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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
What Happened to Pantomime?
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2003-03-01
2022-11-28
2003-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Ben Brewster
2003/03/01
University of Wisconsin
2036-461X
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What Happened to Pantomime?
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19140/16948
2
WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?
Ben Brewster, University of Wisconsin




  Although fiction films had long become the major part of the film programme in the
variety theatres or specialised film theatres in which films were seen, before 1908 few if
any commentators thought that the figures they saw on the screen representing a com-
posed action were actors or that what they were doing was acting. When the activity
was discussed at all, it was likely called “posing for the moving pictures,” by analogy
with posing for “life-view” lantern slides or song slides. Nevertheless, commentators
were clear about what this activity was like, and in particular that, insofar as the per-
formers had to convey the inner life of the figures they were supposed to represent, they
had to do so in a highly mobile and exaggerated way. Challenging the notion that the
cinematograph, if invented a century earlier, could have captured for us the acting of a
Talma or a Rachel, Jules Claretie remarked,

  But would it have really been what I might call Rachel’s statuesque gait that had been pre-
  served for us by the cinematograph? [....] It would be the ghosts of Rachel and Talma that
  would appear to us today. Cinematographic life, or survival, is nothing but life somewhat
  extreme in its posthumous movement or fixity. There is no escaping a certain exaggeration
  in cinematographic gesture. To express a feeling in the cinematograph, to make it compre-
  hensible, visible, the physiognomy has to exaggerate it to the point that it becomes a gri-
  mace. It would be Rachel’s mask I would have before me, not her soul.1

  The figures on the screen so lacked presence that they could only register with
grotesquely exaggerated gestures.2 In the trade press, the same point was often made
with less philosophical justifications, e.g., that bad stage actors are more successful in
the cinema than good:

  The actor who is too reposeful on the stage, and expresses his meaning and feeling merely
  by the tone of his voice or in subtle movements, is utterly worthless for the moving pic-
  ture. Sometimes the actor who has risen no higher than to scrub parts or the chorus can be
  made good use of for the moving picture because of his great proneness to gesture and
  motion.3

  or that the French perform better in films than the English:

  Strange as it may seem, the best moving picture actors or actresses are not found in the ranks
  of American and English professionals. The best material is found in the Latin races. The
  French and Italian people are notably successful. The explanation of this is that the Anglo-

CINEMA & Cie, no. 2, Spring 2003                                                               ­15
BEN BREWSTER

  Saxon is more phlegmatic. By reason of his natural suppression of powers of expression he
  fails to attain the same ends that the others mentioned do. There is a lack of required action.4

   By the time of this last quotation, the Autumn of 1908, trade commentators in France,
England, and the USA were well aware that in France a company, Film d’Art, had been
formed to make films featuring well-known actors from the Parisian stage. Perhaps as a
result of this development, as much as the films that eventually appeared in November
of 1908, the superiority of French films over those from other producing countries evi-
denced everywhere in audience preferences in variety theatres and movie houses,
began to be attributed especially to the acting in those films, and that acting began
more and more to be called “pantomime.” In France, this tendency culminates in the
publication of Eugène Kress’s manual on acting for the cinema, Le Geste et l’attitude,
whose subtitle – L’Art mimique au cinématographe – as well as its content marks its
affinity with such pantomime manuals as Charles Aubert’s L’Art mimique, suivi d’un
traité de la pantomime.5 In England, Nelly Gorman described the Film d’Art films as
examples of “elevated pantomime;” and Colin Bennett wrote in his Handbook of
Kinematography that “the kinematograph actor must be a master pantomimist, and
the writer of kinematograph plays must write for pantomime.”6 In the USA, Rollin
Summers gave a section of an article on “The Moving Picture Drama and the Acted
Drama” the subtitle “The Importance of Pantomime,” and argued in it that “The most
apparent limitation of the moving picture is its powerlessness to use dialogue. A pri-
mary means of expression is thus eliminated and only pantomime remains.”7
   The claim that film acting should be pantomime did not, however, go unchallenged.
As is well known, American commentators rapidly turned away from it, so that the
prevalence of pantomime, seen as a form of acting inappropriate in works to be pre-
sented to an American audience, came to be counted among the defects of foreign
films which authorised their exclusion from the American market by the cartels that
came to dominate the American cinema around 1910.8 In a racist twist, the Anglo-
Saxon reserve that American audiences would or should prefer to see in the cinema
would be subverted by the pantomimic gesticulation of the acting in French films.
Less prejudicially, such commentators as Frank Woods in New York Dramatic Mirror
began to argue against pantomime on realist grounds: “picture acting is not pan-
tomime, […] it is merely the art of fine acting without words, and […] the essential thing
is to have a good story to act and then act it in the most natural manner possible.”9 In
England, rather, pantomimic acting became associated with other schools of tradi-
tional acting, ones that were, by the 1910s, provincial or “old-fashioned,” but which
continued to be felt to be appropriate for the cinema, both because the absence of
speech in the cinema demanded a broader style, and because the audiences for the cin-
ema were seen as relatively unsophisticated, like those who still appreciated the older
acting styles of the spoken stage.
   In France, things were somewhat more equivocal. Although descriptions of film act-
ing as “pantomime,” and of the fiction film as a form of “pantomime” were common
from 1908 until the First World War, this was never a unanimous opinion. In his review
of the preview of the first products of Film d’Art at the Salle Charras in Paris on
November 22nd 1908, Adolphe Brisson, the principal dramatic critic of Le Temps, in a
passage which seems to be echoing conversations with Henri Lavedan, the founder of
Film d’Art and author of the screenplay of the most important film in that programme,

­16
                                                                      WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

L’Assassinat du duc de Guise, after describing the weightier part gesture must play in
film drama as opposed to the ordinary stage play, asks:

  So is this art, from which speech is subtracted, the same thing as pantomime? [...] By no
  means [...] Pantomime has a specialised language and grammar, immutable signs whose
  meaning never varies; one of those signs means greed, another pride, another flirtatiousness,
  and so on. The cinema refuses to use this alphabet; its aim is life. To grasp, sift, fix, by styli-
  sation, the forms of life and their fleeting aspects, that is the task it has taken on.10

  Other French commentators continued to dispute the significance of mime acting
for film.11
  So far, this article has been merely about talk: what contemporaries said about films
and film acting, as evidenced by what was published in both the film trade and the lay
press. When dealing with contemporary comment – especially journalistic comment,
but the same is also true of discourse in general – it is crucial to bear in mind that it by
no means follows that because we can find articles that say that something really is
happening, or because we can find articles that say that something has begun to hap-
pen that there has in fact been any change. Column-inches have to be filled, and read-
ers’ adherence solicited, and for these purposes commonplaces and truisms are more
useful and more easily available than descriptions of unfamiliar phenomena or original
deductions.
  This is important here, because, under one common sense of “pantomime,” most cin-
ema was pantomime by definition. Although in England, the term had taken on a dif-
ferent meaning, in France (and probably also the U.S.A.), the basic meaning of “pan-
tomime” was a play without spoken dialogue.12 With the relatively minor exceptions
of the phonoscène and those films accompanied by actors behind the screen speaking
words in synchronisation with the figures on it, fiction films were enacted dramas
where there was no dialogue, or the dialogue was inaudible and hence anything it was
supposed to convey had to be supplied by other means. In this sense, it was therefore a
truism to say film was pantomime, and the evocation of a genre with its roots in antiq-
uity was highly flattering to the tradesmen who purveyed these wares.13 Most refer-
ences to fiction films as pantomimes are of this kind. When Édouard Helsey in
Comœdia calls the Film d’Art productions “these important pantomimes,”14 it means
no more than if he had said “films” except to imply these are high-class films. When
“Souffleur” writes in the Bioscope that

  The school for cinematograph acting – when it comes – will find that gesture and pan-
  tomime, acting by signs instead of words, will have to be taught, and taught thoroughly;
  moreover, it will be found that a peculiar class of gesture – broad and deliberate – is neces-
  sary to permit of good photography and satisfactory results15

  the first part of this statement says little more than that film actors must cultivate
gestures if they are to convey the inner life of their characters, while the second is the
familiar insistence in these years that film acting has to be broad.
  In the light of this, it is not surprising that Sabine Lenk, in a careful and detailed study
of both the film trade and the lay press in France before the First World War, concludes
that the regular appeal to “pantomime” is superficial:

