SCREEN MACHINE | ISSUE 7 | PERFORMANCE by Screen Machine

JULY 2014

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Sinatra swells over the soundtrack and the camera pulls back in what we feel must be the final gesture of the episode.

ISSUE 7

“PERFORMANCE”

JULY 2014

ABOUT THIS ISSUE CONTRIBUTORS on p.2 FROM THE EDITOR on p.3

ESSAYS NOW EVERYTHING IS BIG by Huw Walmsley-Evans In defence of histrionic acting, in particular Al Pacino in “Heat” and Anton Walbrook in “Gaslight.” p.5 IN THE REALM OF THE UN-SIMULATED by Andrew Gilbert A study of performance in films that straddle the line between porn and art. p.17

FOUR OBSERVATIONS ON THE COMPLEXITY OF SCREEN PERFORMANCE by Whitney Monaghan Including some thoughts on what reality television can show us about the nature of performance. p.25 STARRING MEXICO CITY by Aaron Cutler In praise of the 1943 Mexican suspense film “Another Dawn.” p.33

REVIEWS Elliott Logan on MAD MEN on p.41 Andrew Gilbert on THE IMMIGRANT on p.47 Aaron Cutler on FIFI HOWLS FROM HAPPINESS on p. 50

CONTRIBUTORS Aaron Cutler lives in SĂŁo Paulo with his wife and collaborator, the artist Mariana Shellard. He keeps a film criticism site, The Moviegoer, at aaroncutler.tumblr.com. Andrew Gilbert is working on his PhD at the University of Kansas, where he studies online film cultures and cinephilia. His writing has also appeared in film and feminism journal clĂŠo. He blogs at kinodrome.tumblr.com. Elliott Logan (reviews editor) is a PhD student at the University of Queensland. Whitney Monaghan is a Melbourne-based critic currently working on her PhD in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her research examines the figure of the queer girl in contemporary screen culture. Brad Nguyen (editor and illustrator) is a graduate of Monash University. His writing has appeared in Senses of Cinema, Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings and Overland, and he blogs at inalldirections.tumblr.com. Huw Walmsley-Evans (essays editor) is a Brisbane-based film critic and academic and holds a doctorate in film, media, and cultural studies from the University of Queensland. His research examines film criticism as a cultural institution. He can be found at @hWalmsleyEvans.

This issue of Screen Machine was commissioned with funds from Copyright Agency Limited.

FROM THE EDITOR

hroughout more than a century of writing on cinema, and many decades of writing on television, the emphasis of attention (in much brilliant and illuminating work) has been placed on apparatus, institutions, and on those personnel seen as responsible for harnessing and composing the two mediums’ overall stylistic and narrative dimensions, such as directors, producers, and writers. There is also, of course, a small publishing industry dedicated to actors and performers as “stars,” but this is another way of getting at cinema and television as institutions of political-economy: actors and performers as external to the movies and shows in which they appear. But don’t we have a sense that the timelessly arresting power of cinema and television, of their astonishing success in fiction and non-fiction forms, is their capacity to show moving images of human beings performing on the screen, whether up above or right in front of us? It’s of course true that some of the best writing on cinema and on television is alive to this fact, and brings it home to us. Some of this writing addresses itself directly to performance—or human presence more broadly—as a crucial aspect of film and of television, while some of it illuminates the presence of performance through an engagement with other

matters: issues of style, say, or the work of a particular director, the achievement of a certain film or show. Such writing is precious because it is rare. If we agree that we go—and return—to the movies and to our television shows because we are compelled by the human beings we find there, why is their presence in particular films and shows not a more common port of call in our written appreciation of them? Or when it is, why is it so often brief, summary, or even supplementary in nature? What might we be avoiding? What might we be missing? How else might close, sustained attention to performance shape the way we look at the films and shows we care about? And how do the diverse opportunities available to film and to television shape performances, and vice versa? The currency of these questions was recently on view in a special issue of the online journal The Cine-Files devoted entirely to considerations of performance in film.1 That issue is packed with great work, for example Murray Pomerance on child actor Brandon De Wilde, Joe McElhaney on Lauren Bacall’s walk, and a conversation on film acting between Jonathan Rosen-baum and James Naremore.

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The Cine-Files, Issue 6.

! Rosenbaum and Naremore quickly hit upon the fact that there is a relatively small amount of writing on acting and performance in film, and Naremore offers, among other explanations, one refreshingly direct and honest reason for this:

Each of the writers contributing to this issue of Screen Machine comes at this problem— and related ones, for example the relationship between performer and film style, or the nature of performance and acting in pornography, or the value of oftderided histrionics—differently. Likewise, the reviews featured in the issue handle the presence of performers with differing degrees of directness, and various angles of attack. It is not my place here to declare a triumph each and every word of our attempts to meet the challenges of writing about performance in film and television. Nor should unqualified success—whatever that would look like in any case—be the overriding goal in writing or reading about screen performance. Instead, what is needed most of all is the modelling and dramatisation of the difficulties, opportunities, successes, and failures of such work. Although our stock of it is growing, it remains in short supply. In light of this, the modest but nonetheless important hope of this issue of Screen Machine is to contribute to this vital aspect of writing on film and television.

I suspect most important (I speak from experience), acting is much more difficult to write about than such things as screenplays, editing, or camera style. The performer’s body language, qualities of voice, and styles of movement are relatively easy for audiences to sense and appreciate, but not at all easy to capture on the page.

Agreeing with Naremore, Rosenbaum implicitly supports the necessity of impressionistic writing in response to film acting and performance, a mode of working perhaps at odds with various strains within academic film studies that strive for what are thought to be—or, perhaps, wished to be—more “rigorous” ways of approaching film. Of the best writers on performance in film, Rosenbaum says this: “what they’re usually telling us isn’t so much what actors such as James Cagney and Robert De Niro are doing as how they’re making us feel when they’re doing it, and how certain contexts determine our responses.”2

—Elliott Logan

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Rosenbaum is quoting here from his introduction to the forthcoming Chinese edition of Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema.

Huw Walmsley Evans

NOW EVERYTHING IS BIG Performances such as Al Pacino’s in “Heat” and Anton Walbrook's in "Gaslight" may be ridiculous but there is still a place for histrionics in cinema.

(1998–2001)1 was also a sketch comedy, this time loosely structured around a prime-time chat show format. Micallef’s more recent series—Newstopia (2007– 2008) on the multicultural broadcaster SBS, and Mad as Hell (2012-) back on the ABC—have

1. COMEDIANS

few years ago I met a hero of mine. Shaun Micallef has been a fixture of Australian television comedy since the ’90s, appearing first on the commercial sketch comedy show Full Frontal as a head writer, producer, and performer, and then graduating to his own series on the national public broadcaster, the ABC. This show, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me)

In a trademark example of the series’ irreverent treatment of language and meaning, each season went by a different title or spelling: The Micallef Program (Season 1), The Micallef Programme (Season 2) and The Micallef Pogram (Season 3).

seen a continuing commitment to media parody and satire. Newstopia was delivered straight (even if the content was often surreal) as a news satire in the vein of Armando Iannuci’s and Chris Morris’s The Day Today (1994), while Mad as Hell is an (intermittently successful) attempt at a more winking, knowing The Daily Show with Jon Stewart style of presentation. Micallef is a talented physical comedian, and some of his most fondly remembered characters from the mass audience of the Full Frontal days are broad, gurning caricatures like potato-faced punch-drunk ex-boxer Milo Kerrigan. But even here there are hints of the more referential, intertextual realm where Micallef distinguishes himself, to the puzzlement of many and delight of few. Like many comedians, Micallef is a cinephile2 who revels in imitating the personas of the stars of the Golden Age.3 I met Micallef at a book signing where I did what I almost never do for fear of being “that guy”: asked a question in the Q&A session. Newstopia was going to air at the time and

Micallef had been regularly crossing to himself as roving reporter in the field, Pilger Heston.4 An inordinate amount of the news of the week was therefore being shone through the prism of rants about “damned, dirty apes!” while multinational corporations were like to be accused of making a product that, Soylent Green-style, “is PEOPLE!” These had me in hysterics, and I felt moved to ask Micallef what it was about Heston and others like him—Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Laurence Olivier—imitable personas of a bygone era of the screen, that he found so fascinating? Why did they exert such a strong pull, and why were they so integral to his comedy? I asked, I told him, because I felt that same pull, doubtless in part because I had been habituated to them through watching Micallef and other cine-obsessed comedy writers and performers from a young age. I wondered if he could explain, for the both of us, what the nature of the attraction is? His thoughtful response, and I’m paraphrasing (I wish I had written it down), was that these star personas represented vehicles for performance that have largely passed from use. Styles of acting had moved on, and he wasn’t sure whether these star personas, so consistent from film

2 For example, Micallef opened his TV special (a precursor to his own series) with an extended sequence from Psycho, and ended the second season of The Micallef P(r)ogram(me) in the style of Shane. 3 Take this clip from his “Logies” (the Australian “Emmys”) speech, for example: https://youtu.be/O6g6gb0wRu0

A portmanteau of anglo-Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger and Charlton Heston.

between reservation and full blown emotional projection. These parodies work because they amplify a ridiculousness inherent in these personas. Stanley Cavell has said that “an exemplary screen performance is one in which, at a time, a star is born […] only distantly a person.”5 These comedians know that this distance from the ordinary is what makes for a star, but that stars are also wont to become so massive that they collapse in on themselves. Perhaps it is this potentially disastrous transformation of energy that makes them so fascinating to watch. Here I want to explore these imitable star personas and their performances that teeter on the precipice between the ridiculous and the sublime. I will start by considering some of the existing scholarship that explores this territory, finding some useful terms and concepts to explicate and evaluate such performances, before examining some prime examples, in Gaslight (1940; 1944) and Heat (1995).

to film, represented “good acting” or not, but certainly they were compelling, and fun to do. They are, in a sense, stock characters of his comedy repertoire. Micallef is not the only comedian to be so compelled, to have the imitation of star personas be so central to their comedy, and for the same complex reasons. I cherish the elaborate parody of Rebecca from That Mitchell and Webb Look (2006–2010), with Robert Webb laying the “behaviour” on thick as Laurence Oliver/Mr De Winter (but no thicker than Larry laid it on) and David Mitchell frighteningly correct in his aggressive, libidinous primness as Judith Anderson/Mrs Danvers. British comedian Peter Serafinowicz’s eponymous television show is another recent example, trading in a later generation of performers. His parodies of the “actor’s masterclass” format with Michael Caine, Kevin Spacey, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino are both utterly ridiculous and completely spot on. These comedians wallow in the borderlands between star persona and performance, and in the complexity of this interplay find fertile ground for comedy. In Serafinowicz’s telling, Spacey drips with supercilious hostility; his Brando is the bloated travesty of the Island of Dr Moreau years, and so is portrayed as a Jabba the Hutt-like blob in a choice that should read more indulgently than it does; and his Pacino is a swarthy dwarf, oscillating

2. SCHOLARS

tanley Cavell and Richard Dyer have each offered useful explanations of the nature of screen performance as it relates to character. For Cavell, screen acting is distinctive from

Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971).

stage acting. Where on the stage “an actor works himself into a role,” on the screen “a performer takes the role onto himself.” This shouldn’t be taken to say that there aren’t also theatre stars with imitable personas, or “stars of stage and screen”, as we say, who traverse both worlds. Rather, Cavell is making the point that in the theatre we are, even at our most deferential to the actor, hoping to see their realisation of a character that exists independently of them in the text of the play, which has been and will be taken up and performed elsewhere at other times. Meanwhile in the cinema we are hoping to see the star themselves, with the character providing an occasion to marvel at the star’s intrinsic qualities. Dyer writes of the star’s consistency, over time and between films, as a “source of charisma,” so much so that the notion of the star has “sameness” as an overriding feature.6 What is the screen star’s performance working towards, then, if it is not the embodiment of the character-as-written? Surely it is more than a mere showcase of the “person-ality” of the star. Cavell and Dyer both approach this question in terms of “type”. For Cavell the screen star creates a character, though “not the kind of character an author creates, but the kind that certain real people are: a type”. Dyer takes his

definition of type from Klapp: “a collective norm of role behaviour formed and used by the group: an idealised concept of how people are expected to be or to act.” This might seem the opposite of what a star is and does, but Dyer manages to reconcile star persona and “social type” by noting that the star both fulfils/incarnates the type and, by virtue of her/his idiosyncrasies, individuates it (Critics committed to individualism as a philosophy or tenet of common sense tend to speak of the star’s individuation of a type as “transcendence”).

