To the Observer, What Makes the Represented Object Real, Credible, Or More Precisely, Worthy

Abstract

This article will look at, to paraphrase WB Worthen, 'the idea of the screen actor' through thinking through screen acting in relation to Michael Haneke's Code Unknown (2000) and Abbas Kiarostami's Certified Copy (2010). The framing of performance in both these films raises questions around the ethics of spectatorship, particularly in terms of audience identification with character and the implications of this for the politics of representation. Central to this is the labour of the actor, in using their voice and body to elicit identification from the audience. The actress in question is Juliette Binoche, star of both films, whose repertoire and particular range of emotional expressivity would suggest her to be clearly entrenched in an illusionist/realist mode of acting a role. Binoche's performances usually therefore invite the audience's strong emotional identification with her characters and I will examine how the films under discussion strategically utilise this performance (rather than star) persona. I will start by examining Code Unknown, firstly locating it within broader traditions of modernist ideas of performance and attempting to outline the crucial part that the 'idea' of screen acting has to play in the ethical relationships created between the film and its spectators. I will then discuss Certified Copy, examining how Kiarostami wrong foots the audience in terms of actor, character and performance in the film. However, I will argue that the ethics of spectatorship with regard to acting on screen are treated somewhat differently by the two directors. Whereas Haneke's treatment of Binoche's performance seems designed to engender an awareness in the spectator of their 'duping' by the performer, Kiarostami moves through this to show an appreciation of the performer as presenting rather than representing a reality.

Keywords: Acting;Realism;Representation;Haneke;Kiarostami;Binoche.

Ontological Hesitations and Performing Codes Unknown : Haneke, Kiarostami,Binoche and the ‘idea’ of the screen actor.

As much contemporary theatrical and performance theory has identified, but Film Studies has perhaps not been so quick to pick up on, acting IS an ethical issue.In a fundamental sense to act is to deceive; the word actor itself comes from the Greek word for ‘hypocrite’. As Worthen argues

In performance, the actor is engaged in two performances, a double effort that reveals him as an actor while it conceals him within his dramatic role[…]In the audience we too enact a double performance’ through grasping both reality and artifice, actor and character’ (1984:3)

Worthen explores the ethical implications of the actor’s ‘doubleness’ throughout history, in a way that links the closing down of theatres in the mid seventeenth century to more contemporary theatrical experiments which frame or explore the duplicity inherent in acting itself. In screen acting, the situation is perhaps made more complex by the intervention of the camera in the relationship between actor, character and audience. The gap between actor and character on screen is less open to negotiation, for we are conditioned to the camera as a means of recording a photographic reality. Andre Bazin has argued that film should be defined by how accurately and believably it reproduces reality and so the film actor becomes a central method of validating that reality (1999:195. Therefore, Western modes of screen performance for the most part have been dominated by Stanislavskian/Strasbergian traditions; the film actor has to seem like a ‘real’ person and any performance on screen that draws attention to its own ‘constructedness’ and/or artificiality either intentionally or unintentionally can instantly disrupt an audience’s immersion in the reality represented.

Of course there have been directors, who have therefore used the screen actor’s performance strategically to reflect on film form in order to problematize positivist notions of character and identity. Frank P Tomasulo has written about how Antonioni for instance deliberately utilises an anti- Method style of performance, de-emphasising speech and gesture to underline his principle that ‘our acts, our gestures, our words are nothing more than the consequences of our own personal situation in relation to the world around us’. (Antonioni quoted in Tomasulo, 2005:97-98).

Yet, few directors have thought through the ethical implications of the actor’s onscreen ‘doubleness’. This article will therefore look at, to paraphrase WB Worthen, ‘the idea of the screen actor’ through thinking through how performance is framed in Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000) and Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010). Both these films raise questions around the ethics of spectatorship, particularly in terms of the ethics of audience identification with character and the implications of this for the politics of representation. Central to this is the labour of the actor, in using their voice and body to elicit identification from the audience. Both films star Juliette Binoche, an actress whose list of film performances would suggest her to be clearly entrenched in an illusionist/realist mode of acting a role. Vincendeau (2000) writes of how she prepares intensely for her roles to reach the required level of authenticity, such as sleeping rough on the streets of Paris before playing Michele in Les Amants du Pont Neuf in 1991 and spending months learning to play the violin in preparation for her role in Alice et Martin (1998).However it is also worth noting that Binoche has often played actresses in her career, from one of her very first roles as Nina in Rendez-vous (1985) to her more recent appearance in The Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). Vincendeau argues that the recurrence of artists, actresses and musicians in her repertoire of characters, reinforces Binoche’s credentials as an art-house actress.