                                                                                                    ­17
BEN BREWSTER

  In their efforts to integrate the new entertainment medium, most writers rely on external
  features: film is mute, it tells stories, it usually shows human beings in action, music accom-
  panies its offerings – all these things are also true of pantomime. Hence many conclude that
  film is a kind of pantomime.16

  However, in an as yet unpublished thesis on acting in the early British cinema,
Jonathan Burrows argues, on the contrary, that

  most of the relevant evidence that we can examine points to the pervasive influence of one
  specific European theatrical histrionic tradition which predominantly informed the choice
  of productions, performers and acting styles that they [theatrical adaptations made in
  Britain between 1908 and 1911] showcase. That tradition is the discipline of authentic word-
  less pantomime.17

   Burrows’s claim has two parts. First, that there was an acting tradition associated with
pantomime distinct from other acting styles in the theatre of the period, and second, that
the film acting described as pantomime, in particular the acting in the early Film d’Art
films and that of such films as the 1911 Cooperative Film Company adaptation of
Shakespeare’s Richard III, acted by F.R. Benson and his troupe, can be shown to conform
to that tradition. What Burrows attempts to do is to find prescriptions and proscriptions
in manuals for pantomime acting that contradict those found in similar manuals for the
spoken stage, and then to demonstrate that the films he believes are strictly pantomim-
ic conform to the rulings in the pantomime books and not those for spoken drama.
   Burrows’s first point is that, in the tradition of spoken drama which Lea Jacobs and I
call “pictorial,” gestures were slow. He cites Gustave Garcia’s prescription that “pre-
cipitation between two gestures, in fact want of repose in the general treatment of a
scene completely destroys the illusion which the spectator would otherwise feel.”18
This he contrasts with Aubert’s claim that the action in pantomime had to be “rapid
[...] expressions which require too many explanatory gestures must be rejected or mod-
ified because they cause length.”19 For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, he
links Garcia’s call for slowness in gesture to Dene Barnett’s summary of eighteenth-
century acting manuals to the effect that gesture was timed to the delivery of dialogue
at a very fine-grained level: “The action tended to be matched to the short phrase rather
than to whole passages. One acted by the word rather than by the paragraph or by the
pervading emotion.”20 Clearly, the same could not directly be true of pantomime,
which has no spoken component. However, insofar as pantomime involved gestural
dialogues and monologues, i.e., gesture was used as a substitute for speech in pan-
tomime, the timing of such gesture could approach that of spoken drama. Moreover,
in the same passage Barnett himself draws attention to the vigour of gesture in récits,
speeches in which the actors describe an action not directly depicted on stage, and an
example in Antonio Morrocchesi’s Lezioni di declamazione e d’arte teatrale in which
22 plates with widely different attitudes and gestures illustrate a récit of 16 lines shows
that gestures timed to dialogue could be very fast indeed.21 Aubert’s rejection of long,
complex gestural sequences in pantomime is directed more at achieving clarity than
at pace as such – a string of gestures without speech to clarify the meaning might eas-
ily cause the spectator to lose the thread of the mimed dialogue. “Length” is not being
criticised here for slowing down the action, but for spoiling the “immediacy” that

­18
                                                                   WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

Aubert demands characterise pantomime gestures. Finally, if gesture is rapid in many
films of this period, and later, this is attributable to the brevity of scenes in films,22 a
brevity necessitated by the overall length of the short films standard around 1908, but
retained in feature-length films, which usually have many more scenes than stage
plays of equivalent length.
   Burrows’s second contrast is between Aubert’s suggestion that, in pantomime, groups
of extras may all perform the same gesture simultaneously and Johannes Jelgerhuis’s
insistence, in his Theoretische Lessen over de Gesticulatie en Mimiek of 1827 that
“nothing is more ugly than for two Actors to stand alike, because contrasts must hold
in the whole of the tableau.”23 Burrows sees the extras in L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise
(specifically, the members of the King’s Guard in the scenes immediately before and
after the assassination), and those in the Benson Richard III, as acting in unison in this
way. However, Jelgerhuis and Aubert are talking about such different issues in the
respective passages that the contrast is more apparent than real. Aubert’s suggestion is
in a chapter entitled “On the Unity of Expression” whose main point is that different
gestures should never occur simultaneously: “In no case should an actor be allowed to
express two things at once. For example, to respond to the line So you no longer need
me? by a no with the head and a leave me with the arm.” Similarly, two actors should
never make gestures at the same time, although (but he insists it is not an exception):

  It is true that several actors, when addressing a single person, may at the same time gesticu-
  late, implore, insult, threaten; but were they one hundred, were they one thousand, they
  never represent anything but one crowd, one party, one unit – in other words, a single inter-
  locutor. And, so long as this crowd and the person it addresses do not make their gestures at
  the same time, but each in turn, then the dialogue will be just as clear as if there were only
  two people on the stage.24

  What is at stake is the temporal relationship of gestures. Given that gestures can be
realised in an infinite number of ways – indeed, much of the art of acting lies, not in the
correct performance of a gesture, but in producing a unique variation on the gesture –
then it is quite possible for a group of extras to conform to Aubert’s insistence on per-
forming gestures in sequence, and hence on a crowd all producing a single gesture at
once, without offending Jelgerhuis’s concern for contrast in the stage picture as a
whole, insofar as each extra produces a variant of the gesture, coordinating his or her
variant to fit with the others’ into a harmonious ensemble.
  There is no doubt that the turn taking principle expounded by Aubert for pantomime
was also standard in spoken drama. At a broad level, it can be demonstrated in the direc-
tions given in play texts.25 Where extras are concerned, it is clear that one of the reasons
Chronegk’s direction of the Meininger troupe was seen as so innovative and so offend-
ed theatrical traditionalists is that he rejected the Aubert prescription and provided
each of his extras with an individual piece of business to perform at his own pace, and
the result, at least for the traditionalists, was precisely the distraction that Aubert was
trying to guard against.26
  There might seem to be a contradiction between this turn-taking and the idea of the
tableau, both in the sense of the climactic picture and the sense of conceiving the
organisation of the action on stage as the movement from one picture to another –
after all, the tableau was the assemblage of a group of different, indeed contrasting atti-

                                                                                               ­19
BEN BREWSTER

tudes, all held at once. But the stasis of the climactic picture is what helped avoid the
distraction, since the audience had time to take in its complexity, and the composi-
tional structure even of the picture which was hardly held at all immediately indicat-
ed whose was at that moment the principal part – the succession of pictures is what
made possible the turn-taking.27 Rather than a contradiction, there is a tension
between turn-taking and tableau, part of the overall tension between stasis and move-
ment in pictorial theatre.
   As for the films, I see nothing in the ensemble work of the actors playing the guards
in L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise to offend Jelgerhuis. Their gestures – e.g., when they all
raise their swords to swear to the King to carry out the murder, or when they all point
to the dead Duke as Henri emerges from his bed curtains – are similar, but their arrange-
ment in a semi-circle ensures variation in their outlines for the spectator. Moreover,
there are clear examples of tableaux in the early Film d’Art productions, as well as con-
stant resort to turn-taking.28 There seems nothing to suggest that there was any differ-
ence between pantomime and spoken drama in these matters, and hence nothing in the
films of 1908-10 which was incompatible with emulation of either theatrical form.
Burrows’s source of rules for pantomime acting, Charles Aubert, says as much:

  Actors [sc. in spoken drama] will easily see that, if they can leave to mimes in the narrow
  sense most of the deliberate or considered gestures which are intended to replace speech, it
  is very much in their interest to study and use all the instinctual expressions which so pow-
  erfully enliven speech by giving it more force, clarity, and warmth.29

  Whereas these arguments for a specific acting style for pantomime have depended on
comparing prescriptions for pantomime actors with supposedly contradictory ones for
actors for the spoken stage, Burrows claims at least one case where an acting manual
directly contrasts rules for standard drama and for those for pantomime. He paraphras-
es Gustave Garcia to the effect that (in standard acting) the actor should avoid symmet-
rical movements of the limbs, and goes on:

  However, quick, “symmetrical movements [...] are admissible” he [Garcia] adds, but “only in
  pantomimic action.” Rapid mobility and a plastic susceptibility to instantaneous changes of
  expression are “the first condition of a good pantomimist.” Thus, “The very faults to avoid in
  tragedy or high comedy could be turned to good account” in mute drama.30

