Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

that combine to determine the affectivity of cinema generally rather than the previously hierarchised elements that have attributed all of cinema’s effects to the work of nonperformance elements, whereas authenticity has long been rooted in the “liveness” of theatrical performance. Baron and Carnicke’s book offers an important resituation of performance within cinema’s discourse and a reclamation of the actor’s physical and interpretative craft in cinema’s own performance.

Other recent attempts to inscribe the performer into cinema studies have concentrated on the physical materiality of gesture and movement. Andrew Klevan, for instance, has attempted to expound “a method for sustaining attention to a performance” in order to facilitate, like Baron and Carnicke, “an exploration of the tight-knit relationship of the performances to the surrounding aspects of film style”.³⁴ Likewise, in their introduction to Falling for You: Essays on Cinema and Performance, Lesley Stern and George Kouvaros considered “the broader issue of performance as a textual and corporeal process”, and “how performance is manifested cinematically, how it registers semantically and somatically as cinema”.³⁵ Klevan, Stern and Kouvaros all agreed that the study of cinematic performance is problematised by the “descriptive acts” necessary to effectively convey an onscreen performance through prose.³⁶ Nevertheless, performance is an intrinsic part of the cinematic image—the voice and body of the actor form a key component of the critical and affective appreciation of cinema and its effects.

Accurately noting that the “question of stardom problematizes the question of performance”,³⁷ Philip Drake addressed the problematic relationship conflict between notions of presence and intention in the reception of film performance (especially star performances) in his article “Reconceptualizing Screen Performance”. Drake, drawing on earlier work by Grahame F. Thompson, argued that “performance is not just the intersection of the text/actor/character”, but “its ‘mode of assessment’”. Acknowledging “the centrality of interpretation, and an audience, to the process of performance”,³⁸ Drake contended that “presence … is a discourse produced by performance during its reception; it does not precede it”.³⁹ Drake’s analysis critiqued the ways in which star performances