Acting Out: Screen Performance, Inference and Interpretation

Overview of the Day

9.00 – 9.45 Registration (Bob Kayley Foyer)

9.45 – 11.30 Welcome! (Ceri Hovland and Lucy Fife Donaldson) A Question of Style: The relationship between form and performance (Professor Victor Perkins, Ronan Paterson, Dr Sarah Thomas) Chair:

11.30 – 11.50 Coffee

11.50 – 13.20 Keynote Address – Living Meaning: The Fluidity of Film Performance (Dr Andrew Klevan) Chair:

13.20 – 14.10 Lunch (Studio 1)

14.10 – 16.20 Intepreting Performance (Professor Martin Barker, Dr Alex Clayton) Short break Performing Interpretation (Adam Ganz, Professor John Adams) Chair:

16.20 – 16.45 Coffee/Tea (Studio 1)

16.45 – 18.15 Acting In? Acting Out? (Dr Kathrina Glitre, David Morrison, Dr Steven Peacock) Chair:

18.15 – 19.00 Wine Reception (Studio 1) 19.00  Close / Travel to Reading for Post-conference Meal

1 Acting Out: Screen Performance, Inference and Interpretation

Welcome and Session One

A Question of Style: The relationship between form and performance

Chair:

Time: 9.45 – 11.30

The Eloquence of Bad Acting

Professor V. F. Perkins

Two films by Jean Renoir, La Règle du jeu and The River, and Otto Preminger’s River of No Return present instances where the actors’ calculation of moves and gestures is visible at moments when their characters are offered as behaving spontaneously. Moments like these disturb the expected balance between our background awareness of performance and our concentration upon characters in developing situations. But such disturbances may contribute positively to the overall texture of a performance or a movie. (Vertigo? Bonjour Tristesse?)

V.F.Perkins has written and taught about film for more than forty years, from 1978 at Warwick University. Since Film as Film (1972) he has taken care not to publish too much. He wrote the volume on The Magnificent Ambersons for BFI Film Classics and work continues on La Règle du jeu for the same series.

A Little Touch of Harry in the Night

An exploration of the contrasting acting styles of Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh in their respective films of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

Ronan Paterson

Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh have dominated the screen presentations of William Shakespeare’s plays in their respective eras. Both, as directors, began their exploration through Henry V, and both played the leading roles as well as directing. The two films were made in very different eras, under different circumstances and for different purposes, but what of the contrasts, not merely in interpretation, but in acting style? Henry V comes from the theatre. In order to create it as a film, certain theatrical conventions inherent in the writing have to be dealt with, and a style of performance, rhetorical and language-based, has to be accommodated within the frame of a medium with a dominant tradition of naturalistic acting. The two actor/directors approach the problems in markedly contrasting styles. The paper examines areas of comparison and contrast, and raises questions as to the effectiveness of the two stylistic approaches, looking at the techniques, both cinematic and acting, employed in the creation of the performances.

Ronan Paterson has been a professional actor, director, writer and producer for more than 35 years, working for theatre, film and television companies all over the UK and Ireland. He has taught in theatre and media departments in Universities, colleges and conservatoires, including the University of Winchester, Bath Spa, Queen Margaret’s, Edinburgh, Newcastle College, North Tyneside College and others, and is currently Head of Performing Arts at the University of Teesside. He has recently edited Stages of Transformation for the University of Northumbria Press, and is currently writing a book about different performance interpretations of Shakespeare in theatre and film.

The return of the 'repressive': producing and consuming contrasting modes of performance in Classical Hollywood cinema and The Best Years of Our Lives.