In terms of screen image, the art connection connotes sensitivity and reinforces her identification as an art cinema actress by stressing her empathy with the world of film and their directors (2000: 249).

In terms of her performance repertoire, this then is an actress who it seems can draw on a wide range of emotional expressiveness in the construction of her characters. At the heart of this is the production of tears, material evidence of the deep emotion felt by the actress. This has often been foregrounded by directors who have captured Binoche’s suffering in luminous close-up, most notably in Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue (1993) or Carax’s Les Amants du Pont Neuf(1991). Binoche’s performances usually therefore invite the audience’s strong emotional identification with her characters and I will examine how the films under discussion strategically utilise this performance (rather than star) persona. I will start by examining Code Unknown, firstly locating it within broader traditions of modernist ideas of performance and attempting to outline the crucial part that the ‘idea’ of screen acting has to play in the ethical relationships created between the film and its spectators.I will then discuss Certified Copy, examining how Kiarostami also frames the acting on screen in order to deconstruct the mechanisms of representation.

However, I will argue that the ethics of spectator ship with regard to acting on screen are treated somewhat differently by the two directors. Whereas Haneke’s treatment of Binoche’s performance seems designed to engender an awareness in the spectator of their ‘duping’ by the performer, Kiarostami moves through this to show an appreciation of the performer as presenting rather than representing a reality.

Code Unknown marked a departure in Haneke’s work, being his inaugural French language film and one which for the first time, contained a well- known international star. Through following the lives of several different characters, the film broadly examines the social fabric of life in contemporary multi-cultural Paris. There are several different storylines, all of which intersect periodically, though not particularly schematically throughout the film. The film's bravura first scene introduces to us to most of what could be termed the main characters, through an 8 minute tracking shot that oscillates up and down a daytime Parisian street. The rest of the narrative then develops some of these disparate characters’ stories as we follow the consequences of the street fight that provides the main action in this scene.

Audience responses to Haneke’s work have for the most part been concerned with how to frame or how to understand the contradictory feelings of displeasure or repugnance and compulsion to watch that his work often generates. From Bennys Video in 1992, where the title character makes a home video of himself murdering a classmate to the now notorious interrogation of violence on film that was Funny Games(1998), the spectator is often put into a position where they are forced to question their responses to, or more precisely, examine their complicity in what is being viewed. Much of the scholarship on Haneke has wrestled with the same questions. For instance, both Thomas Elsaesser and Catherine Wheatley have developed ideas about the viewing of Haneke’s films that can bridge these often paradoxical reactions. Elsaesser understands them in terms of the games that Haneke plays with the audience. By wrong-footing them he makes them see something afresh and provokes embodied responses to what they are seeing and hearing (Elsaesser, 2010:53). Wheatley takes a slightly different tack and frames her arguments in terms of ethics, arguing that the spectator is constantly called upon to make moral judgements about not just what is being viewed but their relationship to the material being viewed, as ‘the key focus of Haneke’s films is on the spectator’s responsibility for their own involvement in the spectator- screen relationship’ (2009:4) .Therefore, ethical concerns order both the themes and significantly, the forms of most of Haneke’s work.

As has been discussed by Robin Wood (2003) and John David Rhodes (2010) amongst others, the formal arrangement of Haneke’s mise en scene in Code Unknown is particularly distinctive. Bookended by two almost silent scenes featuring a class of deaf children, the film is separated into 42 sequences (the films subtitle is ‘Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys’). The majority are shot in the same spartan style, with long takes interspersed with exactly the same length of black screen. During these takes, the camera is either immobile as the drama is played out in deep focus before it or tracks back and forth following the characters’ movement as in the first scene. However, there are four scenes in which crucially the photographer or director is not Haneke but a film maker inscribed within the diegesis of the film: two are photomontage sequences ascribed to one of the characters and the other two are sequences from a film in which the Juliette Binoche character, Anne is starring.

Wheatley (2009:56) explores the implications of Code Unknown’s modernist aesthetic but doesn’t pay any significant attention to the issue of acting and performance in the film. Yet

as Brigitte Peuker has identified, switches between the diegetic reality of the film and performance within it, without any formal acknowledgement in the change of the level of reality presented are a central feature of Code Unknown. Peuker asks therefore what is at stake when Haneke draws attention to the acting AS acting on screen? And her speculative answer suggests that it is in the service of muddying the waters of cinema’s ‘truth’ claims (in a Bazinian sense) that Haneke includes these sequences; in other words by constantly making the spectator aware that what they are seeing is never objective but always a representation. (Peuker, 2010:21).