  We should note that Garcia discusses “pantomimic action” rather than “pantomime.”
Indeed, it is arguable that he never discusses pantomime as a genre, probably because it
was not a significant genre on the British stage when he wrote. Burrows’s second quo-
tation shows this clearly. In full, it reads:

  In descriptive ballets the dancers have to express all their sentiments by pantomimic action.
  Mute actors, such as the dumb girl in Masaniello, are also introduced. This sort of acting
  requires a great knowledge of the different gestures appropriate to each sentiment and pas-
  sion. The first condition for a good pantomimist is to possess a face susceptible of great vari-
  ety of expression – of great mobility. The very faults to avoid in tragedy or high comedy
  could be turned to good account in low comedy or comic parts. Symmetric, awkward move-
  ments prove very successful when judiciously used.31

­20
                                                                 WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

  The references to ballet and to Masaniello show that he is thinking of moments in
other genres (I will discuss ballet-pantomime in more detail later) where gestural sub-
stitutes for dialogue are used, such as the communications of a character who is dumb
(one can easily imagine other, similar cases, e.g., when characters are forced to converse
by gesture to make their communication inaudible to another character). Note that the
sentence Burrows completes with a reference to “mute drama” in fact concludes with
“low comedy or comic parts.” The usage of “pantomimic action” in the passage from
which Burrows draws his first quotations might seem more generic:

  Symmetrical movements in acting are admissible only in pantomimic action or low come-
  dy, and are therefore incompatible with elevated sentiments. In high comedy or tragedy
  such movements would be out of place.32

  But the basic framework is the same: Garcia is distinguishing between types of ges-
ture appropriate to low and high genres, and assumes (forgetting here the example of
Masaniello) that characters in the low genres are more likely to resort to mime.
  These quotations from Garcia also illustrate the difficulty of the approach Burrows
takes, assuming that the manuals codify a style, and that an examination of what
actors do in surviving films will allow us to assign the acting in those films to one style
or another. Garcia does not think of acting as one style, or even a set of styles for dif-
ferent kinds of theatre. Pictorial acting is not really a matter of “styles” at all. Rather, it
is an approach to acting which enjoins the actor to consider at every moment how he
or she looks to the audience in relation to the stage picture as a whole. Acting manuals
codify the approach as a set of rules – dos and don’ts – but these are not absolute; thus,
all the manuals tell you that the arms should not be raised above shoulder level, but I
have no doubt that in most performances of most plays in the nineteenth century
some actor raised his arms above his shoulders at some point. The rules’ purpose is to
ensure that the stage picture, and hence the actor’s part in it, is appropriate to the sit-
uation depicted, to the character being depicted, and to the genre of the play being per-
formed. They are rules of decorum, and as such are meant to be broken when situation,
character, or genre require it. The manuals codify the pictorial approach in a neo-
Aristotelian manner as a set of prescriptions for verisimilitudinous mimesis.33 What
appears on stage will be plausible to the audience if it respects the rules of decorum,
which include the provision that, in extremis, the rules should be broken. As Lessing
put it, the actor may permit himself “the wildness of a Tempesta, the insolence of a
Bernini,” if the situation demands it and the transitions to and from the rule-breaking
moment are properly handled.34 As a result, pictorial acting encompasses as many
styles as there are genres, as many styles as there are situations, and, indeed, as many
styles as there are actors. Indeed, it could be argued that pictorial acting would allow a
place for acting which fits no recognizable style, which does not look like acting at all
(and which therefore might, in a different context, be identical to the strictest natura-
listic acting). Burrows’s key example of the reduced acting style he argues was more
typical of respectable (i.e., non-melodramatic) stage acting in Britain at the turn of the
century, Charles Hawtrey, might be a case in point:35 Hawtrey specialised in a very nar-
row kind of comedy in which what was comic was that he failed to respond to situa-
tions in the expected way, i.e., the “actorly” way; a similar kind of humour is generat-
ed by those pantomime dames who do not act in a womanly way (or Cary Grant when

                                                                                            ­21
BEN BREWSTER

in drag in I Was a Male War Bride), though in this case it is a refusal to act according
to character that is at stake.
   Clearly, such a broad account of pictorial acting is intended to make the very notion of
“verisimilar” acting impossible (or coterminous with pictorial acting as such). One of the
things that has most surprised Lea Jacobs and me in the reception of Theatre to Cinema
at conferences where questions of early film acting have arisen is that, although we were
concerned lest our critique of Roberta Pearson’s opposition between “histrionic” and
“verismilar” acting might be too virulent, in the event many people have rather conflat-
ed that distinction with our one between pictorial and naturalistic acting – supposing
maybe that the two oppositions are conceptually different and what we call pictorialist
performances might be classed as verisimilar by Pearson, and vice versa, but for most pur-
poses lumping together Pearson and Brewster and Jacobs as slightly different accounts of
how film acting evolved from theatrical beginnings to cinematic realism. This conflation
has not yet appeared much in print, as far as I know, but an example would be Charlie
Keil’s remark that “Brewster and Jacobs dispute the validity of categories based on pur-
ported distinctions in theatrical practice, but they agree that the transitional period wit-
nesses a marked change in performance style. I see no reason to abandon the descrip-
tively useful terms Pearson has devised.”36 But the real problem is the escalator model as
such, the idea of a “transitional” period during which an old-fashioned, stage-centered
style (with all the bad connotations the anti-theatrical prejudice associates with “histri-
onic”) is more or less steadily displaced by something natural, unaffected, realistic and
better adapted to the cinema. This evolutionism is already evidenced in the 1910s them-
selves, and is now well entrenched, so well entrenched that one book is not going to shift
it. Moreover, although our point about naturalistic acting was that it was a programme
so maladapted to cinema that only a very few filmmakers attempted to espouse it, we did
see it as coming after pictorialism, and hence interpreted film performances which were
heavily influenced by post-naturalist theatrical movements such as symbolism as some-
how pre-naturalist, because they can be analysed in pictorialist terms.37 We thus opened
the door to the temptation to consider particular film performances as somewhere on a
diachronic line between traditional theatrical acting and modern cinematic acting, when
what an understanding of pictorialist acting allows is the possibility of describing the dif-
ferences between different performances and different performers synchronically, with-
out branding one as more “advanced” or “regressive” than another.38
   The misappreciations induced by evolutionist accounts of early film acting are illus-
trated by the way recent commentators contrast the performances of Raphaël Albert
Lambert and Charles Le Bargy in L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise. Thus Burrows:

  There are, it is true, several moments of relative stillness and undemonstrative behaviour in
  L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise from Albert Lambert as the eponymous Duke, but the main star
  of the film Le Bargy – playing Henri III – often employs very broad gestures and moves in a
  noticeably frenzied fashion, particularly in the scene where he gives instructions to the con-
  spirators.39

  And Lenk:

  The sociétaire of the Comédie-Française [Le Bargy, though the description would apply
  equally to Lambert] often uses what, from a present-day standpoint, seems an exaggerated

­22
                                                                 WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

  and misplaced gestural pantomime, while the acting of the other performers is more
  nuanced and reserved.40

