Screened Stages1
DOI: 10.4324/9781003047537-1
When a viewer sees an approximation of a stage embedded in a film, the theatre contained onscreen displays performance as if it were under glass—a museum exhibit of the present moment. When a film represents performance that requires a live audience and live performer such as most instances of theatre, the present moment leaves a screened trace in cinema. Theatre in film is a message from this trace. The relationship between theatre and film becomes theatre infilm when “Jonah and the Whale”-like, one medium, film, swallows the other, theatre. I call this phenomenon the screened stage.
The screened stage is a literal or metaphorical surfacing of theatre, theatricality, or performance onscreen. From Hollywood musicals to films expressly about the stage such as All About Eve (1950) and Limelight (1952) to Alfred Hitchcock's psychological stages in Rear Widow (1954) and individual scenes of live performance such as the Max Fischer players in Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998), theatre has always had a presence in film. The screened stage plays an integral part in Hollywood film, whether in early incarnations such as Charlie Chaplin's and Buster Keaton's silent comedies or in contemporary incarnations such as the collision between the superhero genre and the Broadway play in Birdmanor
(TheUnexpectedValueofIgnorance)(2014) and the mashup of the musical genre in LaLaLand(2016).
Scholars have written about the relationship between theatre and film, from the ontological explorations of André Bazin and Susan Sontag to historical analyses of the variety of ways the two forms borrowed and learned from one another.2 These discussions offer sustained explorations of the relationship between theatre and film, but not as much about the screened stage.3
However, some scholars theorize their own versions of the screened stage.4 Siegfried Kracauer defines the phenomenon of theatre in film by referring to them as “stage episodes.” He explains them in relation to narrative: “Stage episodes not only occur in numerous regular feature films, such as the Birth of a Nation or La Grande Illusion, but form the backbone of most run-of-the-mill musicals.”5 Giving the title to these moments as “stage episodes,” Kracauer interprets these moments as instances of a break in the “flow of life” of the narrative that exist to further cement its “reality.”6 Although these breaks mirror the break between theatre and film when film developed its own artistic styles and cinematic language through cinematography and editing, I argue that seeing film narratives as “the flow of life” privileges continuity and seeks to sublimate discontinuities into an Aristotelian model of representation.
Laura Mulvey also sees theatre in film affecting narrative flow. In her groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” she in part argues that when a performing woman appears onstage in film, she attracts the male gaze and that these moments become pure spectacle outside of narrative time.7 Both Kracauer and Mulvey highlight narrative and interruption. Kracauer sees the stage as cementing narrative reality, whereas Mulvey argues that the spectacle of the performing woman reveals a certain narrative ideology at work in the construction of the filmic image. This book argues, like Mulvey, that the screened stage operates as an important mechanism for exposing cinema's ideologies. I suggest
the screened stage brings questions to the surface about the present, power, identity, trauma, absence, and the Real.
Look at their parallel histories: From the birth of cinema, theatre and film enmesh. Cinema's early exhibition in fairgrounds, staging practices, and narrative drawn from sources as diverse as Shakespeare, nineteenth-century melodrama, and the well-made play tethered the screen and stage to one another. This relationship, despite its separation, continues with continual appearances of the screened stage throughout film history. Charles Musser has argued for a “history of theatrical culture which includes both stage and screen.”8 From the live music at silent film exhibitions to the use of theatrical techniques in early cinema to their seemingly abrupt separation in the development of the Hollywood style, theatre persists as an important touchstone for the screen.
When the Hollywood style emerges and breaks with theatre, forming its own cinematic language (though subtly continuing to use theatrical practices in aspects of the film such as staging), the screened stage becomes a way for the theatrical to move center stage and assert its access to the present: Theatre contains a present that eludes film's representations. This moment of now I will refer to as presentness.9
Presentness is different from presence, in that presence when referring to a performer implies an ephemeral energy that emanates from the person whether physically present or not. Presentness implies a positioning in space and time: One is present, here, and now. Actors onscreen are not present in the here and now although they may be said to have “a presence” in the same way a ghost might. In truth, actors on film are not present, but they are not absent either; they are something other, captured and anthropomorphized. Only a semblance of the material body exists on celluloid. The screened stage signals a longing for the reality that the here and now of corporeal presentness brings.
The continual resurrecting of theatre's image in Hollywood film recalls the repetitive surfacing of disruptive memories in a subject's life after an originary traumatic event. Sigmund Freud explored such
repetitions in relation to unforeseen external events using the image of a train wreck to get at the shock of such occurrences. The surprise of the crash wounds the survivors in such a way that memories of the event insistently repeat in the subject's daily life, often accompanied by unconscious actions.10 Theatre in film entwines the past with the present in similar ways. Screenwriters and directors embed the memory of theatre in film through theatrical techniques that persist after the development of the Hollywood style and the appearance of the screened stage. In this way, the absent present, usually hidden away in Hollywood films, becomes the central feature of the screened stage.
