Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley
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Performance in the Cinema of Hal Hartley By Steven Rawle

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individual actor to be discounted” as “the way technology mediates acting in the cinema is a disincentive to taking it seriously”. Therefore, “many analyses of film acting are in fact discussions of a fictional character (whose creation is the work of a writer) rather than analyses of how that character is embodied (the work of an actor)”.21 Thus, as James Naremore referred to acting, the “aleatory, biological fact”22 of the body’s performative significance has been a secondary critical consideration.23 More recently, following the work of Krämer, Lovell, and Naremore, Adrienne L. McLean has attempted to show how film theory has ignored the role of the actor’s body in performance:

Despite the importance of bodies and embodiment as the locations of narrative meaning and points of spectatorial identification in film, there are several reasons for the relative lack of attention paid to film acting over the past thirty years––the alliance in poststructuralist film theory of the body with generic psychic mechanisms such as voyeurism and fetishism; the feeling that technology intervenes between bodies and spectators such that our experience of the filmed body is rarely felt as physical or material; and, perhaps most pertinent, the lack of theoretical tools with which to explore embodied meaning.24

Although a theory of embodiment, such as that of Steven Shaviro, can suggest that the “flesh is intrinsic to the cinematic apparatus, at once its subject, its substance, and its limit”,25 the body is not posited as a site of performative capacity: “the ambivalent cinematic body is not an object of representation, but a zone of affective intensity, an anchoring point for the articulation of passions and desires, a site of continual political struggle”.26 Perhaps as a consequence, star studies have often overshadowed the study of film performance, where the emphasis on “the discursive, technological and economic structures within and through which stars are produced and circulated”27 has promoted the study of star image over that of the performer. Performance has been viewed as an important element in the creation of star personae,28 but the study of performance on film has often been left trailing.