application/pdf
2036-461X
19151
2
en
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Cinematic Performance: between the Histrionic and the Quotidian
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
2
New Studies
2003-03-01
2022-11-28
2003-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Lesley Stern
2003/03/01
University of California
2036-461X
2
en
Cinematic Performance: between the Histrionic and the Quotidian
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/19151/16956
2
CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE:
BETWEEN THE HISTRIONIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN
Lesley Stern, University of California - San Diego




                                                        A gesture expands into gymnastics,
                                                     rage is expressed through a somersault
                                                                                  Eisenstein


  Cinematic performance, let us assume from the outset, is not confined to acting, nor
does it necessarily privilege the human actor. Nevertheless, insofar as my interest in the
topic is fueled by a curiosity about how films move spectators (the affective dimension),
the body remains central to my inquiry. But how can one speak of “the body” in cine-
ma (as though there were only one)? Or how can one ask such a general question as:
“how do films move spectators?” (as though films move uniformly, and as though spec-
tators are all moved in the same way)? Of course one cannot speak in such general
terms: outside culture and history. But perhaps it is possible to delineate a kind of poet-
ics of performance that approaches the aesthetic in theoretical terms (focusing on the
production of sensory affect and knowledge), and is simultaneously alert to historical
and cultural context, to contexts of reception as well as production.
  The discipline of performance studies privileges the performing body as object of
study but stresses the fact that the “performance text” always includes the audience.
Work in this area attends not only to the signifying work of the spoken (or sung) text
but also to the way the performing body produces energies and affects, which are regis-
tered somatically by the audience. In contrast, film theory for the last thirty years has
concentrated on elaborating the workings of the cinematic apparatus by privileging the
visual dimension, by elaborating the psychic and ideological dimensions of spectator-
ship. There has been little acknowledgement that to be in an audience is not merely to
see but also to feel, to experience a range of somatic responses; and concomitantly there
has been little attention paid to the element of pathos, that element which eludes
semantic description. I believe that we in film studies can benefit from the work done
by performance theorists, so long as we are wary of the fetishization of presence in that
work. The emphasis in performance studies is always on “aliveness,” on the almost
sacred space and time in which performers and audience are simultaneously present,
and on the energy that is transmitted in live performance. I would argue that this trans-
mission of energy is not specific to live performance, that it can occur in cinema as well,
and, moreover, that it generally relies upon some mode of bodily performance. But the
challenge is to understand how the body in cinema can produce affects and transmit
energy when it is an unreal or fictional body: cut up, dispersed, faded in, spaced out,
speeded up, slowed down. But even while it is insubstantial, ephemeral, it is also index-

CINEMA & Cie, no. 2, Spring 2003                                                          ­113
LESLEY STERN

ical of the real, and it is in this tension (between the indexical and the fictional) that
mimetic engagement is generated. The affect produced by cinematic bodies arises out
of an imbrication of acting techniques and cinematic technologies
  Contemporary Western performance theory (both film and theatre) mostly remains
locked into an either-or approach as regards the nexus between performativity and
engagement. Traditionally engagement and illusion are ranged on one side (under the
rubric of Stanislavsky) and estrangement and contemplation on the other (under the
rubric of Brecht). My desire is to understand certain cinematic modalities that defy this
either-or categorization, cinematic modalities that have been neglected in contempo-
rary theory, and for which we need to develop a critical vocabulary.
  I believe that even in the most linear of films, the most representational, the rhetori-
cal ploys are more diverse and surprising than current theoretical orthodoxy (or the
critical language we have inherited from 1970s theory) allows, and also that the gener-
ation and circulation of affect has hardly been understood. Nevertheless, it might be the
case that certain kinds of films, certain kinds of performance modes, might enable us to
articulate new understandings. This also might involve looking at the work of earlier
critics, historians and theorists, as well as investigating both the continuities and dis-
continuities between early cinema and more contemporary cinematic practices.
  In exploring the topic of cinematic performance I have focused on three topoi: move-
ment, gesture, and genre. First: to begin an exploration of movement (bodily movement
in motion pictures) I focus on a particular cinematic trope, the somersault, as it occurs
in a range of films. Second: gesture is of course a huge topic, but it is useful to start
thinking about the history and after-life of gestural regimes in cinema. To focus this
topic I have examined The Tales of Hoffmann (M. Powell and E. Pressburger, 1951).
Third: a very loose genre is constituted by films “about” performance, a genre which I
have tentatively called the “putting on a show” genre, where the show refers not just to
theatre but also to film, television, dance, kung fu… My contention is that the encounter
between different performative regimes and representational systems serves to drama-
tize enactment itself, not just on a thematic level, through narrative self-reflexivity, but
by making visible the performative, and through registering the performative as a ques-
tion of affect.


