ROBERT NUNN
Of all the elements that mark the boundary between theatre and film, presence seems to be the most important. This essay seeks to set aside a sterile debate about whether presence renders theatre innately superior or inferior to film, and instead examines how presence in theatre and absence in film function as elements in the process of making meaning, arguing that it is presence which is the condition for theatrical semiosis, the material support for the kinds of meaning-making that constitute theatre, and, conversely, absence which is the condition for the specific kind of semiosis characteristic of film. After comparing how objects signify on stage and in film, the essay seeks to clarify the difference between acting on stage and in film by drawing on Eugenio Barba's distinction between daily and extra-daily behaviour.
De tous les éléments qui distinguent le cinéma du théâtre, c'est la présence qui semble être le plus important. Cet article cherche à mettre de côté un débat stérile sur la supériorité ou infériorité du théâtre par rapport au cinéma en raison de la présence, pour examiner la manière dont la présence au théâtre et l'absence au cinéma fonctionnent comme des éléments constitutifs du sens. Nous montrons que c'est la présence qui est la condition pour la sémiosis théâtrale, et, inversement, l'absence qui est la condition pour la sémiosis caractéristique du cinéma. Après avoir comparé la façon dont les objets signifient sur scène et à l'ecran, cet essai cherche à clarifier la différence entre le travail de l'acteur au théâtre et au cinéma en faisant appel à la distinction d'Eugenio Barba entre la gestualité quotidienne et la gestualité de représentation.
Working as I do in a multidisciplinary department with the awkward name, "Film Studies, Dramatic and Visual Arts," I cannot help but be aware of "the complex intermedial overlap between stage and film" (Silberman 558). Of all the elements that mark the boundary between the two art forms, presence seems to be the most important: Herbert Blau for instance writes of "the one inalienable and arcane truth of theatre, that the living person performing there may die in front of your eyes, and is in fact doing so" (105). But if presence is the most obvious distinguishing mark between theatre and film, it is also the most contentious. What does it matter that actors are concretely present to an audience in the theatre, and how does it matter?
Arguments about presence have often rested on singling it out and ascribing a value to it in isolation, a value that can be positive or negative. To Walter Benjamin, the arrival of film precipitated a "crisis" in the theatre, for film made it possible to dispense with the aura of presence, uniqueness and unrepeatability that had hitherto made works of art cult objects: "for the first time--and this is the effect of the film--man has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing its aura" (623). For Benjamin this crisis in theatre is part of a larger crisis in the arts, as mechanical reproduction "emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual" (618). To Benjamin, mechanical reproduction destroys presence, and in doing so emancipates not only the work of art but the critical faculties of the viewer. At the other extreme, Joseph Chaikin celebrates the "Presence of the Actor" as a way of resisting the dehumanization wrought by the substitution of film and television images for reality:
. . . whatever the subject matter, all theater for Chaikin is basically about presence. The "very essential heart" of it is the instant-to-instant awareness of shared moments between the actors and the audience: "You're there in that particular space in that room, breathing in that room . . . That's what the theater is. It's this demonstration of presence on some human theme or other and in some form or other." This quality, the fundamental difference between the stage and film or television, involves a heightened "sense of being alive now in this room," even a "confrontation of all the live bodies in the room with the mortality which they share." Theater, finally, can help to create an "appreciation of being."
Such a reminder of our aliveness is desperately needed. Chaikin wrote in an early Open Theater notebook, "People don't know if they're watching TV or seeing an actual event"; he says that people no longer seem to know the difference between a person and a photograph of a person, between a voice and a recording of a voice. The failure to appreciate other people's aliveness precludes compassionate or even responsible social interaction. . . . Theater's affirmation of being, therefore, has a vital social purpose. (Blumenthal 39-41)
This polarization, however, is a sterile and finally unproductive way of considering "presence" in the theatre. Benjamin's celebration of the destruction of the actor's auratic presence by film was contemporaneous with the "comparatively new way of acting" which his friend Brecht was "try[ing] out in a number of German theatres" (121), a way in which the actor was present without aura as a "historical subject . . . as divided and uncertain as the spectators to whom the play is addressed" (Diamond 88). Conversely, as Roger Copeland argues, "no experience (no matter how 'live') is entirely unmediated. . . . Furthermore, the idea that the theatre's 'liveness' is--in and of itself--a virtue, a source of automatic, unearned moral superiority to film and television, is sheer bourgeois sentimentality" (42). As Ann Wilson argues, this absolute validation of "presence" assumes a very particular, and questionable, notion of what exactly is present: namely, the authentic, essential self, whole and pure, recuperated from the fragmenting effect of modern technology (36).
