Acting the Frame

Acting the Frame

Explorations in the Invisible

We can start with a moment from Merci pour le chocolat. Isabelle Huppert’s character Marie-Claire is at a board meeting. She is the heiress to this chocolate company, and while the director speaks about profit, she looks for the briefest of moments off-screen. Who is she looking at, we may wonder, and another film would cut to the person next to her. But the filmmaker, Claude Chabrol (who worked with Huppert seven times), does not, and we barely make out this figure next to her, even in the master shot when Huppert announces that the meeting is over. Why do we make much of this briefest of shots? It is to try to understand an element of acting that is rare but vital, an approach to cinema and the actor that we see often in Marlon Brando’s work, Robert De Niro’s, Joaquin Phoenix’s, Charlotte Rampling’s, Julianne Moore’s and certainly Huppert’s. It is, of course, part of a continuum rather than a category: sometimes an actor possesses this quality in one film but not in another, an actor who rarely expresses it surprises us by working with a filmmaker who brings it out. It requires an actor capable of illustrating the complexity of thought, and a director interested in that complexity. To understand how this works, it is useful to think of the difference between looking at and looking on; thinking of and thinking over. To comprehend the importance of looking at something, we can note the well-known problem Hitchcock had when working with Montgomery Clift on I Confess. There is a moment where the actor was required to look up at a building while crossing the street. As Stuart Jeffries says, “the method actor who had trained with Lee Strasberg said he needed to consider whether his character, a guilt-ridden Roman Catholic priest, would look up at that moment. Hitchcock didn’t care what Clift thought: he needed him to look up at that precise moment or everything leading up to and from that glance would not make sense…if Clift refused, he would have ruined the story arc. Happily, Clift ultimately glanced upwards and the scene makes sense.” (Guardian) Hitchcock wanted Clift to look at something; Clift believed it was out of character, even if it was in the story, and what mattered for Hitchcock was furthering the narrative rather than deepening the feeling.

Our purpose isn’t to say Hitchcock or Clift was right — they were probably both correct from different perspectives, and it made sense that Hitchcock rarely worked with actors more concerned with the complexity of their character over the furtherance of the plot. Yet this isn’t to propose the paramountcy of method acting versus traditional acting, or vice versa. When Strasberg says, “it is not hard to understand and remember. It is hard to feel and to believe” (A Dream of Passion: The Development of the Method), some directors would be happy with the understanding and the remembering, and our argument is that the feeling and believing might be irrelevant even in films that are removed from Hitchcock’s narrative demands. If there were many Method actors, including Clift, Dean, Newman, Shelley Winters and Anne Bancroft, very few of them possessed this quality we will call off-frame acting — the ability to create, in their onscreen look, offscreen space that may invoke the out of frame without it becoming a necessary onscreen presence. Looking on rather than looking at can also lead to thinking over rather than thinking of. In the scene with Huppert in Merci pour le chocolat, the two come together because we don’t know what she is looking at. If we did, it might have confirmed what she was thinking over: that the person to her right found the director a bore, and Marie-Claire and the colleague were sharing a moment of complicity. Instead, we are left to wonder what might be going through her mind at this moment, as she could be thinking about any number of things.

Later in the film, she is speaking to someone on the phone and talks disparagingly about the director, but we might wonder if she was thinking the director a dolt at the meeting, or whether what he was saying was making her feel like a fool who didn’t know how to run her own company. What the director says seems to make sense, and her glance screen-left may indicate someone who notes how absurd her role as the head of the company happens to be, and how perhaps everybody recognises it as well. Yet we cannot say with much confidence what she is thinking about, while in most films with most actors, we rely on the cut or the continuation of the shot to clarify a thought. When, in Top Gun, we see a woman from behind in high heels and a skirt, Tom Cruise looks off-screen as we see him eyeing the person up and down. Then we see who it is (a woman who will be training Cruise and other novice pilots), and the film cuts back to Cruise’s Maverick looking embarrassed as he realises this is the person he tried to chat up in the bar the night before. We have no doubt what is on Cruise’s mind, and what he is looking at is what he is thinking of. The two come together to create an unambiguous match between the look offscreen and the thought in his head. It makes sense that Cruise would have been ideal from Hitchcock’s perspective: he is the ultimate action star who wouldn’t be inclined to question his motive because it is so readily contained in the immediacy of the deed. Whether fighting an enemy, getting the girl, or saving a friend, Cruise’s film are often successful because of the drive the narrative contains, and that Cruise perfectly matches. There have been Cruise films that are more complex — Magnolia, Eyes Wide Shut and Collateral, for example. Yet the approach is the same, even if the directors are quite different. This makes it clear that it isn’t only about how the actor is directed, even if it is obvious that no actor can control their performance over offscreen space. An actor may look offscreen with all the ambivalence they can muster, but a director can still turn that look into the categorical with a shot that clarifies the initial ambivalence. Just in case anybody assumes that while this need to be clear makes sense with an actor of Cruise’s undeniable star power, but limited thespian credentials, we can give another example. Helen Mirren is a gangster’s wife in The Long Good Friday. After a difficult dinner in husband Harold’s absence, but the presence of Americans keen to invest with Harold in London Real Estate, a council official needed for the deal, has become very drunk and wanders off to the toilet. All the characters look offscreen as he disappears, but it is Mirren’s eyes we are more likely to concentrate on as she seems to be thinking of this man as a liability, while the others appear to see him more as an irritant and a nuisance. It is as if the man has violated her sense of dignity (he earlier puts his arm around her shoulder that she removes), and we can admire how complex Mirren’s response is without finding it especially ambiguous.

Yet this is where we have to acknowledge certain actors more than others have the capacity to seek out this ambiguity,y based on looking on and thinking over, and why we have chosen the six we have. But while Cruise’s purpose is to create the largest possible vista of certitude in the example we give from Top Gun, Mirren in The Long Good Friday creates around a moment of certainty, an ambivalence of expression that is partly what gives texture to character, a character she chose to play only on the condition that she could work on the complexity of it. “She was basically the girlfriend in the corner, and I wanted to bring her into the story. So I signed up with great alacrity and excitement, with the caveat that I wanted to change Victoria…” (Guardian) Mirren turned her from a working-class girl doing what she is told, to a middle-class woman who was vital to Harold’s empire, who was a decision maker. This change is one of characterisation, and an issue of the script, but it can also involve the properties of cinema. When the film shows Mirren and the others looking offscreen, it is likely that it will be Mirren’s gaze we will observe. It isn’t only that she has been harassed by the council official — which would make her annoyed and indignant — it is also that we know Mirren has the status and power to turn that annoyance into an irritation of consequence. You could ask viewers what do they see in this look — that as she looks at, what is she thinking about? No such space is created in the scene with Cruise in Top Gun. Yet, equally, we do know precisely what Mirren is looking at because the character has just left the frame, and her gaze is following him in the direction of the toilet. Nothing in John Mackenzie’s fine direction adds to the ambiguity, but in Mirren’s performance, she does suggest possibilities we cannot close down to a singular meaning. In the example from Merci pour le chocolat, the very shot choices generate the inexplicable. Huppert’s look is more ambiguous than Mirren’s, it is true, but there is also Chabrol’s shot choice that adds to this response because we don’t know how the person she is glancing at responds. Is he smiling in complicit awareness that the director of the company is a bore; is he looking worried because Huppert is glancing at him in a strange way? We do not know.

What we need to make clear is that the type of acting we wish to explore, and the sort of depth of character and ambiguity of response, is a nexus. A typically categorical actor working with a complex director can arrive at some of this ambiguity, and a complex actor working with a categorical director can potentially do likewise. But if Daniel Day-Lewis’s greatest performance is in There Will Be Blood, it rests on the combination, as it does not when Day-Lewis appears in Steven Spielberg or Jim Sheridan films. To understand what this means, we can go back to that famous moment in cinema experimentation, when Lev Kuleshov took the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin and insisted that, when he would cut from the actor's impassive face, what mattered was not his expression but the counter shot to an object that would lead the viewer to read into his face what the director had put there. There is ‘nothing’ in the performance; everything is in the edit. When Hitchcock proposed in Rear Window, he was using the Kuleshov effect as he cuts from James Stewart looking out of the window, to various events taking place across the way, in the strict sense, Hitchcock is wrong. Stewart has a range of expressions on his face when his girlfriend Lisa sneaks into the killer’s apartment. But what Hitchcock is probably making clear is that whatever look Stewart conveys is subordinate to the counter shot that contains the performance — the sort of subordination Clift tried to resist in I Confess. Better, then, to see the Kuleshov effect as the zero point of an actor’s performance on a scale that, at the other end, leads to the director contained by the acting. Stewart is much further along that scale than Mozzhukhin, but still contained very much by the throughline of the scene.

