THE UTTERANCE, PAST AND PRESENT

As with some of the other topics discussed by modern film theory,67 _{the problem of cinematic utterance has}

its prehistory in film literature of the 1910s. What do film theorists mean by ‘utterance’, and why does it present a problem? According to Emile Benveniste, a linguistic utterance [l’énonciation] can either belong to the dimension of discourse (to the ‘here and now’), thus implicitly acknowledging the presence of the speaker and his interlocutor(s), or can exclude the immediate situation and those present and hence be situated in the dimension of history (the ‘then and there’), for which the circumstance of the utterance is irrelevant to the situation to which it refers. The ‘plane of history’ excludes the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’; theevents it refers to require only the past tense, etc.; whereas an utterance belonging to the ‘plane of discourse’ can be recognised by the fact that it implies an ‘I’ and a ‘you’, i.e. participants in the given act of speech.68 _{Although Benveniste’s famous distinction may be relatively simple and instrumental when applied}

it happens, are the trickiest. The tacit convention of dramatic theatre, for example, corresponds to the plane of history as presented in oral discourse. Although in terms of real time and real space the performers and the audience they address participate in the same ‘speech act’, the presence of the audience and the very fact of it being addressed is not acknowledged, as the well-known concept of ‘the fourth wall’ developed by Stanislavsky testifies. At the same time, any given play is presented in conformity with stage conventions as a unique event, taking place currently, exclusively, as it were, in the present tense. At first sight this set of theatre conventions does not look drastically different from the rules of the game as accepted by cinemagoers today. But for the viewers of the 1910s the screen and the stage, in terms of presence, must have seemed diametrically opposed, and some time and effort were required before this feeling was overcome. Take Stanislavsky’s attitude to cinema, for example. His method of acting involved paying homage to what he called the ‘gift of public solitude’, i.e. ignoring the presence of the audience and creating a sort of psychological ‘fourth wall’ that ruled out any hint of direct address to the audience, whether by acting, direction or stage design. We might assume that in this respect the type of performance he developed was rather similar to what cinema viewers experienced. Yet even Stanislavsky had difficulty in making the transition to cinema. Whenever he was approached with an offer to make a film, he would turn it down, alleging that the ‘fourth wall of the screen’ frightened him. As he put it in 1914:

Theatre is alive only because of the ceaseless exchange of spiritual energy between spectator and actor, because of the invisible sympathetic strings that exist between actor and spectator. The cinematograph will never have this, because the live actor is missing, because his spiritual impulse is confined by mechanical means. In the theatre a living being alarms us, consoles us, makes us happy or unhappy, while everyone and everything in the cinematograph is as if alive.69

Indeed, the strange idea of absent actors addressing absent viewers was difficult to swallow. In terms of the theory of utterance, film performance was rather unlike anything theatre viewers and actors had been used to. In Christian Metz’s words, ‘During the showing of the film the audience is in the presence of the acting, but the actor himself is absent; during the shooting, when the actor is present, the audience is absent.’70

In the attempt to overcome the feeling of mechanicism and lifelessness associated with the medium of cinema, a unique genre of hybrid performances was born. In 1914 the newspaper The Day started a discussion, which was taken up by theatre periodicals and, of course, cinema trade papers, about whether or not screen action could possibly be combined with acting on stage.71 _{The paper’s critic invited his readers to}

imagine the philosophical dialogues from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment being presented by ‘live’ actors while Raskolnikov’s confused wanderings through the grey streets of St Petersburg before he kills the old lady are being shown on the screen above.72

The great Russian stage actor Pavel Orlenev was more enthusiastic about the idea than anyone else. In 1914 he declared he was going to put on hybrid versions of Dostoyevsky and Ibsen. Theatre critics, however, were sceptical about the project. A reviewer for The Theatre Paper warned his readers:

He [Orlenev] proposes to produce Ibsen’s Brand in such a way that some of the scenes would be played by live actors, and some presented cinematographically. I am sorry for Orlenev, who is sincere in his enthusiasm, because I can see the whole thing turning into an unmitigated disaster: you cannot combine live and dead material, you cannot link the excitement of real living action with the impersonal coldness of the screen.73

