But, of course, we also see ourselves as characters in film and television.
Film often evinces a novelistic conception of character: it develops through experience, it finds its value in specificity. In the sit-com, on the other hand, and to a large extent in the episodic drama as well, character is essentially static, and type is primary; individual variations are not wholly extraneous as they are in the statistical study, but they are secondary elements, add-ons to the core type. The new serial show naturally tends towards a more novelistic conception, but the handful of these that I’ve watched often seem haunted by the static, type-based conception native to their medium. And then, of course, there is the model of character found in television advertising.
At any rate, the specific conception of character adopted by film and television is less important than the nature of the moving image itself. The key feature of these media is that we experience the people in them first and foremost as sound and image. No depiction of character in prose can be as external as even the most perspectival film character. The force of the literal reproduction of face, body, gesture, tone overwhelms us. To see ourselves as these characters is to see ourselves from the outside.
What we imbibe from film is not a sense of ourselves as mind and spirit, but as look, gesture, and tone. To relate in this way to ourselves is disturbing. It generates a self-consciousness of a new type: a material self-consciousness, which applies itself not to our conduct or character but to our bodies, our voices, our clothes.
* * *
Perhaps this helps to account for the odd discrepancy between the faces of people fifty and a hundred years ago and the faces of people today—a phenomenon that I may or may not be imagining.
In the posed photographic portraits of the late 19th and early 20th century, the subjects are usually stiff, frequently odd looking; they look at the camera warily, as one looks at a strange, unknown device; at the same time, a wealth of personality seems to spill out of them. In candid shots of that time—I am thinking primarily of Walker Evans’s subway photos—the faces are without that wary stiffness and strangely expressive. I say strangely, because it is not the expressions that are so expressive but the faces themselves. Character seems graven into them, through some gradual erosion-like process. There is a graceful unselfconsciousness to even the ugliest of these faces that one rarely finds in contemporary faces. Or look at the faces of early film. In The Passion of Joan of Arc we meet with faces the likes of which no casting agent could summon up today. Even the faces of young lovers of the silent era have a strange soulfulness, a weight of character that is largely missing in today’s faces.
It would be going much too far to say that contemporary faces are all alike. They contain much variation, yet when I compare them to the faces of the past, this variation appears somehow flat. I begin to feel (almost inexplicably) that the faces around me are all in some way the faces of children: precocious, thoughtful, anxious, weathered, but still in some mysterious way child-like, as if their owners have not yet tasted too much of life. And when they become active, these faces evince the uncanny over-expressiveness of bad actors or even of masks.
In 1952, Satyajit Ray cast many of the minor roles in Pather Panchali and both leads from non-actors. On camera, these non-actors appear to be just what they are: the residents of a small village in rural Bengal. The same is true in many of the Italian neo-realist films: in The Bicycle Thieves, for example, Maggiorani, who plays the lead, was a factory worker; the boy who plays Maggiorani’s son was a flower-seller’s son whom De Sica spotted on the street in Rome. And the result is just what we would naively expect: these two ordinary, working-class people appear on camera to be just what they in fact are. This would never work today. Contemporary people are not capable of appearing to be what they are. Put on camera, they invariably begin to perform in the most generic and hackneyed manner. In the silent film era, an actor was someone who could appear strange, monstrous, full of wickedness or religious passion. Today an actor is simply someone who can seem not to be acting.
Of course, like so much else, this may all be a morbid fantasy of mine. I would like to try an experiment. I would like to dress up a bunch of modern people in outfits of the early 20th century, groom them accordingly, and then mix them up with actual photos of people from that time. I think I could guess which was which, nine out of ten times. I think most of us could.
I cannot help it if I appear to be a mad man, but lest I appear a lone mad man, I wish to point out that I am not the first to make an observation along these lines and to see something tragic in it. The following excerpts are from a 1973 article by Pasolini:
Film often evinces a novelistic conception of character: it develops through experience, it finds its value in specificity. In the sit-com, on the other hand, and to a large extent in the episodic drama as well, character is essentially static, and type is primary; individual variations are not wholly extraneous as they are in the statistical study, but they are secondary elements, add-ons to the core type. The new serial show naturally tends towards a more novelistic conception, but the handful of these that I’ve watched often seem haunted by the static, type-based conception native to their medium. And then, of course, there is the model of character found in television advertising.
