Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

As Paul McDonald has argued, it is perhaps the inability of screen performance to be scientifically theorized that has led to its relegation to the margins of film scholarship until now; as he proposed “the analysis of acting will never become a precise semiotic science”.²⁹ Likewise, in Reframing Screen Performance, Cynthia Baron and Sharon Marie Carnicke postulated that the theoretical focus of film studies in the 1970s overshadowed the contribution of the performer to the screen experience because semiotic approaches focused almost exclusively on editing or the gaze of the camera.³⁰ Extending this methodological critique, McDonald argued that, although there is a degree of empiricism in the reading of film performances,

Like McDonald, Baron and Carnicke made a persuasive argument for the promotion of performance to a central position in thinking about cinema. Taking a stance against earlier interpretations of cinema, they attempted to demonstrate that “framing, editing, and production design do not do all the acting in screen performance”.³² Although their argument is necessarily polemical, their “reframing” of screen performance locates acting and the work of the actor as a critical part of film’s own performance that plays a crucial role in interpretation, just as McDonald does. Baron and Carnicke argue that in the context of film’s composite form “viewers encounter performance in relation to other cinematic elements”. Their methodology, derived from theatre studies, theatrical practice, Prague structuralism, and film industry contexts, provides an “understanding of screen acting” that they believed “enables fresh insights into film practice generally, for the corollary is that audiences also interpret nonperformance elements through and in terms of their conjunction with acting choices”.³³ Baron and Carnicke’s “reframing” therefore is a reframing of cinema in terms of the composite elements