Secret Agents
by Adrian Martin

Andrew Klevan, Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation (London: Wallflower Press, 2006)

It is a pleasure to read and re-read this relatively short (114 page) book about acting in cinema. Published in Wallflower's admirable "Short Cuts" series, Film Performance lives up to the aims of the list: it provides a clear, economical introduction to an aspect of cinema which, in this case, is everywhere evident (and, indeed, celebrated), but so rarely discussed in rigorous, analytical terms. But Andrew Klevan, a gifted writer, does still more than this: although fairly quiet on the polemical front, his book offers itself as an example of a new kind of criticism, descriptively rich and poetically suggestive.

It is essential to understand the two "poles" in the book's title: achievement and appreciation. Achievement is what a great or even simply good film (and Klevan lines up a shining parade of "classic Hollywood" examples) manages to do all by itself, by dint of its art and craft. But appreciation is what the spectator must rise to, and what she or he can create only in an interplay of description, evocation and analysis.

Time and again in this book, Klevan enacts for us what it can mean to poetically "free associate" from the posture of a body to a detail of décor or the suggestion of a theme - as when a chair is compared to a character: "it has slim parts, a straight back, and is firm (a touch hard, perhaps?)" (p. 65). This is not belles lettres "impressionism" of the kind once excommunicated from serious film writing; it penetrates to the heart of a film's dramatic and poetic logic.

I unreservedly recommend this book to both beginning and advanced students of cinema. My comments from this point on should be construed less as criticisms than suggestions of areas that it would be interesting to see Klevan reflect upon in future, for the general elucidation of us all.

The pithy introduction ("Interpreting Performance") arrays a select number of masters, or mentors, in the annals of writing about film acting - including David Thomson, V.F. Perkins, Charles Affron, and especially Stanley Cavell (whose philosophical terminology filters pervasively, and at moments cryptically, into Klevan's language). One reference sticks out oddly: the Australian anthology Falling For You: Essays on Cinema and Performance (1999) edited by Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros. Odd, because where that book goes, Klevan fears to tread, or he at least seems happy to leave it between the pages of his previous book, Disclosure of the Everyday (2000): cinematic modernism, which has, for at least four decades, proposed a very unclassical, split-level relation between actor, character, "body too much" and (increasingly in our digital age) the performer as mere graphic "element" or special effect. This is not a matter of theoretical fashion: one can hardly appreciate the achievement of Vivre sa vie (Godard, 1962), Arizona Dream (Kusturica, 1993), Dogville (von Trier, 2003), or about a thousand other innovative movies, without the sense of these levels.

Klevan, however, gives us classicism with a vengeance: it is startling, at times, how he returns the act of "reading a film" to what most filmgoers spontaneously do, i.e., speculate on what fictional characters are "really" thinking, feeling or remembering at any given moment of their screen story.

It was once suggested to me that the quality - or, at least, the nature - of any book can be adduced from the structure of its notes. This part of Klevan's book is brief and to-the-point, but is nonetheless telling on the level of what it leaves out. In a book about acting, there is not a single reference to any anecdotal material about the actors considered in his text - material of the sort that can be abundantly found in biographies, memoirs, journalistic profiles or television documentaries. I am not referring to private-life gossip, or speculations on larger-than-life personae, which Klevan does well to skip. But why does he feign such lack of interest in what his preferred actors (or those who worked with them) might have had to say about how they approached their craft? If Barbara Stanwyck has only once said on the public record - even indirectly, or seemingly in jest - that she somehow pitched her acting in relation to the décor she found herself surrounded by, Klevan's argument about her work in There's Always Tomorrow (1956) would be immeasurably strengthened by citing it. But we read nothing, here, of actors' processes, Method or otherwise - and, likewise, not a single classic text on acting for theatre or film (by Stanislavsky or Michael Chekhov or Michael Kirby) is referenced.

Ultimately, in fact, this is not a book about how actors act. It is about how they figure within the stylistic ensemble of any given film. That in itself is a big deal to grasp, and no previous book has offered us such a generous handle on it. Klevan's approach - it has a pedagogical air, in the best sense - is to attend to nothing except what is on the screen before one. What we infer (following Klevan) about the quality and nature of performance can be generated only from this frontal, wilfully reductive vantage point - other inputs, like the social discourse around actors, are mere distractions. But consequently, in order to empower actors as creative agents within the filmic frame, Klevan virtually ends up attributing to them almost everything that is normally attributed to the mise en scène, or the director.

It is a provocative move, involving a risk richly worth taking: it's not everyday that we read accounts of The Philadelphia Story (1940) or The Cobweb (1955) that mention the respective holy auteur-names of George Cukor and Vincente Minnelli only once, within parentheses. And there is no doubt that Klevan awakens us to details and aspects of these movies - such as the bodily language of acting - that we have probably never noticed, or appreciated, so well before.

But the stratagem - this critical fiction in which actors seemingly respond, unmediated, to the felt needs of "the film" or (in a curious affectation filched from Cavell and William Rothman) "the camera" - leads to some strange, questionable moments. An example comes when Stanwyck is praised for "playing off" the resonances of a previous scene in There's Always Tomorrow that (in all likelihood) she would not have attended the shooting of (since she does not figure in it), nor watched its rushes. Only one person was in the position to seize, develop, and take advantage of these resonances, and his name (whisper it between parentheses) is Douglas Sirk.

Indeed, much of what counts as acting or performance in this book - particularly in the discussion of Marlene Dietrich's role in The Scarlet Empress (1934) - is quite simply what any director of even middling skill routinely instructs the actor to do: where to stand and move within the frame in relation to props, lights and other actors. And that is, after all, a decent, working definition of mise en scène! This is why Klevan's argument is strongest when he is in fact detailing the work of a director who directed himself on screen: Charlie Chaplin. Only here does an implicit auteurism of film style slip back in through the side door.

Which brings us, finally, to an intriguing ambiguity in the book's main title. I remember a moment, twenty years ago, when the reasonably avant-garde term "film performance" referred to how a film itself could be said to perform, not merely the actors inside it - and indeed, it was a kind of knight's move, taking the movies back from their "stars" to empower other players and generate other responses. Klevan, intentionally or not, cleverly reverses this trend for a new historical moment: in his account, what the actors do becomes, with a touch of grandiosity, the heart and soul of every old-fashioned narrative film, the very vehicle of its deepest artistry - a passionately nostalgic position in this digital age. And it is probably what the "ordinary moviegoer" foolishly believed to begin with. But even the most naïve spectator stands to learn a lot from the inspired, in-depth, beautifully composed responses of Andrew Klevan.

This review first appeared in Film Studies, Issue 9 (2007), which is published jointly by the University of Kent and Manchester University Press, and reprinted here with permission. Read Andrew Klevan's response.

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