This paper is an attempt to set aside a sterile debate about the value of presence, and to pose the question differently: how do presence in theatre and absence in film function as elements in the process of making meaning? My thesis is that it is presence which is the condition for theatrical semiosis, the material support for the kinds of meaning-making that constitute theatre. And conversely, it is absence which is the condition for the specific kind of semiosis characteristic of film. Let us first consider how an object signifies on stage and in film (how the actor signifies is a more complex matter and will be discussed later).
Objects on stage and images of objects on film function as icons, defined thus by C. S. Peirce: "Anything whatever . . . is an Icon of anything, in so far as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it" (qtd. in Elam 21). However, iconic signs in the theatre are distinct from filmic icons in several important ways. As Elam observes, "The theatre is perhaps the only art form able to exploit what might be called iconic identity: the sign-vehicle denoting a rich silk costume may well be a rich silk costume" (22). Anne Ubersfeld writes of the paradoxical situation (sémiotiquement monstrueuse) of the theatrical sign: it has three referents: the referent of the dramatic text; itself as its own referent; its referent in the real world (34).
But signifying a chair in the dramatic world by a materially present chair on the stage is not a simple matter. To begin with, as Keir Elam points out, its practical function as a chair must give way before its signifying function as a sign of a chair. "The stage radically transforms all objects and bodies defined within it, bestowing upon them an overriding signifying power which they lack--or which at least is less evident--in their normal social function" (7). The object is semiotized. Secondly, the table thus semiotized does not stand directly for another (imaginary) table but "for the intermediary signified 'table', i.e. for the class of objects of which it is a member" (8). Similarly, Umberto Eco clarifies the process of semiotization of the object on stage by saying that it is "ostended," that is, it has been "picked up among the existing physical bodies" and held out as an example of a class of objects (110). What does Lear's joint-stool look like? Something like this.
From these fundamental characteristics of the theatrical sign, certain things follow. First of these is the simultaneous presence on stage of varying degrees of iconicity: in film, with rare exceptions, everything on the screen is iconic to the same degree: the sets, the props, the rear projections, the illusions of three dimensions painted on glass and matted into the image, all end up as elements of a complete image, all "real" in the same way. Conversely, in theatre, three-dimensional actors and props can share the stage with two-dimensional painted flats, with slide projections, with puppets, with what mime artists call "space substance," and with highly abstract icons. A word about those "rare exceptions" in film. A film scholar would be right to point out that I am tending to confound film as a whole with conventional Hollywood narrative cinema. While it is true that in mainstream cinema one would not expect to see obviously two and three dimensional icons in the same frame, there are plenty of exceptions: for example a scene in Hitchcock's Marnie, where a street scene ends in a painted flat. However, the difference between the two media is perhaps clearest here: film scholars have been arguing for years over what Hitchcock was up to in that sequence: is it meaningful, or is it simply that there was not enough money spent to get it right? Nobody watching a play would think twice about such a mix of objects and painted scenery. It rests on such a fundamental convention that it would not demand to be accounted for.