   Thus the difference between the two performances is seen as a stylistic discrepancy,
Lambert being more advanced, Le Bargy regressive. But this is to ignore the point
emphasised above – that pictorialism calls for different acting for different characters
and situations. L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise is generically the most experimental of the
Film d’Art productions. In it, Lavedan abandons the conventions of the well-made play
which dominated most late nineteenth-century drama and opera, and tries to create
what might be called a pageant play, one in which historical events unfold in the man-
ner of a chronicle within a providential horizon in which each character and each deed
is reducible to a moral type. This form had been tried by Romantic writers, and Ludovic
Vitet’s Les Etats de Blois of 1827 might even be a direct influence, but these plays had
been regarded as unperformable; however, there was a very similar impulse behind
many of English spectacular theatre’s productions of Shakespeare, most particularly
Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s 1910 Henry VIII, and it is clear that there was a widespread
preoccupation with pageant drama at this time, seen as restoring the sacral dimension
that the bourgeois theatre had lost (witness the fascination with such folk dramas as
the Oberammergau Passion Play).41 Within this genre, de Guise stands for Hubris,
brushing aside all the omens foreshadowing his death – the anonymous letter, the nose-
bleed, his mistress’s and his fellow Councillors’ warnings – so Lambert shows him with
a calm somewhere between heedlessness and an appropriately Iberian sosiego, while
Henri III stands for Tyrannical Pusillanimity, barely screwing himself up to destroy his
long-time ally and rival, so Le Bargy’s gestures show agitation, terror, uncertainty, con-
tradictory impulses, superstition.42 The contrast in the acting is not one between an old
and a new acting style, but between different characters in different situations. Brisson
captures this contrast in his review: “The King [...] ferrety, disturbed, mouselike, agitat-
ed, [...] the Duke [...] bold, his eye steady, his posture haughty, trusting to his courage.”43
   Thus it seems to me that Burrows does not establish his claim that there was a pan-
tomime acting style distinct from the acting styles of the spoken stage (except insofar
as most early film and pantomime both lacked one of the crucial aspects of that stage,
namely, the conveyance of information via the resources of the voice). And I would also
agree with Lenk that most identifications between film acting and pantomime in this
period are restricted to the obvious features in this last parenthesis. But this does not
mean that there was no significant influence from acting in French pantomime upon
the acting in the early French film. I have stressed that neither contemporary accounts
nor what we can see in the films suggests that there was an acting style for spoken the-
atre that can be homogeneously distinguished from one for pantomime; I have also
indicated that spoken theatre itself had no homogenous acting style. Might not the
same be true of acting in pantomime? One problem here is the small number of detailed
accounts available. Most modern commentators simply rely on Charles Aubert’s L’Art
mimique, assuming this one source is a description of contemporary pantomime prac-
tice, when the author’s own comments suggest that he is promoting a particular con-
ception of mime, not describing the range of mime practice of his own day, let alone the
full range of mime acting.44 Moreover, a glance at films made in all film-producing
countries before the First World War shows that actors in the cinema used a mime
vocabulary which is barely if at all referred to by Aubert in his manual. These pan-

                                                                                            ­23
BEN BREWSTER

tomime gestures are not attitudes or expressive gestures, but rather gestures that stand
in for speeches the characters are supposed to be making. Aubert distinguished five
kinds of action:

  Mimic movements can be divided into five kinds, viz.:
  1) Movements of action, which are purely and simply the movements required to carry out an
  action: to drink, to walk, ... etc.;
  2) Movements of character, which are persistent and define the character, habits and quality of
  a role;
  3) Instinctual movements, which are spontaneous, involuntary, and convey an emotion, a phys-
  ical or moral sensation;
  4) Descriptive or speaking movements, which are voluntary, deliberate, composed, and whose
  aim is to express a thought, a need, a desire, or to describe a person, an objet, or to indicate a
  point or direction.
  5) Complementary movements, which make up the participation of the whole body in the
  expression signified by the main movement, giving that expression more force and harmony.45

  He goes on to say that the fourth category, the speaking movements, are above all
hand gestures, and that they are relatively conventional, and hence require more expo-
sition in his manual than the first three categories.46 Despite the large space devoted to
this fourth category of gestures in Aubert’s manual, he includes few of the gestures that
we see in the films, and the usage he describes differs from that in the films.
  In one of the first American articles attacking mime in the cinema, Frank Woods
exemplifies the “old pantomime” as follows: “If an actor desired to indicate to another
that he wanted a drink of water he would form his hand in the shape of a cup and go
through the motions of drinking.”47 This gesture, familiar to anyone who has seen
many films made in the 1900s and 1910s, is not in L’Art mimique. Kristin Thompson
describes another familiar gesture:

  One could catalogue many standard gestures in films before 1913. For example, when char-
  acters place an open hand palm down about three feet from the floor, that indicates
  “child.”48

  This gesture even occurs in a film that has been described as pioneering a “specifical-
ly cinematic direction of actors,”49 Germinal (SCAGL, 1913), when a number of black-
legs are forced to run the gauntlet of a crowd of striking miners. One of the blacklegs
makes the gesture as an excuse to his fellow workers for his return to work. This ges-
ture – an open hand held low, palm down – is found in Aubert (p. 99, fig. 121), but with
the meaning “small” (or “short” – petit can mean either), and contrasted with that of an
open hand held high, palm down (fig. 122), meaning “big” or “tall.” Obviously, there are
contexts where “short [person]” and “child” could be synonymous, but the Germinal
example is not one of them – it is the father-child relationship that the blackleg is refer-
ring to, not the size of the child; he is excusing his return to work on the grounds that
he has a child to support. The only other familiar mime gesture I can spot in Aubert’s
long list is “arms folded, held close to the body, one elbow higher than the other” (p. 66,
fig. 54), which he says means “carrying a child in one’s arms; a child; a mother.” The
only meaning I have seen this used for is “baby.”

­24
                                                               WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

   However, all these gestures are recorded, with the meaning evident from the films, in
a relatively recent work, Joan Lawson’s 1957 book Mime: The Theory and Practice of
Expressive Gesture with a Description of its Historical Development.50 This book (ded-
icated to Margot Fonteyn) is written for ballet dancers and choreographers. Mid-nine-
teenth-century French ballet, in particular (often called “ballet-pantomime,” as in the
passages from Garcia’s acting manual cited above), had extensive passages of musically
accompanied mime between what were more strictly dances, and such mime evoked
the same contradictory views that we find in relation to the mime dramas of the turn of
the century – some commentators find the mime the most affecting part of the per-
formance (e.g., Théophile Gautier on Fanny Elssler in La Gipsy in 1839),51 others con-
demn it as an incomprehensible waste of time (e.g., Hector Berlioz on La Chatte meta-
morphosé en femme in 1837).52 Modern ballet, and modern choreography of classical
ballet, have minimised the extent of mime, but it is still impossible to perform or fol-
low the action of Giselle or Swan Lake without using or understanding some mime, so
ballet dancers, unlike stage actors, still have to learn this vocabulary.53 Hence their pres-
ence in Lawson’s work. Why their absence (or modification) in Aubert’s, given that
their appearance in films suggests they were probably also present in contemporary
stage pantomime?
   Nineteenth-century French mime usually claims descent from the work of Gaspard
Deburau at the Théâtre des Funambules in Paris in the late 1820s.54 Deburau specialised
in (some authors claim named) the white-clothed clown Pierrot, and although the
mime plays in which his Pierrot appeared were comedies, this clown had a melancholy
streak. Deburau’s Pierrot attracted the attention of literary intellectuals, giving rise to
the long history of Pierrots in modernist theatre, ballet, music, and painting as well as
literature. After Deburau’s death, pantomime persisted as a popular form, usually in the
context of variety theatre (especially in Marseille), but the mime contemporaneous
with the early cinema owes much to a revival, appealing to Deburau, centring on the
Cercle des Funambules, a club founded in Paris in February 1888 by a group of intellec-
tuals including a novelist (Paul Margueritte), a dramatic critic (Félix Larcher), and a
journalist (Raoul de Najac), Paul Hugounet, an early member, stated the principal aim
of the Cercle des Funambules as follows:

  To promote the growth of modern pantomime, by providing authors and musical com-
  posers with the opportunity to produce publicly their works in this genre, whatever the
  artistic tendencies of those works in other respects.55

  This formulation seems deliberately catholic with respect to the range of mime act-
ing in the current theatre, but in a later work, Hugounet adds that the Cercle also aimed
for a reform of pantomime, distinguishing the work of the Cercle from the pantomimes
staged in French variety theatres, thus constituting the Cercle as a sort of “Théâtre Libre
de la Pantomime” (Hugounet’s phrase):

  The point was to suppress in pantomime all the conventional gestures which make it
  obscure, to set aside a whole alphabet which is incomprehensible to the audience.56

  This, along with the use of serious and original music, would serve the distinguish
the work of the Cercle from variety-theatre and circus mime.