Technologically reproducible artistic forms lack the present of the moment of the artwork's creation. This lack contains the loss of what Walter Benjamin termed the “aura.” The aura sets the original work of art apart from the images produced seemingly infinitely in the photographic and filmic arts through its singular embedded presentness.11 For instance, a viewer needs to go to a museum to see the original MonaLisa, which has a certain inherent presentness as an object, whereas the postcards bought from the museum gift store do not.12 The screened stage explores singularity of the present moment in relation to the uncanny repetitions of reproducibility.
Filmmakers painstakingly construct illusions of the present. Yet is the actual moment of performance really different than a film of said performance? Here, Philip Auslander problematizes the usual equation of the live event equaling reality and the mediatized equaling the artificial: “The common assumption is that the live event is ‘real’ and that mediatized events are secondary and somehow artificial reproductions of the real.”13 Auslander points to Stephen Connor's assertion that it is “possible to see how the proliferation of reproductions actually intensifies the desire for origin, even if that origin is increasingly sensed as an erotic lack rather than a tangible and satisfying presence.”14 In cinema, the screened stage exposes a desire for the filmed moment's origin. The representation
of theatre in film becomes present precisely through the medium's lack.
Problematizing the present moment, Auslander persuasively argues that “the single most important point to make with respect to the continued attractiveness of live performance in a mediatized culture is that, like liveness itself, the desire for live experiences is a product of mediatization.”15 Taking up Auslander's argument, this book suggests that mediatization's creation of liveness is just part of the equation. Mediatization also needs the present. Narrative film often uses the present to complete the illusion of the world-onscreen. The screened stage conjures a present as if from the original moment of filming. In this way, liveness haunts mediatization. Without reminders of this liveness, or, as this book argues, presentness, film fails to achieve the illusion of reality. The screened stage constructs a feeling of presentness all the while it reveals, through its lack of materiality, the absent present at the center of narrative film.
Psychoanalysis is instructive here: Trauma equals a missed encounter that, through memory, becomes mediatized and repeated. Analysis allows for the live moment's experience in the presentness of the analyst. The subject then enacts the transference— transferring feelings for someone in the past onto someone (the analyst) in the present. The analyst operates as a screen through which the subject sees reality. This mediatization of memory makes the transference simultaneously present and absent. This transference arises in the present moment between the subject and the analyst. In the psychoanalytic encounter, liveness and mediatization are inseparable.16 Similarly, theatre in film posits inseparability of the media despite the development of the Hollywood style.
Theatre represents one aspect of a triad of relations: Theatre, theatricality, and performance. At times, these relations emerge alone, and, at times, they emerge intertwined. Theatre's appearances consist of literal, theoretical, and metaphorical manifestations. In all such manifestations, theatre occurs in the
present moment and consists of a rehearsed or improvised event where people gather to witness (and, sometimes, to be witnessed themselves).17 Theatre has a beginning and ending point in space and time. The relationship between performer and audience is a key factor in defining theatre. They both include a split, often physical and at times psychic, between the two. Most often, a spectator watches an actor perform. At times, though, the actor may watch an audience. This reversal makes the viewer into something like a performer. The ability for a performer and viewer to engage one another in the present moment finds expression in the theatre.
Theatre often occurs when people gather to see or perform an event. The event may be a scripted drama, dance, or a circus performance of a high-wire artist walking across a tightrope. The performer(s) rehearse for the event. Even in unscripted performances, thinking and planning for the event occurs— parameters are set. Rehearsal implies that the event can repeat. However, if improvised, the event may not repeat. Even without repeating, the event has a beginning and endpoint in time and a structure that contains it.
Theatre also refers to a specific location and/or architectural structure. The original Greek word for theatre was theatron—seeing place. People refer to themselves as goingto the theatre. They go to see a performance. Theatre becomes a place framed by space and time. Varieties of spaces designate themselves as theatre—there is, for example, the outdoor ritual site of the theatre of the ancient Greeks. In addition, there is the Renaissance's creation of the proscenium theatre with its bold grand frame and awareness of itself (its theatricality) or alternately its attempt at verisimilitude. There is the intimacy and flexible seating of a contemporary small black box theatre. Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre space framed with a halfcurtain offers a theatre of ideological confrontation through reveling in the theatrical and jolting the audience from passive consumption. Environmental, site-specific, and immersive theatres make “all the world a stage,” overturning the usual boundaries between audience and performer.
The theatrical event has a specific beginning or ending time. The curtain rises, time passes, events occur, and the curtain closes. At this point, the spectators and actors will leave the gathering and resume their separate existences. This all happens at a particular location that is somehow prepared for the event. Even in a flash mob (the sudden and unexpected performance in a surprising place, usually public), the performers choose the location. Time and location delineate the contours of the event. This delineation makes it theatre.
The kinds of theatre that appear in film vary throughout cinema history. Represented are traditional plays and musicals, as well as popular forms like the circus. Dance also appears through the history of film and factors into Hollywood musicals as well as non-musical films.18 This book examines many kinds of theatre and, less frequently, dance, offering a wide-ranging view of performance from the vantage point of cinema.
Theatre in film allows the two media to both be in plain sight. Theatre becomes a space in Hollywood film where the illusion of reality that hides the endless repetition and duplication that Benjamin called technological reproducibility falls away, leaving both absence and the shock of the present.