While all star performances occupy this murky territory between ongoing persona and discrete character, between idiosyncratic individuation and social type, Lesley Stern offers us some further terminology to explain those instances when we sense this complex equation isn’t adding up. Stern is interested in “histrionic” performances: We might say that in the histrionic a particular relationship exists between the actorly performance and the filmic; the film is conceived within the parameters of a dramaturgy that is not necessarily centred on character, but that is nevertheless charged by an intense investment in acting. The cinematic codes tend to be ostentatious and their very amplification owes something to the theatrical imagination; not theatre in terms of staging or even representation, but in terms of an enactment, a fictionality realised

Richard Dyer, Stars (new ed.) (London: BFI, 1998).

through a world that is acted out, in the process of acting up.7

another way—naturalisation of gesture.” These binary concepts of the cinematic and the theatrical, character and type, histrionics and verisimilitude, get us a long way to explaining what is troubling and fascinating at the juncture of star persona and performance. Yet these formulations are of little use to us in isolation from consideration of the films in which they appear. Andrew Klevan usefully advocates for an approach to performance that considers not just “stars” and “acting”, but that pursues “the complexity of a performer’s internal relationship within a film”; one that treats “performance as an internal element of style in synthesis with other aspects of film style and explores the achievement of expressive rapport.”8 As the following examples indicate, evaluation and appreciation of performances is inseparable from consideration of the films themselves.

Histrionic performance, says Stern, harkens back to precinematic codes of representation: “in theatrical forms such as melodrama and pantomime, actors, rather than pretending to be another person, ostentatiously played a role.” She quotes Robert E. Pearson: Disdaining to mask technique in the modern fashion, actors proudly displayed their skills, always striving to create a particular effect… Audiences and critics condemned as inadequate those who did not demonstrably act: the pleasure derived not from participating in an illusion but from witnessing a virtuoso performance.

Stern sees the history of screen performance in terms of shifts in taste and expectation away from this histrionic mode. Where histrionic performances were characterised by “stylised conventional gestures […] performed quickly […] utilis[ing the] arms fulsomely,” the verisimilar “tended towards neutrality” and “domestication of the actor’s body; or to put this

3. GASLIGHT

et’s start by considering the different performances of the role of the husband in each of the two iterations of Gaslight. The first was made in 1940 in England and was directed

7 Lesley Stern, “Acting Out of Character”, in Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros (eds.), (Sydney: Power Publications, 1999).

Andrew Klevan, Preface to Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower, 2005).

by Thorold Dickinson. In this version Anton Walbrook plays the husband. The second was made in 1944 in Hollywood, directed by George Cukor, with Charles Boyer in the role of the husband. The two versions of the film are, at the broadest level of character and story, identical. In lateVictorian London the Walbrook makes a cooing, tutting sound. “continental”9 husband of an English woman destabilises and discredits his wife by manipulating her into thinking Germanic intonations leave us in she is losing her mind. He does no doubt that we are dealing with this in order to clear the way so an unmitigated villain. We start he can search the attic of the from this understanding and then house they have just moved in to it is taken further. When his wife for a treasure that belonged to the chastises him for flirting previous occupant, whom he shamelessly with the maid, killed many years ago. Despite Walbrook-as-husband makes a this essentially being the same barbed allusion to how she’s role the respective performances prone to imagining things. The are a study in contrast. wife, injured, says that with some Walbrook is menacing from kindness from him she will be the outset. In the first scene where better. Walbrook makes a cooing, we see the couple settled in the tutting sound and smiles as he house together and are able to walks towards her. They embrace observe their domestic life, he as he purrs “of course my dear, of makes scheming pyramids with course,” and he kisses her in a his fingers at the fireside. He has passionless token of affection. She his back to his wife (and to us) kisses him back, and it’s a proper and his stillness, this hand kiss, which he endures for a gesture, and his languid, moment before taking her by the shoulders and wheeling the both of them around on the spot 180 degrees. In a flash, on the other 9 Walbrook was Austrian and Boyer side of the pivot, his face has was French, and so were wellturned from a troubling absence credentialed to play “continental” of expression to a terrifying grin. types.

becoming defined and certain over time. It is Boyer’s performance that seems more plausible. If we think of this role of the husband as a “type” then we have the means for a comparison that favours Boyer’s interpretation. This character is a social type. He is a conman, an opportunist, an A troubling absence of expression. abuser. We know this type from life. We have heard their victims tell their stories in the news In this move their places are media, or we have been unlucky spatially reversed and control, enough to experience such abuse lost momentarily, is reasserted. first-hand. We know they have Boyer, playing somewhat enough charisma to charm their against type—or using type victims, and then it disappears, or subversively having established a is shone selectively, only on persona of continental-lover others. Theirs is a banal evil; they frippery—plays the part very seem defined by an absence. It is differently. His performance is, this recognisable type that Boyer for a long time, ambiguous. We portrays. Watch the scene where perhaps fall for him a little the he confronts his wife about a way the wife, Ingrid Bergman, missing picture that he himself does, or at least we can has taken off the wall. Watch the understand why she falls for him: shot where he walks towards her, he’s most convincing. His out of light and into shadow, but menace, rather than living on the with an even, almost inscrutable surface, shines out from within, in expression—in fact a troubling some avaricious flashes of the absence of expression—on his eyes, some unreasonable matinée-idol features. Walbrook’s outbursts (quickly countered), performance, meanwhile, is and for the first time in a defined by a presence. He is concerted way in a lengthy, villainy personified. Had they fixated discourse on the English been making Batman films in crown-jewels: “jewels are Walbrook’s day you couldn’t have wonderful things… they have a life of their own.” Boyer’s menace is low key, concealed, and builds,

gone past him for the Joker.10 If portrayal of a recognisable social type is a criterion of good performance, then Boyer’s is undoubtedly superior. But how much of the inferiority and incorrectness of Walbrook’s performance, or the correctness and superiority of Boyer’s, is fairly attributable to the performers and their choices? Are these not contingent on the structural conditions of the films in which they appear? We cannot consider these performances apart from the fact that the later American version is superior in many respects; it would take a blinkered Anglophile to claim otherwise (though these are never in short supply). Apart from superior resources to lavish on production, the distinction between the two films is that the American version makes key changes to the story, allowing the later Gaslight to realise a dramatic potential unavailable to the earlier film. In the later version we open with a young teenaged Ingrid Bergman,11 grief-stricken after the

murder of her aunt, the famous opera singer, who was her guardian. She’s whisked away from their house on a fashionable London square and taken to Italy to be tutored in music by her late aunt’s mentor. When we next see Bergman she is blossoming into marvellous womanhood, and she has fallen in love with her latest piano accompanist. He’s tall dark and handsome, attentive to her needs, and seems to hold the key to finally casting aside the shadow of grief and loneliness that has clouded Bergman’s formative years. The suitor—Boyer of course—suggests they marry and settle in London (it’s always been his dream, you see) and Bergman feels she can just about stand to return to that benighted place now that she has him in her life. They settle in the old house and that’s where the manipulation begins. For those familiar with the American version the earlier English one seems to begin in the middle. We open by seeing the murder, but cannot identify the murderer. He ransacks the house but doesn’t find what he’s searching for. Then it’s years later and we meet a husband and wife (Walbrook and Diana Wynyard) as they pull up and move in to a long abandoned house, the same one where the murder took place all those years ago. They seem to have no association with the house, though it turns out later that the husband is not who he says he is; his aunt was the murder victim. The wife,

10 David Thomson does have Walbrook down as being born into a family of clowns: David Thomson, New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 4th ed. (London: Little Brown, 2002). 11 It’s a staggering effect. Bergman was in her late twenties at the time but she looks about 14 at most in this scene. It’s one of those moments where the combination of lighting, costume, and acting seem to affect a miracle.

meanwhile, is a poor unfortunate along for the ride, and by the time we meet her she has already been brought to a lather of mental and emotional imbalance. These differences make the Batman allusion above worth revisiting. Like Tim Burton’s Batman and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, the earlier Gaslight presents a villain who is much more interesting, charismatic, and above all fun, than its damaged, brooding, and somehow insipid hero. The first film is very much the husband’s show. Meanwhile in the later version, although Boyer receives top billing, this is the story of Bergman’s manipulation, degradation, and ultimate triumph. Hollywood understands that the way to play it is to have a very, very beautiful and sympathetic girl—and let’s face it: part of the problem is that Wynyard simply isn’t as winsome as Bergman— slowly driven out of her mind and then brought back around. It’s a satisfying arc. It’s not just that we’re sadists (though there’s more than a bit of that to it; the American film’s tagline, tellingly, is “strange drama of a captive sweetheart”) but that this setup creates different possibilities for performance. Some of the actors in the American version simply do something more compelling with roughly equivalent material. For instance, against Cathleen Cordell in the earlier film, isn’t Angela Lansbury the very embodiment of her character

“type” as Nancy the chambermaid, the cheap, slatternly, coy “domestic”? And isn’t her performance also a lesson in the alchemy of star and social type? Dyer has a problem with critics saying that stars “transcend” the type they are portraying, and I share the reservation. But might we say that a true star, in portraying a social type, produces something transcendent? Lansbury’s part here (her very first) is one where, as Cavell would say, a star is born. In most instances, however, the differences in performance of the same characters seem to have as much or more to do with the shape of the story than with native ability or style. Bergman is sympathetic and compelling in her film largely because we see her as a grief-stricken girl at the outset, then a vivacious young woman in Italy, her long slow decline, and then triumphant resurrection. Wynyard, meanwhile, is at a distinct disadvantage being introduced to us in a nearcatatonic state. Boyer is subtle and restrained, his menace building slowly, because the story unfolds this way in the American version. Walbrook, meanwhile, must find a way to make compelling the emphasis (mis)placed on his scoundrel character. 4. HEAT

M 13

ichael Mann’s Heat (1995) was on TV the other night and I had to

are, it must be said, fucking ridiculous. As we saw at the start Pacino is a favourite of the comedians. Rob Brydon's impression sums up the popular sentiment on Pacino in this clip.12 Over his career Pacino’s trajectory of performance seems to have gone against the grain of the progression of screen acting as a craft, with Pacino initially embodying the interiority and psychological complexity of the new American cinema. The narrative of Pacino, which Brydon rehearses succinctly, is that he has gone from subtlety to obviousness, from domestication to projection, from less to more. As Brydon puts it: “Now everything is big.” The latter half of Pacino’s career certainly has this flavour to it, and the effect is amplified if we view these moments in isolation, as in this “supercut.”13 But look more closely at Heat, and you’ll see that there is differentiation between these extreme moments and the rest of the performance. The character himself is performing in those moments, to intimidate, to heighten, and to sustain tension. Hanna actually explains his philosophy of performance to his wife in the aftermath of yet another social occasion interrupted by police-

“GIMME ALL YA GOT!” stay with it until I had at least seen two of my favourite parts, both moments in Al Pacino’s performance. The first comes when Pacino’s hotshot cop, Hanna, goes to rattle a CI, hoping some information pertaining to the case he is working will shake loose. Sensing the CI is holding out on him, he grabs the table between them and shakes it violently, yelling, twice in quick succession, “GIMME ALL YA GOT.” Later in the film he confronts the boyfriend of the wife of one of the violent criminals he is perusing. Using an outstanding interstate warrant Hanna and his cohorts leverage the boyfriend—played by Hank Azaria—into working with the police. Azaria’s character wonders aloud why he got “mixed up with that bitch”. Pacino leans in and, with eyes just about popping out of his skull and making a hand gesture indicating a rounded butt, yells “because she’s got a GREAT ASS… AND YOU’VE GOT YOUR HEAD… ALL THE WAY UP IT.” Azaria’s stunned, muted response, “… Jesus…” is the only plausible one. These moments