                                                                                          ­25
BEN BREWSTER

  This distinction, between an incomprehensible arbitrary mime vocabulary, an
“alphabet” as Hugounet calls it, and a mime based on the natural expressiveness of the
body is too much of a commonplace to be accepted as a real description (note how it
echoes the fifty year earlier opposition between Gautier and Berlioz), but it does suggest
a range of types of acting in pantomime, and why a writer like Aubert, who shared the
Cercle des Funambules’ reforming ideas, would try to make his descriptive gestures
motivated or “natural” signs rather than arbitrary ones.57 However, there is another
contrast that helps to explain the paucity of descriptions of the conventionalised ges-
tures. A review in Théâtra of a March 1911 performance in Marseille by Georges Wague
and Christine Kerf in the mime play Aux Bat’ d’Aff’ commented:

  How remote this is from the traditional pantomime of those so highly regarded famous old
  mime-artistes and how much I prefer this new art of M. Wague, more true, more accurate,
  more sincere.58

  Wague, indeed, boasted that he avoided hand gestures, restricting himself as far as
possible to expressive attitudes. However, this praise evoked a furious response from
the mime Bighetti:

  M. Wague’s modernism is not an artistic formula, it is no more than a recipe to draw a crowd
  [....]. Pantomime is a difficult science, and to know it you must have learnt it. How can you
  make yourself understood with gestures if you do not use the conventional signs of the
  mimic alphabet?59

  Bighetti (like Sévérin, Thalès and Jacquinet) was a pupil of the Marseille mime Rouffe
(1849-1885), whereas Wague was largely self-taught – he had debuted as a reciter of verse,
and had then progressed to full-blown mime plays via the cantomime, a mixed form in
which the mime illustrated a song performed simultaneously by a singer in the wings.
This quarrel thus counterposes two conceptions of the professional status of the mime.
For Wague, mime is the mastery of the natural expressivity of the body, and hence is in
principle open to anyone; for Bighetti, it is a learned alphabet, and hence is only avail-
able to those who undergo a long apprenticeship under the tutelage of another, older
mime. But the mime who sees his work as a craft secret is not going to publish a how-to
manual. Hence the written record, including both mime manuals like Aubert’s, and the
descriptions of mime by literary intellectuals and drama critics,60 favours a “new pan-
tomime” which minimises the conventional vocabulary, but that vocabulary – the “old
pantomime” – can survive quite vigorously uncommented alongside.61
  Perhaps it should be pointed out that this “new” pantomime has little to do with the
modern French mime we are familiar with from the work of Jean-Louis Barrault and
Marcel Marceau. These mimes trace their descent to Etienne Decroux, who reinvented
mime in collaboration with Jacques Copeau at the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier at the
end of the First World War. Decroux’s mime drew on modern dance, Jacques Doniol-
Valcroze’s eurhythmics, and gymnastics and other sports more than it did on the pre-
War mime tradition.62 In particular, contemporary descriptions of pre-War mime show
no evidence of the concern in the work of Barrault, Marceau, and also Tati, for the evo-
cation of an invisible world, where the mime conjures up a whole environment, other
characters, objects, etc., with his body alone and no scenery and no props, except per-

­26
                                                              WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

haps a few nondescript ones.63 Pre-War mime used all the resources of the spectacular
theatre – props, costumes, scenery. Once again, this suggests that there was no specific
acting style for pantomime, except where acting was directly related to speech: pan-
tomime was simply theatre minus words.
  French mime actors did, however, have a significant effect on the French cinema,
since so many of them acted in it. In France in the belle époque, pantomime was a part
of variety entertainment. Pantomimes were presented (by professionals and amateurs)
in private performances in the homes of the rich, soirées and charity concerts; pan-
tomime was part of the repertory at the big music halls, such as the Folies-Bergère and
the Moulin Rouge; it appeared on the bills in lowly café-concerts. At one end of the
scale, it was an intellectual pastime with modernist aspirations, at the other end `a pop-
ular entertainment barely distinguishable from strip tease. Not surprisingly, the same
stratum of the acting profession that served the variety theatre also provided the acting
personnel of the early cinema, and hence the early stock companies as well as deliber-
ately promoted “cross-overs” from the live stage included many with experience in pan-
tomime. An examination of the filmography of a few famous stage mimes as recorded
in Raymond Chirat and Eric Le Roy’s Catalogue des films français de fiction de 1908 à
1918 illustrates the point. Paul Franck appeared in twenty-three films in these years,
Jean Jacquinet in forty-nine, Stacia Napierkowska in seventy-six, Gaston Sévérin in
nine, Thalès in seventeen, Charlotte Wiehe in four, and Georges Wague in fifty-two.64
Some of these mimes, for example, Sévérin, appeared in films relatively rarely, and
almost always with his own mime troupe in adaptations of stage pantomimes; others,
notably Wague, became fairly regular film actors without abandoning their stage pan-
tomime careers, while yet others, particularly Jacquinet and Napierkowska, moved
from pantomime acting to acting almost exclusively for film. But the overall presence
of pantomime actors, or actors who had established themselves in pantomime, in
French filmmaking, is undeniable. However, by the same token, these actors fit seam-
lessly into the ensembles with which they worked, ensembles that included many
actors from other stage traditions. Napierkowska, it is true, is an actress with a very dis-
tinctive, dance-like style (she had been a dancer as well as a mime, and, in general,
female mimes were often called on for dance in their mime dramas more than the men
– thus, most of Wague’s leading ladies were originally dancers) and this does lead to her
drawing excessive attention to herself (e.g., as the messenger in the 1909 Pathé
Cléopâtre), but in films like Capellani’s Notre Dame de Paris (SCAGL, 1911) her fellow
actors Henri Krauss and Claude Garry match the breadth of her gestures. And, although
I knew Germinal (SCAGL, 1913) very well, I did not realise Jacquinet was a mime until
I undertook the research for this article.
  In addition to the conventionalised mime gestures described above, there are other
instances of mime in early film. In the 1910 Biograph film Gold Is Not All, there is a
scene in which a poor couple, played by Mack Sennett and Linda Arvidson, watch a rich
wife leaving her house in her automobile. After the car leaves the screen with the cou-
ple enviously watching it, Sennett points off in the direction the car left, makes circles
in the air with his forefinger, then points at himself, and lifts a foot and taps his shoe.
The meaning of the gestures is clear enough: the poor husband says to his wife some-
thing like “Look, she gets to ride in a car, while we have to walk!” However, these ges-
tures do not appear in any source I know of mime gestures. Lawson has a gesture for
“walk,” but it is made solely with the arms, moving them backwards and forwards like

                                                                                         ­27
BEN BREWSTER

a child imitating the pistons of a railway locomotive.65 Sennett (or perhaps Griffith)
seems to have invented these gestures for the immediate situation.
   Note that Sennett’s lips do not move during this sequence of gestures. Aubert argues
forcefully that pantomimists should not move their lips, indeed, they should make no
reference at all to the notion that people speak (e.g., make no gestures indicative of lis-
tening to others speaking); the good mime has the talent to “cause the very existence of
speech to be temporarily forgotten.”66 Burrows, Lenk and others have taken the
absence of lip movements as typical of stage pantomime, and hence its occurrence in
films as a sign that these are “pantomime-influenced” films; the fact that in other films
characters’ lips do move thus for them marks the shift to a more realistic kind of film
acting. However, Aubert himself complains that some pantomimists did move their
lips, while the standard gesture for “Silence!” in the other manuals is a finger to the lips
with the hand palm out, and hence an obvious reference to speech, so once again,
Aubert adopts an extreme position on this matter.67 Moreover, film actors throughout
the silent period restrict the amount of visible speaking they do, so the distinction is
not an absolute one. But, from the beginning, filmmakers and spectators thought of the
moving-picture camera as a recording apparatus, and were aware of its limitations,
including, for the most part at this period, the absence of recorded sound, so they did
not have to imagine the world filmed as one lacking speech, while the absence of
speech in stage mime was purely a generic convention, so Aubert, at least, thought it
needed special treatment.68
   However, in later Biograph films, while gestures of the type found in Gold Is Not All
remain common, they usually accompany lip movements, and can be realistically moti-
vated as “talking with one’s hands” while speaking. Also, the effort to avoid conven-
tionalised gesture often results in them being fairly obscure, unlike Sennett’s (and as
gestures accompanying talk are likely to be). In A Lodging for the Night (USA, Biograph,
1912), when Charles West as Dick Logan has to explain to the sheriff how he was set on
by thieves in the night and yet exculpate his guilty host since he is sweet on that host’s
daughter, he speaks to the sheriff and moves his hands up and down and across his body
as if playing arpeggios on an invisible piano. In the absence of an intertitle (the print I
have seen lacked intertitles, which I am sure would have been present here in a release
print), it is quite unclear what he tells the sheriff.
   This kind of “talking with one’s hands” mime (“pantomimic action,” in Garcia’s
sense, but motivated by the absence of audible sound in silent film) remains common
in the cinema, particularly in the comic cinema (again confirming Garcia’s notion that
pantomimic action was particularly appropriate for low genre),69 and, indeed, had a
rich flowering in the late silent period, when the talking picture was already on the
horizon. Think of the children’s attempts to convey to their father the fact that the
chicken leg he is about to serve to his next-door neighbour is still adorned with the fatal
rosette which will reveal that this chicken is that neighbour’s prize rooster, in Pass the
Gravy (USA, Hal Roach, 1928), or Monte Blue’s mime to his wife across the street to
explain the effects of his old flame’s attempts to seduce him in So This Is Paris (USA,
Warner’s, 1926), or Adolph Menjou’s relation to his valet of his night’s adventures in A
Gentleman of Paris (USA, Paramount, 1927). In these last instances, filmmakers resort
to mime partly to evade censorship – mime enables things to be conveyed by characters
to the audience that censorship would not allow in dialogue, whether the content of
that dialogue was represented by titles or by audible speech.