If Brando is still so admired an actor, it rests not least on pushing the further reaches of the other end of that scale. Elia Kazan, directing him in A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront, said: “There was nothing you could do with Brando that touched what he could do with himself,” Kazan said. “In those days he was a genius. His own preparation for a scene, his own personality, armament, memories and desires were so deep that there was very little you had to do, except tell him what the scene was about.” (BBC) On Kazan’s reckoning, Brando would wish for a director who could accommodate his needs, which is distinct from attending to his whims. Maybe the whims increased, and the needs deteriorated further into his career, but what we can see watching early Brando performances is that the acting seems to dictate the space, rather than the mise en scene dictating the performance. In the simplest terms, it is usually the latter which is paramount, with the actor expected to meet their mark to accommodate the camera movements and lighting. Whether an actor meets it or not can be a question of professionalism, and Michael Caine, in an excellent masterclass, goes through many of the rudimentary aspects of the screen acting profession, as he talks about the importance of the camera and how the actor works with its presence. Whether discussing how to meet your mark by walking towards the camera, but never overstepping the mark, looking at an offscreen actor, or how blinking can create a weakness in the performance if you want to convey strength, Caine’s comments are important and useful. But an actor who defies them, or better still, wants to transcend them, may not be lacking professionalism; instead, the needs of the character or situation may leave them looking professionally awkward, but in fact show an insistence on aesthetic integrity.

Caine shows clearly what goes into a skilful performance, but Kazan proposes that what Brando wished to convey meant the filmmaker had to bend just a little to his will. How disruptive this might be depends on how much it is about the work, as opposed to the actor’s moods, and how much the director likes to work with the given moment. Paul Thomas Anderson says, “working with Joaquin kind of requires looseness, it requires an ability to improvise, instinctually, where he might go. Trying to plan something out while working with him is difficult. Because if you feel he should sit on the couch, he's going to find a way to sit over there on the chair.” (Cineaste) Anderson seems happy with the hassle of getting the intuitively correct performance. David Fincher, though, found it infuriating when Ben Affleck wouldn’t wear a Yankees hat in Gone, Gone Girl. Affleck is from Boston and would never live it down, the actor believed. Fincher reckoned his behaviour was unprofessional, he says on the film’s Blu-Ray, and the production was shut down for four days. Some might see in Affleck’s actions, the star more concerned with his image than his character, and in Fincher’s a pointless perfectionism — after all, the hat is just there to hide the character's identity when hounded; it isn’t a reflection of the character’s sporting interests.

Whether an actor is being difficult, or a director too dictatorial, depends on what the material seeks, and while we might see in Anderson’s open approach to Phoenix, and Fincher’s irritation with Affleck’s request, an aesthetic freedom in the former and egos clashing in the latter, both can seem like the actors are unprofessional from the sort of perspective that demands a script is written, shot choices made and the actor does what he or she is told. But few would deny that Mirren turned Victoria into a fascinating character in The Long Good Friday, even if it was very much to the irritation of the director John Mackenzie. “I was a squeaky wheel,” she says, “being very annoying.” (Guardian) Yet it is one thing to change a few lines, to try and give a different shape to your characters or to argue for an aspect of costume designer or a suitable place to sit. But an actor can’t easily dictate a film’s post-production: its editing choices, for example, or the music that accompanies the scene. In the one from The Long Good Friday, the scene offers the moment we have invoked as a single take, with the characters moving from the table to leaving the bar. When in the middle of the shot, Harold’s right-hand man, Jeff, arrives, Victoria says ‘Jeff’ with a sense of relief, but that we might, a minute or two later, read as a reflection of desire as well. (Jeff comes onto Victoria in the lift and she looks tempted, but relieved when the elevator opens and she has been saved ‘by the bell’.) Though there is non-diegetic music when Jeff and Victoria drive to the apartment, there isn’t any when they enter the elevator. It adds to the tension and also gives ambiguity to Victoria’s thoughts and feelings. We just have the hum of the lift and the ker-ching of the doors opening. A woozy sax could have ruined the performance, no matter how subtly Mirren played it. Instead, it focuses on the calculations in Victoria’s mind rather than the desires of her body. Just as she will be working out what Harold should do with the council official, now she will be well aware of how disloyal Jeff is willing to be and perhaps already has been disloyal in other ways as well. Mirren offers a brilliant performance, but the notion of such a thing cannot be extricated from the choices the director makes.

It is why Huppert has always said what matters is the director not the script, and why France’s most celebrated magazine, Cahiers du cinema once opined that Huppert was a case of “actress metamorphosed with director.” (Mubi) When Paul Verhoeven worked with her on Elle, he said he “recognized this ability of Huppert’s and built the production around her to 'let her do what she wanted.’” (Mubi) Yet this is only as good finally as the director’s willingness to incorporate post-production elements that don’t then turn the performance into something less ambiguous than the actor initially offers. As we have noted, a cut to the man next to Huppert after she provides that odd glance would have removed much of its oddness. Equally, in the well-known scene in The Piano Teacher, when Huppert puts broken glass into the pocket of a student’s coat, music could potentially have made much clearer Huppert’s purpose, over the slowly accumulating revelation of a thought process that director Michael Haneke shows as she proceeds to do the deed. We have it also earlier in the film when a young man auditions, and rather than cutting back between the young man’s playing, Huppert and the other music teachers observing, the film offers three cuts to Huppert. The first is a long, full-bodied shot of her seated, looking on with her face at an angle to the piano; the second, a medium shot, and the third a close-up. Huppert may well have decided that she should sit close to the edge of the room all the better to reflect a disdain she feels about this young man’s audition (he is in an engineering student and has already interrupted one of her classes), but she couldn’t so easily have insisted that Haneke offer the scene in three cuts, all to her, and certainly not to how much time would be given over to each shot in the editing suite. Yet Haneke admitted he wouldn’t have made it without Huppert: “One of my conditions when it was offered to me was hiring Isabelle Huppert for the lead.” (Austrian Films) She may not have been able to have control over many aspects of the production, but in the very casting, Haneke was saying that the film was being shaped around her abilities.

Nobody is likely to film Cruise for that type of ability, even if he has worked with at least half a dozen significant directors: Scorsese, Mann, P.T. Anderson, De Palma, Stone, Coppola and of course Kubrick. Yet even in so pensive a moment, where we see Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut in the back of a cab after his wife has told him about an event years earlier that could have led to the collapse of their marriage (when seeing an officer in a dining room, she says that she would have left Cruise to be with him), Cruise offers the unequivocal. We don’t doubt what he has in his mind is retrospective jealousy, and lest we might, Kubrick gives us ten seconds of black and white footage showing his wife making love to the military man. Kubrick’s film may possess many ambiguities, but Cruise’s casting means his character is the least complex, while mysteries abound elsewhere. What are his wife’s motives, or Dr Ziegler’s, who hosts elegant parties, or the various people who come onto him or confuse him? Cruise’s purpose in the film is to look baffled by a world he cannot comprehend, and though we might have wished for an actor possessing complexities of their own, Cruise’s performance turns the film into a work never too far from comedic absurdity: a moral innocent in the world of the perverse. Cruise is here, thinking of his wife in bed with the officer, rather than thinking about things that we cannot fathom. If we could have a penny for guessing every thought a Cruise character has, we could become almost as rich as the actor himself. The directors usually know what they’re dealing with, playing up Cruise’s straightforwardness and leaving the intricacies to the characters around him. In Scorsese’s The Color of Money, it is Paul Newman’s Eddie Felsen and Cruise’s girlfriend (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) who manipulate him into acting more smartly at the pool table, and it is their reaction shots that are used to convey a purpose beyond blind ego.

If we dwelt for a moment on Cruise, it is because he represents better than almost any actor the ‘thoughtless’ end of the spectrum, an actor whose success cannot perhaps easily be separated from this quality, one that shouldn’t be underestimated — but always makes Cruise an action star rather than an actor of intrinsic interest.