12 13

https://youtu.be/_Dml0dAJSis https://vimeo.com/62591294

work. When his wife implores him to share his burdens, to unwind, he responds that he has to hold on to his angst, to preserve it: “It keeps me sharp. On the edge. Where I gotta be.” Like the histrionic performances of old, Hanna attempts in his professional life to “create a particular effect,” in order to maintain control of others, of the situation, and of himself. Apart from the performance’s relationship to character, we have to think about the nature of the film itself. We could say of all of Mann’s films that they create a heightened, sometimes giddying, hyper-reality. Think of the scene on the terrace where Robert De Niro’s character (a violent holdup man called Neil, which I love) courts Amy Brenneman’s gnawingly lonely graphic designer. They exchange naturalistic dialogue about life and family against a front-projected panorama of the sprawling, twinkling grid of Los Angeles-by-night. A film of such stylish artifice seems to accommodate or even invite Pacino’s excesses. Speaking of De Niro, Pacino’s performance must also be considered in relation to his co-lead’s. Each is playing against the established type of their character. Pacino is a cop who swaggers and blows off steam, a big personality; De Niro is a criminal who is incredibly cautious and buttoned down. Pacino blows hot and De Niro blows cold. Pacino seeks to raise the temperature, De Niro to lower it. We cannot consider Pacino’s

performance in isolation from its counterpoint, or from Mann’s style. Pacino’s performance is a cog in a larger machine. 5. PERFORMANCE AND PERSONA

don’t mean to say that performances, or moments within performances, such as Pacino’s or Walbrook’s aren’t ridiculous, but rather that these modes and choices become explicable in context. This helps me to understand why I can accept and enjoy Pacino’s excesses in Heat, and not, say, The Devil’s Advocate (1997). I feel the same about Walbrook’s performance in The Red Shoes (1948), which bears more than a passing resemblance to the one he gave four years earlier in Gaslight, but that I have no hesitation in calling a great performance. Like Pacino in Heat, The Red Shoes is a film that accommodates, and in fact requires, Walbrook’s excesses. Yet although we need to qualify the achievement of Walbrook in Gaslight, it is an achievement none the less. It is the one thing in that film that feels fully realised, accomplished, and compelling. Without Walbrook there would be no reason at all to consider the earlier Gaslight; it would be a mere historical footnote to the Hollywood version. When I think of the character of the husband in Gaslight, I think admiringly of Boyer’s restraint at the conclusion of the film. He

seems almost lackadaisical about having failed in his project of securing the treasure of the dead woman’s rubies and this seems oddly consistent with his callousness throughout. Nothing means that much to Boyer’s version of the husband, not even the things he cares most about. However, if I’m honest, I think of this performance only after lingering lovingly on Walbrook’s. When he’s found out he cackles madly, barks like a beast, and tries to brain the wife’s rescuer with a chair. Even after he’s tied up he still lusts monomanically for “zeh roobies,” to such an extent that he gains super human strength, breaks free from his bondage, and grasps them pathetically. These disparate conclusions show in high relief the films’ divergences, and the types of performances these divergences engender. One is the tale of a beautiful woman’s struggle against cruelty and injustice; the other is the tale of a mad man’s obsession. Boyer’s task is to make credible Bergman’s ensnarement; Walbrook’s is to show us what a true baddie looks like. And let’s not forget that the British public in 1940 saw Gaslight at a time when they were existentially threatened by a deeply unreasonable Austrian man given to shouting and waving his arms. For its original audience Walbrook would have seemed to take inspiration from the newsreels rather than pantomime.

Still, we can explain the difference between these two performances as the difference between the histrionic and the verisimilar. Walbrook gives a “virtuoso” performance, featuring fulsome use of his bodily instrument, while Boyer’s performance “tends towards neutrality” and, in contrast to Walbrook’s, is characterised by “domestication of the body.” These modes offer different pleasures. Boyer’s performance pleases me intellectually, but Walbrook’s lights up a different part of my brain, the same part that is stimulated by Pacino’s antics in Heat. My partner tells me that, when it comes to movie acting, I have a weakness for “ridiculous men.” She’s right. Like the comedians, I am drawn to these excessive performances, recognising their outlandishness but remaining enthralled nevertheless. Perhaps, like Micallef, I like these performances because they tell us something of the essential nature of all screen performance. Perhaps, like Micallef, I like them because they’re easy and fun to imitate. Perhaps both.

Andrew Gilbert

IN THE REALM OF THE UN-SIMULATED Call them pornographic art films or narrative pornography. The performances in films such as Catherine Breillat's "Anatomy of Hell" and Radley Metzger's "Score" transcend cultural categorisation.

ften the closest that narrative cinema comes to the techniques of the pornographic is by way of parody. In a classic sequence from The Big Lebowski, Maude shows the Dude an adult film titled Logjammin’, one of pornproducer Jackie Treehorn’s famous “beaver pictures.” In the adult video we see a cable repair man, played by Karl Hungus (Peter Stormare) arrive to “fix the cable” of Bunny La Joya (Tara Reid) when a fully nude woman

steps out of the shower (real life adult film star Asia Carrera). It’s an all too familiar set up. But is there one element that marks this as a parody of bad porn performance? The ingenious comic delivery of both Reid as the vapid non-actor and the broken German-English droll of Stormare drives the brief sequence, but the cheap sets, harsh lighting, and the low-rent bass lines of the

soundtrack mark Logjammin’ as an instantly recognizable riff on early 90s video pornography.1 However, regardless of the intentions of the Coen brothers, the Logjammin’ sequence exemplifies the nature of pornographic film performance as a bricolage of techniques and

separating this from traditional filmmaking. Yet films and their performances are subject to complex forms of cultural distinction and categorization, a process that, I will argue, is dependent largely on the nature of performance that comes to define the type of film. However, one cannot simply say they are the same without accounting for the cultural differences that distinguish pornography from all other forms of moving images. I propose an examination of pornographic performances as cinematic assemblages; an argument that will take me through a discussion of distinctions of both technique and content. It is the content that distinguishes pornography from cinema, and the content is the performance. At their core pornographic performances are a mash-up of two distinct traditions of screen performance that film and pornography scholar Linda Williams calls acting and performance (what I will call bodily performance to avoid further confusion):

Karl Hungus arrives to “fix the cable.” styles. While traditional actors Reid and Stormare play the role of bad actors, Carrera performs her body’s nakedness to lend some of the bodily authenticity of adult entertainment, and together with all the elements of the video’s mise-en-scene the actors become legible as pornographic performances. In this way, screen performances are assemblages of fragments and are inextricably linked to the filmmaking process. While my interest here is the production of pornographic performance, there is little

Acting implies artifice, being precisely what one is not, though drawing on what one has been in order to create an appearance that is credible. To “act” a scene in which the action is sex is, in these explicit moments, to really engage in sex. It is not quite the same as acting an emotional scene in which, for example, one weeps over the body of one's dead lover.

See also Mike Judge’s underrated Extract (2009) for an example of how a narrative studio film employs the tropes of 1970s adult cinema for comedic effect.

In such a film the performer may not actually feel real grief for the body posing as dead. But actual sexual intimacy with another person does take place in the sex scene whether one “really” feels desire or whether one 'really' comes. This may be one of those occasions where the word performance—connoting an avant-garde edge challenging the more safely contained boundaries of acting—is more appropriate.2

umbrella, one comes to the realization that adult film is as open-ended and nonspecific as saying cinema. The criteria are entirely socially constructed: by country, legal frameworks, and critical polemics.3 Karen Jaehne writes that in her work of programming late night porn flicks for cable TV that each television network, state, and municipality held their own fine distinctions between what constitutes pornography, often with their own subset of terms, all of which point toward the centrality of un-simulated “real” sex acts.4 Without entering into this debate itself, it’s important to recognize the role that unsimulated sex plays in making these distinctions. The United States legal code as well as the Oxford English Dictionary share a two-part definition of pornography: that it involves explicit depictions of genitals and sex acts as well as having the

Williams goes on to clarify performance art as the “art of opening the body of the performer up to the physical and emotional challenge of what is performed.” In this way, acting signifies a primarily emotional artifice whereas performance describes the actual usage of the body for ‘real’ actions. Here pornographic performances are the inclusion of performed bodily acts that are situated within acted roles, at least for the narrative features I will be discussing. While Williams’ distinction is useful here, I should also take a moment to clarify some of the messiness of definitions regarding pornographic films. When I began to consider pornography I immediately encountered the difficulty of classification, particularly in answering what constitutes an adult film or pornographic feature. When considering the breadth of films that fall under this

Ara Osterweil discusses how changing the venue of a screening of Andy Warhol's Blow Job changed its legal classification from art to pornography. See Ara Osterweil, “Andy Warhol’s Blow Job: Toward the Recognition of a Pornographic Avantgarde,” in Porn Studies. See also the classification struggles for the New French Extremity film Baise-Moi, which saw multiple international debates regarding its usage of simulated violence and un-simulated sex in Australia and in New Zealand. 4 Karen Jaehne, “Confessions of a Feminist Porn Programmer,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1.

Linda Williams, “Cinema and the Sex Act,” Cineaste, Vol. 27, No. 1.

intended purpose to sexually arouse its audience. Williams’ also writes that the intent of sexual arousal is a key distinguishing element between pornography and erotic cinema, regardless of the presence of actual sex. Here I am interested in the role of un-simulated sex as the performative element that Williams describes in the amalgamation of acting and bodily performance that constitutes pornographic screen performances. By these accounts, most films that feature unsimulated sex fall under the category of pornography, but certain films that are known for their un-simulated sex, such as Anatomy of Hell (Breillat, 2004), In the Realm of the Senses (Oshima, 1976) or The Idiots (von Trier, 1998) are not typically considered pornography, but remain auteurist art film within the festival circuit, although this often depends on how and where the film is distributed.5 While

Williams attempts to place pornography in proximity to the cinema by exploring how the two categories bleed into each other, her critical opponent James Quandt works overtime to maintain a clear boundary between the two and selects as his target what he dubs the New French Extremity, a loose grouping of French films from the late 90s and early 00s that experimented with the inclusion of un-simulated sex in their arthouse features. Quandt cites the work of Leos Carax, Bruno Dumont, Gaspar Noe, and Breillat as succumbing to a growing trend of infusing art films with pornographic images for shock value, and ending up without a viable classification. Regardless of their critical intentions, both Williams and Quandt are interested in the proximity of pornography to cinema, particularly in the abundance of these French films that saw boundary crossings from the adult film industry into the art house circuit and vice versa. While Quandt loosely groups sex with all other manner of extreme bodily functions (blood, vomit, urine, etc.), the lynchpin of these categorizations is again the inclusion of un-simulated sex within the acting of the films.6 Although Quandt’s categorization is too loose to provide any viable

There is no critical consensus on what films constitute cross-over art films and which remain pornography, however the Williams piece (see footnote 1) engages in this process as does James Quant (see footnote 6). Whereas Williams cautiously explores these films for their potential for radical reinvention of what constitutes cinema and pornography, Quandt argues that all such inclusions of unsimulated sex, with the exception of La vie de Jésus (Bruno Dumont, 1997), result in pedestrian and pretentious films that cannot hold a candle to the classic works of the French cinema.