Somersaults

  We are watching Blade Runner (R. Scott, 1982). Pris, like a human missile, comes som-
ersaulting straight towards us. One moment she is immobile (in a room full of mechan-
ical and artificial toys, she appears to be a wax doll); the next moment she is galvanized
into life, her body moving at the speed of light. The force of her somersault charges the
air; reconfiguring space and time, her bodily momentum is transmitted and experi-
enced in the auditorium as bodily sensation. My stomach lurches. How, I want to know,
is this affect produced?
  It might be instructive at this point to locate Eisenstein’s phrase – “A gesture expands
into gymnastics, rage is expressed through a somersault” – in its original context: his
1934 essay, “Through Theater to Cinema.”1 This is a significant piece of writing because
in it Eisenstein describes those theatrical experiments which brought him to the “brink
of cinema.”2 In orchestrating a stage fight in 1920 he discovered, in a moment of aber-

­114
                           CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE: BETWEEN THE HISTRIONIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN

rant expressionism, how he could affect the audience directly, and this led to a use of
the fight motif to contrast illusionary acting with “the physical fact of acrobatics.” From
here he started working with oppositional units, all leading to montage.
   Eisenstein reminds us (in both his film making and theoretical writings) that intel-
lectual cinema has as its correlate sensory thought or emotional intelligence. In devel-
oping an interest in the production of affect through stylized physical gesture he was
influenced by a number of writers and practitioners, including William Carpenter and
Ludwig Klages (as well, of course, as Meyerhold and the Proletkult Theater). Carpenter
was a nineteenth century British physiologist who delineated a phenomenon subse-
quently named the “Carpenter Effect” – the way in which a person unconsciously mim-
ics the movements of another person whom they are observing, as a kind of physiolog-
ical reflex. Klages expanded on Carpenter’s research to develop an aesthetic theory of
expressive movement which suggested that images of human bodies in motion could
evoke imitative ideo-motor responses in their observers.3 The influence of such theo-
ries on Eisenstein can be understood not in terms of a revelation that a somersault on
screen could evoke somersaults in the audience; rather, he became interested in the way
in which physical gesture and bodily movement could be charged with emotion, and
correlatively, the way in which emotion could be effectively transmitted via a circuit of
bodily affect. Rage, for instance, configured as a stylized gesture, would be experienced
via a somersaulting sensation in the viewer. In order to understand my own involun-
tary mimetic reaction (and to generalize a little about the moving body in cinema) I
have tried to analyze the imbrication, in the series of somersaults in Blade Runner, of
filmic codes with bodily performance.4


Gestures

  Gesture is only one aspect of performance, but it seems to me an entrée, mainly
because it enables simultaneous attention to the somatic (pertaining both to the per-
former and the audience) and the rhetorical. Gestures are performed individually, but
they are not possessed by individuals. They acquire force and significance through rep-
etition and variation. They are never simply signs – of a singular emotion, or identity,
nor an expression of the soul, but a charting of relations, imagined as well as real, inter-
diegetic as well as between films and audiences, stars and fans, characters and actors.
  While a taxonomy of gestures (itemizing symbolic meanings and attached affects)
does not seem to me very useful (because gestures in cinema are not on the whole so
fixed), there is a way of refining our understanding by situating the gestural function
within the context of three performative modalities (all cast in a dialectical form):
histrionic/quotidian, inflation/deflation, the daily body/the extra-daily body.
  The terms quotidian and histrionic serve to delineate two fundamental cinematic
propensities.5 They are not utterly distinct, but rather two impulses always and to vary-
ing degrees present in cinema. On the one hand we can say that the cinema, since its
inception, has always had a curiosity about the quotidian, a desire to scrutinize and cap-
ture the rhythms and nuances of everyday life; on the other hand, since its inception,
the cinema has been driven by a tendency to theatricalization, by a “properly cine-
matographic theatricality,”6 by stylization, by processes of semiotic virtuosity. In more
naturalistic cinema the gestural tends towards the utilitarian and quotidian; in more