It is this intrinsic quality that Haneke and other directors have searched out in Huppert, De Niro, etc. When in another Scorsese film, Taxi Driver, De Niro looks into a glass of Alka-Seltzer and Scorsese offers it as an overhead insert shot, we might see this scene as no more than a homage to Godard’s earlier moment with a coffee cup in Two or Three Things I Know About Her. But Scorsese offers it as more than that because De Niro’s gaze can contain within it nuance that leads us to wonder what he might be thinking. It can function as homage, of course, but also as a metonym for his mood and as a reflective moment for his thoughts. That bubbling gas in the glass can make us wonder how pent-up Bickle’s frustrations are. But this isn’t a simple correlation — the correlative simplicity Kuleshov could claim when he says that the cut between a face and a bowl of soup will indicate hunger. What we have instead is complex correlation: moments before Bickle puts the Alka-Seltzer in the glass, the character fails to listen when one of the other cabbies talk to him. We also have one of the cabbies, Wizard, mention Mau Mau land in a racist dig, and then the film cuts to a slightly high-angle shot of Bickle, before the camera cuts and follows the direction of his gaze as we see a couple of sharply dressed blacks looking on; perhaps having heard the cabby’s remark, perhaps not.

The shot of the glass and liquid fizzing away could be read by the reflexively minded as nothing more than a homage, and by those who like to read things symbolically as a sign of a man soon to explode. However, by working with an actor like De Niro, Scorsese can suggest manifold possibilities within the sequence. Bickle looks like he has a lot on his mind, but this is partly why we cannot read his thoughts. A person with a one track-mind, usually used in the context of sex, can nevertheless sum up many an actor whose purpose is categorical, and of course, Kuleshov proposed that even an actor ostensibly with nothing on his mind can have a clear thought if you conjoin the shot in a certain way. But De Niro, like Huppert, manages to propose a multi-track mind, as if capable psychologically of coinciding with the sound systems that were beginning to be used in cinema at the same time, with Robert Altman the most famous example of densely layering his soundtracks. To offer the analogy might seem like a conceit, but it’s also a way of understanding how a performance can become harder to read because the soundtrack is harder to limit. The more available the sound, the less likely it will be the viewer can say what is on the mind of the character. In the scene from Taxi Driver, Scorsese may not offer the acoustic complexity of Altman, but he makes it complex enough for it to add to the difficulty in reading what is going on in Bickle’s head. One of the cabbies is talking as Bickle looks into the glass, but, as we have noted, nothing suggests Travis is listening, and he could just as easily be hearing the sounds of the cars outside, and the odd honk of a car horn. There is also no non-diegetic soundtrack to indicate what Bickle is thinking. When we see him looking in the direction of the two black men, after the cabbie’s remark, we have no idea whether he is sympathetic to them, and disgusted by Wizard’s comment, or the opposite, just as we don’t know if he is taking in what the other cabbie is saying when he mentions getting a gun, or whether Bickle is ignoring him.

It is as if Bickle is half-listening, which might be a good way to describe the type of acting we are trying to comprehend. When De Niro suggested in an interview that the actor has to find the balance between turning up and giving too much or too little, it captures an element of this introspective intensity. It isn’t so much what the actor is thinking but what the actor withholds in the expression. When De Niro was asked by an interviewer what he was thinking during a scene in New York, New York, the actor replied: “I hate to disappoint you — I don’t know. You probably thought I was really working.” What matters instead is withholding outer gesture, rather than proposing inner thought and feeling. “…You have to know that as an actor you don’t overstate it…You can say it three times when all you have to do is say it once.” (Playing to the Camera) To turn up on set with too much of the performance externalised can leave the actor overly single-tracked, a problem exacerbated when a director adds unequivocal counter shots and non-diegetic music to leave us in little doubt what a character is thinking. If the Kulelshov effect can seem like the most obvious way of determining clear expression without words, then there is no reason why it can’t become more obvious still with the addition of music cuing us, and reaction shots to confirm the thought. Many an actor is good at one-tracking their performance (Cruise, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt), and it might be central to a film’s commercial appeal: as if the actors and directors knew that what was required was the meeting of (simple) minds, all the better to lock down the meaning of each moment. This would be one that accumulates and arrives at a film with nothing left to muse over once it ends, partly because the actors in the film haven’t been given to musing over anything within the diegesis. All the thoughts go into something, and the film relies on looking at things, so we know what they are thinking specifically about.

Yet to achieve the complex isn’t the same as assuming actors have to immerse themselves in the character. Huppert has little need for research; Day-Lewis would, like De Niro before him, learn aspects of a given skill that their characters mastered to better comprehend who they would be playing, whether it was De Niro learning the sax for New York, New York, or Day Lewis on The Last of the Mohicans, “…learning to survive in a forest: trapping and skinning animals, making fires, firing guns on the run.” (Little White Lies) But these can still seem like weak empathic gambits next to De Niro’s decision to play Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. “I said, ‘Jesus, look what happened to him.’ And I thought the graphic difference of being out of shape and then being a young fighter really was interesting.” De Niro added, “I thought I’d like to see if I could gain that weight. So that was my interest and Marty had his reasons, and both of us just came together on the project.” (Independent) Had De Niro merely knocked himself into muscular shape for Raging Bull, this might have seemed impressive at a time before most actors would deliberately work out for a role, or lose weight for one. Brad Pitt in Fight Club, Ryan Reynolds in Dead Pool, Hugh Jackman for Wolverine, for example, or Christian Bale in The Machinist, Matthew McConaughey in The Dallas Buyers Club, Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer. De Niro both gained weight and worked out. He moved from his 66kg self to around 96kg, with the Guardian adding: “De Niro not only had to gain weight for the scenes showing an over-the-hill LaMotta, but also undergo intensive physical training for the fights. He even entered three real boxing matches, winning two.” But what is chiefly interesting is that he saw LaMotta and mused over how someone could go from being a champion middleweight boxer, with the physique this entails, to someone obese. He manages to be both a middleweight and overweight LaMotta, as if seeking in this double transformation an aspect of character that we can see augmented by the look that combines De Niro’s gaze with Scorsese’s camera.

In a club scene, LaMotta arrives with his brother, and we see them in medium shot and notice that LaMotta doesn’t quite seem to be paying attention to what Joey is saying, scanning the room (which is offscreen space) as though there is something he might be looking for, or at. The camera then pulls back, and we follow the two of them as they move through the right-hand side of the club, with the dance floor in the middle and the left-hand side out of the frame. Shortly afterwards, they sit at a table with people the brother knows, and the camera then witnesses LaMotta looking across the room, as the film offers point-of-view shots that partly block what he is looking at, while the camera also gives us slow motion. La Motta has seen Vicky, his future wife, and someone he has already met at the local outdoor swimming pool. Nothing suggests that when he is looking at offscreen space, and at this large room that we don’t initially see, that he is looking at Vicky. If the slow motion suggests that this is the first time he has seen her in the space, so we might wonder what he may have been looking at a moment earlier. The answer would be nothing in particular, but that La Motta is suspicious, paranoid and distrustful — that he enters a space as though expecting the worst, rather than anticipating the best. It is as if Scorsese wants to contain in this offscreen space the aspect of LaMotta’s personality that will become most pronounced, and which incorporates both the psychological and physical manifestations later in his life. He will become so obsessively jealous over Vicky that he will destroy a boxer’s face when she comments on its prettiness, and attack his brother, believing he has slept with her. He will then fall apart, get arrested and become a man of wide girth and little dignity, as he makes some sort of living reciting bits of well-known plays. De Niro said of working on the film with Scorsese: “I didn’t convince him; we have our own ways of [finding common ground]. He’s religious, I’m not, but we converge on the things that are common interests.” (Independent) But for De Niro, it started with the weight, and yet we see it wedded to the type of offscreen space we are taking as central to this essay. He is an actor who can turn what might seem like no more than looking at into looking on, and suggest he is thinking about various things more than simply thinking of a given thing.

Obviously, no actor more than Brando brought this question into cinema, as though his fumbling with objects and mumbling of dialogue were part of the determination to reduce what could look like fundamental components of film narrative into subsidiary elements of complex characterisation. In On the Waterfront, for example, Brando manages to invoke past experience as offscreen space: he will often speak about a moment in time as if it is experientially still pertinent, by looking elsewhere. This can seem a common enough device (and partly through Brando’s influence no doubt) but an actor is more likely to do this by looking out over a hill or at a photograph. Brando does it as though what he is invoking is out of the frame, while he talks onscreen to someone else. The famous moment with his brother in the back of the cab, when he talks about how he could have had a title shot, is a great scene often shown in isolation, but its brilliance comes partly through Brando’s use of offscreen space to suggest past experiences. When his character Terry Malloy tries to explain certain feelings to the woman he is falling in love with, Edie, he says it wasn’t his fault that her brother died. As he invokes the moment, he doesn’t look directly at Edie but offscreen. In another actor’s performance, this could be denial (after all, Terry was tricked into luring the brother onto the roof where the mob threw him off it), but that isn’t how he plays the scene. When he says “don’t look at me when you say that. It wasn’t my fault what happened to Joey”, he momentarily looks off-screen as though the event is taking place out of the frame, just as, a few seconds later, he speaks again of Joey and looks off-screen in the other direction.

