Viewing the Self: The Actor’s experience of Suspended Animation.

by Nicholas Hope, Department of Performance Studies, Sydney University

Time, Transcendence and Performance Conference 2009

Introduction:

The ability to view one’s own performance in playback is a relatively new phenomenon. The first film was made in 1895, and the first public display of television was in 1925. In the following discussion, I suggest that the ever-growing incidence of viewed self-in-performance interrupts our proposed, inherent lived narrative linearity, to encourage a potential state of suspended animation, or else of constant adolescence: a reflexive obsession with past performance and lost potential.

I will begin with what performers always begin with: themselves. I will describe a scene from a film I performed in,1 and outline some of the components that occurred and were included as part of the finished product, and some that occurred but were not included. I will then reference Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea of intentional transcendence and meaning, to enter a discussion of the performance moment described from the perspective of theatrical performance, which I will argue fits the linear formation of intentional transcendence. From there I will return to the filmic performance experience, in order to come back to the conflict between the performance moment lived, and the moment as seen in its edited, manipulated, mirror-image filmic representation. This will allow me to pose some ideas about what that does to the viewing performer, and to briefly apply those thoughts toward a point of consideration for the contemporary, popularised digital media world.

1 Bad Boy Bubby, dir Rolf De Heer, 1993.

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Viewing the Self: Bad Boy Bubby, 1993.

We are filming in a pub near the suburb of Port Adelaide. The pub hasn’t been what is called ‘locked down’, meaning we only have access to this room and the locals are at the back around the bar, and as this is the second night of filming they are annoyed and occasionally heckling. It has sometimes been my job to try to calm them down. This is the third of four live band scenes being shot over two nights and everyone is tired but adrenaline-fuelled. The crew – those not being used as extras – are to the left of screen. The scene is shot with steadicam – a device allowing the camera to move freely without shaking – and I need to be aware of where it is for the purposes of performance, and to be sure not to move too erratically because later the camera has to follow my moves – in a shot that will not be used. Rolf the director has for the first time let go a little, and is quite tipsy. I am in control of how the words come out and when to actually move into the crowd – the vocal and physical rhythm of the piece. The music is recorded but my voice is live. The crowd is also a little drunk and are enjoying the event, which adds to the excitement of doing the scene which for me has a real live band feel.

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The two shots used are taken twice each. In the first – which goes all the way through but concentrates totally on me and on the band members on stage – I mess up the opening gas-mask call and am a little gentler with the cat figure on the chair, and my timing is wrong at the end. The second I am more confident. I manage the call, the cat and the timing as best I can and it works pretty well. The edit uses the first half of the second take.

The first time we do the shot for the second half of the scene, I drop the microphone on the floor before getting the character Angel on stage; it’s too hard to find a microphone stand. I am aware when I do this it might roll and cause feedback, and that thought is with me as I walk through the crowd. I am also aware that I need to see where the microphone has fallen so I can pick it up again, and I am trying to hide the looking as I return to the stage. I am annoyed that it looks awkward. I want a seamless performance. I work that one out the second time but the camera work is considered not as good. The edit uses the first take.

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The scene stops just after this frame and hard-cuts to another scene. In both takes, I had allowed myself to fall back into the bodies of the four women behind me. I liked this both as a rock’n’roll moment and as a signifier of how free the character was feeling, but it didn’t get past the edit. When I eventually see the film for the first time, I am pleased that the first section of the second take has been used, disappointed that the microphone drop is still in there, and I miss the rock’n’roll moment. I am seeing the scene on film, but also as I saw it when performing it; I am watching the mirror image of what I did as well as reliving the actual experience. I am re-editing as I go, and at the same time feeling the whole thing in my body as I remember those moments. It is weird.

Intentional Transcendence

Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that we are born into a given world, with inbuilt tactile-kinaesthetic, sensate and temporal perspectives that insist the world can never be fully transparent to us. Given the nature of these sensate and temporal perspectives, our existence in the world depends on our transcendent intentionality toward it; on our active participation and engagement with it – our being the world, the world being us. This is not a purely solipsistic concept: Merleau-Ponty’s vision of the self as flesh-of-the-world is more a recognition of world, Other and self as elements of the same: mutually recogniseable to each other and in a constant process of dehiscence, of peeling back to uncover new discoveries; of revelation. Transcendent intentionality is active: it is a reaching out toward meaning, a

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…single comprehensive movement, which is the project of a life in process of unfolding. (Langer, 1989: 129)

Monica Langer describes Merleau-Ponty’s perspectival temporality as something

…inseparable from being-in-the-world (Langer, ibid: 130),

with meaning therefore

…inseparable from the primary directionality which that primordial inherence in the world implies (ibid).

Temporality in this construction, she continues,

…is the meaning (sens) of our existence (ibid).

