“substitute,” “fake,” and even “counterfeit.” (Notice also that in some contexts the related term “impersonation” now signifies an illegal act.) The new forms of psychological realism, on the other hand, were associated with such words as “genuine,” “truthful,” “organic,” “authentic,” and “real.” Thus V. I. Pudovkin’s early book on film acting championed Stanislavsky’s idea that “an actor striving toward truth should be able to avoid the element of portraying his feelings to the audience” (334), and in the theater the Actors Studio advocated the development of “private moments” and “organic naturalness.”
The romantic revolution was concurrent with the democratic and scientific revolutions, which also changed attitudes toward “innovation,” a term that had been reviled in the writings of Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and even Shakespeare, but which in the nineteenth century became a signifier of artistic achievement. As René Girard points out, however, where art is concerned, innovation depends upon an imitative or mimetic relationship between new work and prior models: “The main prerequisite for real innovation [in art] is a minimal respect for the past and a mastery of its achievements, that is, mimesis” (244). The postmodern spread of pastiche and quotation might be said to involve a return to just this sort of mastery, but postmodernism relies upon a quality of irony or knowingness quite different from the classical arts.
The irony of the situation is that classicism and romanticism have always been two sides of the same coin. As Raymond Williams convincingly argues in Culture and Society (1958), the eighteenth-century doctrine of imitation was never intended as slavish adherence to a set of rules or to previous works of art; at its best, it was a set of precepts that were supposed to help artists achieve what Aristotle called “universals.” But romanticism also claimed to be dealing with universals; the imitative tradition and the cult of personal expression were therefore equally idealistic and equally committed to a representation of what they regarded as essential reality. Where the history of acting is concerned, the major difference between these two schools is that the former claims to be Plato’s “second nature,” achieved by mimesis, and the latter claims to be original nature, achieved by playing “oneself.”
Both approaches to performance are capable of producing good acting, and in practice most modern actors are pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, willing to use whatever technique works in particular circumstances. In fact, a great many films require a mixture of naturalistic and imitative techniques. Consider Barbara Loden’s raw, disturbing, utterly natural-looking performance in the title role of Wanda (1971), a film Loden also wrote and directed: she probably makes use of Method-style “sensory memory” to help create states of fatigue and hunger (as in the scene in which she sops up spaghetti sauce with bread and chews with gusto while also smoking a cigarette), but her performance also involves mimicry of a regional, working-class accent.
Although the technique of imitation and the technique of personal feeling are often opposed to one another by theorists, they aren’t mutually exclusive; it’s quite possible for pantomime artists or actors who use conventional gestures to “live the part” and emotionally project “themselves” into their roles. A remarkable testimony to this phenomenon has been given to us by Martin LaSalle, the leading “model” in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). LaSalle wasn’t a professional actor when the picture was made and he found himself serving as a kind of puppet, executing whatever movements and poses Bresson asked of him. His performance is minimalist, seldom changing its expressive quality; at one point he sheds tears, but most of the time his off-screen narration, spoken quite calmly, serves to inform us of the intense emotions his character feels but doesn’t obviously show on his face or in his voice. And yet LaSalle creates a memorably soulful effect, reminiscent in some ways of the young Montgomery Clift. In 1990, when documentary filmmaker Babette Mangolte tracked down LaSalle in Mexico, where he has worked for many years as a film and theater actor, he described how the experience of Pickpocket had marked his entire life. He recalled that Bresson told his “models” to repeat actions over and over, never explaining why; at one point he shot forty takes of LaSalle doing nothing more than walking up a stairway. The technique nevertheless had emotional consequences for the actor. LaSalle believed that Bresson was trying to provoke “an inner tension that would be seen in the hands and eyes,” as if he wanted to “weaken the ego of the ‘model,’” thereby inducing “doubt,” “anxiety,” and “anguish tinged with pleasure.” Although the performance was achieved through a sort of pantomime or rote repetition of prescribed gestures and looks, it was by no means unfeeling. “I felt the tension of the pickpocket,” LaSalle told Mangolte. “I think, even if we are only models, as [Bresson] says, we still take part in and internalize the activity. I felt as if I were living the situation, not externally but in a sensory way.” The astonishing result was that after Pickpocket LaSalle moved to New York and studied for four years at The Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg, who became the second great influence on his career.
As important as deeply felt emotion may be to a performer, there’s something disingenuous about the modern pedagogical tendency to devalue imitation, for we can find many instances in which movie actors, even naturalistic ones, are required to perform imitative tasks: depending on the situation, they can be called upon to mimic accents and physical signifiers of age, social class, gender, and sexuality; to deliberately emphasize conventional poses and gestures; to “act” for other characters in visibly artificial ways; to imitate models of “themselves” by repeating personal eccentricities from role to role; and to impersonate historical figures or other actors.
We need only think of film comedy, which often involves the foregrounding of stereotypical behavior and the mechanics of performance. Alec Guinness, a distinguished stage actor whose work in dramatic films depended upon minimalism and British reserve, was one of the most natural-looking performers in screen history, yet he performed in a manifestly imitative way when he played comedy rather than drama. As George Smiley, the leading character in the British television adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1989), Guinness is so quiet, so natural, so lacking in energetic movement and obvious emotion, that he makes the actors around him look like Dickensian caricatures; he reveals a repressed emotional intensity only when he makes slight adjustments of his eyeglasses and bowler hat. Contrast his performance in Alexander Mackendrick’s dark comedy The Ladykillers (1955): as the leader of a group of crooks who rent a room from a harmless little old lady, he wears comic buck teeth and sinister eye makeup, and his interactions with the landlady overflow with fake sincerity and oily sweetness. As Pudovkin might say, he portrays feelings so that the audience, if not the naïve old lady, can see his absurdly unconvincing act.
The burlesque comic Ed Wynn once distinguished between joke-telling clowns and comic actors. The first type, Wynn explained, says and does funny things, and the second type says and does things funnily. The distinction doesn’t quite hold, because comic actors sometimes also say or do funny things; even so, light-comic genres often depend upon performers who can execute ordinary movements and expressions in amusing ways, as if “quoting” conventions. Ernst Lubitsch’s Paramount musicals of the early 1930s are clear examples, requiring the actors to behave in a chic but visibly imitative style. In The Love Parade (1930), which employs a good deal of silent pantomime, Maurice Chevalier is cast as a Parisian playboy and military attaché to the unmarried and sexually yearning Queen of Sylvania, played by Jeanette MacDonald. When the two characters meet, their comically stiff formality soon dissolves into flirtation and then into a duet entitled “Anything to Please the Queen.” Throughout, their every intonation and expression is so heightened and intensified that there’s barely any difference between talking and singing. In the slightly later One Hour with You (1932), everyone poses, speaks, sings, and exchanges glances in this imitative fashion, heightened by moments of rhymed dialogue and direct address to the audience. Chevalier and MacDonald play a happily married couple whose relationship is threatened when the wife’s sexually promiscuous best friend (Genevieve Tobin) secretly decides to seduce the husband. In the first scene involving the three, Lubitsch creates a gallery of conventionally expressive close-ups and obvious displays of body language. MacDonald stands with her arm around Tobin and smiles in delight as she shows off Chevalier. “Look at him!”
