Film, actors and audience

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm by Peter Leithart

Film, actors and audience 2017-09-06T23:41:34+06:00 Peter Leithart

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In his classic essay on the “work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Walter Benjamin made some trenchant observations on the way film affects actors and audiences. Importantly, he believes these effects are not the result of some perversion of the medium of film, but inherent in it.

The actor, he notes acts in “many separate performances” rather than in a single connected period of time, and not before an audience but in front of a mechanical device. This separation of audience and actor has a number of consequences for both.

First, it turns the audience from collaborator to critic: “The camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect the performance as an integral whole. Guided by the cameraman, the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performance. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. It comprises certain factors of movement which are in reality those of the camera, not to mention special camera angles, close-ups, etc. Hence, the performance of the actor is subjected to a series of optical tests. This is the first consequence of the fact that the actor’s performance is presented by means of a camera. Also, the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance to the audience in person. This permits the audience to take the position of a critic, without experiencing any personal contact with the actor. The audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera; its approach is that of testing. This is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.” In short, “everyone who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert.”

Also because of the nature of the film medium, the actor’s acting is minimized. He can’t adjust his performance to the crowd watching. Often the aim is to act “as little as possible,” and thus (in the words of Rudolf Arnheim) the actor is reduced to a “stage prop chosen for its characteristics and . . . inserted at the proper place.”

Instead of an audience, in fact, the film actor has a market, with which he has no personal contact: “This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.” The cult of celebrity is not some perversion of film but, Benjamin argues, its inevitable effect.

Benjamin also thinks that film is inherently biased toward innovation and progressive attitudes in a way that traditional arts such as painting are not. Historically, paintings have been viewed by individuals or by small groups; in the nature of the case, it it extremely difficult for a painting to be shown to several hundred people at once. Mass response thus plays a much smaller role than in film, where every individual viewer’s response is going to be pressured (if not determined) by the responses of those around them. This phenomenon is exaggerated by the advertising and media hype that now surrounds films. Film is, in short, a perfect medium of mass culture (which of course also helped to create mass culture): Traditional arts absorb the viewer or listener; but “the distracted mass absorbs the work of art.”

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