For Merleau-Ponty, temporality and intentional transcendence are linked inseparably.

If we accept this, how is it reflected in the experience of performance on stage and screen?

Flow, communitas, in-the-moment … linearity

In the area of Performance Studies – and we are considering performance here – the anthropologist Victor Turner has been influential in his analysis and interpretation of social ritual process, and the way in which he claims it applies to theatre, or socially constructed performance. Turner deals with the use of liminal and liminoid processes, where the liminal is an

…intense embodied state of flux and chaos, out of which new states of being emerge (Turner, 1990: 47).

Liminoid processes are effectively less sacral, but in Turner’s model the performative theatrical process still

…at its height signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events’ leading to a ‘brief ecstatic state and sense of union…(A) sense of harmony with the planet is made evident, and the whole planet is felt to be in communitas (ibid).

From this can come a unified creation of meaning, and/or an engagement with change: a linear move through areas of crises and confusion, suggests Turner.

In terms of contemporary performance, linearity remains the template of (theatrical) acting training. Stanislavski – still, I would argue, the major referenced contemporary theatrical acting theorist – constructed a system of acting that was designed to go from the conscious to the subconscious. He aimed to create a systematized approach to acting that could achieve a state of being on stage that was ultimately transcendent of the act of acting, such that the actor could react in character to whatever happened in the moment,

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yet still remain in a state of control. Grotowski worked at stripping back the social conventions of the actor in an almost masochistic sacrificial sense, to reach the ‘true’ self and negate the response time between emotion and impulse. Meisner developed his repetition exercises to break through the conditioned responses of actors to achieve their ‘true’ emotional reactions. The overriding paradigmatic element here is the requirement to break down that seen as the culturally contrived norm, to reach an apparently ubiquitous ‘true’ affective reaction. In each approach, a linear temporality is assumed. The actor/performer trains to act/react to events as they occur, potentially following a known path but with the ability to always react as if on the journey for the first time: truthfully, without contrivance, in a state of constant emotional vulnerability nevertheless shaped by direction, set, music, script and so on – but a state which takes the audience with it in empathic community. Audience, actor, participant are brought together in an emotional, affective journey that removes them from themselves whilst still referring to their shared understandings, and delivers them at the end in a shared ‘community of sentiment’,2 as it were. A transcendent journey has taken place, within the real and imaginary time of the performance, and at the best of times there has been that ‘ecstatic state and sense of union’ that Turner refers to; that coming together in act, communication, and meaning: a sense of all being ‘in the moment’, as meaning – and life – unfold.

The Act of Acting

Theatrical performance does occasionally reach that state of self-observed removal that can be described as ‘in-the-moment’ – the points of performance where the actor feels that everything is in balance, that an empathic community of actors, audience, set, music and so on is in process: precise, unified, co-creative. Personal experience acting on stage has carried with it an almost palpable feeling of ‘holding’ audience attention; of at times being able to manipulate it at will, and at other times of physically losing it – and planning how and when best to regain it. The process is one of an in-between state on stage – of attention to role, to other actors, to audience – and to the corporeal, fleshy sensation of atmosphere: the feel of self-and-others on stage involved in the united construction of meaning, and of audience-others joining in with, searching for, and encouraging of the reveal of meaning. A hyper-attention, if you will – the feel of being a ‘medium’ of communication. I watch myself to maintain that character-based focal-body-disappearance and forward-intentionality; but I watch myself aware of every false step, every false accent twang, every audience rustle, every gained or lost nuance. I tread a line between the inhabiting and the modulation of performance and of meaning-construction. When it is right, the balance is exquisite, and, momentarily, infinite. It reaches out in a transcendent, temporal line toward the unfolding of meaning; and it is this which brings together the disparate areas of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, Turner’s anthropology, Stanislavski and others’ acting systems. All appear to subscribe toward this transcendent, linear, temporal unfolding of life and meaning, that ‘feels’ like the core of the successful in-the-moment stage-acting experience.

2 Appadurai, Arjun Topographies of the Self: Praise and Emotion in Hindu India in Lutz, Catherine A. and Lila Abu-Lughod (eds) Language and the Politics of Emotion Cambridge University Press, 1990: 94

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Filmic Performance

Filmic performance is a very different state.

The set of a film is generally full of obstacles; the instruments of the filmmaking process. There are cords taped to the ground, camera tracks to be laid or dolly routes to be planned, lighting states to be arranged and art direction to be finalized. Rehearsal is short and often based around movement – not only of actors, but of camera, boom swinger, extras, cars or whatever other objects are involved. Shots are planned in order of importance: master shot, mid-shots, close-ups, cut-aways. There is a mix of actor suggestions and director requirements, with input from the Director of Photography followed by anything from five minutes to an hour or more wait whilst lighting, camera movement, and set are remodeled to fit the movement of rehearsal. During this time the actor may serve as a lighting prop, be made up, have radio microphones fitted, or perhaps go over the scene with their co-actors.

