STUDIES AND RESEARCH
The Game without the Object: Acting in Different Media and Intermediary Reflections on the Art of Acting
The author of the text is
taking Slavoj Žižek’s commentary about Antonioni’s film Blow
Up as a starting point for an attempt at theoretical
conceptualisation of ’games without objects’ as precisely the
acting games. This is the full quotation from Žižek: It
indicates the hero’s consenting to the fact that ’the game
works without an object’: even as the mimed tennis game
can be played without a ball, so his own adventure proceeds
without the body. (from Looking Awry, 1991,
p. 173). It seems that film and theatre are media where
anything can ’act’, any part of the body, as well as any
human impersonator of the role can have independent narrative
function, therefore permanently turning the acting agents into signs.
For
classical actors, this ’representational metamorphosis’
or metamorphoses of actor’s presence into representation,
is in fact oftentimes understood as a deadly threat: in Baby
of Macon, film director Peter Greenaway is staging
the very process of turning actor’s performance into the
sign. By this act of ’signification’, actors go through
the process of slow death, or at least of the mortification
of their own ’live presence’. Greenaway goes even further
and stages, and records it on film at the same time, the
intermediary performance of killing the actors in the Renaissance
theatre.
The readers of Renaissance drama are in fact
very familiar with this practice. »Dying in the role«, on
stage, was not a metaphor, but the actual high point
of the production (similar to the contemporary snuff
movies). Finally, ’game without the object’, in film
and theatre acting, becomes a game where acting transcends
the actors by creating imaginary and transitory symbiosis;
signification or interpretation that never »stops« at the
’destination’ of the body that watches the performance,
nor in the body that plays it. Several others examples
from theatre and film productions, as well as theoretical
schools of understanding acting, are also analysed within
the context of playing significant games and games of signification
without the possibility of live actor’s body »survival«
in it.
Nataša Govedić |