The second consequence of the semiotization of the object in the theatre is the "mobility, dynamism, or transformability" of the sign (Elam 12-16). Since the object stands for an imaginary object through an intermediary step (of standing for a class of objects), it can alter not only its connotative meanings but its denotative meanings. "Any stage vehicle can stand, in principle, for any signified class of phenomena" (Elam 13): thus gesture can stand for solid objects (mime); speech can stand for scenery (Shakespeare); a hockey stick can stand for a gun (Rick Salutin's Les Canadiens), an actor can stand for any element of the mise-en-scène, etc. Furthermore, as Erika Fischer-Lichte says,
the mobility of signs . . . involves their polyfunctionality. For a theatrical sign can substitute for other theatrical signs only to the extent that it can take on differing semiotic functions: a chair can, for example, be utilized to signify not only a chair, but also a mountain, a staircase, a sword, an umbrella, an automobile, an enemy soldier, a sleeping child, an angry superior, a tender lover, a raging lion, etc. (131)
The "mobility of the sign" works the other way as well. An element of the fictional world of the play can be stood for by a great variety of signifiers: for example, a chair in the fiction can be signified by an actual chair on the stage, a chair depicted on a painted flat, an actor who "says he's a chair," or an actor who mimes a chair or gestures toward one as if it were present.
To take an example from The Farm Show, a documentary play created collectively by Theatre Passe Muraille in 1972, an actual Clinton shopping cart is first of all ostended as itself. It is one of a series of things held up as "things from Clinton." But the moment it is identified not just as a shopping cart but a Clinton shopping cart, its utilitarian function as a thing for carrying groceries is totally supplanted by its value as a sign of everything Paul Thompson and company discovered in the farming community near Clinton. As a sign of a class of things from Clinton, it is figuratively as well as literally mobile: it functions as all sorts of different members of that class: someone's car, for instance.
None of this is the case with the naturalist theatre of the late nineteenth century from which film took off. In naturalist theatre there is a high degree of iconic identity between the sign and its referent, the ultimate example being David Belasco's minutely faithful recreation of a Childs Restaurant on stage in The Governor's Lady (1912): absolutely nothing about it distinguished it from its original except for the fact that it was missing a wall and facing an auditorium full of seats (Carlson 77). Some of the claims by people who love film that theatre is dreadfully limited in comparison seem to come from mistaking the naturalistic form of theatre for the whole of theatre. Any argument that theatre is immobilized in one room while film can take one anywhere seems to assume that what one will see in "live theatre" will be a middle-class living room rendered on stage in detail, not the set of Ubu Roi, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, or Judith Thompson's Lion in the Streets.
In most narrative film, it is not the sign that is mobile but the camera; once an object or a person is filmed, its signification is fixed; a filmed chair is fixed as a chair in the diegesis: although its connotation can develop, its denotation is fixed: it cannot suddenly be something else; a filmed actor is fixed as a single character in the diegesis (doubling is rare, and is always accounted for: twins played by the same actor for instance). This is because of a difference in how the object becomes a sign in the two art forms: in film, there is no object, there is a trace of the object on film, referring back to it; that is, the image is already a sign, nothing further needs to be done to make it so. That being so, its sign-function already established, its referential function is enormously enhanced. The link between the image and its original material support, the object in front of the camera, is so powerful that nobody in a film audience is going to accept an original Clinton shopping cart as denoting anything but an original Clinton shopping cart--on film, it will never be a car. Dudley Andrew, citing André Bazin, points out that regardless of the image's function in a system of codes, regardless of the mobility of the image's connotative function, there is always a sense in which film images are "indices or traces left by nature on photographic emulsion and magnetic tape" (61). That is, the "intermediary signified" in theatre does not exist in film: there is a direct unmediated correspondence between the image on the film and the profilmic object: the "like this, sort of" of theatre contrasts with the "like this, exactly" of film.
The object on stage on the other hand is always, at bottom, what it is. It has no "alreadyness" as a sign. It is only a sign when ostended as a sign. That is, the material support of the theatrical sign is so unmistakably there as itself that the moment of its transformation into a sign can only happen with the active collaboration of the actor and the spectator. Having agreed that this transformation can be accomplished, both sides in the relationship have already agreed that the object can signify anything, or as many different things, as they wish; Paul Thompson commenting on the rural audiences at the première of The Farm Show, who had had little experience of live theatre, noted that they had no trouble whatever accepting the presentational performance style of the show: "if that man standing in front of me tells me he's a tractor, then he's a tractor."
