Absorption and Theatricality

When art critic Michael Fried (1980) wrote about the relationship between a spectator and an artwork looked at, he was talking about 18th century painting, invoking French writer, philosopher and art critic Denis Diderot. Diderot regarded the perfect play and the perfect painting as depicting figures or characters absorbed in their own diegetic reality, which appears as a fiction to the onlooker. The fourth wall thereby erected enthralls the audience, because it allows them to indulge their voyeuristic tendencies. In Absorption and Theatricality: Painting & Beholder in the Age of Diderot (1980) Fried defines the state of absorption as “being wholly engaged in quintessentially absorptive activities.”¹ Typical “vehicles of absorption”² are “sleep-related stares and activities.”³ Other examples are memorizing a lesson, meditating and reading.⁴ In general the ‘absorptive tradition’ exists out of paintings that thematize “engrossment, reflection, reverie, obliviousness, and related states.”⁵ According to Diderot, the primary exponents of this tradition were Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, whose paintings depict figures entirely absorbed in their own act, but there are examples to be found in the theater as well - “act as if the curtain never rose.”⁶ Absorption establishes the most natural and realistic depiction of life, in which the viewer does not take part and is not asked to be aware of his own position, allowing him to be immersed and to transpose the absorption seen to his own viewing practice – thus experiencing absorption. In this moment, when the picture seems not to be painted at all (the play never staged), the artist has established a sincerely anti-theatrical work. This refined absorptive sensation is countered by theatricality, a notion Fried once again borrows from Diderot for whom the concept was problematic:

On n’a point encore fait, et l’on ne fera jamais un morceau de peinture supportable, d’après une scène théâtrale; et c’est, ce me semble, une des plus cruelles satires de nos acteurs, de nos décorations, et peut-être de nos poètes.⁷

The effects of theatricality are visible in two stages. Primarily it governs the (status of the) work itself. According to Diderot, if some of the figures in the scene appear to be less than wholly absorbed by what they are doing or by what is happening around them, and instead are “conscious” of their being beheld, it renders both the figures and the painting theatrical, which the critic names “falseness.”⁸ In a second stage it affects the audience: a theatrical painting is unable to retain the attention of the viewer. By reaching out to its audience, the work of art makes the viewers aware of their own act of spectating, breaking the spell. Theatricality counters truth and conviction, rather installs a distance that bears no credence. A theatrical work is merely readable in its context, confronting its beholder, standing “in his way.”⁹ The importance of differentiating the first stage – which ultimately serves the second in its purpose of an altered perception – from that second stage, lies in the recognition that in painting this ‘consciousness of being beheld’ is still in the hands of the painter. In painting, both stages overlap or are seamlessly complemented through the artist’s solemn reign, acknowledging the inherent theatricality of creation. In cinema and theater, this first stage partially comes to lie in the hands of the actors, opening up a slightly more nuanced question. Possibly, a source of frustration for the director. If absorption within theater or film fails, Fried (in accordance with Diderot) writes, it might well be the doing of the “seemingly innate theatricality” of actors who seem unable to “subordinate them[selves] to the demands of the art.”¹⁰ Diderot had earlier noted that it are often the untrained, unknown extras on stage that prove resistant to theatricality and are better capable of displaying absorption.

Apart from historical painting, the notions of theatricality and absorption have been widely reapplied to analyze more modern painting, sculpture, theater, photography and cinema, not in the least by Michael Fried himself. The critic researched the idea of theatricality and absorption in historical painting, after a first attempt to separate modernist from Minimal art in his 1967 essay Art and Objecthood from a very similar point-of-view. In this essay he claimed Minimal art is literalist art that feeds off its context (the space and visitors of a gallery or a museum) and is therefore theatrical. He noted that anti-theatrical art exists and has meaning in itself and does not need an audience or a context to be understood or even perceived the way theatrical art does: “it is as though […] a work of modernist painting or sculpture – were in some essential respect not an object.”¹¹ Fried broke down this question of physicality into present-ness and presence. Absorptive art has a certain presentness, which lies within the work and which is timeless and spaceless. It functions as “a closed and self-sufficient system,”¹² independent from anything outside its frame, independent from its material. Theatrical work, on the contrary, feeds off its (ephemeral) presence in the room, presenting itself to the beholder, dominating “the entire situation”¹³ wherein the actors and the audience are both present.