James Quandt, “Flesh & Blood: Sex and Violence in Recent French Cinema,” Artforum (Feb, 2004).

definitions here, it is worthwhile to consider one of the films he employs to shape his understanding of the New French Extremity as merely pretentious pornography. Breillat’s Anatomy of Hell is perhaps the most transparent and self-conscious examination of screen performances as composites of techniques. The film begins with a woman attempting suicide in the bathroom of a gay night club. After being rescued by a man who happens by, she repays him with a blowjob and then convinces him to accompany her for several nights in a vacant home to observe her naked body and converse on the nature of misogyny. The opening title card establishes the film’s reliance on montage, stating that the close up shots of vaginal penetration are not of the film’s star, Amira Casar, but of stand in performer Pamela Hunt and that together they form extensions of the fictional character of “the Woman.” This combination of porn performer and traditional actress is not mirrored in Casar’s co-star Rocco Siffredi, the famous Italian pornstar who plays “the Man.” Anatomy of Hell posits its performances as a nearimperceptible melding of techniques that renders the categorizations of art film and pornography nearly worthless. In Breillat’s film “the pornographic” is not merely in the inclusion of un-simulated sex (as Quandt would suggest), but in bringing together bodily performance with

traditional acting (in this way, Anatomy of Hell is not very different from the production of Logjammin’). The pornographic performance is an assemblage of Casar’s acting, Hunt and Siffredi’s bodily performance, as well as a voice over narration that injects a third kind of performance crucial to the overall formation of the piece. The use of voice over, particularly in the opening of a pornographic film, goes a long way to establish the style that will inform the acting and bodily performances. In cases such as these, it informs the viewer of the level of artifice or realism at play before human bodies are witnessed in action, so that when actors do enter the film, a style is already present, as if they are stepping into an agreed upon mode of performance. Breillat uses this technique to set the tone of an introspective, Bressonian examination of Big Ideas, which carries over into the physical presence of both Casar and Seffredi, and continues through the long conversations and the sexually explicit sequences. The entire film is sparse, deliberate, and austere (some have said silly and pretentious). This technique also adds another element to the examination of performance as Breillat herself, not the actors in the film, provides this narration. A similar combination can be viewed in Radley Metzger’s Score (1974), a crown jewel from the golden age of American adult cinema that can more easily be

brought to the table. Elvira, played by Claire Wilbur, was a noted theatrical actor who first performed her role in Score in a stage production, while Betsy, played by Lynn Lowry, became a cross-over movie star more known for her work in low budget horror films such as George Romero’s The Crazies (1973) and David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975), whereas both of the leading men are played by adult film performers: Calvin Culver (Eddie) and Gerald Grant (Jack). But the film’s tone, like Anatomy of Hell, is established in the opening shots through voice over, which is also provided by a member of the crew, the film’s editor Doris Toumarkine. Toumarkine’s tone establishes a hyper-stylized form of camp, the kind parodied in a John Waters or Paul Bartel film. This narration is then layered over standard vérité shots of Wilbur performing domestic chores, which creates a combination of naturalism and artifice common in the American cinema of the 70s. These blended techniques come to full fruition in the final sex scenes where Jack takes Eddie into a secluded bedroom while his wife Elvira does the same with Betsy. Both sex scenes are shot with telephoto zooms looking through layers of texture like mirrors, satin, and a projected stag film that partially obscures the action. But it is clearly visible that Jack and Eddie

A hyper-stylized form of camp. placed under the prevailing conceptions of pornography because of its interest in eliciting sexual arousal. Score follows a swinging married couple, Elvira and Jack, as they try to seduce a naïve pair of newlyweds, Betsy and Eddie, into queer partner swapping. They must cleverly (and comically) break down the walls of their intended partners, who present a façade of bourgeois bliss comprised of Catholic purity and closeted homosexuality. The swinging couple try everything from suggestion to drugs to bed their targets, climaxing in a back and forth montage of queer sex. Score exemplifies how a pornographic film synthesizes various forms into a cohesive whole. This is most apparent in the types of performers that are

are engaging in actual, Lily Carter, who speaks of her pornographic sex, (at least the unlikely high school friendship blowjobs are real; the fucking with Jacky, played by Lily Labeau; could be staged judging from the unlikely because Anna is angle). Elvira and Betsy, introverted and shy whereas however, engage in simulated Jacky is popular and outgoing. sex acts, obscured by the stylistic The narration moves the visuals flourishes, but acted with the from landscapes to shots of Anna same level of passion as the and Jacky swimming in a “real” gay male sex. Such a secluded river. The ambient combination makes the distinction score, which recalls ’90s Lynch, useless as entirely new categories mixed with the fragile narration are necessary to describe a evokes a cinema of lost summers handful of shots in a feature and whirlwind teenage romances. length film, a point underscored This is a film that attempts, not by the reality that all four leads always successfully, at give stylistically consistent and establishing an emotional mood complimentary performances. that carries its narrative. Soon If Score exemplifies how after this erotic opening the plot pornography can be made from a unfurls in further voice over: Anna seamless assemblage of different is traveling by bus to visit her performance techniques and estranged friend Jacky who now styles, than Wasteland (Graham lives in Los Angeles. And as a Travis, 2012) is its bizarro-world brief glimpse of a gang bang reflection: a real life Logjammin’. infers, the film will follow Anna The film is notable for winning through a Dante-esq descent into America’s Adult Video Network’s the city’s sexual underworld, led award (the Oscars of porn) for by Jacky. best film in 2013 and is known for Wasteland’s failings aren’t its high production values and immediately apparent. The emphasis on narrative set up to opening narration montage is scaffold its hardcore quite effective in establishing the pornographic sex scenes. Wasteland plays like a conventional indie film that wouldn’t seem out of place on Sundance or IFC. It opens with a sequence of establishing landscapes and soft spoken, intimate voice over. We quickly come A post-coital card game of Go-Fish. to find that the narration is from Anna, played by

film’s style and tone. But once the film steps outside of this narration and gives us Lily Carter in a dialogue scene with a stranger on the bus, it quickly becomes amateur hour with the dry, affectless pronouncements of an actor with no direction simply reading lines for the camera. The characters do not shine through in the acting, and are only legible because of the exposition and the ham-fisted score that comes to dictate the emotional tone. This in itself is its own kind of assemblage of composite performance pieces: the narrative exposition, which makes sense of the images, the flat performances that move us into the sex scenes, and the actual sex itself. What’s interesting about this plot heavy film is that often the bodily performances are more convincing of the characters than the flat acting. For example, the first time Anna and Jacky have sex with each other is driven by Jacky’s palpable desire in playing the role of sexual initiator for her shy friend. The chemistry between the two stars lights up when Jacky goes down on Anna, whose reservation to let her best friend cross the boundary into intimate partner dictates her physically reserved reactions and eventually, her sexual abandon when the two lose themselves in their passion. Here the two stars are acting their roles of Anna and Jacky while Carter and Labeau perform actual sex. But once the film moves to their post-coital card game of Go-Fish, the acting

resumes its unbearable stiffness with the cadence of a cynical parody of pornography. Pornographic performances provide a cultural mash up of emotional and psychological artifice with physical reality, one that is typically considered taboo or, at the very least, vulgar. In the tradition of the narrative pornographic feature, this element of filmmaking is as foundational as the shots and cuts that make up a sequence and, as I’ve illustrated, these techniques pull double duty by forming the content that will ultimately define whether a film is pornographic, erotic, or just another art film. The composite nature of pornographic performances is neither good nor bad, but remains a crucial element of the very definition of the style, and like any other building block of motion pictures, its effectiveness depends both on the vision of the filmmakers and the talent of the performers. I have sought to consider this mode of filmmaking in proximity to the cinema as I believe that these modes of filmmaking should be considered as part of the vast cinematic tradition, and not separate from it. However, the narrative pornographic feature is but one varied genre to explore and as any jaunt into the further recesses of the internet will illustrate, the majority of pornography as it is available today is anything but narrative.

Whitney Monaghan

FOUR OBSERVATIONS ON THE COMPLEXITY OF SCREEN PERFORMANCE The "complexity" of performance can be understood not just in the conventional sense of actors performing characters but also in reality television where "being yourself" becomes a self-conscious performance.

THE GREAT MISNOMER

discourse. Complexity, I am told, is the epitome of screen performance and something all actors should aspire to. But what does it mean for a performance to be complex? Herewith, four observations:

ach year as the Hollywood awards season concludes and the international film festival circuit begins, I find myself growing tired of one phrase used to describe shorts, feature lengths and television series alike. That phrase is â&#x20AC;&#x153;complex performancesâ&#x20AC;? and it peppers both critical and popular

I. (NON)PERFORMANCE

A 25

camera scenario

records a or event

involving one or several figures. The figures present may or may not be aware of the camera. Would their actions, observed by the camera, then the director and editor, then the spectator, be considered performance? If there are figures present and they are not aware of being observed, their actions might be considered non-performances. They are not actively responding to a camera. In contrast, performance: when a camera is present and its subjects are aware that they are being recorded, they respond by altering their behaviour. Take, for example, a regular occurrence on news broadcasts: a reporter situated in a busy location deals with people passing by. They play for the camera, pulling faces, waving and poking out their tongues, hoping that someone watching at home will notice them. This is a similar phenomenon to what social scientists have described as the Hawthorne effect wherein the awareness of being studied motivates the subject to change their behaviour.1 For me, screen performance and non-performance are differentiated by awareness and intentionality. Thus, in modes of filmmaking when the cinematic apparatus is obscured we may assume that the camera captures non-performances rather than

performances because we assume that the camera observes and records with veracity, with truth. In the 1950s and 1960s, these ideas of non-performance, truthfulness and reality coalesced within the Direct Cinema and cinéma vérité styles of filmmaking, modes that documentary scholar Bill Nichols describes as observational cinema.2 However, beyond the subject’s awareness of being recorded, the simple act of observation can also alter that which is being observed. In a number of fields of science, this is known as the observer effect, a term that refers to the changes that the act of observation makes on the phenomenon being studied. Thus, to record things like temperatures, electricity currents or electron movements requires instrumentation that alters the state of these measurements. Yet in film and television it is more than the act of observation itself (regardless of the mode of filmmaking) that creates a slippage between nonperformance and performance. An example of this slippage occurs in the UK reality series Gogglebox. The series has a simple premise: to understand what television really means to audiences, we must watch people watching television. Each episode

1 Henry A. Landsberger, Hawthorne Revisited (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1958).

Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: U. Indiana, 2001).

is structured around the week’s most watched televisual events and consists of observational footage of families and friends sitting in their living rooms watching (and responding to) the box. The program is filmed with a stationary camera that is positioned like a hidden camera, close to the television in each living room. While the participants are aware of the setup, they do not respond directly to it. Because of this it feels as if we are watching something private: the nonperformance of spectatorship. Yet the series is highly stylised: a narrator introduces the participants and explains the stories, explicitly framing the responses. The editing also works unambiguously to compare and contrast the participant’s varying opinions. Through the choice of particular takes, the performance is crafted after the fact. This is reality programming, after all. Recently an anonymous source has claimed that the series has been scripted all along, that each episode is filmed in a single night (not over a week, as one might assume). The producers have denied this report. This is (non) performance at its best.