The same contrast between the mobility of the camera and the mobility of the theatrical sign applies not only to objects and sets but to space itself. One argument that film can accomplish things impossible to theatre is that the camera can go anywhere while a stage cannot move. That is, the "presence" of the stage is an extreme liability: the audience is not going anywhere, the stage facing it is not going anywhere. There is an interesting misunderstanding of theatrical space in this. The camera moves freely through real space, recording scenes without any limit on how much space is traversed between one shot and another. In theatre, the actual space out of which the fictional space is constructed is in plain view of the audience the whole time. But (moving beyond the severe restrictions of naturalist theatre) the same "mobility of the sign" that applied to objects on the stage applies to the stage itself. Again, Elam's concept of the intermediary step in theatrical semiosis is invaluable. The stage does not stand for a dramatic world in a straight one-for-one relationship. It stands for a class of spaces of which it is a member. The stage as a stage is in one place. But the stage as a sign is as mobile as a camera, only in a different way. One of the conventions of theatre is that the audience is prepared to agree that the actual space can stand for fictional spaces far larger than it (e.g. the "vasty fields of France"); multiple fictional spaces that can be contiguous or far apart; space that can shrink or expand; fictional space rotated on both horizontal axes or the vertical axis. An example of the former: Robert Lepage's rotation of imaginary space in Le Polygraphe so that a vertical wall is for a few moments a horizontal sidewalk; or his production of Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung in which a bed set on its end is being viewed from overhead. An example of the latter: plays such as David French's Jitters where the fictional space rotates 180 degrees from stage to backstage.
For the same reason, the same space, with minimal alteration, can stand for more than one fictional space. A particularly rich example comes from a recent Canadian play, The Attic, the Pearls, and Three Fine Girls, by Martha Ross, Leah Cherniak and Anne-Marie MacDonald, which premièred in 1995 at Theatre Centre West in Toronto (designed by Dany Lyne). The performance space consisted of a large room with the audience on risers at either end, the stage area in the middle. Two large wooden grids hanging from the ceiling along the east side of the performing space signified windows in the dining room of the Fine family's home. When unhooked from the floor and swung back and rehooked to the wall of the theatre space, they signified the sloping roof of the attic. What was happening I think is instructive. In the first instance, it was both the verticality of the grids and the configuration of horizontal and vertical strips of wood that signified, through iconic resemblance to window frames; in the second, it was only the slope that signified, through its iconic resemblance to the slope of an attic roof; the configuration signified nothing. In the course of the play, the grids' signification swung back and forth as the visible part of the dramatic world shifted between ground floor and attic, a telling instance of the polyfunctionality of the theatrical sign.
The concept of polyfunctionality can be taken a step further: any given object on the stage can also swing back and forth between having a sign function and having none (that is, one of its sign-functions can be no function). In the same play, there was a trap door in the middle of the stage. In the attic scenes, it was flung up and the actors made their entrances and exits through it. It signified through its iconic resemblance to a trap door in an attic. In the living room scenes, however, the trap door was just a trap door in the middle of the floor of the studio, signifying nothing; there was an agreement between the performers and the audience to pay no attention to it. This is all in striking contrast to film; at the instant of being recorded on film, everything in front of the camera loses not only the possibility of denoting more than one thing, but also the possibility of denoting nothing, of not being a sign.
Transcodification (the reciprocal substitution of sign-systems or codes) is a common element in theatrical semiosis, as when a mime substitutes a gesture for a pictorial or architectural wall or door. But it is rare in film, whose fictional world is so marked by plenitude--there is so much of everything within the frame--that no element from one code needs to stand for an element in another. When it rains in a play, "rain" is usually signified by dialogue, by sound effects, rarely by actual water. Rain in the world of the film can also be signified by dialogue and by sound; but the world that offers itself to the camera is so infinitely rich that rain is almost always also signified by moving pictures of rain.
