theater and cinema

THEATER AND CINEMAAndré Bazin

“What is specific to theater,” writes Henri Gouhier, in The Essence of Theater, “is the impossibility of separating off action & actor.”The cinema accommodates every form of reality save one – the physical presence of the actorThe successes of Laurence Olivier, of Welles, or of Cocteau can only be challenged or considered inexplicableAlternatively one can only explain them by casting doubts on that commonplace of theatrical criticism “the irreplacable presence of the actor.”

THE CONCEPT OF PRESENCE

The concept of “presence”The cinema challengesPresence, naturally, is defined in terms of time and space“To be in the presence of someone” is within the actual range of our senses – in the case of cinema of our sight & in radio of our hearing


PhotographyThe image of an object or personIts tracing

The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to the taking of a veritable luminous impression in light – to a moldThe cinema makes a molding of the object as it exists in time & makes an imprint of the duration of the object


Hence it is no longer as certain as it was that there is no middle stage between presence and absenceThe mirror relays the presence of the person reflected in it – but it is a mirror with a delayed reflection, the tin foil of which retains the imageWhile our emotion may not be as deep as if we were actually present in the arena at that historic moment, its nature is the sameWhat we lose by way of direct witness do we not recapture thanks to the artificial proximity provided by photographic enlargement?While the increase in the space factor reestablishes the equilibrium of the psychological equation

OPPOSITION & IDENTIFICATION

An honest appraisal of the respective pleasures derived from theater & cinemaThe delight we experience at the end of a play has a more uplifting, a nobler, a more moral, effect than the satisfaction which follows a good filmIn the best films something is missingThe survival of the theater after fifty years of cinemaThe film detects a process of depersonalization of the spectatorOn the stage, because their real presence gives them an objective reality


A member of a film tends to identify himself with the film’s hero by a psychological processTurn the audience into a “mass” & to render emotion uniformLet us compare chorus girls on the stage & on the screenThe cinema calms the spectator, the theater excites himTheater calls for an active individual consciousness while the film requires only a passive adhesion


These views shed a new light on the problem of the actorThey transfer him from the ontological to the psychological levelThe pleasure derived from the theater differs from

that of the cinemathat of the novel

Be undertaken from a psychoanalytic point of viewInto the cathartic process of theater


We delegate Oedipus to act in our guise & place him on the other side of a wall of fire – that fiery frontier between fantasy & reality which gives rein to Dionysiac monsters while protecting us from themThese sacred beats will not cross this barrier of lightJust as when today Orson Welles scatters actors around the auditorium to fire on the audience with revolversWith regard to the objection based on presence & on that alone, the theater & the cinema are not basically in conflictWhat is really in dispute are 2 psychological modalities of a performance

BEHIND THE DECOR

The human being is all-important in the theaterThe drama on the screen can exist without actorsAs Jean-Paul Sartre said, in the theater the drama proceeds from the actor, in the cinema it goes from the décor to manIt is bound up with the very essence of the mise-en-scèneDrama is freed by the camera from all contingencies of time & spaceWhile the theater in contrast uses a complex machinery to give a feeling of ubiquity to the audience

BEHIND THE DECOR

The fact is that the problem lies not in the décor itself but in its nature & functionWe just therefore throw some light on an essentially theatrical notion, that of the dramatic placeThe décor of the theater is an area materially enclosed, limited, circumscribed, the only discoveries of which are those of our collusive imagination

BEHIND THE DECOR

Its appearances are turned inward facing the public & the footlightsAs the painting exists by virtue of its frameThe screen is not a frame like that of a picture but a mask which allows only a part of the action to be seenMan is at once its cause & its subjectOn the screen man is no longer the focus of the drama, but will become eventually the center of the universe

THE SCREEN & THE REALISM OF SPACE

The realism of the cinema follows directly from its photographic natureThe world of the screen & our world cannot be juxtaposedIf this analysis be well founded, then we see that the basic aesthetic problem of filmed theater is indeed that of the decorIt is not in Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet that the text seems to be rendered superfluous or its strength diminished by directorial interpretations, still less in Welles’ Macbeth, but paradoxically in the stage productions of Gaston BatyThey go out of their way to create a cinematographic space on the stage

THE SCREEN & THE REALISM OF SPACE

One would never deny that the essential thing in the theater is the textIt is a conquest of realism

that realism of space without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema

AN ANALOGY FROM PLAY-ACTING

This progress in filmed theater did not rest on the ontological category of presence but on a psychology of “play.”Intellectual self-awareness at the moment of psychological identification never be confused with that act of the will which constitutes theater

(1)THEATER AN AID TO CINEMA

Developed means of expression, know how to use it more effectively than their contemporaries

(2)THE CINEMA WILL SAVE THE THEATER

The screen cannot replace the stage as the piano has supplanted the clavichordSo far from being a serious rival to the stage, the cinema is in process of giving back, to a public that had lost it, a taste & feeling for theaterIt was the same situation with regard to photography & painting. Cinema dispensed photography from what was aesthetically least essential to it: likeness and anecdoteThe same process applies to the theater; bad “canned theater” has helped true theater to become aware of its own lawsIt is Shakespeare for everybody

(3)FROM FILMED THEATER TO CINEMATOGRAPHIC THEATER

We can see in slapstick the rebirth of dramatic forms that had practically disappeared, such as farce & the Commedia dell’ArteIn making a protagonist out of space, the screen does not betray the spirit of farce, it simply gives to the metaphysical meaning of the whole universeNow that the screen can welcome other kinds of theater besides comedy without betraying them, there is no reason to suppose that it cannot likewise give the theater new life, employing certain of the stage’s own techniques


It is the cinema that has preserved their bones, fossilized in the films d’artIt has become a commonplace to attribute their disappearance to the cinema & for 2 converging reasons:

AestheticSociological

The screen has certainly modified our feeling about verisimilitude in interpretation


But the mask is simply an object of laughter while a close-up can drown us in a tear, & the megaphone is ridiculous when the microphone can produce at will a roar from the feeblest vocal chordsAccustomed to the inner naturalness allows the stage actor a slender margin of stylization beyond verisimilitudeNot surprising that Racine’s tragedy is in a period of eclipse


Doubtless it would not be just the style of the interpretation of tragedy that would find its raison d’être once more on the screenThus not only is theater on film from now on aesthetically founded in truth and fact, there are no plays that cannot be brought to the screen provided one can visualize a reconversion of stage space in accordance with the dataWelles & OlivierCinema is for them only a complementary form of theater, the chance to produce theater precisely as they feel & see it

theater and cinema

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