Dr. Sarah Thomas

The growing scholarship on screen performance has enabled us to move beyond broad statements about acting in Hollywood's Classical era. Individual analyses of actors and texts, the roles played by various filmmaking personnel in forming coherent strategies of screen performance, and identifying techniques appropriate to leading and supporting performances have demonstrated the complex construction of 'classical' screen acting. However, even these wide boundaries can exclude certain factors. Form and performance are not necessary complementary. One text can support a range of performative styles not easily defined as 'leading' or 'supporting' acting. Furthermore, these factors can be present in the construction of outwardly similar leading roles. Subtle differences found within screen performances can dramatically alter how otherwise comparable characters are constructed during a film's production and reception. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946) is reliant upon contrasting modes of performance in three analogous roles - three servicemen who return home after WWII. Two of these performances have been widely acknowledged as noteworthy: Fredric March's 'ostensive overplaying' and Harold Russell's 'authentic' yet 'amateur' performance. The third performance - Dana Andrews's contained and repressive 'underplaying' - has largely been ignored. This paper will explore how the film supports these three modes of performance. I will also suggest that ignorance of Andrews's performance is indicative of wider difficulties in addressing underplayed or repressive screen acting. As such, I will examine the relationship between screen performance, production and reception. This will be done by examining Andrews's performance in relation to the formal techniques used by Wyler which work with and against the actor. This often incoherent relationship between form and performance has been reflected in the film's critical reputation which highlights the imbalance between the three main roles. However, it also begs the question, is the perceived imbalance due to an inability to successfully 'read' this type of repressive underplaying?

Dr. Sarah Thomas is Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies at Aberystwyth University. Her primary research interests are Hollywood cinema, screen performance theory and the labour position of the actor within film history. She teaches Classical Hollywood Cinema, screen performance and stardom, and has recently completed her doctoral thesis, "Face-Maker": the negotiation between screen performance, extra-filmic persona and conditions of employment within the career of Peter Lorre".

Session Two

Keynote Address: Dr Andrew Klevan

Chair:

Time: 11.50 – 13.20

Living Meaning: The Fluidity of Film Performance

Dr Andrew Klevan

The paper will focus on the achievement of fluidity in Hollywood performance – the fluid movement of the body – and the way in which, by refusing a definite form, performers ensure that meaning is difficult to isolate or crystallise. By examining the work of Greta Garbo, James Stewart, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, the paper will show how performers keep meaning moving: meanings flow into one another, overlap, adjust and transform before our eyes. Interpretative insecurity is a matter of concern in relation to all the arts, but it is especially relevant, or fundamental, to those arts that move in time and/or space. Studying film performers is particularly illuminating in this regard, because they are not only moving in time and space, but they are living beings – alive with meaning and alive to meaning.

Dr Andrew Klevan is University Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St. Anne’s College. His areas of interest are the history and theory of film criticism, film interpretation, and film aesthetics. He is author of Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Film (2000) and Film Performance: from Achievement to Appreciation (2005).

Session Three

Interpreting Performance

Performing Interpretation

Chair:

Time: 14.10– 16.20

How do audiences evaluate acting on screen? A case study using The Usual Suspects

Professor Martin Barker

Among all the work emerging from the recent welcome resurgence of interest in screen acting, there is a notable absence: any direct exploration of film audiences, and of the role that attention to acting may play within their understanding and appreciation of a film. This is despite the steady general growth in film audience research. One of the reasons for this, I suspect, may be that the task is methodologically quite exacting, and that poses a challenge which I have been trying to meet. Over the past few months, with colleagues at Aberystwyth, I have been developing the first stage of a (hopefully eventually larger) project to open up this field. In the first instance this is via a screening at Aberystwyth Arts Centre on November 28th of the film The Usual Suspects. We have been recruiting people with a range of different levels of knowledge of, and interest in, the film, with the aim of drawing out (by a combination of questionnaires and discussion groups) the languages that different kinds of audiences deploy to describe and evaluate one key scene (the line-up), thereby to explore how these associate with wider ways of anticipating, understanding and evaluating the film, and to begin to see how the languages used on one particular film may connect with wider lexicons and systems of understanding and appreciation of films.