­28
                                                                 WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

  There is one last type of mime that is remarkable for its absence, or at any rate rarity,
in the early cinema. Although, as we have seen, pantomime was associated with ethnic
stereotypes, it seems surprisingly infrequently used to convey ethnic information. It
may be true that, very broadly speaking, the basic ethnic stereotype at work – the
notion that the breadth and frequency of gesture is in inverse proportion to geograph-
ic latitude (in Europe at least) – is reflected in the acting of ethnic types, but the effect is
quite slight. In The Baby and the Stork (USA, Biograph, 1912), it is important to the plot
that the man who delivers the coal at Bobby’s family’s house is Italian (because this
explains why suspicion falls on him when the family’s baby disappears, a suspicion
motivated by a newspaper article presumably referring to something like black-hand
gangs engaging in kidnapping – here too, the print I have seen lacked titles and inserts),
but nothing in Edward Dillon’s performance marks this Italianicity to me. Even more
strikingly, although it is a central feature of Assunta Spina that it is set in Naples, and
this is emphasised in costumes and even more in the use of Neapolitan settings for the
exteriors, the repertory of gestures deployed by the actors – Francesca Bertini as
Assunta, Gustavo Serena as Michele, Alberto Albertini as Raffaele, and Carlo Benedetti
as Funelli – is quite standard, with no Neapolitan peculiarities, despite the notorious
gestural specificity of the Neapolitan, and the availability of a famous book on
Neapolitan gesture – Andrea de Jorio’s La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire
napoletano of 183270 – to use as a source. It may be that the national and international
character of the film market deterred filmmakers from the use of local peculiarities,
unless these were immediately comprehensible to an international audience as “local
colour,” so gestures which needed to be understood to follow the plot of a film had to
belong to a cosmopolitan repertory (or be so firmly naturalistically motivated as to be
comprehensible to anyone without previous familiarity). Although the raison d’être of
the play by Salvatore di Giacomo on which the film is based is that it was in Neapolitan
dialect, every Italian print I have seen has dialogue titles in standard (Florentine)
Italian, without the slightest attempt to capture a Neapolitan flavour.71
  However, in the comic series he directed and starred in for Gaumont, Léonce Perret
does seem to be using gesture to mark what is presumably the Parisian culture of his
protagonist (which seems in general much more important to Léonce than it is to
Linder’s Max or Prince’s Rigadin, despite the fact that one assumes that these characters
usually live in Paris). In Léonce à la campagne (Gaumont, 1913), there is a scene in
which Léonce and his wife Poupette (played by Suzanne Le Bret) are staying at Léonce’s
uncle’s house in the country. One evening they are called to meet a group of the uncle’s
friends, who have come to dinner. The guests, local bourgeois, are sitting outside on the
terrace awaiting the call to dine. Léonce and Poupette approach the group from the rear,
as most of the guests listen in rapt attention to a harangue from a plump middle-aged
gentleman with a self-important attitude. After introductions, the gentleman resumes
his harangue. Standing behind them, Léonce and Poupette exchange glances, then both
look to camera and make the same gesture: they hold their right hand to their right
cheek, with the hand bent so that the back of the fingers is nearly against the cheek and
the wrist is towards camera, then wave the hand up and down, rotating it at the wrist,
so it brushes the cheek. The meaning of the gesture is not precisely clear (to me – I won-
der if a modern Parisian would recognise it at once?), but it seems to involve contempt
for the guests and a degree of incredulity, together with complicity with the spectator:
“Who do these bumpkins think they are?” I cannot find it in any of my sources on pan-

                                                                                             ­29
BEN BREWSTER

tomime or ethnic gestures, though it might be a variant of de Jorio’s negativa, in which
the bent hand is held with the back of the fingers under the chin and the back of the
hand facing the interlocutor, and whose meaning is “I reject what you propose!”72 Here,
though, it surely underlines the fact that Léonce and Poupette are Parisians, with the
assumption that the spectators are, too, or at any rate they are more likely to identify
with a Parisian than with a provincial.73
  So, what did happen to pantomime? It seems clear from this argument that a pan-
tomime-based cinema was not a “road not taken,” neither an inappropriate theatrical
borrowing that had to be cast off to allow the emergence of true cinematic acting, nor a
lost opportunity to create a “non-realist,” stylised cinema. Insofar as the early cinema
shared an obvious feature with stage pantomime, its lack of audible dialogue, it was a
form of pantomime, as all those “superficial” commentators maintained, and it
employed many stage mime practitioners. But apart from the area of gestures that sup-
plied the absence of speech, there was no special pantomime acting style – rather there
was a very wide range of acting “styles” in the pictorialist theatre as a whole, which
included the pantomime theatre, and the cinema drew on them all. And the mime that
supplied the absence of speech continued to be used in the cinema, and indeed, was
probably more widely used and more elaborated and orchestrated in the late silent peri-
od than in the 1910s. Rather than attempting to demarcate the broad trends of a stylis-
tic history of film acting, we need to study the different ways actors deployed the
resources of pictorialist theatre in the early cinema.



1 J. Claretie, “M. Claretie et la Cinématographie,” Ciné-Journal (26 November 1908), p. 6
  (reprinted from Le Temps).
2 Claretie here invokes a topos of early commentary on the cinema most familiar nowadays in
  Maxim Gorky’s famous 1896 review of a Lumière Cinématographe show in Nizhni Novgorod.
  See N. Burch, Life to Those Shadows (London: BFI, 1990), pp. 23-24 and J. Leyda, Kino: A
  History of the Russian and Soviet Film (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 407-409.
3 Moving Picture World (13 July 1907), p. 298.
4 “Film-Picture Actors,” The Bioscope (2 October 1908), p. 18
5 E. Kress, Le Geste et l’attitude: L’Art mimique au cinématographe (Paris: Comptoir d’édition
  de “Cinéma-Revue,” 1912), and Ch. Aubert, L’Art mimique, suivi d’un traité de la pantomime
  et du ballet, 200 dessins par l’Auteur (Paris: E. Meuriot, 1901). In Théâtre contre Cinéma. Die
  Diskussion um Kino und Theater vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Frankreich (Münster: MAkS
  Publikationen, 1989), p. 153, Sabine Lenk gives many other references to commentary sug-
  gesting films are pantomimes and that film acting is pantomime, including Louis Schneider
  in Phono-Ciné-Gazette (15 August 1908), p. 693 (reprinted from L’Etoile Belge), Fourniols in
  Touche-à-tout (December 1912), p. 479, and Des Anges in Comœdia (12 April 1913), p. 4. She
  also establishes that the same was true of Germany in the same period.
6 Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly (20 January 1910), p. 611; and C. Bennett, Handbook of
  Kinematography (London: Kinematograph Weekly, 1911), p. 219. For a detailed account of
  English claims that film acting was a form of pantomime, see John Burrows, “The Whole
  English Stage To Be Seen For Sixpence!”: Theatrical Actors and Acting Styles In British
  Cinema, 1908-1918 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, to be published).
7 Moving Picture World, vol. 3, no. 12 (19 September 1908), p. 212.