In this scenario the filming of the scene for the actor is divided between a number of performative concerns. These include but are not limited to such considerations as: how to operate for the placement of camera in relation to other actors and set; how and when to catch the required light; how to work the differences in lens size and camera placement; how to repeat the affective arc and physical movements in a way appropriate to each different camera set-up; how to negotiate the required affective peaks at this point of the narrative, which will almost certainly be out of the linear order of the story. The whole becomes, in an intense scene, inscribed into what Zarilli calls the bodymind (2004: 661): the heightened awareness of the whole physical, organic self operating in tandem with the world of the filmmaking apparatus. The feeling of ‘in-the-moment’ is equally as intense in this world – and it is a world. When everything in a crucial shot goes right – performance, camera movement, actor movement, sound – there is for the actor a feeling of operating in a cognitively unified emotive-and-physical clockwork: the cross-over point just right; the shadow cast by the walk across the window precisely placed to be caught by the oppositional movement of the camera; the electrical cord stepped over just out of sight of shot; the emotional interplay perfect – all encapsulated in a heightened, intense ten to thirty seconds that everyone recognizes and is part of. There is communitas, meaning-making, transcendence within the act of being right there and yet removed enough to have control, that sometimes brings on a round of applause from all those involved, before moving on to the next take. And the next take may not work as well: the shadow may be wrong, or the emotional/meaning interplay slightly skewiff; or the electrical cord cause a stumble. Or it may be that that transcendent moment happened in the master shot, and the close-ups just don’t get there; or that the actor’s moment was different to the camera-operator’s moment – as in the microphone sequence described above.

Viewing the Self revisited: Body Memory

The positive moments come and go throughout a film shoot, much as they come and go throughout a theatre run, a sports game, or some other form of performative unity. With film, however, they often occur as a series of concentrated, disconnected, short-burst small-community triumphs that build towards a temporally withheld, unified whole. It is

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not until six months to a year later that the performer is able to see the finished product in its manipulated form – as in edited, graded, sound designed, and so on. They will often see it with an audience who do not share the performers’ pre-knowledge, or who share a different point-of-view. The crew members, for instance, will see the camera images they were involved in capturing. The performer, watching themselves on screen, sees a mirror image of what they experienced. Much of what is remembered is there on the record; but it’s there the wrong way round. The performer is getting the Other’s view of their character-self, whilst at the same time remembering and tactile-ly, kinaesthetically and visually recalling all the non-shown elements of those moments. Perception in that instance is self and Other. At the same time, the performer is seeing, from the choices made on screen and from their suddenly heightened memory of all the elements of making the scene, all the choices that have been discarded. There is the happy inclusion of an in-the-moment take – and the loss of another. It is an in-between state, an interregnum, between what happened, what could have been, and what is. Despite seeing the image in a reverse, mirror-image format with all the peripherals removed, that first viewing can still excite the body memory; to such a degree that watching is like reliving. Intentionality at that moment is focused back in time: body memory, tactile senses, visual recall, self-judgement: all are struggling with the frozen present of the constrained filmic image, the lived memory of its capturing, and all the lost potential in between. This is close to a state of suspended animation; neither here, nor there. There is a temporal transcendence evoked in the embodied past, that struggles with being in the present, and has little to do with the future.

Edward Casey categorises body memory into three separate types – habitual, traumatic, and pleasurable. (Casey,1987: 148). In some ways, the visual catalyst that evokes the body memory of an intense filmic moment spans all three; the blocking of the scene requires instant habituation, whilst the intensity has both a traumatic and pleasurable element. Casey writes that body memory

…is thus not just something we merely have; it is something we are: that constitutes us as we exist humanly in the world (Casey, 1987:163).

It helps make the past a

‘…direct constituent of the present’ (ibid:168),

but in Casey’s model the present-self continually modifies the recalled past as it responds to ever-new stimuli and situations:

…the co-immanence of past-cum-present binds this body together in the realm of its self remembrance (ibid:169).

The viewing of the performing self in its manipulated form does not allow that modification: the filmic image as projected is not subject to further revision. The viewing is a moment of inefficacious struggle, caught between self in the embodied moment, self as performer, and self as viewing Other.

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M.C. Dillon explains the Other/Self divide in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility theory:

There is dehiscence, écart, difference in the distancing of my body from anothers, in the divergence of the signified from the signifier that sustains it, in the isolation of a being from the Being which encompasses it – but in all these cases the reversibility of the terms grounds an intertwining that makes them interdependent rather than mutually exclusive and gathers them in the folds of the flesh of one world (Dillon, 1988:223).