Martin Barker is Professor of Film & Television Studies at Aberystwyth University. His research interests have spanned many areas and many years, but in the last twenty years he has particularly focused on the development of the methods and tasks of audience research. Most recently he directed the international Lord of the Rings research project, looking at the meanings of fantasy for audiences across the world, and undertook contracted research for the BBFC into audience responses to screened sexual violence. His interest in acting arose out of realising simply that questions about audience responses had not yet been asked.

Acting to Save the World (Fuck Yeah): Team America, Comedy and Performance

Alex Clayton

Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, 2004) may seem an unlikely starting point for a conceptual investigation of performance. Nonetheless, this puppet-based parody of the action genre offers, besides puerile, scatological fun and a sharp satire of contemporary

9 Acting Out: Screen Performance, Inference and Interpretation world affairs, a vivid meditation on the nature of acting – in the double sense of ‘performing’ and ‘intervening’. Prompted by this dimension of the film, and by its distinctive combination of puppetry and spoof, this paper will explore questions pertaining to comedy, performance and the body. How does acting relate to doing? Do puppets act? Why are the strings so visible? And why is Kim Jong Il so very ronery?

Alex Clayton is Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Bristol. He is the author of The Body in Hollywood Slapstick (McFarland: Jefferson, North Carolina and London, 2007).

Re-producing screen performance

John Adams

This presentation is an early report on work in progress on a practice-led research project into structures and dynamics of screen performance. ‘Performance’ here is a layered terms that connects and moves between concepts of inferred agency and role, understandings of player and enactment (what the actor does), and elements of enactment mediated through the lens of film form and convention. Conceptually, the work will be located with reference to a neo-phenomenological position with filmic origins in the practice of Jean- Luc Godard and drawing on the work of contemporary thinkers such as Graham Harman. This approach aims to operate beyond the realm of linguistic discourse analysis in film studies, rejecting a prime focus on meaning; it seeks rather to develop audio-visual explorations of performance that uncover and / or suggest new relations within and between elements hitherto confined or repressed by conventional categories. The practice research (starting in Feb 2009) develops through scaleable workshops with small inter-disciplinary groups of academic researchers and creative audio-visual and performance practitioners. Taking loose thematic provocations (e.g. surfaces, timing, borders) the workshops generate original material, cite and re-work archive film, engage with critical positions, and use audio- visual material from media sources in all forms as contextual points of reference. The eventual outcomes will be presented in a range of audio-visual forms.

John Adams is Professor of Film & Screen Media Practice in the Drama Department at the University of Bristol. He has a special interest in practice-based approaches to teaching and research in screen media, and was the founding editor of the Journal of Media Practice from 2000-06. Recent research includes a practice-based, inter-disciplinary project on 'expanded cinema' (funded by a major grant from the AHRC) and writings on aspects of place and space in early film. He is currently a developing a practice-based exploration of

10 Acting Out: Screen Performance, Inference and Interpretation screen performance concepts. He has produced and/or directed over 30 broadcast films and theatre productions, and co-founded and chaired both the Watershed Media Centre (Bristol) and the production company Watershed Television Ltd.

Interpreting oneself – performance, feedback, and the digital

Adam Ganz

I look at how digital technology is changing the nature of performance, as inferences and interpretations about the meanings of performance are being made by performers as they make their work. There is a level of conscious feedback, which is no longer the sole territory of the director. In our article Lina Khatib and I traced this back to the development of the video assist and how “…the elision of the boundaries between the space in front and behind the camera means that the actors participate in the making of the film in a different way.” In both film and TV performances are beginning to include “found objects” of performance, “real” activities captured on camera - Increasingly performances are comprised of a collage of the “real”, (that’s to say the purely observed and recorded) with the consciously “performed”. This synthesis of “behaviour” and “performance”, with the opportunity for the performers to modify either or both of these in response to analysis (including their own) is the distinguishing feature of digital performance and one which is transforming the role and status of performers as co-collaborators. I look at Ivan’s XTC (the first High Definition digital feature), as a key text marking that shift, in which the three lead performers Peter Weller (actor,) Lisa Enos (editor and producer) and Danny Huston, (director) are experienced in making those inferences and interpretations about the work of other performers - and themselves.