The encounter between absence and presentness at the core of David Lynch's Mulholland Dr . (2001) toys with the simultaneity of each through an encounter between cinema and theatre. The film weaves the tragic story of a young woman who commits suicide when her seemingly charmed Hollywood dreams vanish, leaving a hellish Real in its wake.19 In the most well-known scene from the film, Lynch fashions a collision between worlds as an encounter of theatre in film. Betty, played by Naomi Watts, and Rita, Laura Harring, watch a woman sing on stage in a strange magic show in the half-empty Silencio Café. The spectator sees the space of a stage, a figure upon it, red curtains, and an audience. In this scene, Lynch offers a simulation of the live event. It feels live but is not. When the singing woman in the film falls in slow motion to the stage, her recorded voice surprisingly continues. It suddenly
becomes clear that the woman was never singing. The fakeness of the event reveals that the entire enterprise is “recorded,” false, an illusion.
The audience watching the film experiences a peculiar déjà vu moment as what seems to be the real and recorded tangle, abruptly breaking the illusion of the live. It is through the shock of severing this illusion that the constructedness of the world becomes visible. Indeed, after this moment, the film radically shifts: Characters go by different names, the style of the film's aesthetic transforms from one of Hollywood glamour to gritty realism exemplified by jump cuts. The narrative arc splinters with many storylines left behind while new realities sprout like roots of a tree. Theatre onscreen acts as a mirror reflecting cinema's carefully crafted nature. The shock of the woman's fall during the song reveals a recorded reality jolting the moviehouse audience into a moment of now: A presentness ironically born of the screened stage's inability to be present.
The woman falling on the stage in Mulholland Dr . resonates with the story of the screened stage from the birth of cinema to the Hollywood style and beyond. The stage in Lynch's version of Hollywood film weaves a complex narrative of a conjoined beginning seemingly traumatically torn asunder and mourned. Just as the woman falls and her recorded voice continues to reverberate through the theatre, the theatre even after its seeming separation from film resurfaces throughout the history of cinema.
Often, surfacing of the screened stage occurs during periods of great technological change in the filmic medium. MulhollandDr . was Lynch's last film on celluloid. In his next film, InlandEmpire (2006), he transitions to digital filmmaking. The content of both films flirts with such changes in their use of films-within-films-within-theatreswithin-films. Auslander points to Marshall McLuhan's work on media wherein McLuhan asserts: “A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”20 The screened stage emerges as a potent force in the history of film as its different incarnations reveal new technologies
coming into being and fading away; each repetition offers a chance for the spectator to mourn each passing of the present into the past. Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin explore “remediations,” the “representation of one medium in another.”21 According to their analysis, “new technologies of representation proceed by reforming or remediating earlier ones.”22 Remediating early technologies within newer ones suggests one nostalgically refuses to let go of the longed-for media. Remediation also acts restoratively, allowing earlier technologies to live again inside the new. The Silencio Café scene contains the anxiety technological change brings. The falling singer points to a fragmenting with each innovation in cinema and a way to grapple with the dread of obsolescence and dreams of resurrection.
An expression of this dread plays out in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971).23 Early in the film, the gang of Droogs sexually terrorizes a young woman on the abandoned boards of a proscenium stage. They pull upon her naked body as if she is a doll. She unsuccessfully struggles to free herself from their violent tugging, pushing, and grasping. The camera is high and pulls back from an initial glimpse of painted flowers above the center of the proscenium frame to a slowly tracking out wide shot that captures the whole scene. The staging is embedded in the ruin of a theatre. Theatre becomes a form of cruelty in the scene. Suddenly, the space of the stage becomes one not only philosophically concerned with presentness and absence like in Mulholland Dr., but also a political space where a filmmaker can place a demand on spectators to consider their own unseen ideologies. Kubrick seems to ask: What is a well-meaning audience to do? And: Is there such a thing as a wellmeaning audience? He pushes the viewer to the limit in AClockwork Orange through its relentless violence often paired with theatrical performances. The passiveness of the spectator here asserts the ominous inertia of looking. The stages in the film frame this passivity, making it visible.
Sometimes theatre does not appear directly onscreen. In its place theatricality asserts itself as do the Droogs' highly stylized
performances in the film. Hallmarks of theatricality include a certain heightened artificiality of movement, voice, and environment. Style, acting, costumes, and gestures, to name just a few aspects, are examples of the way theatricality can appear within cinema. Unlike the theatre that is both a performance tradition and location, theatricality moves between theatre settings to everyday life. This fluidness allows theatricality to act as a kind of vanishing and disappearing act. As Samuel Weber argues, theatricality asserts itself in its ability to “install” and “dismantle” the stage which then becomes moveable: A medium unto itself.24 Theatricality can embed itself in any situation, illusory or real, and as such is mutable. Theatricality installing itself is part of the very fabric of the fragmentation and interruption of the cinematic form. It threatens to disturb the smooth illusion of classical film's construction. The use of theatricality erects a structure, a frame in which screened stages appear and disappear. To make his point about installation, Weber quotes Benjamin's writing on the stage of the then-new epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht:
The abyss which separates the actors from the audience like the dead from the living, the abyss whose silence heightens the sublime in drama, whose resonance heightens the intoxication of opera, this abyss which, of all the elements of the stage, most indelibly bears the traces of its sacral origins, has lost its function. The stage is still elevated, but it no longer rises from an immeasurable depth; it has become a public platform. Upon this platform, the theatre now has to install itself.25
The stage, as a place displayed for viewing, had been set apart from the viewer. For instance, the “abyss” of the orchestra pit from the stage and audience in Wagner creates a sense of the sublime in opera. Now, with what Benjamin sees as the loss of the stage's power, theatricality becomes something that can be assembled and disassembled in different places and contexts, making the screened stage more than just a representation of a stage.