Terry/Brando isn’t doing this because he cannot meet Edie’s eye — he often does meet her gaze, and he offers a similar use of off screen space in other scenes as well. When he meets up with the priest late in the film after his brother Charley (Rod Steiger) has been killed, he again uses offscreen space to suggest past events over any inability to look the priest in the eye. This may rest on what Brando takes to be the film’s theme: a problem of regret rather than guilt. While he perhaps should feel a little guilty over Joey’s death, and reason enough why someone would look away at certain moments with the dead man’s sister, this isn’t what the film is about, and why Terry has no reason to confess to the priest. If the film were about this, the key scene would have been between Terry and his confessor, while the most important one is, of course, with his brother in the cab. This is where he expresses regret at throwing the fight, and he would no doubt regret Joey’s death just as he will later regret Charley’s demise when he is killed after Terry won’t take a job from the gangster boss to stop Terry from saying what he knows about him. Terry may feel guilty about Joey and his brother’s demise, but more likely regrets that he didn’t respond sooner to the gangster’s murderous ways, just as he regrets that he took falls so that his brother could make money on boxing matches. There Terry was, a possible title contender, and he took a fall because his brother and others had put money on his rival Wilson. It is as if offscreen space opens up the possibility to see regret, as though the alternative is beyond the frame, just out of reach.

Some might understandably say this is just an aspect present in actors who have absorbed the Method, and want to register in their performance that people don’t always look directly at the person they are speaking to; that part of what they are saying and doing is elsewhere. It is true that Steiger sometimes looks off-screen when he speaks to Brando, and we will find many examples of this in James Dean and Montgomery Clift’s work as well. Our purpose is only to say that Brando offers it as something more. The Method was a theatrical notion, originating in Russia and Stanislavski, who directed Chekhov’s plays, and adapted in the US by Stella Adler, Lou Strasberg and others, and usefully adopted in post-war American theatre, though hardly seen as unproblematic. After all, Foster Hirsch says, “critics of Strasberg’s Method claimed that his unrelenting focus on inner work neglected such external matters as voice and projection, and out of this common complaint emerged the stereotype of the mumbling, unwashed Method performer who ended up playing his or her own neuroses rather than the psychological truth of their character.” (BFI) Arthur Miller believed Strasburg “…makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean, that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing.” (Paris Review) But if we are correct that Brando manages to use offscreen space to suggest a sense of time past in time present, just as Huppert can turn the offscreen gaze into one of great ambiguity, and De Niro into one of great trepidation, paranoia and threat, then we can view the actor bringing something new to the screen, even if cinematically he was preceded by Clift. Miller could see that while the Method was troublesome in the theatre, it had advantages on film. “…in the movies, curiously enough, the Method works better. Because the camera can come right up to an actor’s nostrils and suck out of him a communicative gesture; a look in the eye, a wrinkle of his grin, and so on, which registers nothing on stage. The stage is, after all, a verbal medium. You’ve got to make large gestures if they’re going to be able to see it all.” What Brando brought was a palpable temporal and spatial complexity to images that are potentially so much more spatio-temporally flexible than those on the stage. In theatre, there is no notion of an image: it is a space. It may increasingly adopt cinematic devices to open that space up, but central to theatre’s appeal remains the actual presence of the actors on stage. In film, the actors are absent, but their potential presences are manifold, as we know often enough when a film uses flashback: a character talks about a moment of crisis, and there they are, in another time zone.

It may have been films like Hiroshima, mon amour that radically opened up this type of filmic spatio-temporality, but Citizen Kane or The Bad and the Beautiful are good examples of films unravelling layers of time. It isn’t that theatre couldn’t adapt the latter pair, but few would deny that cinema is much less cumbersome a medium to offer time’s complexity. Brando may have become initially famous for his stage work, and some might believe many of the later film roles he took were for the money, but if directors, including Resnais, Fellini and Bunuel, insisted on using film’s capacity for the temporally malleable, Brando was an actor more than most who suggested it in the looks he could give. On the Waterfront doesn’t move into flashback, but Kazan could potentially say there was no need to do so — that Brando contained within his performance the layers of time that obviated the need for flashback. When Kazan proposed that Brando had “…the inner struggle of conscience. That’s the essence of the story, Terry’s inner conflict…” (Kazan on Kazan), it might appear that Kazan’s comments contradict our own — that we have proposed the film is about regret rather than guilt, and that shame is a much closer cousin to guilt than to regret.

But if the film’s most famous scene is the one in the back of the cab, and there is no shame or guilt in evidence, but clear regret, then surely this is the dominating feeling, and one that can be so well played by Brando because he can convey what could have been within what he happens to be, without simply arriving at self-pity. In this sense, the shame Kazan talks about creates a context within it to contain the regret, as if, without it, Brando’s performance would have risked victimhood. When he looks offscreen, it is as though he can see other pasts that could have subtly led to different futures, and a present that is a horrible mesh, with regret the strongest.

Kazan goes on to say that he needed an actor who could convey inner struggle, and adds that “…it has genuinely to be there in the actor playing the part”, as he had also considered casting Frank Sinatra. “I think Frank would have been wonderful but Brando seemed more vulnerable. There was more self-doubt, more schism, more pain in Brando.” (Kazan on Kazan). It is this schism and vulnerability that Brando captures in his need to bring a character in close and expect the audience to overhear it. This isn’t just about the dialogue that may sometimes be close to inaudible; it is also about a sensitivity to that schism, which must take outer form as vulnerability rather than performativity, and this brings us to Phoenix.

One way to describe several Phoenix characters is that they are a mess, figures trying to figure things out within a psyche which might not trust that anything can be resolved. Like Brando he shares in his body language irresolution, as numerous actors do not. You can cast fine actors like Paul Newman, James Coburn, Harrison Ford and Michael Douglas as characters in crisis, or faced with dilemmas, but none of them will internalise them like Brando or Phoenix. Even so wonderful an actor as Jack Nicholson will present the indecisive short of the irresolute. Part of Nicholson’s brilliance in Five Easy Pieces is the anger that is constantly externalised, whether it is insulting his girlfriend, a waitress, a woman who condescends towards his girlfriend, or taking out the frustration he feels while stuck in a traffic jam by playing a piano on the back of a truck. Nicholson wouldn’t be inclined to share this thought of Phoenix’s: “Somebody told me recently that Marlon Brando was talking about the Don Corleone, and he said that the way that he approached the character was with love, that he loved him,” he said. “And this immediately struck me, because I think that's how I've always felt about the characters that I played.” (Fandango)

Yet how does such a thought work in the context of our argument, of actors capable of suggesting the importance of the frame, and often finding directors who can accommodate that quality? Phoenix turns offscreen space into an emotional presence chiefly through the actors he works with. In a strict sense, any shot/counter shot will be offscreen space, but it will usually be contained by the immediacy of the onscreen presence in the reverse angle. To see the difference between De Niro and Phoenix (who of course acted together in The Joker: a film so influenced by both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy), we can think of a diner sequence with De Niro in Taxi Driver and one in Two Lovers with Phoenix — as well as a scene on the rooftop in the latter film. In Taxi Driver, Bickle is besotted by Betsy; in the scene from Two Lovers, Phoenix’s Leonard is besotted by another woman, not the one he is seated opposite. However, while De Niro plays the scene with a constant air of misunderstanding, Phoenix plays it with the comprehension of feelings he can’t match, but can understand. It might be his partner who says that she understands him and that he is different, but though she is a decent person and capable of love, there is a diagnostic dimension to her remarks. After she talks of loving his hands, she looks at his forearms and sees the scars of self-harm. Sandra says he is different and that she wants to look after him, but Leonard isn’t someone who can be looked after without reciprocity, and later, there is a similar scene, no longer in shot/counter shot, with the neighbour, Michelle, a woman whom he has become besotted with. He says he wants to look after her, but he expresses it with both need and desire, saying, unlike her married lover, who has gone back to his wife, he will never leave her. One can watch the scene and know the affair is real but impossible, just as we can watch the earlier one and know it is conventional and predictable — that Sandra wants to marry and settle down, and that this will not be enough for Leonard, just as being faithful to Leonard will not be enough for Michelle. The film proposes that he is self-destructively pursuing Michelle, but that there wouldn’t be much of a self involved in marrying Sandra. In the diner sequence, Phoenix conveys feeling, but within preoccupation— he is interested romantically in Michelle, but this doesn’t mean he isn’t emotionally sympathetic to Sandra. Phoenix registers feelings, but they are weak next to those he has for someone else.