“themselves” wherein the “self” is constructed for the camera. This is the performance of persona and it is most typically seen in the realms of reality and lifestyle programming. It is also the backbone of the Hollywood star system. Consider RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality series in which participants compete against each other to be the best drag queen. The contestants are introduced in the first episode of each season. We begin the sixth season in the starry depths of outer space. A 1950s style television floats into the screen space, as a grainy black and white image of two dressmaker mannequins appears on its screen. As the camera zooms in on this image, we are transported to a warehouse workshop filled with dressmaking items and miscellaneous neon pink objects. The camera focuses on dressmaker mannequins, polystyrene heads, mirrors, lights, work desks, and clothes racks as it moves around this new location. From a door in the centre of the room, a figure emerges. It is drag queen Adore Delano, dressed in an aquamarine wig, red plastic strapless dress with matching gloves and faux fur coat. “I’m home,” she announces as she stands proudly in the middle of the workshop. Here we cut to a talking-head interview with Adore, sans drag costume. In the reality genre, this pattern of event-interview provides a space for a kind of meta-commentary as the

II. PERFORMING PERSONA

n a structured but not necessarily scripted film or television program, a figure or figures perform for a camera or audience. They do not perform in a scripted role but rather as

to the workshop and the pattern is repeated. However, this time we begin to see something new: contestants responding to other contestants. In the workshop Adore rolls her eyes at Ben, then we cut to another interview with Adore-in-boy-clothes providing commentary of the scene. The event-interview device gains complexity as more contestants are introduced and as the series progresses. Throughout the fourteen episodes, performances of drag personas are contrasted with The interview is another performance, of course. boy-clothes interviews, and eventually slippages occur. contestants discuss their actions Some facades break while others and responses to particular intensify, leaving audiences situations. Before thinking too searching for some sort of truth hard about the way this device is within their performances. All the constructed, we might consider while we are never privy to their this a space where the nonboy-names. They exist only as performing figure comments personas. upon the performances of the competition. So it seems a little III. PERFORMING odd that while he is dressed in CHARACTER(S) “boy-clothes” Danny Noriega introduces himself as Adore n actor, already Delano.3 Adore-in-boy-clothes is performing persona, is like the inner-voice of Adore observed and recorded as Delano, trashy drag queen they perform a scripted role. It is extraordinaire. The interview is this performance, the another performance, of course. performance of character, that is A second contestant, Ben de la most often considered “complex” Crème, arrives through the door by film and screen criticism in which “complexity” tends to stand in for skilled, or nuanced, or interesting, or affective. Of 3 When they are not in drag, the course the performance of contestants refer to their outfits as character is not limited to single

“boy-clothes.”

characters. For instance, in the Showtime series United States of Tara, Toni Collette portrays multiple characters, or actually the multiple personalities of one character suffering with Dissociative Identity Disorder. While these characters are typically distinguished by costume, Collette also alters her speech and adjusts her posture to articulate Tara’s changing personalities. While some performances (like this one) are indeed more skilled than others, for me there is nothing more arresting than seeing an actor on screen truly embrace and embody a character. It was Sandra Bullock’s performance in Gravity that left me white-knuckled, gripping the armrest at the cinema. There was something in her terrified breathing as her character flew uncontrolled through space that rattled in my chest and left me too gasping for air. I have seen films and television programs with performances so compelling that I have forgotten to blink. With my eyes watering, I have vowed never to forget them. Other performances I have felt in my stomach, like a flutter of butterflies. They flutter to my head and start my thought process. This is how I felt when I saw Blue is the Warmest Colour or the first volume of Lars Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac or, better still, Dennis Lavant in all but one of Leos Carax’s films. I have seen

As if the film was really a non-performance in disguise. poor performances too, a combination of bad acting and awkward dialogue but these also seem to stick with me. And then there is something like Lindsay Lohan in Paul Schrader’s The Canyons. She plays Tara, a dead-eyed former actress who has an affair with the lead actor in her boyfriend’s film. The role is perfect for Lohan, as if it was written with only her in mind. There is an emptiness to her performance that makes it seem like there is an emptiness within her, as if the film was really a non-performance in disguise. But then there are moments when we are left questioning this reading. In one, Tara and her boyfriend are asleep in their bed. Tara searches for her phone and finds it inside her boyfriend’s bedside cabinet. He wakes as she reaches for it and violently attacks her. Disaffected Lohan crumples like a piece of paper, emotion flowing through her emotionless frame. Another scene: Tara and her boyfriend have a foursome with another couple. When her boyfriend turns off the lights in their bedroom, coloured lasers

are switched on and a dreamlike electro soundtrack begins. Soon, under a sea of neon lights, they are a mess of shadows and light, limbs and hair. The boyfriend instructs the two women to kiss, which they do. But then Tara takes control of the scene, instructing her boyfriend to kiss the other man. “That’s what I want to see,” she says and watches them intently. Then, for a brief moment she looks directly into the camera. The neon lasers wash over her face. Her gaze is arresting. And then it is gone. A short digression on the subject of character: When I was in high school I was an avid viewer of Home & Away. I watched it every night after school and delighted in the opportunity to speak about it with my friends the next day. At the height of my love for the series, the character Flynn Saunders (the town doctor) was played by Martin Dingle-Wall: a typical bland soap opera actor playing a typical bland soap opera character. Seemingly overnight Dingle-Wall was replaced with Joel McIlroy and my adolescent self was confronted with the artifice of the screen. My understanding of the character was so wrapped up in the aesthetics and mannerisms of the original actor that to see another in his place was jarring. I didn’t even care for the character, his performance was not particularly nuanced or powerful or interesting or affective, but I stopped watching soon after.

IV. PERFORMING PERFORMANCE

f there is another possible layer to screen performance to consider under the topic of “complexity” it is the performance of performance. For instance, in biopics about actors or musicians, established actors perform as star personas and, at times, perform as notable characters. Several layers of intertextuality and embodiment are at play. In the 2011 biopic My Week with Marilyn, Michelle Williams portrays Marilyn Monroe, and at times embodies Marilyn Monroe as Elsie Marina in the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl directed by Laurence Olivier. My Week with Marilyn is, at its core, a film about performing. It left me reeling in the striking contrast between Williams’ performance of Monroe’s profound sadness and Monroe-as-Marina’s joyful, carefree effervescence. Then there is the body swap genre. Of course, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich is a prime example of such a film. John Malkovich stars as a fictional version of himself whose mind is invaded by people who find a portal into it and take control of him. Another body swap film worth noting is the 2003 version of Freaky Friday (perhaps this article should have been subtitled “in defence of Lindsay Lohan”). In this film, Lohan plays the rebellious daughter of sensible mother Jamie Lee Curtis. After the

two characters have an argument about who’s life is harder, they miraculously swap bodies. From this point on, Curtis plays a teenager trapped in the body of an adult while Lohan plays the role of an adult trying to be youthful trapped in a teenage body. While Lohan plays the

series begins with Maslany as Sarah Manning, a rebellious British con artist in a leather jacket. She’s on the platform at a train station when she spots a well-dressed woman behaving oddly. With her back to Sarah, the woman lines up her possessions on the platform. As Sarah approaches her, the other woman turns around. It is here that the camera finally reveals her face. She is identical, aside from slight differences in her clothing and hairstyle. This is Maslany as Elizabeth Childs. For a moment the characters look at each other as if looking into a mirror. Then Elizabeth breaks eye contact and jumps in front of a moving train. When Sarah runs from the scene she stops to steal Elizabeth’s handbag and so begins her transformation into Beth (or, to be precise Sarah-as-Beth). We watch as she dyes her hair, alters her speech patterns, perfects her Canadian accent and attempts to emulate Elizabeth’s stance, gestures and movements. Her aim is to steal Elizabeth’s wealth but she soon gets caught up in something much bigger. Orphan Black is a series about human cloning and, as I have noted, Maslany plays several other characters. These include “The German,” Katja Obinger; Allison Hendrix, a suburban Canadian “soccer mom;” American PhD student Cosima Niehaus; a deranged Ukranian

As if looking into a mirror. teenage daughter effortlessly, there is incredible nuance in her awkwardness after the body swap. Her presence is newly authoritative but she appears both at home and alienated in her skin. The layers of performance collide when one considers Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black in which Tatiana Maslany plays several characters that are identical in appearance. The

serial killer named Helena; an evil corporate CEO named Rachel Duncan; and a transgender man named Tony Sawicki. The characters are so distinct from one another that it is easy to forget that a single actor portrays them. However, it is not simply Maslany’s mastery of multiple characters that makes the series so special. No, the specialness happens when the clones become aware of one another and, because of circumstance, are forced to act as each other. For instance, in the first season Sarah commits to being in two places at once. As Beth, she must confront a serial killer who is targeting the clones. Meanwhile, in her life as Sarah she is given a single chance to meet with her young daughter. She convinces Allison to take on the role of Sarah for a night while she continues to play Beth and solve the crime. It is here that we see Allison’s transformation from clean-cut suburban mother to rebellious con artist. And, even though she portrays both Sarah and Allison, somehow Maslany makes it obvious that we are witness to one character performing as another. Allison-asSarah is slightly excessive in her gait and also in her British accent. Her gestures are emphasised and her dialogue is just shy of unnatural. In a more recent episode Sarah performs as Allison, yet this is complicated further: Allison has been checked into a rehab facility and is required to perform a body-swap role-play with her husband,

Donnie. The result: Maslany-asSarah-as-Allison-as-Donnie. This clusterfuck of performances is breathtaking. CODA

hile it is tempting to conclude this piece on the assertion that Orphan Black shows us what truly complex performance really looks like, I must resist. Why? Because the phrase “complex performance” as it is commonly used in screen criticism is a misnomer. Drawing apart different layers of complexity on screen as I see them, I have come to realise that there is complexity to all screen performances. This complexity is in the slippages between non-performance, performance and personas, in the embodiment of characters, in the performance of performance, or the performance of performance of performance. Although critics who praise films for their “complex performances” might have us believe that complexity is synonymous with good and that such performances only exist within highbrow films and quality television, there is equal and perhaps more interesting complexity to the lowbrow: the realms of reality programming, drag queens, science-fiction, and of course Lindsay Lohan.

Aaron Cutler

STARRING MEXICO CITY The success of the 1943 Mexican suspense film "Another Dawn" is a culmination of several performances — not just actors and actresses, but also the "performances" of the director and film technicians.

e often leave films talking about the performances in them. Such discussions typically revolve around the work of human actors; sometimes (as in the case of Balthazar the donkey, or a particularly emotive canine), a non-human animal is invoked. Yet whenever we evaluate a film director’s work, we are also analyzing performance, in much the same way that we do when we consider how a maestro handled his or her orchestra. Since acting is fundamentally a matter of technique, we bring additional

considerations of performance to the work of people typically thought of as film technicians. A film’s cinematographer, sound designer, and editor are all, in different ways, performing for us, and it is usually easy to tell how well or poorly their performances have gone. The collaborative nature of cinema entails that many different performers contribute to any one film. We even frequently expand our performance critiques to include what might seem to be inanimate objects, whether single buildings—such as the emotive,

take place in any city in the contemporary world.

expressive Overlook Hotel of The Shining (1980)—or entire cities made up of them. (In how many films has New York played the leading role?) Several of the medium’s most intriguing works have inevitably been ones that place different levels of performance into dialogue with each other in ways that catch our attention. One wonderful, undervalued example is the 1943 Mexican suspense film Distinto Amanecer (henceforth referred to as Another Dawn), recently restored in a beautiful 35mm print by its home country’s Cineteca Nacional. The film’s power depends overtly upon the contributions of and collaborations between its five central performers. Its director, Julio Bracho; its two main human actors, Pedro Armendáriz and Andrea Palma; its director of photography, Gabriel Figueroa; and its chief location, Mexico City, all worked together to build a fiction about discovering the safeties and dangers of one’s surroundings. Their collaboration resulted in a story that illustrated problems of modern urban life in a way that no other Mexican film of its era had prior to it, and that few fiction films made anywhere else have done since. Another Dawn begins with a rejection of specificity through the film’s opening title card:

This message was likely added by the film’s producers in an effort to placate censors. It soon gives way to concrete locations that viewers of the time would have recognized: The Palacio de Bellas Artes (aka the then-nine year-old Palace of Fine Arts), traffic-lined streets, and the Palacio de Correos de Mexico, the country’s main post office. Issues of the city’s chief daily newspaper, the Excélsior, are soon shown being printed with the front-page announcement that a union leader has been murdered at the Palacio de Correos, followed by the sight of paperboys loudly hawking the news outside the Excélsior’s head offices. The city is thus established as landmark-filled, with people moving between sites of interest. At the same time, many of the film’s images have suggested congestion—swarms of cars, crowds of people, and even large piles of newspapers—which would seem to make free movement and access to information difficult. An image of a traffic light soon appears, offering regulation (ironically, we will see) as a solution. Mexican audiences were not only unused to seeing their country’s capital depicted in this way—they were unaccustomed to seeing it onscreen at all. The setting for many Mexican commercial films that had been released in the years shortly

The characters in this drama hold no relation to people in real life. The dramatic conflict that is here presented holds universal characteristics and could therefore