Theatre, through theatricality, is now a “public platform” and potentially manifests politically instead of from the deep divide between the living and the dead.26 Theatre in Benjamin's view can play a part in social change as Brecht's theoretical innovations attempt. The performer may then utilize theatricality as a taunt or even a weapon against ideology, particularly when “immeasurable depth” has disappeared. By alerting the spectator to the present moment through theatricality, the audience member, according to Brecht, can leave the theatre having seen the ideology driving their lives and put into motion social and political change. Of course, Brecht theorized about live performance. Film offers Brechtian estrangement with a difference: The present moment remains just out of reach of spectator and therefore can be seen through its absence.
Some Hollywood films contain overt theatricality, especially when cinema was in its infancy. This theatricality bursts forth from certain performances such as Charlie Chaplin's in his film TheCircus(1928). The film contains a protagonist whose entire body brims with an excess of expression characteristic of being on, in Chaplin's case, the music hall stage.27 His clown-like appearance and movements place him on stage wherever he goes even when he is trying to avoid it.28 Most Hollywood musicals do not hide their exuberant theatricality either. Whether through a Busby Berkeley crane shot of a floating flower composed of young women in a pool or breaking with the narrative completely as in Gene Kelly's 13-minute “Gotta Dance” number in Singin' in the Rain (1952), the musical wears its theatricality on its sleeve.29 Contemporary films like Anderson's Rushmore (1998) and MoonriseKingdom(2012) use theatricality as a signal of the world as a kind of miniature stage that, if arranged properly, breaks traumatic repetitions of characters' grief and mourning.30
Like the mutability of theatricality, performance also manifests in varied ways. In Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo (1958), Scottie, played by James Stewart, attempts to remake an approximation of the seemingly deceased Madeleine, played by Kim Novak, through her
look-alike, Judy (who just happens to be the performer playing the fantasy Madeleine) by using a process of mortification—compelling Judy to perform for him. Just as Madeleine led Scottie into a fantasy narrative through performance, Scottie then transforms Judy, demanding she perform to restore his desire.31 Scottie's trauma repeats once again when Judy falls to her death, creating a film that Alice Rayner points to as “ghosting” performance and theatre itself.32 Performance, for the purposes of this book, emerges in various ways. The first way performance occurs refers to an actor's craft and to the actual occasion of a subject doing in front of an audience. This doing can be real or psychic and occurs either onstage or in everyday life. Performance can happen on a stage or in a sports stadium or shopping mall. Performance might happen within the subject. For example, projection—a subject attributing aspects of herself to another—becomes a kind of psychic performance. In other theories of performance, philosophers such as Judith Butler argue that identity, particularly gender, is performative.33 I will draw on many of these notions of performance to analyze instances of screened stages but ground it in two distinct and separate uses: First, in Richard Schechner's “twice-behaved behavior” and second, as what Peggy Phelan calls performance's ontology which “becomes itself through disappearance.”34
Twice-behaved behavior implies that performance is a deliberate event in space and time that either rehearses its moments or may also emerge spontaneously only to be repeated again. The event the audience sees, planned at an earlier moment, enacted in the now of performance, occurs once again.
Phelan's ontology of performance means that it is a moment that disappears and because of that disappearance escapes reproduction. To escape means to be separate from the circulation of images and, therefore, capital that is part of technological reproducibility.35 This definition places precedence on time, in particular the present moment. Performance, according to Phelan, rehearses disappearing —the passage of time acts as the measurement between the present moment and absence.
A performance can occur with or without theatre and theatricality, but when theatre and theatricality exist, performance is almost certainly there as well. When theatre is a location, performance becomes the occasion. It is what people see in the seeing-place. An actor takes part in a performance. Performance is the action of disappearance. When looked at side by side, Schechner's and Phelan's different understandings of performance force the singular (Phelan's definition) next to the repeatable (Schechner's “twicebehaved behavior”). In both articulations, performance is what something does as J.L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words expands it to the speech act. Using the marriage ritual, Austin makes the point that saying “I do” is performative, ready to repeat (although not reproduce) in future marriage ceremonies.36 Presentness contains the word present a word that can also do. For example, an audience presents itself to the performers. Performance is the moment of doing—of presentness—that inevitably must disappear.
Theatre and performance are similar in the way that both can be events that occur in front of an audience. Performance is different in that it not only refers to the event itself but also to the ways in which, both internally and externally, the performer enacts. Likewise, theatricality can be a kind of performance; however, as a distinct medium that is separate from either theatre or performance, it assembles and disassembles at will. All three terms connect via the present moment and its relationship to absence.