In the Taxi Driver scene, Scorsese establishes it in a two shot as Bickle and Betsy exchange a few words, with Bickle saying he needs to get his life in order, needs to get ‘organisized’ as he offers a joke Betsy doesn’t quite get, and then clarifies it by saying what he means: it is a bit like one those signs in offices that say think. The film cuts abruptly to a medium close-up of Bickle and then back and forth before returning to the two-shot, and then back into a closer exchange of close ups. The scene opens with a fast-moving track towards their table, one that potentially contains menace, but settles for registering an awkwardness it anticipates. In the scene, De Niro and Scorsese offer the shot/counter shot very differently from Phoenix and his director, James Gray, but both actors are capable of conveying the device’s presence as a presence. In De Niro’s work, there seems to be an abyss between one shot and another — and thus between one person and another. In Phoenix’s work, it can indicate an irrepressible intimacy — the sort of vulnerability Kazan saw in Brando. It is there in different ways in both Her and The Master. In Her, Twombley has long broken up with his ex, but isn’t dealing it with it so well, and finds more solace in an operating system than he does with other human beings. Yet this isn’t because Twombley is incapable of human co-feeling; he struggles to contain human warmth and lets it spill over, to the point of misunderstanding. When he goes on a date with a woman desperate to settle down, he has helped create a fuzzy and flirtatious atmosphere, without feeling the need to offer the commitment the woman instantly demands after they kiss. As she says she wants a serious relationship, though they are on a first date, Twombley expresses some reservations, and the woman turns on him, saying he is a “really creepy dude.” Director Spike Jonze films in shot/counter shot close-ups that leave the background a blur, and from the woman’s point of view, seen from Jonze’s directorial choices, she may have a point: they have created intimacy. But just as De Niro’s relationship with shot-counter shot is often aloof, Phoenix closes the gap by conveying in the close up a warmth that could bring anybody into it, rather than the exclusionary space De Niro usually occupies.

In this sense, Brando and Phoenix share a sensibility as De Niro and Huppert share quite different ones. When critics often talk of miscasting, they understandably think of the role but less often about the components of the image that make up the role: the use or absence of non-diegetic music, the use of close-ups, reaction shots, colour schemes and costumes. With the type of actors we are looking at here, they possess a sensibility so strong that, however consciously or otherwise, directorial choices are being made around them, or bad decisions are undermining an aspect of their performance. To cast any of the actors here in a role, and then rely strongly on cue music to convey their thinking, would be a misapplication rather than miscasting, while to slap over the top of a Cruise film a soundtrack, telling us exactly what is on Cruise’s mind, augments the performance of an actor who can look like he might have too little in his head without it. This doesn’t mean that any of the actors under discussion shouldn’t have non-diegetic accompaniment; it just means that it should better complicate already complicated feelings, not simplify still further simple ones. In the early stages of The Master, director Paul Thomas Anderson uses Jonny Greenwood’s music (woodblock and strings) to capture what we will see is a highly strung character. This might seem obvious on the page as we describe it, but on the screen, it registers well and anticipates brilliantly Phoenix’s interior chaos, a young man of sexual frustration and emotional fragility who is ripe for cult status: for the Scientology he gets caught up in. Anderson knows well the type of music that can capture a person’s deepest desires and disorders, and it works no less impressively with Greenwood’s score for Daniel Day-Lewis’s will in the earlier There Will Be Blood. Equally, Haneke’s use of Schubert in The Piano Teacher, or Scorsese’s Bernard Hermann score in Taxi Driver, conveys to us the succinct misdirection of emotion in the former, and Bickle’s misplaced romanticism in the latter.

However our broader point is not only that great actors work with great directors, and that know which elements to bring in to augment the performances. There is in the performance itself something unyielding that cannot easily be turned into the singularity of emotion. It might seem unfair always to use Cruise as our figure of transparency, so let us instead choose Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. When he speaks about being alone at night with nothing to do, and that he would always think of his Jenny, the emphatic ‘always’ in the voice-over he offers is met by the cue music emphasising he would indeed always think of his childhood love. Nothing in this score undermines the performance — Hanks offers it so that the music seems inevitably to come in and prove a point, one already there in the expression on his face and the voice-over line. One of the problems for Arthur Miller concerning the Method on the stage was that “despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions; I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are only, so to speak, the libretto for the music — that the actor is the main force that the audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. They are told that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever.” (Paris Review) Nevertheless, while Miller’s irritation may be understandable in theatre, and is often the case in cinema, actors like De Niro, Brando, etc. possess a quality that means to concentrate too much on the through-line of the story risks creating an over-simplification of the character. Cinema is much more a medium of observation than theatre, which is a medium of statement, as Miller insists. “The stage is, after all, a verbal medium. You’ve got to make large gestures if they’re going to be able to see it all. In other words, you’ve got to be unnatural. You’ve got to say, ‘I am out to move into that audience; that’s my job.’ In a movie you don’t do that; as a matter of fact, that’s bad movie-acting, it’s overacting. Movies are wonderful for private acting.” In different ways, Huppert, Brando, De Niro and Phoenix bring out this quality of the private, of the inexpressive within the expressive.

Our final examples will be Charlotte Rampling and Julianne Moore, both fine actors of this ‘private acting’. This is partly because, like Huppert, both are capable of playing ‘perverse’ characters, women whose drives aren’t contained by expectation, but usually counter them. If Rene Zellweger in Jerry Maguire and Bridget Jones’ Diary can cling to the idea of meeting the right guy and getting married, with the expression on her face often little more than anticipatory excitement, Rampling will leave us often wondering what might excite her, and the story will partly be predicated on its difficulty. This isn’t so much the old saw about an actor wishing to know their motivation (a claim often in Cruise, Hanks and Zellweger’s films that would be a redundant question since the answer offers itself on almost every page of the script), but what unusual aspect of life might be discovered to draw out of them a passion. A more psychologically normative rather than aesthetically singular approach to the actors under discussion could say that they are actors who often play asocial characters, while Cruise, Hanks, Roberts and Zellweger often play social ones, social in the sense that the values their characters live by coincide with the norms of social expectation. If Bridget Jones can’t get a boyfriend, or Roberts finds most men useless, or Hanks wishes to get home to his wife, kids or girlfriend, or Cruise wants to be the best fighter pilot or cocktail maker, the demand can appear almost impersonal. Isn’t this what most people would want in similar circumstances? You might not want to be a fighter pilot or a barman, but if you happen to be, why not try to be the very best? If you are at war or stuck on an island, of course, you’d want to get back to your loved ones.

But a pressing question for Huppert, De Niro, Brando, Phoenix, Moore and Rampling is what they want, as though the question in their best work passes through the prism of a subjectivity that cannot be generalised. It is partly why Bickle can move from attempting to kill a presidential candidate to slaying the pimps. He is frustrated and lost, and looks for a purpose rather than possessing one. It is also why Huppert can be equally destructive or self-destructive, as if there is little difference because there isn’t much point behind the deed — merely an impulse that needs to be met. Interestingly, when Kazan would speak about Brando’s work for the director, Kazan noted that “…if I told him what I wanted to begin with, he almost always not only gave me what I asked for, but he gave me something different that I was grateful to have.” (Kazan on Kazan) If the through-line of the character is too categorical, there isn’t much point in giving the director more because it is contained by the parameters of the character. Brando could always see beyond those limitations, aware that the selves he played contained an aspect of the impenetrable that only the singularity of gesture could reveal. It might be a surprising act of stealth in Last Tango in Paris; a slovenly gesture in Apocalypse Now. In the Bertolucci film, we might expect the slovenly and in Coppola’s the stealthy. But in Apocalypse Now, Brando turned up on set overweight, and yet when we think of the role and the numerous other actors considered, we could see why, on paper, Clint Eastwood may have seemed ideal. He would have arrived fit and lean, a man easy to believe as someone with a brilliant military career behind him. Yet he might not have caught the intelligence of Kurtz and the self-destructiveness that leads Willard and co to search him out. Coppola may have hoped he wouldn’t be carrying an additional thirty pounds, and let us not pretend that Brando added the weight with the deliberate intent of De Niro in Raging Bull. But retrospectively, it makes sense for the role: here is a man whose will has collapsed in on itself, and Brando offers a performance mainly in close-up that captures brilliantly the introspection he has become absorbed by. When he speaks to Willard about how you have to make horror your friend, he goes on to discuss a village where he and others inoculated the kids from polio when he was in the special forces. Afterwards, the enemy came and hacked off the inoculated arms. When Kurtz returned, all he saw was this pile of little limbs. As Kurtz speaks, he eats, and as he does so, he looks up at offscreen space, speaking hesitantly as Coppola allows the light and shade to play on his visage, with moments where Brando is in complete darkness. It is an astonishing example of an actor conveying in monologue a past he makes vivid with a director who seems raptly attentive to the acting, and wishes to augment it without interruption. Brando, refusing to play the role as fighting fit, instead offers it as despondent dissolution, a collapsed star that becomes a black hole, his mouth the orifice that can’t say no as he tries to convey through the same orifice what cannot be comprehended. In Last Tango in Paris, he plays a man with a history of failure rather than success, an American in the city who has been living for years in his (just deceased) wife’s place, where they rent out rooms. In one scene, he is lying on the floor and does a backflip. It isn’t in character, but it isn’t quite out of character either — it instead reveals an aspect of it: that he would have been a strong and powerful man, as we are told he used to be a boxer. While in Apocalypse Now, he plays up an impeccable career soldier who has gone mad; in Last Tango in Paris, he offers a character who has lived a listless life, and then provides this moment of unforeseen force and agility.

