Performance Design: An Analysis of Film Acting and Sound Design

Abstract

MOST ANALYSES OF CINEMATIC PERFORMANCE focus on three areas of an actor's performance style: his or her gestures, facial expressions, and vocal qualities. This paper examines third of these in great detail, utilizing and expanding scholarly concentration on accent, intonation, and unique timbre and materiality that belong to a particular voice. Although voice continues to stand at heart of actor's performance, greater issue of and performance includes an array of other matters, such as interplay between and image, including animated image; effect of changes in technology; relationship between dialogue track, music track, and effects track; and question of agency in determining who-the technicians or actor-actually creates performance. My interest in these issues derives from a larger concern with defining film acting as distinct from theater acting. This focus on medium specificity, though sometimes relegated to background of a given analysis, guides three sections of this paper. By highlighting uniquely filmic components of and performance, I hope to suggest some of ways both creation by actor and crew and perception by spectator function across era to characterize and complicate what counts as film acting. The influence of in shaping performance has been central to filmic medium-and to comparison of film and theater-since introduction of sync in late 1920s. Critics writing at time, such as Rudolf Arnheim, proclaimed that sound film ... [is] a means of'canning' theater, a replacement for theater, and that sound film is theater which has been technically perfected (29-51). Those who focused on work of actor, specifically, also remained tied to a comparison with theater. Rene Clair, however, also identified differences between two, ascribing a more nuanced and realistic style of acting to film. Writing in 1929, Clair praised cinematic for total lack of theatrical affectation in their voices and claimed that actors show remarkable flexibility... their acting with speech is as natural as was their silent acting in earlier (43). These quotes clearly illustrate two important points: perception of film as the as theatrical performance because of synchronicity in actor's visual and aural representation, and perception of film acting as different from theatrical performance because of availability of a more realist mode of speaking. Sound/Image Interplay: Trouble in Paradise, Sunset Boulevard, and Pickpocket Although Arnheim and Clair argue different sides of debate, neither fully examines how inherent separation of and image in production of film versus theater impacts possibilities of performance. Although many examples exist that demonstrate early directors' experimentation with sound-image interplay, I will examine three films that put this interplay to work specifically in regard to performance of its lead actors. Roughly halfway through Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), we spend almost two minutes watching medium close-ups and close-ups of a series of clocks while listening to voice-over dialogue from Lily (Miriam Hopkins), Gaston (Herbert Marshall), and Madame Colet (Kay Francis). In this sequence, actors' performances are transposed from visual arena to aural one. Marshall and Francis, in particular, exploit separation of and image to create meanings both inside of and outside of narrative of film. The heightened phoniness Marshall and Francis employ vocally allows their characters to hint at sexual interest between them, while at same time it allows to wink to audience extra-textually. Marshall and Francis seem to be telling audience to use its imagination to create romantic interlude hidden offscreen. …

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