Imitation, Eccentricity, and Impersonation in Movie Acting
From the eighteenth until the early twentieth century, the Aristotelian concept of mimesis governed most aesthetic theory, and stage acting was often described as an “imitative art.” Denis Diderot’s “Paradoxe sur le comédien” (1758), for example, argued that the best theater actors played not from personal emotions or “sensibility,” but from “imitation” (Cole and Chinoy, 162). According to Diderot, actors who depended too much upon their emotions were prone to lose control, couldn’t summon the same feelings repeatedly, and were likely to alternate between sublime and flat performances in the same play; properly imitative actors, on the other hand, were rational observers of both human nature and social conventions who developed imaginary models of dramatic characters and, by imitating those models, reproduced the same nuances of behavior and colors of emotion every evening.
For centuries actors on the stage were taught to imitate a vocabulary of gestures and poses, and certain variations on the theory of acting as imitation persisted into modern times, as in the essays on aesthetics in the 1880 and 1911 editions of The Encyclopedia Britannica, which try to distinguish between the mimetic arts and the “symbolic” or abstract arts; in both editions, acting is described as an “imitative art” dependent upon and subordinate to the higher art of poetry. At a still later date, Brecht went so far as to argue that not only fictional characters but also everyday personalities and emotions are developed through a process of imitation: “The human being copies gesture, miming, tones of voice. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping” (152). For the past seventy or eighty years, however, the dominant forms of actor training in the United States have minimized or even denied the importance of imitation and the related arts of mimicry, mime, and impersonation. “The actor does not need to imitate a human being,” Lee Strasberg famously declared. “The actor is himself a human being and can create out of himself” (Cole and Chinoy, 623). More recently, the website of a San Francisco acting school specializing in the Sanford Meisner technique (named for a legendary New York teacher of stage and screen performers) announced that its students would be taught to “live truthfully under imaginary circumstances” and to “express oneself while ‘playing’ imaginary circumstances” (www.themeisnertechniquestudio.com).
The change of emphasis from imitation to expression is due in part to motion pictures. Filmed performances are identical at every showing, making Diderot’s paradox appear irrelevant, and movie close-ups of actors reveal the subtlest emotions, giving weight to the idiosyncrasies of personal expression. But the shift toward personally expressive acting precedes the movies. The first manifestations of the change appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century, with new forms of stage lighting, Henrik Ibsen’s psychological dramas, William Archer’s call for actors to “live the part,” and Konstantin Stanislavsky’s introspective naturalism. By the late 1930s, when variants of Stanislavsky’s ideas were fully absorbed into U.S. theater and Hollywood achieved hegemony over the world’s talking pictures, dramatic acting was nearly always evaluated in terms of naturalness, sincerity, and emotional truth of expression. A kind of artistic revolution had occurred, which, in some of its manifestations, was akin to the victory of romanticism over classicism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. As M. H. Abrams explains in a famous study of that earlier revolution, the metaphor of art as a mirror reflecting the world was replaced by the metaphor of art as a lamp projecting individual emotions into the world. “Imitation” became associated with such words as “copy,” “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