We can see the relationship between theatre in film in earnest during Guy Maddin's BrandUpontheBrain!(2006), which premiered as a live show that included narration in homage to Japanese Benshi performances (performances wherein narrators took on character voices during silent films) and Foley sound effect artists, creating film performances in which the live and the recorded intermingled and, depending upon the ever-changing narrator, created a new performance of the film for each viewing. In speaking about the performance in an interview on the website for the BrandUponthe Brain!:LiveShow, Maddin remarks:
It has always been a dream of mine to give a spectacular, crowd-pleasing, live-music presentation of a silent film. I guess I had it in mind secretly while shooting, but I didn't dare mention it to anyone on the set, except maybe as a joke. Poor silent film, it needs all the help it can get… cinephiles –myself included – have to be in a special mood to watch silent film today; …But I've noticed that if there is a live element to a show the audience gives the night so much good will, the picture is suddenly embraced as if it were its own premiere, and the year were 1927! Well, I wanted to throw so much “live element” at this thing I would guarantee myself a ton of audience good will!!! It's worked beyond my wildest dreams.
For the first time in my career, I feel like a showman, a P.T. Barnum, not JUST a filmmaker! I love the feeling.
I was emboldened to use a narrator because I read… [about] …silent film explicators – people who stood on the stage and explained the most basic things transpiring in a film to an audience not used to watching film. Exhibitors in those early days weren't confident that viewers would be able to follow a picture through an edit, that they might be disoriented by constant changes in camera point of view, so these explicators talked them through it. It sounded so charming. Then I read of the Japanese Benshi, narrators who took on characters' voices during the projection of a silent film.37
This live cinematic event performed a complicated dance between reproducibility and presence that was only increased by the subject of the film: Memory and its reemergence. This encounter is somewhere between theatre and film, reminiscent, as Maddin observed, of the practices of early Japanese silent cinema. Donald Richie observes in JapaneseCinema: AnIntroductionthat “from the first the cinema [in Japan] was regarded as an extension of the stage, a new kind of drama, and not as in the West a new kind of
photography.”38 Japanese cinema straddled the divide between theatre and film, inside and outside.
Theatre, theatricality, and performance weave in and out of one another onscreen; this allows the relationships between these different phenomena to connect via film. This book offers one narrative of theatre in film through close readings of moments when the screened stage appears. Although rooted in film history, Screened Stages: On Theatre in Film does not offer an exhaustive historical narrative or catalog of the multitude of instances of the screened stage. Instead, this book theorizes the relationship between theatre and film as it relates to ideas of presentness and absence in select images, narratives, and spectacles onscreen. The exploration of primarily canonical Hollywood films, directors, and/or performers roots the screened stage in a specific context that analyzes the Hollywood style in relation to the ideologies that surface when theatre appears in film.
Chapter 1: “Disappearing in Plain Sight: from Magic Trick to Hollywood Style” examines the “magic” of early and contemporary cinema as represented in the films of Georges Méliès and the transition from early film to the Hollywood style as well as the magic show trick as staged by contemporary director Christopher Nolan. Theatre and film entwine at film's birth through the exhibition, artistic practices, performances, and content. This beginning, referred to as the “cinema of attraction” by Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault, was comprised of trick films that, for example, often showed a magician's act onstage.39 These attractions, a theatre and film fusion, perform the presentness and absence that surface in the vanishing and appearing acts of the magic show stage.40 At the end of the cinema of attractions, D.W. Griffith and others' creation of the Hollywood style with methods of cross-cutting, montage, and other innovations drives the attraction underground and replaces it with seamless worldmaking and narrative structures.41 Film breaks from theatre at this moment. His innovations pushed film to become its own medium. Left behind, the attraction and production practices that draw specifically from theatre go underground.
Chapter 2: “The Presentness of Charlie Chaplin and the Screen Dreams of Buster Keaton” interrogates the relationship between mechanically reproduced images and presentness by analyzing two Chaplin films, TheCircus (1928) and Limelight(1952), and Keaton's Sherlock Jr . (1924). In The Circus, Chaplin's Tramp unwittingly becomes a performer. In Limelight, we follow the end of a performer's career when performing gives way to mortality. Chaplin's films straddle the divide between silent film and the talkies —and theatricality becomes a way of working through this transition. In SherlockJr., Keaton's story of a projectionist who dreams himself into the screen, alongside Freud's concept of “Screen Memories” and the idea of cinema as a kind of “dream factory,” makes the dream of cinema a theatrical space where one medium embeds in the other. Both Keaton and Chaplin bring absent presentness to the fore.
Chapter 3: “Longing for Depth in the Hollywood Musical” theorizes the performing bodies within spectacular screened stages in musicals by first exploring the work of Busby Berkeley. Cinema's continual returns to the realm of performance through spectacles of screened stages and dancing bodies gesture toward a dismantling of the screen and reveal a desire for corporeal presence of the kind that the live provides. The end of the chapter looks at the seminal Hollywood musical Singin' in the Rain (1952) and its relationship to changing technologies and the influx of the new medium of television. From the well-known early sound films The Jazz Singer (1927) and Footlight Parade (1933) to Singin' in the Rain, cinema demonstrates that the moment that sound emerged presented a loss of silent film's theatrical expressivity, perhaps best expressed through narratives of screened stages. In this way, Hollywood cinema can allow theatre to catch a glimpse of itself on the big screen all the while the Hollywood musical explicitly attempts to control theatricality, often discounting live performance even when it seems to place it on a pedestal.