­30
                                                                       WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

8 See R. Abel, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 (Berkeley:
   University of California Press, 1999), pp. 136 ff.
9 “Spectator’s Comments,” New York Dramatic Mirror, vol. 63, no. 1622 (22 January 1910), p. 17.
10 “Chronique Théâtrale,” Le Temps, no. 17317 (23 November, 1908), pp. 1-2. The section of this
   article on the Film d’Art programme was subsequently reprinted as “Ce que M. Brisson pense
   du Film d’Art,” Ciné-Journal, vol. 17 (3 December, 1908), pp. 7-9; it is extensively quoted by G.
   Sadoul, in Histoire générale du cinéma II: Les pionniers du cinéma 1897-1909 (revised edition,
   Paris: Denoël, n.d. [1978]), pp. 504-507, and there is a partial translation in R. Abel (ed.), French
   Film Theory and Criticism, A History/Anthology, I: 1907-1929 (Princeton: Princeton
   University Press, 1988), pp. 50-52.
11 For example, the film trade journalist Yhcam, and Maurice Luguet (“Opinions,” Comœdia (18
   February 1914), p. 4). See Lenk, op. cit., p. 170.
12 In England, pantomime was and is the name given to a local variant of the magical spectacle
   which in France would have been called féerie, one in which the emphasis was on clowning. The
   different kinds of pantomime practised in France and England in the nineteenth and twentieth
   centuries had similar roots in eighteenth-century (and earlier) illegitimate theatre, which, at least
   officially, had been required to be wordless, and had often featured clowns. As the restrictions on
   the illegitimate theatre were progressively relaxed, French pantomime, claiming descent from
   Gaspard Deburau, took its aesthetic dominant from the mime, whereas English, epitomised by
   Joseph Grimaldi, found its in the clown. The indifference to reference in the trade press is illus-
   trated by the fact that this perfectly well-known distinction did not stop English commentators
   from claiming that actors who had distinguished themselves in pantomime (in the English
   sense) were therefore particularly suited to the cinema – thus, a Kinematograph and Lantern
   Weekly profile of Flora Morris highlighted her experience in “pantomime, one of the finest train-
   ing grounds for the picture actress” (27 April 1911, p. 1775, cit.); J. Burrows, op. cit., p. 154.
13 The Bioscope published a learned article, “The Revival of Pantomime,” by Laurence Trevelyan
   tracing the history of the genre from the primitive imitation of animals through ancient
   Greece and Rome to the puppet dramas of Maeterlinck and Reinhardt’s Sumurun (21
   December 1911, pp. 813-815).
14 Reprinted in Ciné-Journal, vol. 12 (5 November, 1908), p. 7.
15 The Bioscope (7 December 1911), p. 679.
16 Lenk, op. cit., p. 153.
17 Burrows, op. cit., pp. 61-62.
18 G. Garcia, The Actor’s Art: A Practical Treatise on Stage Declamation, Public Speaking and
   Deportment, for the use of Artists, Students and Amateurs (London: T. Pettit & Co., 1882), p.
   158, cit. in Burrows, op. cit., pp. 77-78.
19 Aubert, op. cit., p. 228, cit. in Burrows, op. cit., p. 77.
20 The Art of Gesture: The Practices and Principles of 18th Century Acting (Heidelberg: Carl
   Winter Universitätsverlag, 1987), p. 18 (cit. in Burrows, op. cit.)
21 A. Morrocchesi, Lezioni di declamazione e d’arte teatrale (Firenze: Tipografia All’insegna di
   Dante, 1832), pp. 255-257 and figs. 17-38.
22 See the analysis of gesture in a scene in An Official Appointment (USA, Vitagraph, 1912) in B.
   Brewster, L. Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (Oxford:
   Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 127-129.
23 J. Jelgerhuis, Theoretische Lessen over de gesticulatie en mimiek (Amsterdam: P.M. Warnars,
   1827; repr. Uitgeverij Adolf M. Hakkert, 1970), p. 90.
24 Aubert, op. cit., pp. 229-230.

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BEN BREWSTER

25 See my analysis of the last scene of Paul Armstrong’s Alias Jimmy Valentine in “Alias Jimmy
   Valentine and Situational Dramaturgy,” Film History, vol. 9, no. 4 (1997), p. 405.
26 “Two citizens cannot begin a conversation without the bustle of a market-place erupting
   behind them, so that we are willy-nilly distracted from the important dialogue.” Hans Hopfen,
   “Die Meininger in Berlin,” in Streitfragen und Erinnerungen (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1876), p. 241.
27 See the analysis of William Archer’s description of a scene from Hernani in Theatre to
   Cinema, op. cit., p. 89.
28 See the analyses of La Tosca and La Fin d’une royauté in Theatre to Cinema, op. cit., pp. 121-123.
29 Aubert, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
30 Burrows, op. cit., p. 78.
31 Garcia, op. cit., p. 163.
32 Ibid., p. 80.
33 One of the most unfortunate things about Roberta Pearson’s distinction between a “histrionic”
   acting style and a “verisimilar” one. R. Pearson, Eloquent Gestures: The Transformation of
   Performance Style in the Griffith Biographs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), esp.
   pp. 27-37 and 43-50 is that her definition of “verisimilar,” conforming to a conventional notion
   of the real world, is a crude version of the Aristotelian notion of verisimilitude, conforming to
   a set of maxims that say how in certain situations, certain characters will behave, and such a
   regime of verisimilitude governs all nineteenth-century acting before naturalism. Of course,
   generic appropriateness also enters into the definition of Aristotelian verisimilitude, but it
   would be hard to deny that even the most “verisimilar” Biograph performances do not take this
   into account – Mary Pickford acts differently in comedy than she does in drama.
34 G.E. Lessing, The Hamburg Dramaturgy (New York: Dover, 1962), p. 19.
35 Burrows, op. cit., pp. 46-47 and 339-58. “Might be,” since I have not seen any of Hawtrey’s
   films or read enough description of his stage appearances to make an overall assessment of
   his acting.
36 Early American Cinema in Transition: Story, Style, and Filmmaking, 1907-1913 (Madison,
   Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001), p. 141.
37 A Yeats specialist has pointed out to us that a passage in which the poet discusses Sarah
   Bernhardt’s acting in a 1902 production of Phèdre which we used (Theatre to Cinema, op. cit.,
   p. 100) as evidence for the length of poses in the pictorial acting tradition was intended to
   mark her performance as a modernist rather than a traditionalist one. Similarly, what we
   treated as Asta Nielsen’s “pre-naturalist” pictorialism might better be seen as a “post-natural-
   ist” pictorialism, and the influence of symbolism on the films in which Lyda Borelli or Emma
   Bauer appear is undeniable.
38 Pace Keil, if we did “agree that the transitional period witnesses a marked change in per-
   formance style,” we do not think that the mid-1910s performances of Borelli, Bauer, Nielsen,
   Bosse and Sweet can be seen as having evolved in the same way from the acting of the film
   stock companies when these were formed in 1907-8. Perhaps one might generalise that act-
   ing improved overall in the late 1900s, as performers learnt to master the special conditions
   of film as opposed to stage acting (which is not to say that performances became less theatri-
   cal – more likely, as performers gained confidence in the new medium, they realised that
   stage practices they had thought would not “go over” in film did register with audiences, and
   hence their film performances became more like their stage ones). But the development of
   cinematic acting in the 1910s cannot be reduced to a single evolutionary line.
39 Op. cit., p. 74 note 43.
40 Op. cit., p. 170. In Théâtre contre Cinéma, Lenk accepts the notion of a natural cinematic

