Film Acting and Performance Capture the Index in Crisis

Film Acting and Performance Capture The Index in Crisis Philip Auslander ince 2002, every time Academy Award nominating season rolls around, it is guaranteed that journalists will once again raise the question, “When SWill a Motion Capture Actor Win an Oscar?” as Hugh Hart did on Wired .com (January 24, 2012). This discussion began when New Line Cinema, the company that released Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, made a concerted effort to garner a Best Supporting Actor award nomination for Andy Serkis, the British actor who played Gollum in the film, a nomination that was not forthcoming. Twentieth Century Fox would repeat the gesture in both 2012 and 2014, again on behalf of Serkis, this time for his performances as the ape Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Again, there were no nominations, even though critics and audiences alike praised Serkis’s performances as Gollum and Caesar, for which he won other awards. Before proceeding any further, I want to address the fact that I just described Serkis, who has become the most famous actor to work extensively with performance capture as well as a staunch advocate for the practice, as having played Gollum and given a performance as Caesar. Hart quotes Serkis as saying, “Review- ers have a strange way of describing my performances. They’ll say things like, ‘Serkis lent his voice to’ or ‘inspired the emotions’ or ‘lent his movements to’ or ‘emotionally retained the backbone of,’ as opposed to ‘performed the role.’” A screen actor myself, I choose to pay Serkis the respect of avoiding such circumlocutions and describing him simply as an actor who plays roles through performance capture even though the status of motion capture performance as acting is precisely the question at issue. Derek Burrill calls the questions raised about performance capture and film acting and the seeming reluctance on the part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and © 2017 Philip Auslander PAJ 117 (2017), pp. 7–23. 7 doi:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00376 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00376 by guest on 30 September 2021 Sciences to recognize what Serkis and others do as acting the “Gollum problem.” He summarizes the debate in a series of questions: “Was Serkis present enough in the performance? At what point is something too digitized? If something is partially digitized, what of its ontology, its presence? Can someone (or something) perform, in the traditional sense, in the digital?”1 These are clearly far-reaching questions that extend well beyond the realm of film acting to the general status of performance in the digital age. Here, I will restrict myself to examining the problematic status of performance capture in film acting primarily through Bur- rill’s first and third questions, those concerned with presence and ontology. My point of departure is yet another question: Why is it that the voting membership of the Academy, made up of film industry professionals of all types, is appar- ently unwilling to nominate actors who perform through performance capture? It is important to note that there is nothing in the Academy’s rules governing the Oscars to prevent actors working in performance capture from being nominated for acting awards. In fact, when the Academy modified its definition of an animated film in 2010, it specifically included new language (taken here from the 2015 Academy publication The 87th Annual Awards of Merit) to the effect that “motion capture by itself is not an animation technique.” This clause can be interpreted legalistically as a way for the Academy to shift films using performance capture out of the animation category, thus paving the way for such performances to be considered in the acting categories. It is the case, however, as the LA Times revealed in an article titled “Unmasking the Academy: Oscar Voters Overwhelmingly White, Male” (February 19, 2012), that the nearly six thousand voting members of the Academy are markedly less diverse than the moviegoing public, and even more monolithic than many in the film industry may suspect. Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership. It would not be surprising in the least if this group were to prove to be conservative in its understanding of what film acting is, and what kinds of things that show up on screen should be eligible to be awarded as such. However, the fact that the Academy’s membership is dominated by aging white men in no way explains exactly why performance capture may be objectionable from their pre- sumed conservative standpoint. 8 PAJ 117 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00376 by guest on 30 September 2021 Discussing the Gollum problem on Salon.com (February 18, 2003), Ivan Askwith suggests that Serkis was not nominated because Academy voters could not see Serkis in Gollum, just as they could not see John Hurt in the title character of The Elephant Man, a performance with which Serkis’s work is frequently compared. Although nominated for best actor, John Hurt did not win in 1980, a loss he has partly attributed in recent interviews to the fact that the audience could not recognize him at all. It seems almost certain that Serkis, had he been nominated, would face the same problem. Defining the problem in terms of the actor’s recognizability, Askwith frames it as an issue of iconicity, to use a semiotic term. Recall C. S. Peirce’s definition of an iconic sign or icon: “Most icons, if not all, are likenesses of their objects. A photograph is an icon.”2 Gollum is not a likeness of Serkis—they look almost nothing alike. Bert States suggests that we need to be able to perceive the actor in the character in order to appreciate the performer’s artistry: “We always recognize Olivier in Hamlet or Olivier behind the dark paint of Othello. When the art- ist in the actor comes forth, we are reacting to the actor’s particular way of doing his role.”3 This process is short-circuited, however, if we cannot recognize Serkis in Gollum, leading to a situation in which the performance is not perceived as creditworthy and therefore not eligible for an award. I use the term creditworthy in the way Stan Godlovitch does when talking about musical performance to mean that we as audience can “read back from what [we perceive of the performance] to the [performer’s] creditworthiness and hence skillfulness.”4 Gollum’s lack of iconic resemblance to Serkis seriously inhibits this process of reading back, and, therefore, impedes the audiences’ appreciation of the actorly skill that Serkis brought to his performance. However, iconicity is not the only semiotic dimension of the Gollum problem. I shall argue here that although it is reasonable to characterize the actor as an iconic sign for the character he or she plays, there is a deeply embedded historical discourse around film acting that sees the actor’s gestures and, especially, facial expressions on screen not primarily as iconic signs for the character’s gestures and expressions but, rather, as indexical signs of the actor’s interiority. In the remainder of this essay, I will investigate the indexicality of film acting, first by examining the relationship of the Gollum problem to current debates over the ontology of digital imagery, then by contextualizing it in relation to entrenched assumptions about the nature of film acting. First, however, I will offer a brief overview of performance capture as a technology and process. AUSLANDER / Film Acting and Performance Capture 9 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/PAJJ_a_00376 by guest on 30 September 2021 WHAT IS PERFORMANCE CAPTURE? Commentators regularly trace the history of motion capture back to the studies of animal and human motion through sequential photographs undertaken by Edweard Muybridge in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Fast-forwarding to the motion picture era, another important precedent for motion capture is the rotoscope, a device invented in 1915 by the celebrated animator Max Fleischer, whose studio produced both Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons. The rotoscope allowed animators to draw over filmed performers by hand to transform them into cartoon characters, as the Fleischer Studio did with bandleader Cab Callo- way, who appears as a ghostly dancing walrus in the 1932 animated Betty Boop short, Minnie the Moocher. This technique is still in use. Although the field began to develop rapidly in the late 1980s, electronic motion capture actually began in 1967 with Lee Harrison III’s Scanimate. For the first time, a performer wearing a “data suit” could directly control the movements of an animated figure on a television screen through her own movements.5 This remains the basic procedure of motion capture to this day: a performer is outfitted with sensors at a number of points on the body. As the performer moves, high- resolution digital cameras track the displacement of the sensors and relay this information to a computer. The data can then be used to animate an onscreen CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) figure created by designers and animators. This was the case for Serkis’s portrayals of Gollum, Caesar, and the title character in Peter Jackson’s 2005 film King Kong, as well as for his representation of Capt.

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