In the case of the actor, the semiotization of the object is even more complex than in the case of theatrical space, set and props. To begin with, it is the case with stage actors too that there is an intermediary signified: the actor does not stand directly for the character, but for a class of fictional objects, one of whose members is "like this, sort of." It is for this reason that on stage, an actor can play a character of a different age, or sex, or race, without elaborate make-up; an actor can play the same character at different ages with minimal changes to costume and none at all to make-up, etc.; an actor can play several characters in the same play--universal in theatre since the Greeks, and rare in film unless it is accounted for within the diegesis; an actor can stand for inanimate objects; actors can speak in different languages in the same play (common in the nineteenth century when, for instance, Salvini touring America spoke his lines in Italian while the rest of the cast spoke English). The mobility of the sign applies with special force to the actor.
The existential link between the film image and the profilmic event drastically reduces the mobility of the sign in the case of the film actor. In mainstream narrative film, there is almost always a simple one-to-one equivalence of actor to character. The exceptions tend to be striking and disorienting, as when in Buñuel's Viridiana two actresses play the same character, with no explanation.
However, in order that this intermediate stage in theatrical semiosis--the reference to a class of objects--can effect the transformation of the human being into an iconic sign, something has to happen to the stage actor's body. Here another difference between film and theatre manifests itself. In film, any object, human or nonhuman, becomes a sign simply by being recorded on film; it needs to do nothing to be a sign besides being on film. In theatre, there is a profound difference between a human and a non-human sign. In the case of the non-human sign, for the semiotization of the object to occur, it is enough to ostend it somewhere, anywhere, that has already been agreed to be a stage. But a human being placed on stage does not have it nearly so easy. Bert O. States speaks very eloquently of the element of risk faced by the actor: the risk of failure to be a sign, which has no equivalent in film:
. . . the actor-character teeters constantly on the verge of catastrophe--that is, of becoming one of us. Actors refer to this as falling out of character, a highly expressive metaphor for this sudden entry into the lower, or nonabsolute, world of the audience. Obviously, this is too severe. Actors do not feel they are in danger in the sense that a demolition expert does. The danger the actor experiences is necessary if there is to be an art of acting. It is the opponent for which the actor is thankful, like the aerialist's high wire or the mountaineer's rockface. It is what he works with, and for. It is the condition of virtuosity. (121)
Eugenio Barba clarifies what must take place in order for the actor to be not only himself but at the same time a sign: "the body's daily techniques [must] be replaced by extra-daily techniques, that is, techniques which do not respect the habitual conditionings of the body." Barba explains that if this does not happen, the capacity of the actor's body to signify is severely limited: the actor then, he says, citing Decroux, "is a man condemned to resemble just a man, a body imitating a body" (Dictionary 15). In order to signify more than himself, in order to be able to stand for abstract meanings, to "earn" mobility as a sign, the stage actor must follow certain principles which "are a means of stripping the body of daily habits, in order to prevent it from being no more than a human body condemned to resemble itself, to present and represent only itself" (16).
The film actor, on the other hand, can indeed represent more than himself, without having had to replace his daily techniques with extra-daily techniques. By the mere fact of having been recorded on film, he has been transformed into a sign, capable of standing for far more than himself. The film actor acts what the character did. He knows that every move he makes is being recorded, and thus, transformed into a sign, without any extra effort on his or her part: as Walter Benjamin observed, "Experts have long recognized that in the film, 'the greatest effects are almost always obtained by "acting" as little as possible'" (623). The film actor leaves behind a series of traces which a film audience reads as a narrative, knowing that the mere fact that a film is unwinding in the projector is guarantee that narrative is happening here, that is, a virtual past already exists and is being repeated. The actor need make no special effort to bring that virtual past into being; its alreadyness is a given. The power of film acting lies in the fact that "daily behaviour" is held up to the spectator as something that must be paid attention to because it has already been seen. Hence the power of film acting, not in spite of, but because of, its reliance on "daily behaviour," whose characteristics are as Barba describes, in complete accord with Benjamin: "Daily bodily techniques generally follow the principle of minimum effort, that is, obtaining a maximum result with a minimum expenditure of energy" (Paper 15-16).