This point is borne out by a scene fourteen minutes into the film, where we are suddenly presented with a corner of a rather shabby, industrial space from a fixed camera position. We have previously been given indications that the Binoche character, Anne is an actress, as when we are introduced to her in the first scene, she is on her way to get the press for the previous evening’s show and has an important meeting to go to. In this scene, we first hear Binoche/Anne and an unnamed man off-screen talk about the scene that Binoche/Anne is about to perform and then we see her walk into the frame. At this point, we can see the change in the texture of the image. It is clearly marked as videotape, with barely visible horizontal lines running through, that show up particularly on the close ups. The frame wobbles somewhat as if to draw our attention to the presence of the camera. Binoche speaks her lines directly to us the audience as the unseen director feeds her cues from the script from the play/film for which she is presumably auditioning. The sequence from the script is presumably designed to showcase the character’s performance skills as we see the character receive the news that she is now trapped in this space and cannot get out. At this point there is perhaps some epistemological uncertainty as to whether the character Binoche is playing is still auditioning for a part or has been, within the diegetic reality of the film, trapped by a madman with a camera, who wants to see her die. We see Binoche in close up register a range of emotions, from initial disbelief, to exasperation to fear and a growing sense of panic. Real tears are seen in her eyes, as the off screen voice dispassionately asks her whether she can hear the gas coming into the room. With tears streaming down her face, the off screen voice asks her ‘to show him her true face’ to avoid dying. As Binoche looks stricken, he demands again,’ not your lies or your tricks. A true expression..be spontaneous..react to what is happening’. Binoche gasps out the final word of the scene straight to camera, ‘How?’ On one level, we see Binoche as Anne as the unnamed character construct her performance for the camera, expertly marshalling her expression, gestures and tone of voice for the purpose of generating an empathetic response in the spectator. Yet it is so convincing that we are suddenly unsure whether it is Anne herself who is afraid. As Brunette has argued, the ambiguity extends through the final part of the scene, where the director’s off screen admonishment to be yourself, could now be directed at Binoche herself. (2010:76).

In many ways then the whole film can be read as a meditation on performance and more precisely on acting for the screen. Thomas Elsaesser has explored in some detail the games that Haneke plays describing the changes in the framing of material as ‘an ontological hesitation’ requiring ‘a cognitive switch’ on the part of the audience (2010:62). Although he doesn’t explore performance in detail, I would argue that the oscillation between a theatrical ‘performance’ and ‘being’ is very much part of Haneke’s pattern of ontological hesitations. It is there in the very first sequence, when we see a small child caught in the centre of the frame showing extreme signs of distress but saying nothing, cowering away from the audience. We think that we will cut to identify what is causing her trauma only for her to suddenly slump back to a neutral stance. The cut reveals an audience within the diegetic reality of the film: a group of deaf children, trying to identify with sign language what emotion the girl is acting out through her use of facial expression, body language and gesture. Haneke focuses in turn on each of the children’s faces as they express interest, boredom, or are moved to sign and act out what emotion they think the child is performing. Children here seem to be being used, precisely because codes governing their performance are within the boundaries of ‘non matrixed performance’. (Kirby, 1972:4)

This sets up the rest of the film as a potential site for the exploration of the staging of performance on screen, for how gesture and facial expression are coded by the actor within the cinematic apparatus to invoke the audience’s identification and participation in the fiction. This is further evidenced by perhaps one of the key scenes in the film, where Anne and an unknown man are seen kissing in a pool at the top of a penthouse apartment and we suddenly we see Binoche’s face change abruptly from joy to anguish. We see what has caught her attention, when we cut to a child teetering precipitously on the edge of the apartment building. The man saves the boy, as Binoche cries with relief then abruptly slaps the child and pulls herself away, still panting with emotion. This scene is then revealed to be playing in a screening room as the audio visual images are suddenly slowed and rewound and we see Binoche as Anne and the man trying to redub the voices on the film, whilst collapsing into incontrollable laughter.

In this scene Haneke uses a radically different style from the rest of the film (fast editing, shot, reverse shots, point of view shots and a fantastically dubious fast zoom to make us think that the boy has fallen down). As Wheatley and Elsaesser have identified, this draws attention to the how the cinematic apparatus operates to rack up the tension and draw the spectator into empathetic identification with the protagonist. But I also think we have to consider the centrality of the actor’s labour in this effect. Paul Macdonald has written eloquently about the importance of acting and argues, ‘in films, identification is achieved not only through the construction of a cognitive point of view but also through the forming of an emotional point of view. Acting has a vital role to play in both categories’ (2004:39).