                                                                                        ­115
LESLEY STERN

histrionic cinema the gestural tends towards the abstract, expressive and stylized. In
both cases gestural inflection has the capacity to move us (viewers) in ways that involve
less semantic cognition than a kind of sensory or bodily apprehension.
  The terms inflation and deflation serve to designate cinematic operations, and their
employment signals a shift away from a problematic of representation, and an orienta-
tion more towards rhetoric. Inflation involves an ostensive propensity, an exageration
or foregrounding of the cinematic codes (color, editing, camera movement, acting ...);
deflation, on the other hand, involves a playing down of the codes, an intensive, rather
than ostensive, propensity.
  The daily body and the extra-daily body do not serve to describe and identify persons,
but rather to distinguish modes of performance. The daily body is also a gestural and
cultural body, imbued with techniques that have been absorbed and learnt and which
are acted out on an unconscious and habitual level. The extra-daily body is differentiat-
ed from the daily in the kind and range of techniques and the way they are deployed.
This body has been produced through disciplined training, which enables a particular
deployment of energy, and includes a context: the presence of an audience, and the
marking out of a performance space. Eugenio Barba, from whom I have borrowed these
terms, calls this a “decided” body and he writes, “The actor gives himself [sic] form and
gives form to his message through fiction, by modelling his energy.”7
  The Tales of Hoffmann seems to me a wonderful vehicle for exploring performance
since it is at once so histrionic and inflated in its operations and yet so moving.8 This is
precisely because of its imbrication of cinematic codes and actorly codes. It is full of
trickery, extravagant special effects, stylized colour, artificial movement, jump cuts,
magical dissolves that transform the “real” opera into a cinematic phantasmagoria.
André Bazin referred to it as the creation of “an entirely faked universe…a sort of stage
without wings where everything is possible.”9 Elsewhere Bazin argued that the trans-
position of a piece of theatre to cinema is possible only on the condition that it does not
cause people to forget but rather to safeguard the theatricality of the œuvre.10 We
might say that Tales safeguards the operaticality of its source, but does so through sub-
jecting the opera to certain cinematic operations that we shall name operality: opera-
tions, that is, of histrionic cinema. By naturalistic standards acting in this film is unbe-
lievable, and yet the performances are rivetting; that is to say, they have the capacity to
rivet our attention, and incite a mimetic response (kinesthetic duplication rather than
psychological identification). This surely derives from Powell and Pressburger’s deci-
sion to use dancers, and in the choreographing of movement to privilege the gestural.
  A key to understanding Tales and its histrionic dimension, I argue, lies in a recogni-
tion of its genealogy, traced via the evolution of a performative dimension in nine-
teenth century opera, connecting to some of the tropes of silent cinema, and also to a
certain avant-garde trajectory in the twentieth century that privileges the physical over
the psychological, and the somatic over the semantic in the generation of affect.11 In
the early part of the twentieth century the modernist body began to emerge on the
avant-garde stage, a body trained in techniques that both derived from forms of indus-
trial labour (the Taylorism of Meyerhold) and from the array of physical culture move-
ments and modern dance techniques that were proliferating in Europe.12 Meyerhold
articulates the nature of this new attention to the somatic register: “Just as Wagner
employs the orchestra to convey emotions, I employ plastic movement [...] The essence
of human relationships is determined by gestures, poses, glances and silences…”13

­116
                           CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE: BETWEEN THE HISTRIONIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN

