Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Through movement and body language actors embody (make visual) the underlying emotions and motivations—the subtext—of characters. Filmmakers may take for granted the use of subtext, today, but pre-1930s, the visualization and the physicalization of subtext was rare in film. I’ll examine a couple of scenes of cinema from the silent era, such as Friz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and note how much of the acting tended to utilize the theatricality and exaggerated techniques of acting found on the 19th century stage. Challenging this conventional approach in 1898, Konstantin Stanislavsky, in a ground-breaking stage production of Chekhov’s The Seagull, engaged elements of the new science of psychology, devising a form of acting “truth” onstage that made physical the behavior, emotions, and “unconscious” motivations of characters—the material implied beneath the surface text of a script. He experimented with ways to make this subtext visible through the actors’ bodies. Some of these techniques would eventually work their way into cinema—but not until decades later. In addition to describing Stanislavsky’s 1898 production of The Seagull, Alfred Hitchcock’s concept of “pure cinema” will be used as a point of comparative analysis. Examples from François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), as well as a more contemporary scene from Peter Webber’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003) will be used to show how these films engaged in key concepts of Stanislavsky’s embodiment of subtext and Hitchcock’s pure cinema, revealing a form of cinema that utilizes compelling visual storytelling techniques through actors’ bodies.