crunching noises, munches up potato chips with the same relentless jaw muscles, washes beer around in his mouth and then swallows it with physically noticeable gulps.
These two Brando-generated metaphors come together in the scene where Kowalski rummages through Blanche's trunk, his clawlike hands burrowing furiously and throw-ing velveteen dresses and fake fox fur back over his shoulders with fierce determination.
These apparendy insubstantial bits of stage business prepare us for the climatic scene in which Kowalski, having worked havoc upon Blanche's wardrobe, at last destroys the woman herself, devouring her futile illusions of Southern gentility. (Film - the Medium and the Maker, p. 249)
Scott maintains that the Method is equally adaptable to performers (such as, he suggests, Brando) who are essentially the same in every film (for, despite 'fabricating an astonishing array of ethnic accents' he is always 'the surly proletar-ian who suspects every smell of middle-class decorum' (ibid.); cf. also Kaplan's discussion of Last Tango in Paris referred to above), and to performers (Rod Steiger is Scott's example) who 'put aside [their] own personality to think [their]
way into an alien psyche' (p. 251). In either case, the fact that many people did and do believe that the Method performer 'got inside the character' or 'became' him/her gave such performances a mark of authenticity that made other styles seem correspondingly artificial or stilted.