The critic’s worst fears were realised; the result was the opposite of what Orlenev intended. Instead of eliminating the contrast between stage conventions and those of the screen, Orlenev’s textual mutants only heightened it. In his memoirs Orlenev himself admits that the experiment was a failure, although it ran to full houses for more than three months and made good money.74 _{The review in The Theatre was succinct:}

‘the second half, printed on soulless film, is as colourless as the first half, the spoken part, is vivid.’75

Film histories relate that early film actors, especially in comic genres, would sometimes turn towards the camera and give it a wink. I am not sure how this particular mannerism was received but, as a general rule, the harder films tried to address the viewer directly, the more the viewer seemed to be aware of the one-way character of this contact. As the poet Konstantin Ldov remarked in a poem of the 1910s, ‘Film characters are not just mute, they are also blind.’76 _{This phenomenological aspect of early cinema is described with}

almost archaeological authenticity in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In Mann’s novel the residents of an Alpine sanatorium excitedly watch a scenic short showing a young Moroccan girl, her firm breasts half-exposed, smiling and waving to them:

[Catching a casual glance from the screen]…the audience stared, taken aback, into the face of the charming apparition. It seemed to see and saw not, it was not moved by the glances bent upon it, its smile and nod were not of the present but of the past, so that the impulse to respond was baffled and lost in a feeling of impotence.77

For some observers the awareness that the event which seemed to be unfolding right in front of their eyes had, in fact, taken place in another time and space, must itself have been an aesthetic experience. In one of Virginia Woolf’s essays we find a vivid introspective analysis of this feeling. She suggests that objects represented in films, compared with the way they are represented in photographs,

have become not more beautiful, in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The King will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet.78

In Russian literature the metaphor of cinema as ‘a world without me’ was used to portray two psychological landscapes traditionally important for Russian culture: the world as seen through the eyes of an émigré and the world as seen by the dead. In Nabokov’s novel Mary [Mashenka, 1926] Ganin, a white émigré in Berlin, ‘imagined that the foreign town passing before him was only a moving snapshot’.79 _{And the émigré writer}

Alexander Kuprin, writing from Paris, complained that ‘nothing that happens here seems real; it’s as if everything is taking place on a cinema screen. I’m not living in it, you understand’.80

The other mental landscape, life as if seen through the eyes of the dead, was linked with the uncanny but commonly observed feeling one experiences at seeing one’s own face on the screen. In the Introduction to this book I have mentioned Alexei Tolstoy’s and Leonid Andreyev’s instinctive revulsion at seeing themselves in early newsreels. The uneasiness characteristic of such an experience has been portrayed in Luigi Pirandello’s novel Shoot!, in a passage describing what the fictional actress Varia Nesteroff used to feel while she was watching herself on the screen: ‘She sees there someone who is herself but whom she does not know.’81 _{Ganin, the fictional film extra in Nabokov’s Mary, recognises himself on the screen ‘with a}

deep shudder of shame’, but also with ‘a sense of the fleeting evanescence of human life’,82 _{and feels}

Strange encounters of this kind used to invoke a tenet canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church. Within the Orthodox tradition it is believed that, before they go to Heaven, the souls of the dead hover over the earth for forty days and in that time they review their former lives. Needless to say, watching screen characters in the knowledge that they were no longer there was immediately seized upon as the closest equivalent of this post mortem view of earthly life. As the Cine-Journal’s film correspondent wrote in 1917: ‘[Being in the cinema] is like the soul detaching itself from the body and looking down to see the body imitating the presence of the soul by mechanically copying and repeating certain gestures.’83 _This

same association formed the theme of a poem by a major Symbolist writer, Vyacheslav Ivanov:

So all my life

Is on a moving ribbon. Clear evidence—no lies— Of the life I lived.

But, actor, could you bear To see yourself,

From the darkness,

Without daring to intervene? Too dreadful, is it? But

Before the fiendish torments start There awaits us in the darkened hall That cinema beyond the grave.84