Mexican cinema” that lasted until the late 1960s. A great number of the films from its early days, including Bracho’s debut feature, conveyed an accordingly optimistic spirit. Another Dawn was the former experimental theater director Bracho’s fourth film, following ¡Ay, qué tiempos señor don Simón! and two epic period works, História de un gran amor (1942, aka Story of a Great Love) and La virgen que forjó una patria (1942, aka The Saint That Forged a Country). These three films shared a cheerful outlook from which Another Dawn broke away. Bracho and his co-screenwriter Xavier Villaurrutia, working Octavio reads a newspaper opposite a menacing loosely from Spanish man in a black suit and dark sunglasses. expatriate Max Aub’s unproduced play La vida conyugal (1942, aka Married preceding Another Dawn, whether Life), set out to work against the they were dramas or tragedies, grain of their country’s cinematic was countryside. These films had output. Other popular Mexican included Julio Bracho’s debut films of the time, in addition to feature, ¡Ay, qué tiempos señor taking place in pastoral settings, don Simón! (1941, aka Oh What had unfolded largely during the Times, Mr. Simon!), a broad daytime. Another Dawn, by musical farce that had shattered contrast, transitions from the national box-office records. At a morning news announcements to moment when the Second World the city at night, illuminated War was impacting the output of largely by flashing neon lights several previously dominant from department stores and national cinemas, Mexican studio nightclubs. The film will take work was thriving both in terms of place over the course of this production and of popularity, night, during which Octavio resulting in a period commonly (played by Pedro Armendáriz), a known as “the Golden Age of fellow union organizer, first

appears reading the newspaper on a trolley opposite a menacing man in a black suit and dark sunglasses. Octavio seeks documents stashed in a postal box at the Palacio de Correos de Mexico that will implicate the city’s corrupt governor in his colleague’s murder. He also hopes to stay alive for long enough to do so, and steps off the trolley with the man in black walking at a distance of several meters behind him. As the two men move purposefully forward, Octavio strides in and out of light, doing his best to disappear. The image of a hunted man in shadowy flight might seem familiar from the Hollywood noir and French poetic realist films made contemporarily to Another Dawn, a fact implicitly acknowledged by the name of the film’s recently formed production studio, Films Mundiales, S.A. (“Global Films”). By 1943, though, the more prominent films in these genres had generally abandoned urban documentation beyond establishing shots and occasional inserts of street movement that lent atmospheric grit to their set-bound action. Major exceptions—such as the haunting Hollywood horror film The Seventh Victim (1943), in which characters roam Greenwich Village in a similarly nocturnal way to how Another Dawn’s people explore Mexico City—were often low-budget films of relatively low priority to their studios that had been shot with an eye towards saving

money. The scale on which these works were conceived was not at all comparable to that of Another Dawn, which was very clearly an “A” picture. Its two leads, for instance, were well-known to Mexican audiences. The darkly handsome, smooth-skinned thirtyone year-old Armendáriz had established himself as a romantic icon several years prior to its making. The sultry twenty-eight year-old Andrea Palma, his costar as well as Bracho’s real-life sister, had become no less than the first female icon of Mexican cinema a decade prior with her role as a poor young rural woman driven into prostitution in the popular melodrama La mujer del puerto (1934, aka The Woman of the Port). Their characters find each other inside a movie theater, into which Octavio wanders in an effort to lose his tail. The moment in which he sits near her (surrounded by a sea of real-life Mexico City residents) is an illustrative instance of collaboration between four of the film’s key performers—Bracho, the two actors, and Figueroa. In Bracho’s previous features, the actors, camerawork, and editing had moved together across smooth, continuous lines of action whose narrative shifts had come through close-ups in which eyes spoke louder than mouths. This is what happens in Another Dawn as both Octavio and the camera turn towards Palma’s character, Julieta, enjoying herself as she watches an escapist musical—¡Ay,

characters as though keeping viewers emotionally close to them, much like he does in this first encounter. His manner of lighting Another Dawn, however, differed from his approach on other films. Figueroa had photographed Bracho’s first three features in particular in standard high-key lighting, keeping the films’ lead actors in clear focus as they took their dramatic decisions. For Bracho’s fourth, he experimented with low-key lighting, making an effort to follow the actors while cloaking them in layers of shadow. This effect continues from the movie theater out onto the street, where Octavio follows Julieta after she leaves. As they walk and They find each other inside a movie theater. ride a taxi together through narrow alleyways and qué tiempos señor don Simón!, no curving roads, he tells her that he less. The two people share needs a place to hide until he can glances, and both actors pour board a train out of town the their respective star powers into following morning. Julieta agrees gazes loaded with bittersweet to shelter him inside her recognition. The revelations that apartment, and will also consider come shortly afterwards arrive leaving with him. She confides with no surprise: Octavio and that she is currently impoverished Julieta were sweethearts at and trapped in an unhappy university, and are now meeting marriage to a tight-fisted again for the first time in eight bureaucrat named Ignacio, and years. she hints that she dreams of The man directly behind the getting away, leading to Octavio’s camera, Gabriel Figueroa, shot explicit invitation for her to join Bracho’s first four features as well him. At several points during their as many other important “Golden early scenes, as well as in many Age” films. In Bracho’s three later ones, Octavio and Julieta’s initial films, Figueroa’s camera faces are the only visibly lit parts had confidently glided between of their bodies; at other times, not

even their expressions are discernible, and the people seem to be struggling not to vanish into darkness. It is often the city that threatens to devour them, with buildings and cars casting long shadows over the people like hungry mouths closing around food. As the film scholar Charles Ramírez Berg argues about Another Dawn in his forthcoming book The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films, the film’s visual scheme contains existential dimensions. Octavio and Julieta are constantly grappling with shadows external to them, and they carry with them their own shadows of former lives. They soon arrive at the small apartment, which Julieta inhabits with Ignacio and with her adolescent brother Juanito (played by Narciso Busquets). She and Octavio begin a fond conversation with Ignacio about the history that they all share. (Ignacio is played by Alberto Galán, a successful character actor in the George Sanders mold who was appearing in his third Bracho film.) We learn that the three adults went to university together; though the school is not named, the film’s dialogue implies that it was the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and that the trio worked with the student strikes that helped the university gain independence from government control in the 1920s. Their reminiscences are soon

disrupted, though, by the frontdoor appearance of the mysterious black-clad man who had been following Octavio and who now enters the apartment taking notes as an “electricity inspector.” After he leaves, Julieta crosses her arms and cynically calls him “a perfect spy,” reminding viewers that in these days, freedom from government influence looks unlikely. The happy past travels with the film’s lead characters like dead weight. The contrasts between Arméndariz and Palma’s performances are key to expressing Another Dawn’s sense of hopelessness. At the time of the film’s release, some reviews complained that Arméndariz, with his smooth and perfectly shaved skin, erect posture, and well-kept suit, was unbelievable as a union leader. Today this seems like the point. Through the actor’s stiff and declamatory performance, Octavio becomes more an idea of a man than an actual one, to his fellows’ detriment. Whenever another person (most notably Julieta) expresses troubles to Octavio, his common response is to raise his head high and declare that he will solve the person’s problems through fighting the government. Armendáriz’s lover’s presence makes Octavio ring hollow. His greedy gaze often seems more engaged with the future than with the people directly in front of him; what excites Octavio more than anything, we sense, is not individual companionship, but

rather the possibility of the masses joining his side. The future, so tangibly immediate to Octavio, looks distant to Julieta. In contrast to Armendáriz’s continual stares upwards, Palma plays Julieta as constantly looking straight ahead or at the ground, as though attempting to shield her eyes from an enveloping cloud of melancholy. Palma had once served as a makeup assistant to Marlene Dietrich, and had modeled her performance in La mujer del puerto after those of the older German actress. Nearly a decade later, both Dietrich and Palma’s great film talent still lay in drawing viewers towards them. Their faces registered defeat as a fact of daily life with which a companion might sympathize, and to which such solidarity could bring relief. The two womens’ presences differed in several important ways, though, which worked to make Julieta’s circumstances more heartbreaking. Unlike Dietrich, who even in her early film roles had conveyed the sad wisdom of age, Palma’s features were more smooth than weathered, giving the sense that hardship had come upon a sweet girl prematurely. Furthermore, in opposition to Dietrich’s calm, slow movements, Palma often bustled inside her frames, jittering back and forth in search of ways to escape them. Julieta finds escape difficult to achieve, since the thing that she is ultimately looking to flee is her

life, from which she sees no real exit. She watches as Ignacio, who has shown unspoken jealousy towards Octavio for his wife’s affections, eventually leaves her with Octavio in the apartment— ostensibly to pick up the documents on the fugitive’s behalf, but also to visit his mistress. Some time afterwards (after several evaded threats from menacing government agents), she tells Octavio that she must go to work, since “some things, like hunger, can’t wait.” Bracho and his longtime editor Gloria Schoemann then execute a dissolve from a painting of a nude woman to an image of Julieta poised in an evening dress at the bar of Mexico City’s Club Tabu, where we discover that she supports her family as a fichitera, or female escort (and likely prostitute) to male nightclub guests. Though fichiteras had previously appeared in Mexican films, it was unusual for one to be played by a star of Palma’s stature, and the announcement of Julieta’s profession would likely have surprised many of Another Dawn’s viewers. Bracho and his sister boldly chose to have her embody a type of person who was common in Mexico City, though officially invisible from it. Within the classical mode of film acting, star actors gain their power through their ability to win our attraction, and often succeed most gloriously when they best convince us that their characters’ struggles apply to ours. For many

audience members at the time, seeing Palma playing Julieta’s conditions could have offered them a shock of recognition. Throughout the film up to now, the actress has guardedly played Julieta as a strategist weighing how much of herself to reveal. This rarely proves truer than in the film’s Club Tabu scenes, where she courts men and tries to appease her suspicious pimp’s ego while periodically looking over to the table where she has stationed Octavio, as well as around the club to make sure that no one has recognized him. Octavio, for his part, sits intently watching her, accepting what she has to do while hoping that he can rescue her from it. In an important sense, though, he will not be able to do so. Julieta has lived by selling herself to men—men at the club, as well as Ignacio. To leave with Octavio for another city would be a variation on the theme, and in some ways a worse option than the others, since what he offers her is largely immaterial. Palma allows us to see this truth registering across Julieta’s face until the film’s ending, during which Octavio enters Mexico City’s central train station with his documents in hand against the backdrop of an approaching dawn. Ignacio and Juanito have accompanied him to see him off while Julieta has ostensibly stayed behind. He steps aboard; she then surprisingly rushes into the station and chases him onto the

train. The two former lovers stare at one another, and the film cuts back and forth between them until Figueroa’s camera pushes in on Julieta’s tear-struck face. Suddenly, we switch to views of the train cars leaving the station, closing with an overhead shot— and then the camera lowers, slowly and patiently, until it rests on Julieta and Juanito standing side by side on the platform as they watch the train pull away. Ignacio appears to be delighted, and when her little brother asks her why she didn’t go with Octavio, she simply shrugs: “I would have cried more if I had.” She changes the topic to getting Juanito to school on time as the three people walk through the station portal, which opens out onto their city. Triumphant music closes the film, though the potential uplift of this finale is complicated by what the film’s five main performers have worked together to show leading up to it. Bracho and Figueroa now record Palma walking without Armendáriz, once again left to fend for herself within a city that— like a classical film star—could resonate for anyone who lives in the contemporary world. Thanks for research help to Nelson Carro and Raúl Miranda López of the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City, as well as to Charles Ramírez Berg, who shared with me unpublished excerpts from his forthcoming book The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films (to be published by The University of Texas Press in 2015).

