The Actor's Medium: On Stage and in Film

The Actor's Medium: On Stage and in Film MARC SILBERMAN A comparative or contrasting approach to the role of the actor in various media would have to consider a wide spectrum of pertinent issues, including style, physical function, audience expectations, technological interventions, cultural and, historical specificity, and so forth. To grasp the implications of such an approach while evading the demands of a comprehensive study, I want to focus on a particular instance of the actor's medium: the actor's migration from the expressionist stage to the expressionist film in Germany during the late teens and early twenties of the twentieth century. By concentrating on a local "case study" from over seventy years ago, I hope to suggest that historical controversies bearing on the complex intennedial overlap between stage and film persist into the nineties. At the threshold of a new century image production, storage, and retrieval by means of video, satellite communication, and digitalization seem to have exhausted or superseded the cinema, not to mention the theater. Yet, just as the theater did not disappear when challenged by the cinema, the cinema is not now withering away before our eyes, and actors will undoubtedly still playa role in the newly emerging media. Indeed, recent vigorous productions of cinematic (and increasingly tclevisual) adaptations of dramatic texts demonstrate how "traditional" perfonnance media continue to mold our expectations vis-avis , say, Peter Greenaway's film adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest under the title Prospera's Books or Kenneth Branagh's Hemy V. In my view the competition and borrowings between theater and cinema reflect ongoing concerns about cultural hegemony as well as philosophical issues of aesthetic practice.' In particular, the heated debates about the nature of theater and cinema in the teens and the twenties became touchstones for what retrospectively can be recognized as part of the broader shift pertaining to' the modernist crisis . As we move now into postmodemism, once again questions arise about accepted boundaries, apostrophized in notions of transgression and pastiche. Modern Drama, 39 (1996) 558 The Actor's Medium 559 Thus, the early attempts to define the new cinematic medium in relation to other arts provides a historical dimension to current multi- and interrnedial projects. Moreover, a retrospective glance back will- show that already at the beginning of this century, not to speak of our contemporary situation, no one medium can be understood in isolation, but rather its importance can only be conceived in relation to other media. . Examining the role or function of the actor as it migrated from stage to film in the teens will allow me ask whether the art of acting changed in response to the evolution of a new medium. To anticipate my conclusion: yes, it·did; and by extrapolation, this historical change suggests that a similar shift is now under way. The recent, but not uncontroversial, focus on the actor's body and on performance theory and practices is in my view part of a more general cultural response to the increasingly dematerialized body in the electronic age. Just as the early cinema drew on performance and representational modes from popular theater traditions as well as other forms of entertainment, so is contemporary performance responding now to the broader culture's shift in the understanding of the body. I am referring to the technological body and its reformulated subject/object relation; for example, the health-club body honed to perfection on electronic and compute'rized exercise machines; the videoarcade body with electronic extensions of the motor reflexes; the disembodied personalities in computer.chat-rooms engaged in cyber role-playing; or the virtual body sheathed with electrodes that has become an organic "hard disk" synthesizing real physical and psychological reactions to electronic stimuli. Hence, in the Terminator films the body of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes the material out of which sophisticated computer software constructs incredible special effects; and recently a sub-genre of "network" films has thematized the world of electronic communication that can variously liberate or possess the human body (Robert Longo, Johnny Mnemonic; Ian Softly, Hackers; Brett Leonard, Virtuosity; Irwin Winkler, The Net; Kathryn Bigelow, Strange Days). The entire project of showing historically how traditional acting styles changed...