SUMMARY—“Performance I”

· Movie criticism has found it difficult to discuss the role of the actor, and the vocabulary for critically examining performance remains limited. One explanation for this is that acting is analogical, a mode of communication that works in terms of proportion, gradation, and inflection rather than the clear-cut distinctions and differences of digital sign systems.

· Movies and movie performances are "built" rather than "shot." Unlike theatrical acting, a cinematic performance is discontinuous, fragmented into the individual shots which are the movie's constituent parts, and reassembled in the editing room.

· A movie is a performance and not a text. All attempts to reduce movies to texts, whether through analogies between film and language, shots and words, or through formal analysis, ultimately fail to resolve the interpretive complexities of performance.

· The spectacle of movement was the cinema's first "production value." For the first time the world was revealed in motion, and the impression of lifelike movement amazed and excited its earliest viewers. Taking his terminology from vaudeville, film historian Tom Gunning has described early cinema as a "cinema of attractions," which he suggests has remained a component in Hollywood's subsequent production.

· Movement is present in Hollywood movies not only in the sense of the movement of objects within a fixed frame, but also in the movement of the camera itself, and the movement produced in the editing process. These three kinds of movement usually work in combination with other elements of mise-en-scene to direct audience attention without drawing attention to themselves.

· Nearly every Hollywood movie has at least one sequence which displays movement as a production value, interrupting the narrative of the movie, and challenging its dominance. Chase sequences and dance numbers are clear examples of these "autonomous spectacles," a source of pleasure offered to the audience independent of the narrative. We can distinguish between such autonomous performances and performances which are integrated into the narrative of a movie, but Hollywood movies are organized to accommodate both kinds of performance and to shift, at different moments, between the two.

· In keeping with Hollywood's conventions of representation, acting performance routinely aspires to transparency, creating a sense of character without making the audience aware of how this is achieved. While Hollywood appropriates performance styles from a variety of theatrical traditions, providing different performance styles for different generic contexts, acting has a higher status than other styles, deriving from the superior cultural prestige of legitimate theater. Acting remains, however, a largely untheorized, intuitive activity.

· Contrary to the common wisdom that acting for the screen requires more natural behavior than is needed on the stage, the camera's presence makes screen performance intensely artificial, counter-intuitive, and anything but natural, a matter of "techniques rather than feelings." The circumstances of production ensure that actors cannot experience their performances as coherent, but they must use their unnatural techniques to create the plausible illusion of a unified personality.

· Hollywood's commercial aesthetic places a higher priority on the star's recognizable performance as himself or herself than on the psychological plausibility of the character the star portrays or the coherence of the plot. In the production of a star vehicle, the character is adapted to fit the star.