   My suggestion is that we look to the cinema of the divas for an antecedent to the ges-
tural quality of Tales, particularly to a figure like Lyda Borelli. In a film such as Ma
l’amor mio non muore! (M. Caserini, 1913) the inexorability of fate (and attendant sen-
sations of fear, sorrow, yearning) unravels as much through the activity of her little fin-
ger, as through plot devices. Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs point out that Borelli’s per-
formance in Ma l’amor mio non muore! is “dependent upon and facilitated by the
lengthy takes and staging in depth which are typical of European cinema [of the time]
more generally.”14 Through extremely detailed analysis they demonstrate that she is
never still, but rather moves very slowly from one pose into the next. They do not ask
(this is not their concern) why and how her gestural modality is so affecting. One of the
reasons is her decided body, which concentrates energy and concentrates our attention,
so that we kinesthetically experience the emotional range being enacted. In particular,
she utilises the technique of contra-posta or recoil. This was a modern technique based
on a dynamic of resistance and yielding; it involved moving into a pose, finding the
point of resistance and leaning out of it, thus concentrating and then redirecting ener-
gy. It occurs in a number of places: in the tango and its variations for instance (immor-
talised by another diva, Asta Nielsen, most famously in her dance in Afgrunden, U. Gad,
1910) and in the teachings of Eisenstein and Meyerhold.15
   If we read The Tales of Hoffmann via this genealogy (stressing on the one hand the
process of reading rather than the assertion of direct influence, and on the other hand
the migration of gestures across a more extensive cultural landscape than that con-
tained by the duality of theatre and film) many of the techniques deployed by the per-
formers, Robert Helpman in particular, become legible. Moreover, by examining an
overtly histrionic film like Tales we can actually sharpen our analytic tools for under-
standing more quotidian gestures in the cinema. Take a figure like James Dean, a sup-
posedly method actor, who adopts deflationary techniques, who reduces the space
between the daily and extra-daily body, who appears to be improvising anew rather
than repeating a repertoire of techniques. But look at Rebel Without a Cause (N. Ray,
1955) and notice how he exploits pathos through the technique of recoil.


Genre

   Innumerable films belong to the “putting on a show” genre or group, and they will
not all yield the same insights; the most interesting examples for our purposes will be
those that extend reflexivity beyond the diegesis and actually enact performative
issues. In terms of films about film making, for instance, Stanley Kwan’s Centre Stage
(aka The Actress, 1992) or Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996) yield a great deal more than
Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine (1973). In part this is because they are intertextual and
allusive of film history; they explore different styles of acting rendered through differ-
ent modes of film making. Like many films dealing with theatre (think of Rivette, or
Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge, 1963) and some dealing with television (The King of
Comedy, M. Scorsese, 1983; and Bamboozled, S. Lee, 2000) they also are implicitly about
film performance.
   To facilitate analysis of films within this group, and to understand how narrative and
thematic concerns intermesh with performativity I propose four analytic categories:
thematic motifs, generic tropes, figurative formations, performative modalities.16

                                                                                       ­117
LESLEY STERN

Thematic motifs are grounded in the diegesis. They include: high culture versus low
culture, theatre versus film, disaster versus success, public versus private. Generic
tropes refer to privileged moments, iterative scenarios, dramatic dynamics which,
although embedded in a narrative, have a certain recognizable autonomy as “set
pieces”; their function is rhetorical and generically (rather than narratively) affiliated.
Included in generic tropes are: the big break, the audition, the rehearsal, opening night,
kidnapping, repetition compulsion, performative objects, Springtime (this trope –
short for “Springtime for Hitler” and derived from the ambivalent hit musical number
of that name in The Producers (M. Brooks, 1968) – is a correlative of the thematic motif
of disaster versus success, and it refers to the propensity of these films to invest “bad”
acting, via virtuoso performance, with the power to fascinate and entertain). Figurative
formations refers on the one hand to the range of stock figures – star, celebrity, produc-
er/director, ingénue, understudy, ghost, diva – and on the other hand to the range of
relations that this “cast” enables, and to the emotional tenor of these relations: admira-
tion, love, erotic energy, emulation, envy, revenge… Performative modalities include
three already mentioned – histrionic/quotidian, inflation/deflation, the daily body/the
extra-daily body – as well as on-stage/off-stage, on screen/off-screen, acting/not acting,
actor/role, stage/screen (which maps onto theatre versus film), self/other,
performer/audience.
   To give a very brief indication of how these tropes are mobilized and transformed I
shall look at two pairings: 42nd Street (L. Bacon, 1933) and The Band Wagon (V.
Minnelli, 1953); and All About Eve (J. L. Mankievicz, 1950) and Opening Night (J.
Cassavetes, 1977).
   42nd Street, as a musical and a backstage drama, introduces many of the features of
the “putting on a show” genre: the ingénue, the big break, an on-stage/off-stage and per-
former/audience dialectic, and the stage/screen dynamic. Mostly the film respects the
theatrical stage as the locus of performance, the stage is contained by the film frame,
and through this process of duplication we, the film viewers, are positioned as analo-
gous to the intradiegetic stage audience. The narrative moves from audition to rehears-
al to the anticipation of opening night, in the course of which the diva (Bebe Daniels)
twists her ankle, and the ingénue gets her big break, her man and stardom. The film
concludes with the opening night of the stage show. But this opening, choreographed
by Busby Berkeley, is unlike any stage show we have seen. In an unheralded and star-
tling move the camera abandons all pretense of emulating the stage audience’s point of
view, and gives us a purely cinematic perspective and construction. The conjunction of
cinematic technology and performing bodies gives us not the opening night of a stage
show, but cinematic performativity at its most sensational. In its final 42nd Street does
not represent a stage show; it enacts the cinema’s capacity to transport us through
space, to take us, via bodily sensation, out of our own bodies.
   Twenty years later, in The Band Wagon characters can sing and dance off the stage.
The stage is not invoked through proscenium shots (as it was initially in 42nd Street).
Theatricalization of the cinema, at which Minnelli excelled, is achieved through other
means: through the articulation of performing bodies and stylized mise en scène, for
instance. The celebrated “Dancing in the Dark” number, is the inverse of Busby
Berkeley: a duet, intimate, lyrical. Representationally it evokes the quotidian – one
evening Fred and Cyd escape their professional lives (and the trouble they are having
meshing two different performative modes) and take a horsedrawn carriage into