The stage actor, on the other hand, is acting what the character wants; in Susanne Langer's terms, he is not part of an already recorded "virtual past"; he is actively engaged in constructing a "virtual future" (307). To do so, the actor's body must lean into the future; it must display the precarious balance which Eugenio Barba speaks of as the basis of stage acting, a precarious balance which would look absurd in film, but which is absolutely necessary in theatre, because the theatrical audience is not watching something whose alreadyness both as sign and as narrative is established; nothing is given in advance. The translation of the human body from itself into a sign of more than itself requires two things: the extra-daily behaviour of the actor, and the audience's active choice to receive this extra-daily behaviour as sign, and its active choice to construct a virtual future out of the actor's behaviour. In contrast to film, the stage actor's
Extra-daily techniques are based . . . on the wasting of energy. At times they even seem to suggest a principle opposite to that which characterizes daily techniques: the principle of maximum commitment of energy for a minimal result," a "dilation of energy" (Paper 16).
Barba helps to explain why the stage actor's body differs so profoundly from the film actor's body, when he describes the dialectical relationship between daily and extra-daily technique: "Daily body techniques are used to communicate . . . . Extra-daily techniques, on the other hand, lead to information. They literally put the body into form, rendering it artificial/artistic but believable" (Paper 16). To put the body into form is equivalent to rendering it present as a sign.
In film, since the days of silent cinema, the only actors who can get away with extra-daily behaviour are those who are in films about the stage, "acting" on a stage within the film's diegesis; otherwise, their performance strikes a film audience as in some way fundamentally wrong: "stagy," "theatrical," "melodramatic." Sometimes, that dissonance has been used to powerful effect as in the films of Sirk and Fassbinder. Conversely, actors who try theatre after having worked exclusively in film tend to disappear on stage: nobody uses "filmic" or "cinematic" to express their dissatisfaction with their performance, but if they did, they would be referring to the peculiar feeling that the actor is simply representing himself.
I have been arguing that presence in theatre is the condition for theatrical semiosis, the material support for the kinds of meaning-making that constitutes theatre. It is so in two senses: first, the material presence of objects and people on stage requires the kind of semiotic process we have been describing: the object must be picked up and ostended ("like this, more or less") in order to be a sign at all, otherwise its sign value is no more than what it already is in "real life." Bert O. States speaks of "the bite that [theatre] takes into actuality in order to sustain itself in the dynamic order of its own ever-dying signs and images" (36). The presence of the object also is the material support for the mobility and transformability of the object as sign. The human being actually present on stage takes this "semiotization of the object" a step further. In order to be a sign of more than himself, the actor's behaviour must undergo a profound change, from daily to extra-daily technique.
To conclude: let us consider these two examples of illusion in film and illusion in theatre.
You are watching a film in which an actor carrying a pail of water suddenly empties it straight at the camera. You duck. Nothing is coming at you. The water is absent in both space and time. The fundamental illusion of film is presence (not so much the presence of water in the world the spectator inhabits as the presence of the spectator within the fictional world). As Christian Metz argues,
. . . what unfolds [in film] may . . . be more or less fiction, but the unfolding itself is fictive: the actors, the "décor", the words one hears are all absent, everything is recorded (as a memory trace which is immediately so, without having been something else before) . . . it is the signifier itself, and as a whole, that is recorded, that is absence: a little rolled up perforated strip which "contains" vast landscapes, fixed battles, the melting of the ice on the River Neva, and whole life-times, and yet can be enclosed in the familiar round metal tin, of modest dimensions, clear proof that it does not "really" contain all that. (43-4)
One ducks to avoid being soaked by water that is not there and never was there. Film is absence pretending to be presence.
You are watching a play. It is commedia dell'arte. Arlecchino has a pail that clearly has water in it, for he has just put his hand into it and you heard splashing. Suddenly, he empties the pail at the audience. You duck to avoid being splashed . . . by white confetti. Here, too, the water was not there: but it was signified by something that unmistakably was there, and, thanks to the mobility of the theatrical signifier, stood very effectively for water in Arlecchino's pail. Thus, in perfect symmetry with film, whereas the fundamental illusion of film is presence, the fundamental illusion of theatre is absence. Theatre is presence pretending to be absence.
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