Brando’s innovations and surprises were central to his reputation as the greatest of modern actors, but they also helped dissolve the characterisational through-line that was allied to plot, and proposed more complex human behaviour on screen. While we can see without difficulty that legacy in De Niro and Phoenix, it is harder to locate in Huppert, Rampling and Moore. This is partly because of the gender difference, but also because the behaviour takes a very different form. Yet what all six actors have in common is that they turn the predictable into the complicated, and have often worked with directors sympathetic to that search. Speaking of working with Moore on several films, Todd Haynes would say: “I could speak at length about the reasons why. It was remarkable, when we found each other on my second feature film, Safe, how fully formed she was, that early in her acting career.” Haynes notes that “she had such a command of the medium and understood how much the camera picks up things that may not even be perceivable when you’re shooting. There have been things I don’t even see until I look at the dailies.” (Guardian) What she shares with the actors here is attentiveness, a rarer quality in screen acting than we might expect, but that shows an actor sharing some of the same qualities as a good waiter. They both need to comprehend a broader mise en scene.

In both Safe and Far From Heaven, Moore plays conservative, domestically-oriented women who are aware of problems within their world, but can’t quite articulate what the problem happens to be. In Far From Heaven, it rests on race, sex and gender. in Safe, on ecology, psychology and physical health. Far From Heaven is the more legible film, but Cathy is no easier a character to play than Carol White in Safe. The difficulties for an actor are similar: to acknowledge on a nervous level a world they cannot quite understand. When an actor plays a character with a clear goal, this winnows screen space and the environs beyond to the demands of the obstacle, and the nervous system expresses itself through stress and release, through danger and its removal. It usually requires no more than attention, not attentiveness. But the more the obstacles are diffuse, the harder it is for the character to ascertain the problems, and the more complex the screen space becomes for the actor occupying it. In Safe, Carol is often small within the frame, yet this doesn’t mean Moore’s performance is no more than an aspect of Haynes’ mise en scene. It means that instead of the acting taking places within a concentrated narrative, with the surrounding screen space secondary, it makes the mise en scene as primary as the performance. The acting must be alive to all the possibilities in it because one can never quite locate the problem. In Safe, Carol attends a neighbour’s birthday party, and the atmosphere is anodyne, the host is wealthy, and Carol is lost. When she wanders off to the bathroom, she looks in the mirror and seems to wonder who is looking back, a stranger to herself in her own company, and it isn’t any better when she returns to the party. When she exits the bathroom, the film doesn’t show her leaving it, but finds her in the background of the shot, as she comes towards the others in the foreground. While she has been away, the women have been talking about her, whether she has been seeing a psychiatrist, and how her skin appears. This isn’t malicious, even if it might seem insensitive. But then Haynes creates a hyper-sensitive environment, one where the viewer wishes to understand Carol’s predicament as Carol tries to comprehend why she acquires various unhealthy symptoms without other people succumbing, and with nothing specifically in the environment that appears to be causing it. As she moves from her LA suburban home to a retreat in the desert, Carol becomes sicker and sicker.

“From beginning to end, [Safe] is a film that demands to be read by the viewer”, Amy Taubin says, “There are signs in abundance but no answers or messages." (Sight and Sound) Haynes says in his interview with the critic, “… I do think that the illness in [Safe] is the best thing that happens to her. It’s the thing that kicks her out of unconsciousness, out of this unexamined life, and makes her begin to think about things in a completely different way and take some steps toward changing her life.” (Sight and Sound) If it forces Carol to try and understand her life better, in turn, it demands the viewer comprehend the frame with more complexity, and for Moore to show in her performance a susceptibility much greater than is usually expected of an actor. Yet Safe can seem like a film with little thespian agency, as though the actor is in the frame like a model is in a painting — that their purpose is to exist within a very specific composition. There is truth to this, but Haynes was in no doubt that in Moore, he had discovered his Carol White. “Julianne does something that few actors do. She disappears before your eyes. It becomes a ‘Can you find the woman in the picture?’ Puzzle…Julianne understood that instinctively and intellectually. Unlike actors who are trained to show you every nuance of emotion, Carol can’t do that.” (Sight and Sound)

To understand this type of performance and perhaps all the actors under discussion, we can think of Pasolini’s famous essay on free-indirect discourse. Pasolini focuses on directors who found in the sixties that they could offer a new way of making films. “The poetic nature of classic films was thus not obtained using a specifically poetic language. This means that they were not poems, but stories. Classical cinema was and is narrative. Its language is that of prose…” (‘The Cinema of Poetry’) The newer cinema could be poetic, and the director’s presence felt. But we should remember the article comes from seeing cinema as capable of using a literary device, that in free-indirect discourse, the work can take on the quality of dialogue, but without the speech marks. It is a way of giving the text over to characters who are no longer confined by finding themselves trapped in inverted commas. By the same reckoning, we might wonder if most actors are also caught in the limitations of speech; that their performance rests on what they say and little on how their body conveys it. If Haynes is right that Moore disappears into the picture, then in a strict sense we might wonder if any actress will do. Clearly not, and this partly rests on the film opening itself up to a free-indirect subjectivity that can be deemed Carol’s, just as the film that Haynes would acknowledge as a precursor (and that Pasolini also invokes), Red Desert, uses Monica Vitti. Though Vitti is an important presence in Antonioni’s film, she appears less present as an actress than Moore, as if Antonioni wants us to understand the environment, while Haynes wants us to understand Carol. Vitti wasn’t an important actress for Antonioni, and so it made sense that Ingmar Bergman could say “…he never comes into contact with actors. They don’t know what he wants, and he doesn’t know how to talk to them.” (Ingmar Bergman Interviews)

Bergman is both right and wrong. Antonioni rarely wanted from his actors complex characterisation. That was his business: to create through the frame a performance that would have little interest in the actor’s inner motivations and rely on colour and figuration to convey what he wanted to say rather than what the actor wanted to express. “I know …that sometimes actors feel uncomfortable with me; they have the feeling that they’ve been excluded from my work. And as a matter of fact they have been…There are various ways of getting certain expressions from actors, and it is of no interest to know whether or not there is a corresponding mood behind these expressions.” (The Architecture of Vision) Haynes would be unlikely to make such a claim, and thus wants from Moore a different quality within the question that Pasolini believes Antonioni was asking. In an interview on YouTube, between Haynes and Moore, Moore says she knew nothing about California going into the film, and Haynes asks if she didn’t know California at all, how did she know who this woman was. Moore replies that she started with the voice and wouldn’t allow it any timbre, keeping it hushed, and then added up-speak that was beginning to become popular, and which suggested insecurity and doubt. She then speaks about how Carol signifies and knew that when the wrong couch arrives, this would help unravel her personality and force her back into her body, to try and find a way to exist in non-materialistic terms, just as these materialistic means are central to the crisis the film observes.

Antonioni would probably not have posed the question to Vitti as Haynes does to Moore, and Moore answers with great skill, illustrating why she is a very fine actress. But what matters even more within the context of this essay is that she understands that, no matter how she controls her performance, she is working within a context that incorporates the vision of her role as directed by Haynes. This might seem an obvious point, but if Haynes relied on a lot of close-ups, then that vocal work would have been significant but not quite eerie. When early in the film Carol answers the phone and speaks to her mother, Haynes doesn’t move from the establishing shot to the medium close-up. The camera stays where it is, and Carol is small on the left-hand side of the frame. It isn’t only that the voice is small, so is Carol, and while she may have had control over the vocal register of her performance, she is reliant on Haynes’s direction to bring out just how small that voice can seem. This, of course, doesn’t undermine or work against the performance, and this is the difference potentially between Haynes and Antonioni. Antonioni wants configurations; Haynes wishes to explore internal states given outer form.