In that dehiscence, in that intertwining, movement is taken to be linear and forward; to be the continual unfolding of meaning. I suggest that in the viewing of the Self in the manipulated filmic image, the movement of meaning is subjected to a series of glitches, lost or frozen moments in the triangle of past, present, future, brought on by the clash of present embodied recall with viewed, lost, past potential; and these glitches limit the future, by virtue of the inflexibility of the non-malleable filmic past.

Pixillated futures

This of course is short-lived and only of passing interest, except perhaps to the confused performer sitting in the audience watching themselves with a mixture of narcissism and horror; and it is quite specific. It is also temporally fractional – a moment where the performer-now and performer-then meet via the projected image, without the post-reflective mitigations involving the journey of the film, its people, and the self that flow in to conscious thought immediately after that first viewing, akin to the ‘seeing round the edge of the frame’ that Walter Murch refers to (2001). That post-reflective thought is malleable. It allows the consideration of everything around the image and its collection to be part of a linear, shaped and shaping temporality, open to Casey’s modifications and to the ever-morphing constitution of self that is past-present-future remembrance and projection. The actual re-visitable filmic image, however, is locked-off: the movements, emotions displayed/remembered, colours, sounds, timing – all remain the same, and for that fractional pre-reflective moment of the self viewing the self in performance, the performer/self is caught in a temporal glitch that jolts present meaning.

Does this have any application outside the film/TV performer? I propose it does. We live in a digital age. Digital video cameras are ubiquitous and the ability to display moving images on the internet and mobile phones is growing exponentially. Whilst there is a rigour to good filmmaking that requires great concentration and accuracy, and that contributes to the embodiment of particular moments, a visit to You Tube or My Space or any of the burgeoning social and marketing internet sites shows a huge range of recorded, narrative stories and/or histories of variable quality – but certainly inclusive of works that would require reasonable levels of organization and skill. This too is a relatively new phenomena, and coincides with what Nigella Lawson, interviewed by Andrew Denton, described as “a totalitarian state where the children run everything”.3 The availability of digital video has occurred in the same era as the rise in mass youth-oriented culture, and in the democritization of celebrity; young people growing up in the world of My Space, You Tube, Face Book, reality TV and so on are constantly on show, encouraged to be

3 Lawson. Nigella on Give ‘em Enough Rope, ABC Sept. 29 2008: www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s2374633.htm

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constantly ‘special’ in public.4 The marketing of self makes us our own consumables, desperate to be accepted, seen and adored by all, with a consumerist market-driven culture that feeds on that desire. The image of the self that is projected and watched back represents, amongst other things, a sustained claim on lost youth, desirability, and frozen moments: a pixilated linear narrative that folds, rather than unfolds.

I cannot help speculating that the growing tendency or availability of the technology to record and view the self, to some degree backs us away from a progressive intentional transcendence; that it feeds into an obsession with the lost potentials of the past, creating an obstacle to Casey’s co-immanent past-cum-present that helps shape the future. It is interesting to consider whether that somewhat narcissistic looking back is a contributing factor in a highly consumerist world to what I, taking a leaf from Nigella, might call the Age of Adolescence: Langer’s ‘project of a life unfolding’ frozen, or at least chilled, in a growing fascination with the timeless area between self performed, and self viewed.

Tom Wolfe described the 1970’s as the ‘me decade’ because of the turn toward self-fulfillment and the ‘personal as political’ (Aronson, 2000: 145). The Age of Adolescence is characterised by the ‘look at me’ digital revolution: but that ‘look at me’ criteria potentially involves a willing state of suspended animation.

Aronson, Arnold. Avant-Garde Theatre: A History. Routledge, New York, 2000.Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington and

Idianapolis: Indiana Universtiy Press, 1987.De Heer, Rolf. "Bad Boy Bubby." Australia: Village Roadshow, 1994.Dillon, M. C. Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, Studies in Phenomenology and Existential

Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.Langer, Monika M. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception : A Guide and

Commentary. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Kegan

Paul, 1962.Murch, Walter. "Seeing Around the Edge of the Frame" in In the Blink of an Eye: A

Perspective on Film Editing, Silman-James Prus 2001Stanislavsky, Constantin. Creating a Role. London: Methuen, 1994. Reprint, 9.Stanislavsky, Konstantin. An Actor Prepares. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.Turner, Victor. "Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual and Drama?" In By

Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, edited by R and Appel Schechner, W, 1990.

Zarilli, Phillip B. "Toward a Phenomenological Model of the Actor's Embodied Modes of Experience." Theatre Journal 56:4, no. December (2004): 653 - 66.

4 In Thorstein Veblen’s ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’ (1899: Oxford Uni Press New York 2007), luxury and fame beyond the reach of the ordinary were described as available ways for the rich to distinguish themselves; therefore, to be celebrities, apart from the norm. I suggest the drive for all to chase celebrity (Big Brother, My Space etc) is a democritization of celebrity.

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