REVIEWS DON DRAPER’S DANCE Review of “Mad Men” by Elliott Logan

as it gradually unfolds, its movement into the future potentially complicating the past that is already laid down. So where or how does our judgment and interpretation draw the line between a moment, an episode, a season, and a series? My review of a Breaking Bad episode for Screen Machine faced this same question, and my response then was to put the blinkers on and narrow down, homing in on a fragment. But what if the moment that moves us demands otherwise? This question was made especially salient by the moment that moved me to propose this piece on “the Mad Men I’ve been watching lately”: the seemingly final scene of the seventh season’s penultimate episode, “The Strategy”. Alone together in the office after hours, Peggy and Don wrestle with a recalcitrant pitch for the fast food company Burger Chef. As their conversation turns to their own lives, Peggy comes upon what sounds like the perfect line as Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” comes onto the radio. “They’re playing it all the time,” says Peggy, focussed on the work. “Do you think that’s a coincidence?” asks Don. He stands, extends his hand in an invitation to Peggy, who accepts, and the two slowly dance. Peggy places her head on Don’s chest, and, moved by the contact, he plants a kiss atop her

his piece was proposed in a vague way, as something like “a review of the Mad Men I’ve been watching lately”. On reflection, the haziness of that proposition seemed to me to capture something like the strange difficulty of “reviewing” serial television, an issue I’ve already given some consideration elsewhere on this site.1 The difficulty stems from the species of television serial that typifies the kind of excellence witnessed over the last fifteen or so years. It is one that, for its fullest appreciation, demands we intimately inhabit the complex mesh of a show’s internal history

1 See Elliott Logan, "A moment, against the turning of the earth," Screen Machine, Issue 3, 2012.

head, as the Sinatra swells over the soundtrack and the camera pulls back in what we feel must surely be the final gesture of the episode as the image fades out. But then from black we fade in again, for four short scenes that form an unexpected coda, upsetting our carefully laid sense of an ending. In his typically perceptive and insightful review of the episode, Sean O’Sullivan describes the scene of Don and Peggy’s dance as “a lurid piece of fan service.”2 I at first felt like calling this judgment “ungenerous,” but that would cast the scene as some unfortunate mishap in need of critical charity. Nevertheless, O’Sullivan’s charge seems to me an important one that needs to be taken seriously, because it hits the heart of the scene’s risk, but misses, I think, its richest reward. For me it was simply one of the most strongly and deeply moving images of renewed contact between two people I have seen. I say “simply” but at the same time there is nothing really simple about it. As George Toles’s writing frequently reminds us, it is not always the case that the feelings and emotions stirred by the most moving works of art form a deceptive veil. Perhaps just as often, it is our defensive resistance to the apparent obviousness of strongly felt sentiment that gets in the way.

Rather than “seeing through” whatever is being put before us, our distanced superiority might obscure whatever is being revealed, making us flatly incapable of involvement in its depths.3 And far from lulling us into some unreflective stupor, such experiences of feeling demand to be taken account of. As Toles writes, “We are provoked by the strength of our response to interrogate the elements that brought it forth, to find out what the images have spoken to inside us that has led us to believe in their significance.” What leads me to believe in the revelatory force of Don and Peggy’s embrace? The close of the extraordinary sixth season (“In Care Of”) saw the ever-more destructively alcoholic Don forced to take a leave of absence from the company, following his truthful but disastrous performance during the Hershey’s pitch.4 Don’s

For wonderful examples and examinations of this idea as it matters to our appreciation of certain films, see George Toles' essays “No Bigger than Zuzu’s Petals: Dreaming the Real in It’s a Wonderful Life,” “Toward a Reading of Random Harvest,” and “Obvious Mysteries in Fargo,” in his A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). 4 https://youtu.be/gxMef0hYIWw. It’s a great shame that whoever uploaded this clip saw fit to cut out Don’s crucial last line of the scene: “If I had my way you would never advertise. You shouldn’t have someone like me

Sean O’Sullivan, “Living in the Not Knowing,” Kritik, 19 May 2014.

leave echoes Freddy Rumsen’s quiet drinking-related ejection in season two’s “Six Month Leave,” an exit that opened up an office for Peggy. So the first few episodes of this (short) seventh season has therefore been concerned with Don’s absence from Sterling Cooper & Partners, with what the place and its people are like without him around.5 In the compelling third episode, “Field Trip,” Roger tells Don he is welcome back at work. Don, secretly rudderless without a purposeful place to be each day, anticipates slipping right back into his old role. Part of the brilliance of “Field Trip” is its acknowledgment of the fantasy we share with Don, a fantasy disrupted by his calamitous passage from the sixth to the seventh season: that he is singularly possessed of a capacity to step into the world and, by the simple power of his gaze and voice, bring murky chaos and incomprehensibility into

clarifying alignment and crystalline focus. Don’s return to work doesn’t match his famed entrances of so many successful pitches, beginning with the seminal salvage of the Lucky Strike pitch in the first ever episode (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”).6 His walk through the halls is initially presented as his anxious imagination of returning to a place he no longer recognises and which no longer recognises him, and his presence in the office is greeted with nostalgic affection by some but, for many, is an unexpected disruption that brings only a day of disorder and rancour in its train. Don’s time is spent anticlimactically, waiting alone as the partners hold an emergency meeting to decide his fate. The episode ends with the partners issuing a list of written conditions for his comeback, each targeted at the maverick behaviours (drinking, reckless improvisation) that make Don the dangerous and compelling centre of our involvement in Mad Men itself. (Perhaps most galling for us as viewers is this stricture outlined by Bert Cooper: “You are to stick to the script in meetings, and that

telling that boy what a Hershey bar is; he already knows.” 5 As was the case with Breaking Bad’s final season, AMC (or perhaps just their advertising sales department) have seen fit to split Mad Men’s final season in two parts, seven episodes each, separated by about one year of development and production. I suppose there might be some kind of discussion to be had about whether this constitutes one season or two, but let’s just agree to treat these seven episodes as a more or less discrete body of work for now and call it the seventh season.

My understanding of Mad Men is indebted to Toles’s astonishing essay on the series, which is built around his brilliantly illuminating account of that scene. See: George Toles, “Don Draper and the Promises of Life,” in Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock (eds), Television Aesthetics and Style (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

means the script will be approved by the people in this room.”) Cooper slides the contract across the table, and Don considers it, his face taut with concern. The camera pushes into a close-up, scrutinising in anticipation of his response, which Hamm holds back for a beat or so. He then breaks the dam, but the release of pressure is not an explosion, only an instant emptying-out, merely a resigned “Okay” followed by a wry shrug of not exactly surrender (there is no sense of loss) or of acceptance (the gesture is not really a pleased one, either). But before we can figure out the feeling and sense of his expression, the opening bars of the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “If 6 was 9” come in loud atop the image, and the episode cuts to black. The magnificence of these closing moments reaches its greatest height in these very final instants, orchestrated so that the sense of a vacuum-like letdown of pressured anticipation is somehow in synch with the strutting declaration of the bass chords that open “If 6 Was 9,” the shimmer of the cymbals a beat later lending smoothness to what is otherwise a shockingly sharp cut to black. Returning to the moment repeatedly, I continue to discover the same charge of feeling carried off by its arrangement and timing of competing gestures, hopes, expectations, and tones, which are somehow handled to clash and join. Kept alive is the tension

between our wish for Don to be the focal point of some kind of stunningly defiant orchestration of the world around him, to restore to perfect order the often shattered fragments of his life, and the episode’s insistently prosaic rejoinders in the face of this fantasising, not only on Don’s part, but on ours also. Is the union between Don and Peggy that so deeply moved me at the end of “The Strategy” such a fantasy, stripped of the selfreflexive irony on display in “Field Trip”? Or is it something like an answer or response to that episode’s reminder that there is often something childish and destructive lurking within our wish for the world and our place within it to be brought into clarifying alignment? My sense of the scene hangs upon the key gesture of Don’s response to Peggy tenderly laying her head upon his chest. Don’s smile of pleasant contentment gives way as he is taken aback by the contact and warmth. But his reticence is slowly overcome as a deep well of feeling rises up within. Hamm somehow captures that inner constriction of the chest and throat as we are overwhelmed in a way that defies easy containment, definition, or explanation. It is as if he is just now realising something (even if not apprehending or understanding it) he has known for a long time, and come close to on occasion in the past, but always drawn back from for fear of letting slip his grasp on his cut-

out sense of self-image. Pressing a kiss atop Peggy’s head, and holding her there, reminds us of their past moments of shared contact over the years. These have been, in various ways, fleeting, kept back from any full release of feeling or commitment, or have been alloyed by loss and anguish. Don’s extension of his hand in “The Strategy” calls to mind the final scene of “The Suitcase.” The morning after Peggy has accompanied Don through the night of Anna’s death, Don places his hand atop Peggy’s as they look over some work on his desk, and holds it as they keep each other’s gaze, acknowledging what they have shared. After a short moment, Don releases his grip and they move on with the day and its business. Near the end of the fifth season’s eleventh episode (“The Other Woman”), Peggy tells Don she is leaving for another firm. She offers the seated Don a handshake, but he clasps her hand in his, and kisses it. A tear rolls down Peggy’s cheek, and she slowly withdraws her hand, as he lets his go slack. In the light of these earlier scenes, the word I fall upon trying to characterise the feeling expressed by the way Don plants his kiss atop Peggy’s head, and leaves his face pressed into her hair, is “need.” At this moment his refusal to in any way avoid their need for each other’s companionship and care is one of the most important things he might ever do, a chance that if

missed or held back from can never be recovered. My sense that something as ultimate as this is at stake in their embrace is justified by their talk that sets the scene for this dance, talk about what has become or will never become of their lives, about things they can and cannot remember. (“What do you have to worry about?” Peggy asks Don. It seems to unravel the sureness with which he has just consoled her own fears, and in Hamm’s delivery, which carries the uncertainty of someone unused to speaking out-loud when no-one else is in the room, it is as if we hear Draper speak more clearly and directly than we ever have before: “That I never did anything. And that I don’t have anyone.”) It is this fear of a life’s total disintegration that their embrace responds to. But in the gradual melting of Don’s initial reticence we see that the achievement of this contact between he and Peggy, not only one of reunion but of renewal, relies on his surrender, or refusing to hold himself back in reserve as a hedge against a threatening loss of control. For me this helps account for the astonishingly moving force of their reflection in the conference room mirrors down the left hand side of the screen. It might seem a contrivance, an emphatic attempt to ram home a sense of achieved unity and harmony through pictorial balance, a reading inline with the suspicion that the scene as a whole is no more than

a blindingly sentimental manipulation of our desires as slavish fans. But as the camera draws back it allows a vertical window frame that forms a solid column of black to wipe out the reflection, cancelling Don and Peggy’s ghosted doubles projected upon the glass. The expressive effect is not just to unify what is split. The force it carries is one of redirected attention, away from a vanishing phantom image towards this man and woman as they are, together, just now. The despair and terror that lurk as strong and dangerous currents only just below the rippled surface of Don and Peggy’s conversation is very real and justified, because the fears they share are of nothing less than the irrecoverable loss of not only missing one’s own life, but in the process of missing another’s life too, the life we share together.7 The other Mad Men moment that moved me as strongly as this came only a week later, with the final scene of the season. The pivotal events of “Waterloo” are the moon landing, the unexpected death of Bert Cooper that very same night, and the following morning Roger Sterling’s attempt to wrest control of the firm back towards he and

Draper and away from the mechanistic rationality of Jim Cutler and his IBM 360. (Much is made of how the television broadcast of the landing provides an opportunity for the disparate members of the ensemble cast to be joined in common. As well, we see Cooper appreciate Armstrong’s famous words; “Bravo,” he says.) As the partners and employees together mourn Cooper’s death while also celebrating their highly profitable sale to McCann Erickson (which leaves Don in control of creative), Don walks down the stairs to his office on his own. Offscreen, a voice we must have known we would never hear again calls out: “Don, my Boy,” we hear Bert say. Don turns, and sees Cooper standing at the bottom of the staircase landing. Cooper slowly sidles into what at first seems a simple vocal rendition of “The Best Things in Life Are Free,” but which becomes a complete albeit modest musical number, replete with backing score and dancing secretaries. Don first looks as bewildered as surely we are, yet as the number develops into its brassy joy, incomprehensibility gives way to a kind of delight. But as Cooper’s song wraps up, and he turns and shimmies away from Don towards the office at the end of the hall, we see on Hamm’s face the expression of a man confronting a vision or experience of unfathomable depth. Overwhelmed, he sits against the secretarial desk outside his old office, at which his

7 My sense of this theme in Mad Men is indebted to Robert Pippin’s writing on these subjects in Henry James. See: Robert B. Pippin, Henry James and Modern Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

old secretary, Miss Blankenship, died in episode nine of season four (“The Beautiful Girls”). Towards the end of that episode, Cooper stood by as Roger and Joan wrote Blankenship’s eulogy. As they gave her occupation as ‘executive secretary’, he interjected: “She was born in 1898 in a barn, she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.” What do we make of these echoes? How are they felt in this moment? Don is throughout Mad Men gifted with the ability to see the dead, and to hear their voices. In his brother Adam, who he sees with the rope burn of his season one suicide still cut across his throat, and in PFC Dinkins who in season six he sees with a missing arm and a hole in his face, Don’s vision is one that understands death as unable to make us whole. Is his and our wish for the kind of union we witness at the end of “The Strategy” so childish and sentimental, then, in the face of such an acute sensitivity to the stakes of life? To the fact of life being always ghosted by not just death itself, but also by the moments of irrecoverable loss and waste that haunt the living? The two dances that mark the closing episodes of Mad Men’s seventh season issue just this challenge.

