Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

encounter film performances. Another filter is created by
a more specific type of experience, namely, viewers’
knowledge of media and popular culture. As in the case
of celebrities, genre stars, and legitimate actors, viewers
encounter many film performances through and in terms
of an actor’s picture personality (a composite figure that
emerges from an actor’s portrayal in a series of films) or
star image (a multidimensional image created by stories
about an actor’s off-screen life). An additional framework
or filter that colors audience responses and interpretations
emerges from another specific type of experience, in
this case, viewers’ knowledge of film history and traditions
in the performing arts.
While most performance signs are drawn from
everyday life, even in Anglo-European cinema the degree
to which that is true depends on the performing art
tradition that most influences the film. For example,
Orson Welles’s (1915–1985) performance in Citizen
Kane (1941), which includes scenes that are emblematic
of expressionistic performance, often uses performance
signs that do not have a direct relationship with everyday
life. In moments of extreme emotion, as when Kane
smashes the furniture in his wife’s bedroom just after
she has left him, Welles uses highly stylized expressions,
gestures, and actions to convey the character’s anguished
inner experience. His gestures and actions are larger and
more extreme than gestures and actions used in daily life,
and his facial expressions are far more truncated than
facial expressions in everyday interactions. By comparison,
Meryl Streep’s Academy Award-winning performance
in Sophie’s Choice (1982), which exemplifies the
naturalistic tradition in film performance, depends on
performance signs found in everyday life. In moments
of extreme emotion—for example, when she recalls the
experience of giving up her daughter to Nazi officers—
Streep uses familiar physical signs to convey the character’s
anguished inner experience. She creates the image of
a woman in anguish through her tears and runny nose,
the rising color in her cheeks, the tightness of her voice,
her shortness of breath, and her glances that avoid eye
contact.
In world cinema, it is clear that performance signs
reflect the cultural and aesthetic traditions underlying a
film’s production context, and that theatrical traditions
are an especially important factor. Western audiences
need to recognize that, for example, Peking Opera is a
major influence in Chinese cinema, and that Sanskrit
drama is a central influence in Indian cinema. In order
to appreciate the rapid shifts in the tone and energy of
the actors’ performances in a film such as Die xue shuang
xiong (The Killer, 1989) by Hong Kong director John
Woo (b. 1946), one needs to be acquainted with performance
traditions in Peking Opera. Similarly, to see
how performances contribute to the modulations of
Acting
mood and feeling in a film such as Monsoon Wedding
(2001) by Indian director Mira Nair (b. 1957), it is
useful to understand the influence of Sanskrit drama even
on internationally produced Bollywood films.
Even when there is a shared theatrical tradition, films
and audiences are often separated by distances in time,
location, and social situation. For audiences acquainted
with Anglo-European theatrical traditions, a look at films
from different eras and different national cinemas helps
to clarify the fact that performances reflect the cultural
and cinematic conventions that inform a production
context. For example, performances in a Shirley Temple
(b. 1928) film such as The Little Colonel (1935) are
entirely different from the performances in a film such
as the dark, retro fantasy The City of Lost Children
(1995). The contrast between the performances does
not reflect an evolutionary process in acting but instead
the fact that films draw on historically specific conventions
in their representations of gender, age, class, ethnicity,
and locality.
In the Hollywood studio era, characters in films such
as The Little Colonel are embodiments of social types that
are combined in ways that illustrate moral truths. In a
modernist film such as Un condamné à mort s’est échappé
(A Man Escaped, 1956) by Bresson, the human figures are
minimalist traces stripped down to their essential qualities.
In a naturalistic film such as A Woman Under the
Influence (1974), directed by the American independent
filmmaker John Cassavetes (1929–1989), characters exist
in social environments and their actions emerge from
personal histories and environmental circumstances. In
a postmodern film such as The City of Lost Children,
characters are traits cobbled together, vacuous shells of
identities that circulate in a narrative-saturated society.
A film’s conception of character will often reveal the
dominant views of its culture. For example, in Broken
Blossoms (D. W. Griffith, 1919), the young Chinese man
(Richard Barthelmess), more complicated than the stereotypes
of the era, is still the inscrutable Oriental, while
the young waif (Lillian Gish) who is killed by her
drunken father is given enough screen time to transform
the emblematic case of domestic violence into the story
of an individual young woman. The various conceptions
of character in a film can also create layers of social
commentary. In Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of
Underdevelopment, 1968) by Cuban director Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea (1928–1996), the women that Sergio
(Sergio Corrieri) mentally undresses as he passes them on
the streets of Havana are presented as social types, namely,
women in the tropics who are living in conditions of
economic and cultural underdevelopment. Interestingly,
the film’s use of voice-over and subjective flashbacks
prompts us to see Sergio as a unique individual and as
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 17