Introduction

Historically, studies of film and tv performance have often relied heavily on the actor’s star image—discursively constructed across various textual and extratextual sites—as an interpretive heuristic. As a result, a large body of research has explored facets of performance that relate to aspects of the star’s image and the ways in which an off-screen persona may shape on-screen performance. However, recent media studies work on performance has shifted the focus from star and celebrity to performative techniques and practices. Several collections on film acting and performance—most recently, Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke’s Reframing Screen Performance (2008) and Aaron Taylor’s Theorizing Film Acting (2012)—have broadened our historical and theoretical understanding of performance. Further, much scholarly work has been attentive to identity construction and the body: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), Kathleen Rowe’s The Unruly Woman (1995), and Deborah Harris Moore’s Media and the Rhetoric of Body Perfection (2014), for example, have explored identity issues pertaining to body shaming, body disorders, bodily violence, expressions of sexuality, and gender performativity. The editors of the Velvet Light Trap would like to build on this historical-theoretical approach by focusing attention on the relationship between performance and the body as articulated across a range of media forms and national-industrial contexts.

Throughout the history of the moving image, the body has been the central locus of mediated performance. Through movements, gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations, the body constitutes the basic physical instrument of performance, which, through interplay with other aspects of the mise-en-scène, creates meaning. For instance, Buster Keaton’s slapstick performance is predicated on the disjunction between his fixed, deadpan expression and his frenetic pratfalls. Though staging, timing, and editing are central to Keaton’s elaborate stunts, the actor’s body—his gestural language, his carefully controlled movements, his immobilized visage—provides the basic vehicle for his physical comedy. In the 1950s, Stanislavski’s system and Method acting brought new attention to the body as a performative instrument. Although Method acting is built upon a psychological connection between actor and character, the character’s internal emotions are still expressed through the actor’s body. Method actors recall and channel physical and emotional sensations through the body; minute physical details such as a slight eye movement and a small gesture can provide tremendous insight into the character’s feelings. For example, James Dean’s performance in Rebel Without a Cause is rooted in bodily movements that communicate the inner feelings of his character, Jim Stark. Dean clenches his fists, violently raises them over his head, uncontrollably punches a police officer’s desk, and wildly kicks in a family portrait to demonstrate Jim’s anger and frustration. Dean also communicates Jim’s romantic interest in Natalie Wood’s Judy with subtle eye movements, while small head motions and even putting a cigarette in his mouth backward suggest his nervousness at being alone with her.

More recently, new media forms (from video games to social media) and digital technologies (such as motion capture, 3D, and Photoshop) have shifted how bodies are viewed, visualized, and altered. A performer’s body can now appear in otherwise impossible situations or be changed into otherwise impossible shapes. This raises both theoretical and practical questions concerning the relationship between digitally manipulated bodies and the multiple agents that craft their performances. For example, motion capture performances and the digital resurrection of actors such as Laurence Olivier and Marlon Brando have ignited debates over whose bodies “perform” these characters, the actor who provides the character’s movements and voice, or the animators who manipulate the performance in postproduction?¹

Although the body—via movement, facial expressions, and vocalizations—provides the gestural and communicative language of performance, this language is neither fixed nor ideologically neutral but is instead continuously shaped and reshaped by historical and cultural pressures. Moreover, as Cynthia Baron, Frank P. Tomasulo, and Diane Carson argue, performative mediations of the body “lie at the intersection of art, technology, and culture.”² Thus, the representational practices and codes through which bodies are mediated (in cinema, television, theater, vaudeville, radio, recorded...