­32
                                                                      WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

     vocation for “realism:” “If directors like Calmette, Le Bargy, or Carré return to well-worn the-
     atrical paths, pure filmmakers like Jasset or Feuillade strive for the reproduction of ‘authen-
     tic’ life” (ibid., p. 171). In later articles, and in those written in collaboration with Frank
     Kessler, she emphasises rather the suggestion that, following Brisson in the review of the first
     Film d’Art programme cited above, film actors strive for an artistic “stylisation” of life, which
     is, of course, by no means incompatible with a pictorial approach to acting. See especially F.
     Kessler, S. Lenk, “‘…levant les bras au ciel, se tapant sur les cuisses.’ Réflexions sur l’univer-
     salité du geste dans le cinéma des premiers temps”, in R. Cosandey, F. Albera (eds.), Cinéma
     sans frontières, 1896-1918, Images Across Borders (Lausanne-Québec: Payot/Nuit Blanche,
     1995), pp. 133-144, and F. Kessler, “Lesbare Körper,” KINtop, no. 7 (1998), pp. 15-28.
41   A less lofty influence, clearly, was earlier historical films such as the Lumière’s La Mort de
     Marat (ca. 1897, Catalogue no. 749) or Pathé’s 1902 version of L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise,
     which themselves derive from dioramas, tableaux vivants and history paintings, all popular
     manifestations of nineteenth-century pictorialism.
42   More generally, in pictorialism villains have broader gestures than heroes. This is still evident
     in Capellani’s Germinal, where it would be a mistake to see Jacquinet’s performance as Chaval
     as “hammy” while Henri Krauss’ as Lantier is “naturalistic,” and to attribute the difference in
     style to the fact that Jacquinet had a long career in mime before he became a film actor.
43   Brisson, op. cit.
44   Burrows simply asserts that Aubert is “authoritative” (op. cit., p. 76), without offering any jus-
     tification for the claim. Apart from the pantomime manual (which had the good fortune, for
     later commentators, to be translated into English many years later), Aubert was the author of
     two volumes of pantomime plays, but, as far as I know, none of these were part of the stan-
     dard mime repertory of the period.
45   Aubert, op. cit., pp. 12-13. The radically different assessments we have seen in contemporary
     discussions of mime in theatre and film (and in ballet, as we shall see below) can be largely
     accounted for if we distinguish what part of mime acting the commentators are discussing.
     In general, those who regard mime as immediately comprehensible and affecting are talking
     about Aubert’s third type of gestures, the ones expressing characters’ feelings; those who
     regard it as an arcane system of hieroglyphics are talking about his fourth, those gestures that
     stand in for characters’ speeches. Largely but not wholly. In the review of L’Assassinat du Duc
     de Guise cited above, Adolphe Brisson clearly objects to the stereotyped character of mime
     expressions of feeling as well as to the arbitrariness of the speaking gestures.
46   Ibid., pp. 16-18.
47   “Spectator’s Comments,” New York Dramatic Mirror, vol. 62, no. 1612 (13 November 1909), p. 15.
48   “The Formulation of the Classical Style 1909-28,” in D. Bordwell, J. Staiger, K. Thompson, The
     Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (London: Routledge,
     1985), pp. 189-190.
49   M. Marie, “Place de Germinal dans l’histoire du cinéma français,” 1895, special issue L’Année
     1913 en France (October 1993), p. 230.
50   (New York: Pitman, 1957). See p. 92 for “drink,” p. 87 for “child,” and p. 85 for “baby.”
51   La Presse (4 February 1839).
52   Revue et gazette musicale (22 October 1837).
53   See M.E. Smith, Music for the Ballet-Pantomime at the Paris Opéra, 1825-1850, Yale University
     Ph.D. thesis (1988), especially pp. 70-76.
54   Mime had a place in variety theatre in other European countries and the USA. in these years,
     too – the issue of the New York Dramatic Mirror that reviewed the first Film d’Art films

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      shown in America contained an advertisement for a mimed Wild-West show – but French
      mime received more literary attention and its history is easier to trace.
55    P. Hugounet, Mimes et Pierrots, notes et documents inédits pour servir à l’histoire de la pan-
      tomime (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1889), p. 238.
56    Hugounet, La Musique et la pantomime (Paris: Ernest Kolb, n.d. [1892]), pp. 15 and 17.
      Hugounet also edited a special number of the magazine La Plume on pantomime: no. 82 (15
      September 1892).
57    Lawson gives the following for “mother:” “1. Raise both arms through 2nd position. 2. Bend
      forearms inwards and allow them to cross chest. 3. Both hands come to rest with the finger-
      tips just below and inside opposite shoulders. Traditionally the R[ight] hand is nearest the
      heart. Palms against body” (p. 102). She suggests, however, that the original meaning of this
      gesture (which might be thought naturally to express “chastity”) was “virgin,” but the use of
      it in paintings of the Virgin Mary led to its arbitrary adoption as the sign for “mother.”
      Contrast this shift from the motivated to the arbitrary with Aubert’s conflation (for natural
      reasons) of the signs for “baby” and the sign for “mother.” In the same way, Aubert replaces
      the sign for “child” with its motivation, the indication of a small size. Lenk notes the opposi-
      tion between a “natural” and a “conventional” school of mime, but assigns Aubert to the lat-
      ter, on the grounds that L’Art mimique devotes so much space to descriptive gestures, ignor-
      ing the “non-conventional” nature of Aubert’s descriptive gestures. See Lenk, op. cit., p. 167.
58    21 March 1911; cit. in T. Rémy, Georges Wague: Le Mime de la belle époque (Paris: Georges
      Girard, 1964), p. 109.
59    Letter to Théâtra (13 May 1911), cit. in Rémy, op. cit., pp. 109-110.
60    See for example R. de Najac, Petit traité de pantomime, à l’usage des gens du monde (Paris: A.
      Hennuyer, 1887), p. 4ff.
61    American trade-press comments that contrast an “old” and a “new” pantomime, such as H.F.
      Hoffman’s “Cutting Off the Feet” (Moving Picture World, vol. 12, no. 1, 6 April 1912, p. 53),
      imply, and have been taken by modern commentators to mean, stage acting versus film acting,
      but it may well be that they are echoing a debate current in the pantomime theatre of the day.
62    For this tradition, see J. Dorcy, The Mime (New York: Speller & Sons, 1961), with essays by E.
      Decroux, J.-L. Barrault and M. Marceau.
63    This kind of mime was, however, part of English and American clowning, particularly that
      used in the variety theatre as opposed to the circus, and as such found its way into slapstick
      comedy in American cinema. It may be that French mimes learnt it from Chaplin and Keaton
      as much as from any native tradition.
64    R. Chirat, E. Le Roy, Catalogue des films français de fiction de 1908 à 1918 (Paris:
      Cinémathèque française, 1995). It should be said that this filmography is not ideal for gener-
      ating this kind of statistics. No catalogue of early films can claim to be complete, so there may
      have been films in which mimes appeared which were missed entirely by the compilers., and
      there may be films which do appear, but in which the presence of a mime actor is not record-
      ed. But there may also be over-representation as well as under-representation. Chirat and Le
      Roy seem to have decided to assign a catalogue entry to every title they found in an authori-
      tative source. Quite apart from the quality of the sources they used – an entry in J. Mitry’s
      Filmographie universelle, surely the single major source of error in early filmography, seems
      to be enough to ensure a title an entry – the same film can have several titles that are author-
      itative in this sense. Films have working titles which are not identical to their release titles;
      they are given new titles on re-release; films which are adaptations of plays or other works
      may be referred to (especially in the memoirs of participants in their making) by the title of

­34
                                                                       WHAT HAPPENED TO PANTOMIME?

     the work adapted rather than the actual release title. There are examples of all these kinds of
     multiple entry in the films with mime performers listed in Chirat and Le Roy’s catalogue. I
     have endeavoured to eliminate these extra numbers. Fortunately, for films which appeared in
     the Pathé Catalogues (films by Pathé itself, but also those by SCAGL and the early Film d’Art),
     H. Bousquet’s Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914 (Bures-sur-Yvette: Henri Bousquet,
     1993-1994) and De Pathé Frères à Pathé Cinéma (Bures-sur-Yvette: Henri Bousquet, 1999)
     make this correction a relatively easy task.
65   Op. cit., p. 113.
66   Op. cit., p. 222.
67   For “silence,” see Lawson, op. cit., p. 109. “Secrecy” (p. 107) also involves a finger to the lips,
     but the lips are tapped and the hand is held palm in. This gesture, too, obviously refers to
     speech.
68   In the same way, although the scenes in most films in this period, even tinted and toned ones,
     were monochrome, no one thought they had therefore to pretend that the world filmed was
     one without colour.
69   See Thompson, op. cit., p. 192.
70   See A. de Jorio, Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity (Bloomington: Indiana
     University Press, 2000).
71   Francesca Bertini is supposed to have acted in the stage version in Naples before she entered
     the cinema (as one of Assunta’s assistants in her laundry, not in the lead part). I do not know
     whether the Neapolitan dialect companies used specifically Neapolitan gestures in their per-
     formances as well as the language. If so, Bertini is avoiding them in the film version.
72   De Jorio, op. cit., p. 291 and plate XXI.
73   Since writing this, I have learnt from Bernard Bastide that this is a standard French (not pecu-
     liarly Parisian) gesture meaning “Boring!” Note that the conventional mime for “bored” is a
     polite yawn, with the hand held to a half-opened mouth, not this much more vulgar gesture
     (see Lawson, op. cit., p. 86).




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