Chapter 4: “Circulations: Performing Women in Three Films From 1950” analyzes the role of the performing woman onscreen. Here, the study shifts from looking at examples where theatre explicitly appears to spaces where the idea of theatre or a metaphor of
theatre is used. The year 1950 brought with it three important films dealing with the subject of acting: Hitchcock's StageFright, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve, and Billy Wilder's Sunset Blvd. All three films show a fascination with the performing woman and the circulation of the performer as a commodity in “show business” with all of the career vicissitudes that come with it. Each film deals with the inevitable replacement of the established order with a new one. Whether this theme of circulation appears because of technological changes as in SunsetBlvd.or through the appearance of a younger, more “appealing” figure, as in Stage Fright and All About Eve, representations of the actress within cinema become a contested site of power in the circulations of ascension and replacement. Theatricality in each of these films becomes a resistance to the male gaze; the desire to perform becomes a subversion of cinema's imperative to see.
Chapter 5: “The Traumatic Stages of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick” explores the onscreen representations of violent events as performances with distinctive structural elements that twin that of trauma. Examples such as Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) and Kubrick's The Shining (1980) show a screened stage full of disturbance. The violent outbursts in Hitchcock and Kubrick focus on the power of the gaze and use the theatre metaphorically as an interrogation of what it means to be a spectator. Stages emerge spatially within a film through framing and cinematography, but also as spaces in a character's mind. Even more than this, screened stages become a system of thought that explores trauma. Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that an event appears as something which disrupts the current situation, changing the known coordinates forever after it happens.42 In psychoanalytic terms, the category of trauma also changes the structure of the subject's reality after the traumatic event. In trauma, the event repeats, unconsciously restaging the conditions of its origin for the subject. This restaging serves alternately both as an unknowing rehearsal for future trauma and a performance of the event itself. For Hitchcock and Kubrick, the theatrical restaging of trauma structures many of
their films. Ultimately, however, the spectator's gaze sets the structure in motion.
Chapter 6: “David Lynch and the Stages of the Brokenhearted” explores Lynch's art and cinematic work beginning with TheElephant Man(1980). Here, the book returns to the stage proper and its parts expressed in the theatricality surrounding performance. For instance, the curtains and cinematic framing create prosceniums that appear onscreen literally in both theatres and everyday life. These representations offer a presentness and depth to the structuring of space and time that unfolds in his films. The relationship to narrative that occurs in all his work oscillates between fantasy and that unbearable aspect of reality that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan calls the Real. The use of the stage suggests a relationship between the two that connects directly to a sense of decomposition within his films that collapses the divide between theatre and cinema. The chapter concludes with Lynch's most recent film, Inland Empire (2006), in which the transition between celluloid and digital technologies becomes a central theme. The representation of the stage on screen amid technological changes suggests an enduring relationship between the two forms.
Chapter 7: “The Infinite Stages of Lars von Trier, Charlie Kaufman, and Wes Anderson” looks at three contemporary directors who posit the stage and theatricality onscreen as a place of infinity and mourning. Lars von Trier reimagines the Hollywood musical as a container for infinite trauma with Dancer in the Dark (2000), whereas Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) gestures toward the theatre as a space of infinite presence where humanity in all its manifestations is on display. Theatricality and the stage in the films of Anderson have a persistent focus on mourning. Anderson's Rushmore features the Max Fischer players, a precocious acting troupe in a private school under the direction of the endlessly clever, heartsick, and grieving Max Fischer. Rushmore contains a miniaturized theatricality that is perhaps the singular hallmark of Anderson's films. In MoonriseKingdom (2012), the bittersweetness of love first encountered backstage in a dressing room before a
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Title: A brief and remarkable narrative of the life and extreme sufferings of Barnabas Downs, Jun Who was among the number of those who escaped death on board the privateer brig Arnold, James Magee, commander, which was cast away near Plymouth-Harbour, in a most terrible snow-storm, December 26, 1778, when more than sixty persons were frozen to death. Containing also a particular account of said shipwreck
Author: Barnabas Downs
Release date: September 29, 2023 [eBook #71758]
Language: English
Original publication: Boston: E. Russell, 1786
Credits: Steve Mattern, David Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Who was among the Number of thoſe who eſcaped Death on board the Privateer Brig A , J M , Commander, which was caſt away near P H , in a moſt terrible Snow-Storm, December , , when more than Sixty Perſons were frozen to Death.——Containing alſo
A particular A of ſaid Shipwreck.