Cinema on Stage, Cinema in a Gallery: Theatricality and Film

Cinema cannot be experienced with the same shared liveness as is possible in theater. Cinema’s (a)materiality forms an obstacle, it is experienced through a (distancing) machine. A film bears no presence since it is “screened”¹⁴ and not exhibited. Because of that, Fried writes, “the engrossment of the movie audience sidesteps the question of theatricality.”¹⁵ These claims leave cinema out of the debate. Film and philosophy scholar Matthew Abbot affirmed this blind alley, writing that “the result will be neither theatrical nor anti-theatrical, for cinema has no mode of address in the strict sense,”¹⁶ referring to the technical or material distance. Abbot’s answer is to leave behind this impasse, suggesting to analyze cinematic absorption “without presupposing it is a function of illusion.”¹⁷

Abbot (2017) analysed Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) in terms of absorption and spectatorship. He is concerned with the social and public implications or justifications of theatricality, though the political or social criticism in Shirin (2008) is performed through absorptive means. By presenting a series of portraits of famous (mostly Iranian) actresses watching a film, without showing the film they are watching, Shirin demonstrates that self-reflexivity does not necessarily undermine absorption:

Shirin reflects on the problematic status of cinematic absorption with cinematic means, and it is hard to imagine a more absorbing treatment of it.¹⁸

In his further research, Fried acknowledges the ambiguous position cinema is in, unable to absorb an audience into its materiality and at the same time allowing the audience to become fully absorbed in the film without having to be present. Yet here Fried argues that the absorptive character comes too easily to cinema: its mere negation of theatricality does not render cinema “a modernist art”¹⁹ that so successfully demonstrates absorption. In cinema, the audience is present in the “experiencing machine,”²⁰ an idea Fried takes from Jeff Wall. Trying to fit Opening Night into the spectrum of absorptive to theatrical art, from here on, thus moves past the claim of materiality. Although Fried ensures us that it is not the question of materiality that makes him say cinema sidesteps theatricality, it is difficult to grasp what exactly does.

In Four Honest Outlaws (2011) Fried turns back to the obstacle that is called cinema, compelled to rephrase and rethink how cinema - automatically - sidesteps theatricality. Fried believes there is more to it than the argument of materiality and acknowledges once again the fact that absorption and anti-theatricality can be attempted with cinematic means. Classical narrative cinema, he argues, strives for absorption, just like any other visual art can do, but in his writing the critic puts great emphasis on the plot, the fate of the characters, the narrative, rather than the actor’s singular movements, gestures, postures. In Opening Night, both audiences (in the film or watching the film) are grabbed by the unparalleled performances of Rowlands. However much one wants to understand the vocal expressions coming from the haunted, ill, or distressed characters placed in the center of (all of) Cassavetes’s film(s), his characters speak with their bodies, as examined by Vincent Amiel (1994), Philippe Lubac (2005) and in some respect by Todd Berliner (1999) in his writing about the ‘real realism’ of Cassavetes. The absence of a well-defined narrative, such as in most of Cassavetes’s movies, had earlier allowed the viewer to enjoy the absorptive paintings by Chardin and Greuze. In these paintings, just as in Cassavetes’s work, it is mostly the curving of a body, the direction of a pair of eyes, the gesturing of a hand, a frown or a gaping mouth that is central to the image, that tells what one is “doing, hearing, thinking, feeling,”²¹ and that gives away the level of absorption of the figure(s) depicted. Nevertheless Fried writes that in narrative cinema we are “hooked by an event,”²² which sounds like an unfair suggestion, compared to our self-explanatory fascination for the gesturing of a painted student of Greuze.