We see it again in Far From Heaven, as Moore once more plays a woman who is a stranger to herself, with Cathy capable of great feeling, but these will not conform to fifties American expectations. Cathy is conservative and married, has kids and has made a home for her family with the assumption that this is what one does. Haynes doesn’t propose that Cathy rebels; he instead contains her values within the film’s colour scheme and mise en scene. Cathy’s husband may well cheat on her with men, and eventually leave her, and Cathy is drawn to a black man who helps out in her garden after his father gets ill and passes away. But nothing can happen between Raymond and Cathy because the shift would be too great, and Haynes is well aware that she is a woman of her time, even if she may have burgeoning feelings that indicate she is emotionally less contained by it. Far From Heaven makes more use of close-up and point-of-view shots than the earlier film. When Cathy sees a stranger in her garden, we see him from her look offscreen. When she finds her husband in his office embracing another man, the film offers a fast pan from her face to the men embracing. The performance can appear more agent-oriented than in Safe, but what is important isn’t how many lines the actor has, how much the film is seen from their perspective, but how much the film manages to convey as readily an indirect discourse as a direct one. It isn’t especially the point-of-view shots that convey Moore’s feelings; if anything, the use of them can point up their conventionality all the better to show how Haynes does capture Cathy’s state. The director needs an actress who can play Cathy with conviction, yet also film her with an unavoidable double-register: she is a woman of her time being watched by an audience from a different one.

If Huppert is the great actress of the inexplicable and the ambiguous, Moore is brilliant at absorbing irony into her performance without turning it into the facetious or knowing. When in Far from Heaven, she goes into the garden and sees Raymond. As he moves towards her, she steps back, even though there is nothing menacing in Raymond’s expression. When he says he is the gardener’s son, she apologises, saying she just didn’t know who was in her yard. Yet the implication is that she is especially horrified by a black man being in it, even though she has a black maid and a black gardener, of whom he is, of course, the son. We can recognise her racial prejudices, while she can only see the threat, and Haynes asks us to observe casual, microaggressive racism, while also seeing why Cathy would be frightened. We empathise with her predicament and are wise to her naive preconceptions. Just as in Safe, when Carol gets so worked up about getting the wrong couch, we can see that this is nothing but a first-world problem, so we can recognise within it another first-world problem that sees how fragile Carol is when, with so little sense of self, material items carry the import they do. Another actress might play the scenes too knowingly and leave the character behind, prioritising cueing an audience’s response. However, working with Haynes on both films, it is though Moore’s purpose is to play it straight and allow Haynes to find a form that can generate this double-register, which isn’t quite the same as the ironic. It is closer to a gestalt experiment, where we cannot not see the irony depending on our perspective, and then cannot not see its absence from another one.

In Far From Heaven, Cathy’s scarf blows away, and behind the house. When she goes to retrieve it, the camera offers a high-angle crane as though mimicking the earlier movement of the scarf’s trajectory. She arrives, and who is holding it but Raymond, in a moment that resembles a woman dropping her handkerchief, and a man picking it up. When they get into a discussion, he talks about his small business and adds that it has been about the only thing his degree has been good for. Cathy says this is marvellous, and that Raymond should be proud of himself. There is potentially plenty to find ironic here: the overblown crane shot, the scarf as handkerchief trope, and Cathy’s oblivious condescension towards Raymond: a black man with a business degree, as if it should be a source of surprise. But that isn’t quite how Haynes frames it, and certainly not how Moore plays it. She can see that Haynes will take care of the form, and she can act in a way that, she says, “…although it's very artificial, it's coupled with this incredibly real, very emotive content. So when you have that much emotion happening within the language, it isn't parody because it's full.” (The Hollywood Interview) Speaking of the genesis of the film, she says to Terry Keefe that Haynes offered the script, saying it was written with her in mind. “It’s an incredible honor to have something written for you that way. I've had a couple of parts written for me before but I've never had a whole movie written for me.” (The Hollywood Interview)

This allows the actor to see that their work isn’t just a function of the drama but of the mise en scene as well. When Keefe asks Moore how difficult it was to act within the style of melodrama, she said it was easier than she expected because this approach to acting had become a mainstay of television drama. But that would seem to be only half the story, or perhaps a quarter of it. She acts as though in a melodrama, but also creates more subdued effects than we would expect in Dallas, Dynasty and Knots Landing. Her performance isn’t constantly cueing the narrative progression or offering gestures large enough that no viewer would need to muse over their meaning. Moore’s performance isn’t, of course, as ‘small’ as the one she offers in Safe, but much of the overstatement in the film doesn’t come from Moore’s performance; it comes very deliberately from Haynes’ direction. We could say that Moore is in a drama that is filmed as a melodrama, while in TV shows like Dallas and Dynasty, they are melodramas filmed as dramas. When in an episode of Dynasty, a woman slaps another as they discuss one of the woman's finances, this is plot melodrama and acting to match it, but the show’s shot choices are quite neutral. The episode continues in its simple shot/counter shot manner, while the music rises to take into account the slap, but it is consistent with the score in the rest of the scene. In contrast, in Far From Heaven, when Cathy stands in front of a Miro with Raymond at a gallery, where she expresses surprise at seeing him in what is otherwise an all-white crowd, she hears nearby giggles, and the camera offers a similar fast pan to the one we have seen when Cathy witnessed her husband’s affair. The film then cuts to her friend speaking to someone and, in the reverse shot, we see Cathy and Raymond in the background as Cathy leaves Raymond behind, crosses where her friend quickly catches her attention, and where she asks Cathy who this man happens to be. The camera movements and mise en scene are so much more complex than in the TV soaps, but they convey the overcooked within the underplayed. There has been no music in the scene, but as it concludes, and leads into the next, the music rises as it suggests the following sequence, but also can be seen to comment on the one we are in the process of exiting.

Our purpose is to say that whether in a drama like Safe or a melodrama like Far From Heaven, Moore plays small and allows Haynes to either reflect that smallness in Safe by often making her tiny within the image, or in the latter hints at the largeness of her emotions through how he uses camera movement, colour and music. Throughout Far from Heaven, she wears costumes that can seem conservative in their cut (to match the period), but exuberant in their colours: lime greens, puff blues, cherry reds. Moore may speak about seeing an acting style that comes out of fifties melodrama and fed into television that she could draw upon. These were the type of performances offered by Joan Collins, Linda Gray, Linda Evans and Victoria Principal. But it is one where Moore’s acting is instead subdued and contained, not so much pushing the story forward, as repressing her emotions all the more actively so that the film can convey them in gesture and object. At the end of the film, when she goes to the train station, just as Raymond is leaving the town for good, she arrives wearing on her head the very scarf that he had retrieved earlier in the film. There is nothing in Moore’s acting that is melodramatically telling us how she feels, but the scarf and the camera movements more than convey her sense of loss over Raymond leaving. Whether it is the camera pulling away from Raymond’s point of view as we see the expression on her face as the train eases out of the station, or the film’s closing shot that returns to the one at the beginning of the film, but with darker colour tones and a different season, Moore allows much of the feeling to be conveyed in the form while she contains it in the acting. Though we see her face a hint at collapse, and showing the possibilities of tears, this is far removed from the classic acting of the forties, where we might expect her to chase after the train, for Raymond to get off, and them to fall into each other’s arms as she tells him she loves him and she will always love him.

Moore has often played characters for whom emotion is blocked or controlled (in Short Cuts, The Hours, Savage Grace, even in different ways in films like Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street and Magnolia). This isn’t the place to explore Moore’s oeuvre — all we want to make clear is that the emotions she offers are at the same time emotions contained, and has found in Haynes, in Safe and Far From Heaven, a director who finds the perfect form to match the nuance of her thespian content. In this sense we can see Moore, Brando and Phoenix as actors of feeling as Huppert, De Niro are actors of unfeeling - and this latter aspect is evident also in much of Rampling’s work, where the director’s purpose is to discover a passion that is unlikely to find itself expressed in feeling, yet must pass through the mind and be understood as, not just complex, but potentially a complex. Whether it is her husband’s death at the beginning of Under the Sand, the affair she has in Paris at Night, the monkey she falls in love with in Max, mon amour, or openly admits to killing her husband in He Died with His Eyes Open, Rampling often plays characters who are as mysterious as those played by Huppert, but with that mysteriousness contained by the sexual. Huppert’s sexual desire is often presented as a matter of fact or non-existent, while for Rampling it is as if she seeks in it the pleasure that will dispel the displeasures that happen to be life more generally.