Printed by E. R , for the A ,
P -O L - , Sept ,
In the Preſs, and in a few Days will be publiſhed and ready for Sale, by E. R , at his Office, near Liberty Pole, by the Thouſand, Hundred, Groce or leſſer Quantity, at the moſt reaſonable Rate: Alſo may be had of Mr. B G , at the Boſton Book-Store, near the State-Houſe in Cornhill; Col. E B , Bookſeller, at the London Book-Store, in Marlboro’-Street; Mr. W G , Bookſeller, at Shakeſpear’s-Head, in Newbury-Street; Capt. W G , at his Grocery and Weſt-India Store near the Bridge, in Boſton; Mr. L C , and Mr. T , Innholder, near the Bridge, and Mr. E H , in Charleſton; Mr. E K , at his Store, near the Market, in Salem; Mr B E , at the Poſt-Office, in Newbury-Port; Mr. A B , Bookſeller, in Portſmouth, New-Hampſhire, and by many other Printers, Bookſellers, Shopkeepers and Travelling-Traders in Town and Country
B I C K E R S T A F F’s
B O S T O N A L M A N A C K, For the Year of our R , .
Which will contain a great Variety of uſeful and entertaining M , in P and V
This W will be likewiſe ornamented with a large Number of engraved Plates, ſome of which repreſent the twelve Signs of the Zodiack in Miniature, and the ſeveral
Employments and Diverſions of the G F , throughout the different Seaſons of the Year: Alſo a curious Repreſentation of a C C , debating on State-Affairs; at the Head of the Table is a Figure of H O N E S T U S, that renowned Champion and bold Atteſtor of the L of the Subject, and ſworn Enemy to L , who is converſing with one of the Order; over his Head is a Label with theſe Words “No C , no L A W Y E R S:” Another Plate repreſents a very curious and droll Scene of a large Group of the B O , or the S of L and C , mounted on Jack-Aſſes, Peacocks, &c returning from a rich Feaſt at C C , &c.
his kindneſs in correcting the following ſheets.
A
N A R R A T I V E, &c.
W A S born in Barnſtable, in NewEngland, October , , of credible Parents, whom I ſerved as an obedient Son, I hope, until the commencement of the late war called me from my home, and led me to exchange the occupation of a Huſbandman, to which I was bred for the more dangerous employment of a Soldier. In this capacity I served my Country campaigns, and know not that my behaviour was censured by my officers.
A having returned for a time to the Farming-Buſineſs, I concluded to try my fortune at ſea: I entered accordingly on board the ſchooner Bunker-Hill, Captain Iſaac Cobb, Commander, on a privateering voyage: But we had not been out more than days before we were taken by the brig Hope, one Brown, Commander, and carried into Halifax.
We were committed to jail and kept very ſhort: Then I was taken with the ſmall-pox, thro’ which GOD ſafely carried me when deſtitute of the neceſſaries of life, and under great preſſure of mind. But after my being recovered ſo far as to be returned to the jail from the hoſpital, in conſequence of my having nothing but a ſmall allowance of ſalt proviſions, which were next to poiſon for a ſick perſon, I was taken with a violent fever, which returned me again to the hoſpital, and brought me to the gates of the grave. No perſon who hath not experienced it can imagine how gloomy and diſtreſſing it is to be under ſuch circumſtances: To be far diſtant from our deareſt Friends; to be among perſons who are not only without any concern for us, or intereſt in our fate, but who are our profeſſed enemies, and not governed even by the common principles of humanity, is a caſe truly melancholy. In this ſituation I was attacked with a bleeding of the noſe, (to which I had before been ſubject) which brought me to the very borders of eternity!
A this I was, by the ſmiles of heaven recovered and reſtored, by a cartel, with of my Countrymen to our own homes. How
welcome they were to us, and how pleaſant it was to me to ſee the faces of my Friends again, any one may imagine more eaſily than I can deſcribe!
B tho’ I had been ſo unſucceſſful in my firſt attempt at ſea, I could not reſiſt the inclination I had to try once more what Providence would do for me: I left my native place, went to Boſton, and entered on board the brig Arnold, James Magee, Commander. I well remember I felt an unusual dejection when I entered on this undertaking; and tho’ I pretend not to ſay that this foreboded the miſfortunes I was to meet with in this fatal veſſel, yet I have often reflected upon it ſince with a degree of admiration.
W the brig lay in the harbour, I attempted with ſome other hands to go on board another veſſel in a ſmall boat, but the wind ſuddenly riſing we were in danger of being drowned; the boat run on Governor’sIſland, and we were obliged to ſtay there hours before we could get off. Providence preſerved my life in this danger, in order that I might live thro’ greater, and teſtify to his loving kindneſs and mercy.
O December , , Capt. Magee
ſailed from Boſton: We had been at ſea but a few hours, when a moſt terrible gale of wind aroſe, ſo that the water was almoſt knee deep on the leeward ſide of the quarter-deck. We continued in the Bay that day and the night following, but on the next day we got into Plymouth. The wind was abated, but the cold was ſevere and intenſe beyond deſcription. We came to anchor a little below BeachPoint, in the Harbour of Plymouth.
O Saturday, December , about o’clock in the morning, from the violent motion of the ſea, the brig ſtruck the bottom as tho’ it would drive her keel in. As there was not depth of water enough to work the veſſel in the place where we lay, and we ſaw a heavy ſtorm coming on, our Commander thought it beſt to cut our cables and let her drive, which was immediately done. The ſtorm increaſed very faſt, ſo that we were obliged to cut away the main-maſt, and we drifted upon an hard flat a little to the weſtward of Beach-Point.