­118
                            CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE: BETWEEN THE HISTRIONIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN

Central Park. But this quotidian is rendered in an inflationary manner. That is, the cin-
ematic codes are heightened (the lighting which gives a fairybook blue to the night, the
sets, the painted skyline), the extra-diegetic music (“Dancing in the Dark”). The public
and private and on-stage/off-stage tropes are animated here for both narrative and per-
formative purposes. But none of this quite explains what is so magical about the scene.
I think it is because of the enactment of the difference between the quotidian and the
histrionic, demonstrated through a transition from the daily to the extra daily body.
Put simply it is the tension between walking and dancing. The “stars” alight from the
carriage and walk towards a dance pavilion. They walk through the dancing couples;
others dance, they walk, but they begin to walk in time, a lilting walk, almost a glide.
Entering into a blue glade there is a moment – almost invisible, undecipherable – when
the walk turns into a dance. This moment is rhymed by the ending of the dance with
the step back into the carriage. When I watch this sequence, though sitting in the the-
atre, I feel as though my own body has been liberated from its quotidian solidity, is qui-
etly soaring into another dimension.
   All About Eve is a backstage classic: it takes many of the features of the genre and
twists them. Bette Davis plays a mid-century diva, who makes every gesture matter,
taking up the frame, declaring “I like to act.”17 But, in terms of the diegesis, she is under
threat. The film deploys many of the features of the genre I have outlined, but with a
series of twists and inversions. The ingénue figure (Eve), who is also a fan, insinuates
herself into the life of the star she so adores and emulates, becomes her understudy,
studies her every move, gets her big break (through arranging for the star to be kid-
napped), takes the star’s place, and becomes a star herself. At the end of the film a new
figure appears in Eve’s dressing room, a young ingénue … The process will be repeated.
And indeed it is, or at least is continued, in Opening Night. The emotions of mimeti-
cism turn to envy, malevolence, revenge (the malevolent fan is mobilized in King of
Comedy,18 which also elaborates the kidnapping motif, given further fascinating
twists in Bamboozled and another film about film making, Cecil B. Demented [J.
Waters, 2000]). The fan (dressed just as Eve was in the beginning of All About Eve) turns
up at the stage door in beginning of Opening Night – as part of a mob besieging the
great actress Myrtle Gordon, played by Gena Rowlands. Shortly after this the fan is hit
by a car and killed. She returns as a ghost, a malevolent ghost with whom Rowlands has
to do battle, as she struggles to find a way to play, on stage, a part she finds unsympa-
thetic. Myrtle is haunted, but the ghost has a materiality (on occasion she is embodied
by an actress), and the struggles are extremely violent, visceral, shockingly affective. I
have a feeling that Opening Night is a paradigmatic text for this study (even though it
is still an experimental and exploratory study) because the way it mobilizes the
daily/extra-daily body and the theatre/film modalities demonstrates that even while
the cinematic body is insubstantial, ephemeral, it is also indexical of the real, and it is
in this tension (between the indexical and the fictional) that mimetic engagement is
generated.