Adam Ganz is a writer/director and Lecturer in media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London. He studied at Cambridge and Bristol Universities and at the National Film and Television School. Before working at Royal Holloway he taught aspects of screenwriting, directing and narrative design at the Royal College of Art, the University of Northumbria, London Metropolitan University, and the University of East London amongst others. He has written screenplays for several production companies including Granada Television, the BBC, Redwave Films, Kismet Films, APT Films, Granada, and IWC Media. He has directed several short films, which have been shown at festivals around the world and on Channel 4 and Sky television. He has also worked as a script consultant for a number of companies including the BBC, Complicité and Working Title, and as a narrative consultant on several large multimedia projects. He has research interests in digital cinema, narrative and visualisation and have written an article (co-authored with Lina Khatib) (2006). "Digital Cinema: The Transformation of Film Practice and Aesthetics". In New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, volume 4, issue 1, pp. 21-36. "Cause Trouble! Inspire Change! Do it First" - Writing Series Drama for Channel 4 was In the Journal of Media Practice volume 8, issue 3, pp 273-288 A version of which was given at the BFI Conference on Channel 4.

Session Four

Acting In?

Chair:

Time: 16.45 – 18.15

Still acting: Doing nothing as an acting choice

Dr. Kathrina Glitre

Film theory has often argued that the affect of film performance is constructed by montage and mise-en-scène, as much as by the actor’s craft. While critical of this tradition, Richard Dyer nonetheless suggests that the final shot of Queen Christina (1933) exemplifies its possibilities: Much can be read into this shot – of resignation, melancholy, profound feeling. Yet it is well known that the director, Rouben Mamoulian, told Garbo to do nothing for this scene, and she did as she was told. (In itself, one should say, a considerable feat of performance.) The meaning of her face in this shot thus derives entirely from its place in the film’s narrative, the way it is shot, and the resonances of Garbo’s image carried by her face. (Stars, 1979: 163) While Dyer at least recognizes the difficulty of delivering such a performance, I would dispute his conclusion: it does not necessarily follow that ‘doing nothing’ means nothing. A film-making choice has been made and we can infer meaning through stillness, as much as through movement and expression: Garbo is still acting. This paper explores this moment and two others, from North by Northwest (1959) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), in order to establish a range of ways in which ‘doing nothing’ can be understood as an acting choice that creates meaning and affect.

Dr. Kathrina Glitre is the author of Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-65 (2006) and co-editor, with my colleagues, Mark Bould and Greg Tuck, of Neo-Noir (forthcoming). I am currently completing an AHRC-funded project on film acting, Starring Cary Grant, for the Close-Up series.

Performing Loneliness

David Morrison

The emotion of loneliness is present in a wide variety of films, and is often conveyed by performance in combination with other formal means. But how exactly is loneliness conveyed through performance, and why do we feel or assume this emotion when it is performed? To answer these questions it is useful to look at common performance signs relating to loneliness (such as the ‘downward gaze’), at particular qualities of a lonely

14 Acting Out: Screen Performance, Inference and Interpretation performance (such as blankness or stillness), and to examine certain vocal tendencies (whether a tendency towards monotone expression or even silence). These elements are often inter-linked, acting in conjunction throughout a performance to signify loneliness, and it is important to realise that they all appear to be ways of communicating a sense of non- communication. Investigating loneliness in relation to performance is not simply a matter of recognising lonely gestures and traits, however, but is also a question of asking why these elements appear lonely to the viewer, despite an often fairly restrained use of emotional cues with which to convey meaning. This paper will attempt to shed light on why we might infer loneliness from the above signs, qualities and tendencies, employing particular examples from Jacques Audiard’s Read My Lips (2001), and Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights In The Dusk (2006). The paper will also draw on Bela Balázs’ concept of the ‘silent soliloquy’ and James Naremore’s notion of ‘expressive incoherence’ to demonstrate how loneliness can be exposed through performance even when a character is not performing alone, since frequently it is the case that characters will appear most lonely when performing opposite others. It is hoped that this paper will contribute to questions of how performance conveys feeling, but also how feeling is integral to the idea of experiencing performance.