Cinema recontextualized in a gallery or a museum also makes absorption (into the plot) impossible for the visitor, because of the way the films are often mutilated (cropped, extremely slowed-down, cut into concomitant pieces). The visitor can however focus his attention on the absorption the actors seem to inhabit, their movements dragged, dramatized, debilitated. In a gallery, there is room for fascination in gestures, although Fried applauds the absence of famous actors in the experimental film art of Douglas Gordon, because these actors’ idiosyncratic movements, mannerisms and tics - which we are familiar with - would take away our chance to become absorbed. Does recognition kill absorption? In this case, Opening Night is beyond redemption, since Cassavetes is known for always working with the same people who were his close friends and family. Rowlands’s movements are very much her own and ever-returning in every film she made with her husband. Fried distracts us from the discussion of absorption in cinema, by moving it once again to the realm of gallery art. Nevertheless, the “derealization of the exhibition space,”²³ to the critic, is a feast of anti-theatricality. I suppose substituting ‘exhibition space’ with ‘cinema hall’ is not too far-fetched and we can make claims of anti-theatricality in ‘normative’ cinema. I will treat Opening Night seen from a fictional liveness (often hard to distinguish from lived-ness and likeness), that is present only within the film (as theater) or seen as a shared experience of the audience outside of the film - where sometimes it clashes with the considerations of the former.

In an earlier essay, Jeff Wall, Wittgenstein, and the Everyday (2007), Fried applauds the anti-theatricality of the contemporary photographic works of Jeff Wall, reminiscent of the 18th-century painterly tradition, yet immediately remarks that it cannot compete with Chardin and Greuze because one can see that the subject photographed was well aware of the presence of the photographer. Therefore Fried calls it a “staged” form of absorption.²⁴ Reacting to this essay on Jeff Wall, critic James Heffernan (2008) questions the notion of staged absorption, using another example provided by Fried, namely Lesende (Hans Richter, 1994), a painting depicting a woman reading, which is painted after a photograph. Fried calls it staged, because the young girl must have noticed the photographer shooting her portrait. Heffernan replies by asking “how Chardin’s absorbed young men [could] have failed to notice the man with the paintbrush and easel?”²⁵ For Heffernan the answer merely depends on the ontological fiction. Once we abandon our suspension of disbelief (accepting the inherent theatricality), a whole array of different kinds of absorptions offer themselves in the scope of being real versus being staged.

Following Heffernan, differentiating Chardin’s real absorption from Wall’s staged kind, is hardly sustainable. Heffernan challenges the idea of absorption a second time by confronting a painting of Chardin with Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez. This time Heffernan adds the question whether direct address immediately destroys the possibility of absorption:

Though fully facing the beholder of the picture, he is looking at the royal couple who are outside the picture, standing (presumably) in front of the painter but reflected by the mirror shown behind him, so that Velázquez’s art neatly becomes the mirror of the mirror of life. Patently ignoring the figures ranged across the foreground of the picture, looking resolutely at the couple posed beyond them, is he any less absorbed by this royal pair than is Chardin’s Young Student by his drawing?²⁶

Following Heffernan, breaking the fourth wall does not render a work of art theatrical and does not take away its potential to be absorptive. Fried, on the other hand, writes in a footnote in Why Photography Matters (2008) - where he brings theatricality and absorption to the late modernist era - that in classical narrative cinema a look into the camera betrays any sense of absorption, since the look can at no point be returned, for then its staged nature would be revealed.

This ambiguous alternating becomes visible in Opening Night, where theatricality and absorption are equal layers, not oppositions, building a single narrative, confusing reality and fiction, confusing truthful and staged despair. Halfway through the film, the distressed leading actress, Myrtle, is having a nervous breakdown in her hotel room and can be heard talking to herself in the bathroom. Manny, the director of the play, who is with her in the hotel suite, comes in and asks her: ‘Are you going over your lines?’ Yet the lines Myrtle is repeating do not appear elsewhere in the film, not even when rehearsing the play, which amplifies the confusion. (On what level are we?)