To help us here, we can think of a moment in He Died with His Eyes Open, and that returns us to the initial point of our enquiry — that scene in Merci pour le Chocolat where Huppert looks offscreen, and we can’t quite ascertain the nature of that look. In this instance, Rampling’s Barbara Spark is escaping from Paris with her latest lover/victim, the detective (Michel Serrault), who is investigating a murder that she may have committed, but whose innocence he is also trying to prove.

They are staying in a hotel in northern coastal France and dining in the hotel restaurant. As the detective talks, she looks lingeringly offscreen in a shot that could propose she is thinking to herself, or looking at something or somebody. It can seem like a simple piece of acting when a character doesn’t want to confront certain truths, or knows that the truths they are willing to confront are not known by the other person and can hardly be articulated by the character herself. From one perspective, this is an important point narratively — the detective is speaking about the brother she hasn’t admitted to having, someone who had beaten up the dead man. But by the end of the film, we find out that Mark isn’t only her brother, but also her lover, and the plot hinges centrally on the unhinged — that for many years Barbara has been sleeping with her younger sibling, and this is where her emotional loyalty has most often lain. She may have many lovers, but it is as if all the others have been no more than inevitable flings, given her devotion to the man with whom she most likes sharing her bed.

This would be perversity enough to explain an aspect of Rampling’s persona, one never shy of the sexual in its most dissident forms — whether her upper middle-class woman’s love for a monkey (Max mon amour), as a rich Holocaust survivor who embarks on an affair with former Nazi who now works as a night porter (The Night Porter), or a French Literature professor who goes on sex vacations to Haiti (Heading South). She takes what the French call ‘la difficulté d’être', “the difficulty of being, existential problems…” and sexualises them. “I think it’s something that I actually carry within me. I carry that power to actually do those things. It’s nothing that I consciously do. I saw that quite early on when I saw films of myself. I didn’t know I had it, but I saw it.” (Interview Magazine) Nevertheless, if she were merely playing sexpots, that would be one thing, and a limited one, and if she were concerned only with the difficulty of being, we might wonder if the similarities with Huppert would be too pronounced. In that look offscreen, she manages to convey brilliantly a desire that no counter shot can meet, as if what she seeks from a man cannot be matched by the sexually complex feelings in her body. If it often takes an unexpected form, this doesn’t mean that it has been satisfied; more, it has tried everything. Her persona indicates someone who is never satisfied but manages to take this as a sexual dissatisfaction, and opens it up into an existential one — hence the difficulty of being.

While in He Died with His Eyes Open, director Jacques Deray closes the story down as the detective discovers that she did kill her lover, and as he witnesses her also killing Mark, the performance goes beyond the boundaries of its narrative purpose. Just as Deray has the good sense to hold the shot on Rampling with no counter shot to show what she might be looking at, so he accepts that though the always fine Serrault is our leading character, Rampling is the film’s enigmatic presence. This proves often no more than a femme fatale tease; once the film reaches its conclusion, there need be nothing inconclusive about the siren who has been manipulating others to get what she wants. Rampling has played femme fatales in various manifestations (including Flesh of the Orchid, Farewell My Lovely and The Verdict), but rarely plays them as if no more than an element in the plot. In He Died with His Eyes Open, this is clear in the film’s conclusion. There she is at the police station, looking at a ten-year sentence (five with good behaviour) if she confesses, and we might wonder whether a confession would be a superficial one that suits the needs of the policier, just as it suits the needs of the police. However, her closing remarks in the film aren’t about her need to confess, but her demand that the detective should. “From the beginning, have you for a second, even for a second, been sincere, or have you always been just a filthy stupid cop?” It is a refrain the film repeats a few seconds later as we cut to the detective walking along the street and hearing in his head her remark, suggesting he is the guilty party. The film doesn’t play it for irony, even if there is much humour in a work that knows Serrault is both a serious actor and a skilful comedian (perhaps best known for La Cage aux folles). From Barbara's point of view, we might wonder if the detective is insincere while she is sincere, even if he is the one looking for the truth, and she is the one hiding it. Few actresses are better at drawing out what might seem synonymous and antonymous— truth and sincerity as opposed to lies and insincerity. While the detective may be insincerely honest, she is sincerely dishonest.

One may read Barbara’s comments as self-pity and also as special pleading in her attempt to escape a jail sentence, but that would be to ignore her tone of contempt. She despises what she sees as the detective’s superficiality, his ability to see everything apparently contained by the job he does, and by the facetious attitude he often adopts. One of Barbara’s former lovers may say that he offered her an ultimatum when he couldn’t handle any more of her lies, and would return home from work to find other men in their bed, but this wouldn’t make her insincere. It is proof of her own version of sincerity. When the ex proposed that she needed to change or leave, she left. When the ex says that Barbara has a brother, this is the first time the detective has heard about it, and he expresses surprise. The ex-lover says, “Not all the time, only when it suits her.” In different ways, Huppert and Rampling both go beyond the obvious dichotomies that are the common lot of the femme fatale — insincere dishonesty that we find brilliantly portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck to Kathleen Turner, from Double Indemnity to Body Heat. But sincere dishonesty is a product of paradox, and registers the difficulty of being, as Rampling proposes. Yet because this problem of being has often in Rampling’s work been closely associated with desirability and desire, her oeuvre is narrower and more sexualised than Huppert’s, and closer to a more conventional femme fatale that she then often subverts. Yet what they both share is what Mia Hansen-Love says of Huppert: “for her, there is a line and there is what’s behind it…The line is just part of what she has to say, just part of what she thinks or feels. 90% of what’s in mind is not said.” (Film Comment) Huppert, Nel Dahl says, “describes a quality she deems her 'double gaze”: being both subject and object, actress and writer. “I enjoy being both subject and object and in my films; in other words, being able to create a space in which I can stand back. […] I cannot help but have that double gaze. Why do I say double? In theory, it should be the director who stands back and looks on. When I adopt this analytic approach, I adopt the position of the writer rather than that of actress." (Mubi) It is the quality of an actor playing characters who watch as much, if not more, than they are watched, while Rampling often indicates someone who is watched far more than watching. Even in that moment we offered in He Died with His Eyes Open, when she looks offscreen, and Deray offers no counter shot, we wouldn’t be surprised if in a counter shot she was looking at a man looking at her. She doesn’t quite have that double gaze Huppert believes she possesses, even if she shares with Huppert the being that is more than the character. As Rampling says, "That’s why I do a lot of cinema d’auteur and a lot of noncommercial work, because I want to go into the lives of my characters. Independent cinema allows me time to find the psychologically attuned characters that are really talking, really being. (Cineaste)

Yet this remark would be pertinent to all the actors we have been looking at, figures who can show that through offscreen space, and on screen presence, one that usually alludes to a reality far greater than either the expression would seem to demand or that the plot insists upon, opens up an arena within the film where ‘la difficult d’etre’ can be explored and exposed. This, of course, isn’t exclusive to these six actors, and this is why we have instead proposed it is part of a continuum rather than a category. However, most actors play a part without quite singularising the role, and turning it into a question that accompanies the story. Rampling is not necessarily a better actress, for example, than contemporaries such as Mirren or Julie Christie, just as there are other actors of Phoenix’s generation who can embody a role with gravity (Michael Fassbinder, Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy and Michael Shannon). But it seems that, for at least a period of time, the six actors here have pursued acting as an existential question, one that coincides often with filmic questions, as though they were all aware that the camera isn’t just a recording device of the story, but a forensic tool for the presentation of the soul. That might sound too metaphysical a notion for many, and yet it shouldn’t at all be taken as a religious one. It is more a surplus quality to many of the performances here, matched by directorial work, one acknowledging the actor offers more than the sum of a character’s parts — and that the acting question is contained by a being that is a scrutiny of self, over clearly registering the demands of a plot containing character. Such an approach requires directors sympathetic to such an idea, and the answer clearly hasn’t been in actors directing films with themselves in leading roles, though Brando and De Niro both tried. It is more, finding directors who can bring out this quality of being in the form that the film achieves. There is perhaps no such thing as great film acting a priori, but instead a quality of being the actor possesses and the director finds. As Huppert says, “The camera lens is like a microscope that goes beyond the surface. It’s like you’re exploring a secret, [film] is about exploring the invisible.” (Mubi)

Acting the Frame

07/05/2026

Explorations in the Invisible

Acting the Frame

Explorations in the Invisible