I’m interested in the relationship between two kinds of presence:  the presence of the live actor and the presence generated by a video or film image of the actor.   Can the actor be viewed as a technological instrument, with the capability of recording speech and action through rehearsal, then playing this behavior back in performance?

Wooster Group, Hamlet (2006). Photo Paula Court

Performance invariably references the past work of actor and director and attempts to recover that work within the game of the representation of immediate action.  I have the idea of an “arrest” from film theory to identify two aspects of time:  first, the extended period of rehearsal in which the actor’s memory is imprinted, and secondly, the moment in which the actor is filmed or videotaped.  The interaction of live actor and technologically represented actor encourages the spectator to address both as images, or as agents that stimulate image production in the imagination.

The question of what constitutes presence in the theater or, perhaps, more accurately, what presence in the theater constitutes formulates the critical issue I am struggling with.  I consider the actor’s presence as it relates to and differs from the technologically produced image of the actor.  The components of the phenomenon I address are the following:

• first, the body and the voice of the actor used to construct an image of a dramatic figure; second, the dramatic figure produced by the actor’s work ;
• and finally the image produced in the spectator’s consciousness that mediates the perception of the body of the actor as actor and the body of the actor as fictional persona.

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As I do not confuse the concrete materiality of pigment with the object represented in a still life painting, I am aware that the corporeal presence of the actor is the medium of the representation of the fictional persona and not identical with it even though I perceive both actor and character simultaneously.   I both conflate and differentiate the body of the actor and the body of the character because I see the body of the actor as the body of the character and yet I know that one is not the other.

The technologically produced image functions as a sign of a corporeal body that was present to the camera at the moment of filming.  The projection of that film or video in performance seems to metamorphose the lens of the camera into the eye of the spectator even though the filming occurred  prior to the event of performance.  Metz writes:  “…[the] primary identification with the camera has the effect of transforming it into a retroactive delegate of the spectator to come.”   When spectators see the technologically produced image of an actor, they believe that the camera “saw” an actual human body that was present to it at that moment and that their present seeing reproduces the perception of an actual body.  Metz’s discussion exposes the temporal complexity of this identification with the imagined eye of the camera.

While the actual body of the actor–its tangibility as corporeal presence–may give the empirical reality of the live actor a special privilege, the persona of the actor will always remain, in some sense, inaccessible because it is masked by the performance and because the fictive persona will always be more accessible, more comprehensible than the actual.  Some theorists locate special value in the human actor in live performance because this presence is ephemeral.   Peggy Phelan writes:  “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance  cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.”  In this argument, film and video operate as strategies to arrest the inevitable disappearance of human presence.   The empirical reality of the human actor, which may appear to us as more substantial in performance because palpably there in its corporeality, becomes, in the retrospective moment of theorizing, the more fragile in contrast to the greater recoverability and stability of the recorded image of the actor.

While the prerecorded video representation of the human figure, like the picture on film, signifies primarily as a reference to an event in the past, we also realize that this process does not wholly recover the prior event but merely marks a moment that has been lost.   In Roland Barthes’ now familiar essay on the rhetoric of the image, the French theorist claims that when we study a photograph, we do not see a presence “being there,” but rather a presence that “has been there.”  Barthes identifies a peculiar conflation or “illogical connection of here and then.”  Because we recognize that the photograph displays what is not really here, the still photograph has no projective power.  According to Barthes, because the projective cinema employs narration, fiction, the audience identifies the film not as the experience of what “has been there,” but, rather, responds to the experience as “There it is.”