At any rate, the specific conception of character adopted by film and television is less important than the nature of the moving image itself. The key feature of these media is that we experience the people in them first and foremost as sound and image. No depiction of character in prose can be as external as even the most perspectival film character. The force of the literal reproduction of face, body, gesture, tone overwhelms us. To see ourselves as these characters is to see ourselves from the outside.
What we imbibe from film is not a sense of ourselves as mind and spirit, but as look, gesture, and tone. To relate in this way to ourselves is disturbing. It generates a self-consciousness of a new type: a material self-consciousness, which applies itself not to our conduct or character but to our bodies, our voices, our clothes.
* * *
Perhaps this helps to account for the odd discrepancy between the faces of people fifty and a hundred years ago and the faces of people today—a phenomenon that I may or may not be imagining.
In the posed photographic portraits of the late 19th and early 20th century, the subjects are usually stiff, frequently odd looking; they look at the camera warily, as one looks at a strange, unknown device; at the same time, a wealth of personality seems to spill out of them. In candid shots of that time—I am thinking primarily of Walker Evans’s subway photos—the faces are without that wary stiffness and strangely expressive. I say strangely, because it is not the expressions that are so expressive but the faces themselves. Character seems graven into them, through some gradual erosion-like process. There is a graceful unselfconsciousness to even the ugliest of these faces that one rarely finds in contemporary faces. Or look at the faces of early film. In The Passion of Joan of Arc we meet with faces the likes of which no casting agent could summon up today. Even the faces of young lovers of the silent era have a strange soulfulness, a weight of character that is largely missing in today’s faces.
It would be going much too far to say that contemporary faces are all alike. They contain much variation, yet when I compare them to the faces of the past, this variation appears somehow flat. I begin to feel (almost inexplicably) that the faces around me are all in some way the faces of children: precocious, thoughtful, anxious, weathered, but still in some mysterious way child-like, as if their owners have not yet tasted too much of life. And when they become active, these faces evince the uncanny over-expressiveness of bad actors or even of masks.
In 1952, Satyajit Ray cast many of the minor roles in Pather Panchali and both leads from non-actors. On camera, these non-actors appear to be just what they are: the residents of a small village in rural Bengal. The same is true in many of the Italian neo-realist films: in The Bicycle Thieves, for example, Maggiorani, who plays the lead, was a factory worker; the boy who plays Maggiorani’s son was a flower-seller’s son whom De Sica spotted on the street in Rome. And the result is just what we would naively expect: these two ordinary, working-class people appear on camera to be just what they in fact are. This would never work today. Contemporary people are not capable of appearing to be what they are. Put on camera, they invariably begin to perform in the most generic and hackneyed manner. In the silent film era, an actor was someone who could appear strange, monstrous, full of wickedness or religious passion. Today an actor is simply someone who can seem not to be acting.
Of course, like so much else, this may all be a morbid fantasy of mine. I would like to try an experiment. I would like to dress up a bunch of modern people in outfits of the early 20th century, groom them accordingly, and then mix them up with actual photos of people from that time. I think I could guess which was which, nine out of ten times. I think most of us could.
I cannot help it if I appear to be a mad man, but lest I appear a lone mad man, I wish to point out that I am not the first to make an observation along these lines and to see something tragic in it. The following excerpts are from a 1973 article by Pasolini:
[In 1959], a provocateur among us [i.e. the Italian communists] would have been nearly inconceivable (unless he was an amazingly good actor) – in fact, his subculture would have marked him, even physically, as distinct from our culture. We would have known him for what he was from his eyes, from his nose, from his hair! …Now … [n]o one on earth could distinguish a revolutionary from a provocateur physically. Physically, Left and Right have melted together.Of course these changes depend on political and economic developments as well. I'm not saying they're due entirely to the consumption of moving images. One of the convictions behind these "crumbs" is that effects usually have many causes. When someone says "Here's why," we should always reply (not-rhetorically) "And why else?"
…
I feel an immense and sincere unhappiness in saying so (or rather, a literal feeling of despair) – but in the present moment thousands and hundreds of thousands of faces of young Italians resemble more and more the face of Merlin. Their freedom to have their hair look the way they want it to is no longer defensible, because it is no longer freedom. The moment has come, instead, to say to young people that their style is horrible, because it is servile and vulgar. Or better, the moment has come for they themselves to realize it, and for them to free themselves from this guilty anxiety to remain in synchronicity with the degrading order of the horde.
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