1 S. Eisenstein, “Through Theatre to Cinema” (1934), in J. Leyda (ed.), Film Form; trans. by J.
  Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1970), p. 7. I have to admit to taking liberties
  here – Eisenstein only mentions the somersault in passing, but it is a charged phrase, and like

                                                                                             ­119
LESLEY STERN

       the movement itself it flies through the air, tumbles through space, escaping the static page.
       It is, I believe, a significant mention.
2      Ibid., p. 8.
3      I am grateful to Miriam Hansen, Adam Daniel and Yuri Tsivian for drawing my attention to
       the “Carpenter Effect” and the influence of Carpenter and Klages on Eisenstein.
4      L. Stern, “I Think Sebastian, Therefore I… Somersault: Film and the Uncanny,” Paradoxa, vol.
       3, nos. 3-4 (1998), pp. 348-366.
5      L. Stern, “Paths That Wind Through the Thickets of Things,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1
       (Fall 2001), pp. 317-354.
6      Deleuze discusses the notion of a “properly cinematographic theatricality” and “a theatrical-
       ity of cinema totally distinct from the theatricality of the theatre (even when cinema uses it
       as a reference).” He is interested in what happens to various theatrical tropes, bodily postures,
       modes of delivery and voicing when they are “borrowed” from the theatre, but deployed dif-
       ferently by the cinema. He argues that the very substance of cinema, as a technology with its
       own potential for articulating the temporality of bodily presence (as it subsists and moves in
       time), produces a new theatricality with specific affects. See G. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-
       Image, trans. by H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), p. 83.
7      E. Barba, Beyond the Floating Islands (New York: PAJ, 1986), p. 94.
8      L. Stern, “The Tales of Hoffmann: An Instance of Operality,” in J. Joe, T. Rose (eds.), Between
       Opera and Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 39-57.
9      A. Bazin, Radio-Cinéma-Télévision (July 1951), cited in “Les Contes d’Hoffmann,” Avant-
       Scène, Opera and Cinema, no. 360 (May 1987), p. 70.
10     A. Bazin, “Theatre and Cinema,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 1, selected and trans. by H. Gray
       (Berkeley - Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972), p. 117.
11     I do not mean to flatten out the heterogeneous range of performative modalities existing in
       early cinema, particularly as manifested in different national cinemas, but also across genres
       and sometimes within single films.
12     And indeed in Hollywood too. American modern dance developed in California, along with
       film. Body awareness was often considered more important than a background in theatre.
       Lillian Gish, for instance, attended the Denishawn school of dance and Ruth St Denis chore-
       ographed the Babylon sequences in Intolerance (D. W. Griffith, 1916), which were copied by
       De Mille in Male and Female (C.B. De Mille, 1919). See C. Olsson, “Moving Bodies,” Aura: Film
       Studies Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (1998), p. 78.
13     V. Meyerhold, Meyerhold on Theatre, ed. and trans. by E. Braun (London-New York: Methuen,
       1969), p. 56.
14     B. Brewster, L. Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema: Stage Pictorialism and the Early Feature Film (New
       York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 111-12.
15     For the tango see Y. Tsivian: Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception (Chicago:
       University of Chicago, 1998), pp. 46-7; and “Russia, 1913: Cinema in the Cultural Landscape,”
       in R. Abel (ed.), Silent Film, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 203-208. For
       recoil see A. Law, M. Gordon, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics: Actor Training in
       Revolutionary Russia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1996); and M. Iampolski, “Rakurs
       and Recoil,” Aura: Film Studies Journal, vol. 4, no. 1 (1998), pp. 4-15. I am grateful to Yuri
       Tsivian for illuminating discussions on this topic.
16     L. Stern, “Putting on a Show or The After-life of Gestures,” (July 2000); issue of the on-line film
       journal, Senses of Cinema: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/.
17     François Regnault uses this phrase in discussing Robert De Niro, in whom he detects “an

­120
                            CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE: BETWEEN THE HISTRIONIC AND THE QUOTIDIAN

   inner jubilation.” See F. Regnault, “Plaidoyer Pro Niro,” Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 286 (March
   1978), pp. 49-51.
18 I discuss De Niro’s histrionic disposition in “Acting Out of Character: The King of Comedy as
   a Histrionic Text,” in L. Stern, G. Kouvaros (eds.), Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and
   Performance (Sydney: Power, 1999), pp. 277-305; and also in L. Stern, The Scorsese Connection
   (London-Bloomington: BFI-Indiana University Press, 1995), particularly Chapter Six.




                                                                                            ­121