PRE-TALKIE SALVATION Review of “The Immigrant” by Andrew Gilbert

ames Gray’s The Immigrant is, at its core, a religious melodrama about individual salvation. The film is striking for its un-ironic sentimentalism that is almost jarring in today’s festival climates, where irony and selfawareness are often received as the paragon of cinematic sophistication. Gray’s style is at once a devotional to the ability of the melodramatic to give audiences an entry point into the emotional experiences of his characters, while moving away from a self-reflexive emphasis on the medium itself in favor of the lives and experiences that the cinema is capable of depicting. The Immigrant delicately balances a nuanced social exposé of a culture built on corruption while anchoring every tragedy and triumph in the sentiments of its characters. Upon closer inspection one can see how the film echoes a bygone era of filmmaking, pulling its thematic

influences directly from the immigrant dramas of the American silent cinema while unabashedly appealing to the audience’s sympathy in a manner that recalls Chaplin and Griffith. Sharing more than just a title with Chaplin’s famous Mutual short, The Immigrant (2013) mirrors the earlier film’s iconic imagery with an opening shot of a man in 1921 gazing upon the Statue of Liberty as a steamship pulls into dock. Also like Chaplin’s Tramp, the passengers of that ship are met with oppressive poverty once on shore, albeit without the great comedian’s hallmark slapstick. The gazing man of the opening shot is Bruno (Joaquin Phoenix), who we soon come to discover is prowling the docks in search of a fresh young naïf to ensnare, and quickly zeroes in on Eva (Marion Cotillard), a Polish immigrant who arrives with her sister to escape the aftermath of the First World War. Not unlike the set-up of George Loan Tucker’s silent melodrama Traffic in Souls (1913), which features two Swedish sisters who arrive at Ellis Island only to be greeted by a prostitution ring lying in wait for them, The Immigrant quickly establishes its fateful pairing of the religious, strong-willed Eva with the charming but dangerous Bruno. The rest of the film charts their growing entanglements as they inch toward the possibility of redemption from the codependent circumstances they find themselves in. By the subtle

manipulations of Bruno, Eva is quickly separated from her tubercular sister, whose quarantine on the island is exploited as leverage to push Eva into prostitution in order to pay for her sister’s release. While Tucker’s film establishes the complexities of the ruse that ensnares his unsuspecting immigrants, Gray reveals Bruno’s process as one of appealing to the emotional desires of those he corrupts. Eva is not forced into prostitution with the imposing physical brutality that Tucker depicts, but is emotionally coerced for the sake of her sister’s well-being. In seeming contradiction to his caustic pimping of Eva, Bruno falls desperately in love with her, an obsession that turns deadly when a potential suitor attempts to take Eva from him. The suitor’s accidental death at the hands of Bruno forces the pair to flee from pursuing cops. However, Eva, despite her confessed hatred and mistrust of Bruno, cannot bring herself to abandon him to his own Machiavellian devices. In one of the most openly religious sequences of the film, Eva goes to confession where a nosey and possessive Bruno stands within earshot, listening in on her private conversation with the priest. Gazing toward the heavens in a composition that recalls Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, she confesses how she uses her body for money, how she allows Bruno to use her, and how

she will not go to heaven for her sins. The priest, after explaining her plight as God’s punishment, tells her that “all souls can be saved” and asks, “Does the shepherd not rejoice even more when the lost lamb returns to the fold?” More than just the proselytizing of an onscreen character, these biblical aphorisms structure the thematic movement of the film. When the priest tells Eva that she must leave Bruno, she responds with a move that seals their intertwining fates: she proclaims that she must help Bruno, not by saving him, but to set him on the path of his own salvation. She must believe that he can be saved. It is here that Gray replaces the capitalist logic of making your own opportunity in America with a variation that depicts spiritual redemption as a boot-straps endeavor: no one can save you, you must save yourself. This convergence of destinies is driven home in the final shot, which looks out of a window as Eva and her sister finally escape from Ellis Island on a small boat, framed next to a mirror reflecting Bruno as he walks away, after having exhausted his resources to procure their escape. The composition allows for both characters to move in the same spiritual direction—forward toward redemption—while their bodies drift away from each other. Their future paths are threaded together by their mutual salvation, which Gray depicts as a self-actualization that enables a

means of escaping their moral plight, and not simply being scooped out of the jaws of desperation by a kind hearted benefactor (as in Traffic in Souls). Yet Gray is a bit unclear on exactly what salvation entails. Does Bruno recognize that he can be good (read: less exploitative of others) and does Eva accept that she is “not nothing” as she proclaims? Or is their reciprocation of good deeds enough? Their situations are not suddenly different: they remain poor, racially persecuted immigrants in a hostile land. But their understanding of themselves has shifted, and a possible righteous path awaits them, whatever that may be. Drawing further from its pre-talkie predecessors, The Immigrant recalls the salvation narrative of Reginald Barker’s The Italian (1915), which follows the moral descent of an impoverished immigrant, who saves his soul in the film’s final moments by rejecting wickedness, even though he remains the destitute victim of injustice. There is the potential for a dangerous religious obscurantism here that favors an ethereal salvation over the material realities of their situation. But Gray’s sentimental melodrama is foremost a humanist film that privileges the individual experience—their feelings and desires—over favoring the system itself, which often runs the risk of depicting the

characters as the helpless victims of a tragic history.

early in the film with an image of one of his tall, thin iron sculptures of a human figure as it casts a shadow upon a wall. At first, both sculpture and shadow are standing still, but then the shadow begins to pull away stage right, as though making a dramatic exit. This shade could stand for Mohassess leaving the world. He is also leaving his work behind, as we learn that he often did. The flamboyantly gay, chain-smoking, hoarsely laughing, and very present fellow is shown seated comfortably on his sofa, telling Farahani’s camera his life story. When he left Iran for good following his brother’s 2006 death, he says, he chose to take few of his paintings and sculptures with him. From among the works he possessed that he knew he wouldn’t bring to Italy, he gave one to each of his nieces, and then destroyed the rest. “I didn’t want to leave anything for scavengers,” claims Mohassess during “A Room, A Green Couch,” the first and longest section of Farahani’s fourchapter film. “I have made my living from this work and I enjoyed it emotionally and spiritually.” This is one possible solution offered to the mystery of why Mohassess got rid of so much of his art. Like some other possibilities that the film raises, it fails to satisfy entirely. His claims that society was too ignorant to appreciate his works, to name one, are challenged by their present-day sales for exorbitant sums, as well as by descriptions

LATE WORK Review of “Fifi Howls From Happiness” by Aaron Cutler

ifi Howls from Happiness depicts life after death. The Iranian directorcinematographer Mitra Farahani’s documentary—which premiered at last year’s Berlinale and has since played at numerous festivals—focuses on one life and death in particular. They are those of Bahman Mohassess, a famed, reclusive Iranian modernist artist that the filmmaker tracked down to the lavish single-bedroom hotel room in Rome he inhabited during his final years. Farahani, a former painter long fascinated with Mohassess, worked with a small number of crew members to record conversations with the seventy-one year-old man during the months before his July 2010 death. She marks his last day

of commissions that he had received from the Shah’s wife and from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. (Museum administration, however, insisted on fitting underwear around his sculpted nude’s prominent penis.) At other times, he states that burning and ripping artworks apart helped them fulfill their roles within the decades-long act that he staged both for himself and for the world. The works come to stand for Mohassess as he explains his intentions behind long-lost paintings and sculptures over their surviving catalogue photos. The colorfully grotesque and vibrant pieces are often filled with stick figures wrapped in violent contortions around each other. These tableaux, offered in tribute to recent wars, massacres, oil spills, and nuclear power plant meltdowns around the globe, cheerfully illustrate what the artist calls his central theme: “the condemnation of existence.” His works place conquerors, conquered, and the rest of the human race’s members on an equal level, he claims. Every one of them is in a mess. Throughout these scenes, we sense Mohassess making himself into a work, appropriate for someone whose legacy is tied to performance art in addition to fine arts. He directed many of Iran’s first stage productions of texts by European playwrights such as Jean Genet and Eugéne Ionesco, and even now seems to be acting for Farahani, to the point of

sometimes interrupting himself in order to tell her how she should film him. The filmmaker stays offscreen throughout, entering Mohassess’s frame mostly through the sound of her voice and through her hands sharing cigarettes with him. She attempts to solve Mohassess’s mystery through studying him, at first as his interlocutor. She then grows more active in the film’s second chapter, “The Commissioners,” by hunting for someone to commission him to make a new piece. She settles upon Ramin and Rokni Haerizadeh, a pair of wealthy Iranian artist brothers and Mohassess devotees based in Dubai who agree to pay any price. The brothers come to serve Farahani as Mohassess’s foils. They meet with him to discuss his terms, and their attentive presence gives occasion for the older artist to discourse on his practice over shared good meals and wine. To the tune of 100,000 Euros (70,000 up front and 30,000 upon delivery), Mohassess vows to paint “an impossible masterpiece”; if he cannot complete the work, he says, the brothers can collect on their deposit by removing artworks of equivalent value from his apartment. The trio recall the two visiting painters and their secluded master in Honoré de Balzac’s short story “The Unknown Masterpiece” (1831), whose plot is recounted by Farahani in voiceover as the awestruck

Haerizadeh brothers first enter Mohassess’s home. Throughout this chapter and her film’s third, “Drama or Tragedy,” Farahani brings in additional characters and artworks that help her flesh out Mohassess. For instance, a group screening in the living room of his most cherished film, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (1863), casts him as an ennobled relic of a dying world, much like Don Fabrizio de Salina. Mohassess is also made out to be like a painting called Fifi hanging from his wall about which one of the brothers inquires while the three men are making inventory. The painting depicts a swooning red figure with its arms crossed and a black hole for a face, inviting speculations both of torment and of pleasure. Mohassess reveals that not only did he choose to take this work with him from Iran: he has carried it with him everywhere he has gone for the past half-century. Farahani periodically returns to consider Fifi while the artist prepares his new painting, a process abruptly interrupted by his death from sudden, violent illness. She chooses not to show Mohassess at work on his chosen canvas at any point, and instead presents us with moments of him alternately telling her that she should record him painting and preparing himself for the job. Nor does she directly show his death, at which she is present. Instead, we hear sounds of his coughing up blood and see images with familiar contents: Sculptures

whose shadows are departing. In the film’s concluding chapter, “An Image,” the Haerizadeh brothers come to collect. As they enter the apartment with packing tape and wrap up works to take with them (including Fifi), the room feels filled with present absence. Farahani has solved Mohassess’ mystery, in some sense, by preserving it; though it might seem that she has not shown him creating, she has actually done so in collaboration with him for the entirety of the film. With each word and gesture that he has spoken, the two have made art to survive him.

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At least the blowjobs are real; the fucking could be staged judging from the angle.