David Morrison is a final year PhD student at King’s College, London. His current research investigates the construction and representation of the feeling of loneliness in film, with particular emphasis on how film creates emotional affect through the employment of specific tropes and devices. He has taught on a variety of modules at King’s in the Department of Film Studies, and has contributed a number of articles to the BFI’s screenonline website. His research interests include Spanish cinema, and the study of aesthetics and emotion in film. Before pursuing an academic career David worked in both music and film distribution.

David Lynch, Laura Dern, and Crying on Film

Dr. Steven Peacock

This paper considers the close relationship of one director and performer in acting out instances of 'crying'. It takes the three performances offered by Laura Dern in the films directed by David Lynch as a triptych: a trio of stark portraits featuring a woman in tears. Concentration on this pattern of cruel fascination allows for questions to emerge about Lynch's handling of Dern, the actor's tearful performances, and of crying on film.

Steven Peacock is Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Hertfordshire. He is the author of ‘Colour in Film’ (Manchester University Press, forthcoming), and co-editor of

‘The Television Series’ (Manchester University Press). He has written extensively on film and television aesthetics.

Acknowledgements

Ceri and Lucy would like to thank everyone who helped make today possible with particular thanks to the department for allowing us

Rosemary Allen, Chris Bacon, Simone Knox, Liz Silvester

Andrew Klevan

Jonathan Bignell, Mark Broughton, John Bull, Alison Butler, John Gibbs, Lisa Purse, Doug Pye, Mike Stevenson, Lib Taylor,

Email Addresses

1. Name Institution Email 2. John Adams University of Bristol [email protected] 3. Martin Barker Aberystwyth [email protected] University 4. Jonathan Bignell University of Reading [email protected] 5. Sergio Dias University of Kent [email protected] Branco 6. Sophie Brown University of Oxford [email protected] 7. Tom Brown University of Reading [email protected] 8. Alex Clayton University of Bristol [email protected] 9. Patricia Di Risio University of [email protected] Melbourne 10. Lucy Fife University of Reading [email protected] Donaldson 11. Hannah Durkin University of [email protected] Nottingham 12. David Foster University of Reading [email protected] 13. Adam Ganz Royal Holloway, [email protected] University of London 14. John Gibbs University of Reading [email protected] 15. Kathrina Glitre University of the [email protected] West of England 16. Liz Greene York St. John [email protected] University 17. Ceri Hovland University of Reading [email protected] 18. Joe Kember University of Exeter [email protected] 19. Andrew Klevan St. Anne’s College, [email protected] University of Oxford 20. Jacob Leigh Royal Holloway, [email protected] University of London 21. Katherine University of Exeter [email protected] Limmer 22. Reina-Marie University of Reading [email protected] Loader 23. Alan Lovell Independent Scholar [email protected] 24. Victoria Lowe University of [email protected] Manchester 25. James University of [email protected] MacDowell Warwick

26. Michael Morgan Central School of [email protected] Speech and Drama 27. Douglas Morrey University of [email protected] Warwick 28. David Morrison King’s College [email protected] London 29. Ruth O’Donnell Royal Holloway, [email protected] University of London 30. Ronan Paterson University of Teesside [email protected] 31. Steven Peacock University of [email protected] Hertfordshire 32. V.F. Perkins University of [email protected] Warwick 33. Lisa Purse University of Reading [email protected] 34. Sarah Ralph Aberystwyth [email protected] University 35. Heather University of Reading [email protected] Sutherland 36. Sarah Thomas Aberystwyth [email protected] University 37. Tim Vermeulen University of Reading [email protected]