T was early on Saturday morning, and we now laboured hard in throwing over our wood and getting our guns off the decks into
the hold, but the veſſel began to leak very faſt, and with every motion of the ſea ſhe ſtruck the bottom as tho’ ſhe would ſplit in pieces. We kept pumps going, but could not gain upon the water. The ſtorm now increaſed to a moſt prodigious degree: It ſnowed ſo thick that we could ſee but a very little way from the brig, and the cold was extreme; we continued hard at work all day without eating or drinking any thing ſcarcely, having but little appetite with the proſpect of death continually before our eyes.
U now we had hopes of eſcape, but juſt before night we looked into the hold and ſaw the caſks floating about; this drove us to deſpair, and we forſook the pumps without a ray of hope but from the immediate interpoſition of divine Providence. Many of the people now began to pray, and I went into the cabbin and ſat upon one of the guncarriages. I had not been there long before I ſaw cheſts floating about, and perceived that the tide was flowing on us very faſt; by direction of the Capt. all left the cabbin and came upon the quarter-deck.
I is not poſſible to deſcribe my ſenſations at this period; death appeared inevitable,
and we waited every moment for its approach! Even now, when I recollect my feelings it is difficult to ſteady my pen! And indeed I had ground enough for my apprehenſions, for we had not been long upon the quarter-deck before the water upon the main-deck was even with it. Our foremaſt was ſtill ſtanding, which cauſed the veſſel to roll very much, but when we had cut that away ſhe lay ſtiller. The brig now lay ſunk; the tide was flowing faſt and the ſea broke very heavily over us. We were all upon the quarter-deck, and the water came in upon us ancle deep.
T was a ſail in the netting upon the windward-quarter, which we contrived to laſh over us, but there were ſo many under it that we ſhould have been ſtifled for want of breath, if we had not cut places to let in the air. The tide was then about at its height but the ſtorm did not abate. There was nothing to be heard around but ſcreeches, groans and deep lamentations for themſelves and their families, and earneſt cries to G O D for mercy and relief!
T was ſuch a croud upon the quarter deck we could not ſtand up without treading
upon one another. Being in a ſtruggle I was thrown down and trampled upon as if the breath would be crouded out of my body: However I ſoon recovered my feet and trampled upon others in my turn; for the immediate regard which every man had to his own life prevented him from attending to the diſtreſſes of his neighbours!
S in this manner and trying to clear ourſelves from thoſe who fell down had pulled off moſt of our ſhoes, and the wet and cold ſoon froze our feet. Nature could ſuſtain it no longer and the people began to die all around me. Capt. John Ruſſell of Barnſtable was the firſt of thoſe with whom I was acquainted that died, but many others ſoon followed him. Fatigue and diſtreſs, added to the extreme cold and deſpair of relief, put a period to the lives of great numbers. Thoſe who were able to ſtand were obliged to huddle up cloſe together, and breathe in each other’s faces to preſerve them from freezing to death, while their comrades were dying around them all night. In the morning a moſt awful ſight preſented itſelf to us; of our Comrades lay dead acroſs each other,
and but of my Townſmen were among the living!
O Lord’s-Day, Dec. , the ſtorm abated and the ſun appeared clear, but the ſevere cold ſtill continued. We ſaw Plymouth and a number of people coming along the ſhore for our relief: We could diſcern them puſh off two boats and make an hard trial to come to us, but the harbour was ſo full of ice they could not reach us: We ſaw them return and it gave us an inexpreſſible ſhock. The elevation which their appearance gave us tended to ſink us the lower. Our ſituation was very gloomy; we had little to ſupport nature except rum; no ſhoes on our feet, and very much frozen; the Heavens was our only covering!
I my ſenſes until about o’clock on Lord’s-Day, but was then deprived of them and lay on the quarter-deck until the next day, when a boat got to us in order to carry the living aſhore, which amounted only to . When they were looking around to collect the ſurvivors, they at firſt ſuppoſed me to be dead, but ſeeing one of my eye-lids move they took me up and laying me in the boat carried me aſhore.
I carried to Mr. Bartlet’s tavern, whoſe kindneſs to me I would thus publickly acknowledge, and hope I ſhall always remember with gratitude. My cloaths were firſt cut from off me and I was put into cold water in order to take out the froſt: I was then placed in bed and having my teeth forced open had ſome cordials poured down my throat, but I have no remembrance of any of theſe tranſactions, for I lay perfectly ſenſeleſs until o’clock on Monday, when my ſenſes came to me at once. My eyes were not open, but I heard the voices of perſons talking around me, and the firſt idea which ſtruck me was, that I was ſtill on board the brig, but that a boat come to our relief. I ſoon however opened my eyes and was informed of what had happened and where I then was.
I gradually, but was obliged to paſs thro’ the painful operation of having ſome of my limbs ſeperated from my body: But after all theſe diſtreſſes I am ſtill among the living to praiſe G O D! Let my ſpared life be devoted to his ſervice, and may I ever be mindful of his benefits!