A Truthful Play

Even before the first scene on stage, Cassavetes makes it abundantly clear that we are about to watch a theater performance. In three successive shots before the opening credits, applause is ringing in the background while Myrtle is smoking a cigarette backstage, a red curtain is drawn and a frontal take of the audience in the room instantly makes the film viewer understand this is a fiction-in-fiction story. Myrtle (playing Virginia) enters the stage, which mimics a living-room. Virginia sees Marty (Cassavetes) sitting on a stairwell, placed parallel to the backdrop and she has a chat with him, turning her back to the audience (acting as if the curtain never rose). The play at the outset does not cross its own boundaries: it is a sincere fiction; leaving the audience uninvolved, inactivated, uninvited. It is what we expect from Cassavetes’s regular group of actors, which exists out of “extremely talented professionals”²⁷ that would never break character. We are watching a kammerspiel unfold, not too far from the genre paintings of Chardin and Greuze, which has its characters absorbed in their own story - until Myrtle objects and whimpers:

Manny:

You’re acting like some grade school theatrical kid, for Christ’s sake! Everybody loves you. You’re a super, high-priced professional.

Myrtle:

I’m what?

Manny:

Now, calm down.

Myrtle:

Huh? I’m what?

Manny:

Calm down, will you?

Myrtle:

What am I?

Myrtle does not recall being a high-priced professional. She breaks down and weeps because she does not understand her character. At the same time we see the high-priced professional Gena Rowlands, proving virtuosic acting skills in the movie Opening Night. Is Ben Gazzara, saying the lines above, perhaps addressing Rowlands, the movie star? Opening Night consists of multiple levels of absorption. Whilst laying one over the other, the surfaces of each level touch each other, reflect each other and inherit a form of theatricality in their doubling - Gena knows what she is doing.

The opening quote of this essay comically captures this confusion of reality versus fiction that is the center of attention in the film. One could argue the movie is about ageing, such as Myrtle proclaims about the play. But doing so, means confining oneself to the story on stage and allowing oneself to be absorbed by the fiction posed upon the viewer. Or is it not? In an interview Rowlands once said that “at a certain point in your life, you can no longer depend upon the things that upheld you in your youth; you must accept your second self and embrace it.”²⁸ In Opening Night she makes a very similar statement. In the theater performance, called The Second Woman, the main character, Virginia (Myrtle), goes to visit her ex-husband and meets his second wife, yet the play is not about this second woman. When Myrtle goes to a seance to rid her of her ‘ghost’ Nancy, a young fan that died before her eyes, she explains that “at some time in your life, youth dies… and the second woman in us takes over. I believe that Nancy is the first woman of my life,” which leaves Myrtle to be the second woman, sounding a lot like Rowlands. In an interview, Cassavetes gave yet another explanation as to who the two presupposed women are that meet in Myrtle. Part of the character is based upon Rowlands’s personal life and her existent and demanding context (children, marriage, “prescribed chores”),

the other is what you could be if none of these other things existed. The selfish, individual part of the person – your own mind’s eye view of yourself – is to me [Cassavetes] the epitome of an actress.²⁹

Absorptive art can only exist when nothing else does. Absorption is an aim, a striving. It is the epitome of an actress attempting to let go of her daily, societal being in order to reach a certain truth in oneself. Theatricality is what unavoidably stands in its way, since perhaps all life is theatrical and since certainly all art is theatrical. Michael Fried’s staged absorption remains theatrical, regardless of his attempt to defuse the situation by calling the work of Jeff Wall and Hans Richter not necessarily a “fall”³⁰ back to theatricality, rather saying they convey a certain (acknowledged) to-be-seen-ness, “which emerges in this context as a necessary condition for the successful depiction of world-meaningfulness in contemporary photography.”³¹ Truthfulness and world-meaningfulness can be performed, in essence being theatrical.

From the point-of-view of the movie camera the absorptive aim of Opening Night (if existent) succeeds - although there is a single breach which I will return to at the end. The film does not address us, it compels us to get inside Myrtle’s mind:

What Cassavetes essentially retains from the theater is its theatricality, in other words the hyper-expressivity of the body, the gesture, the word, the work on posture and its implementation through performance, the essence of theater in a sense, but theater imbued with the everyday.³²

This quote by Thierry Jousse remains true for both levels of fiction in Opening Night. There is no visible distinction between Rowlands expressiveness when playing Myrtle or when playing Virginia. Of course this could also be an exhibit of Myrtle’s inability to distinguish her stage presence from her live presentness as an actor. In every movie she made with Cassavetes, Rowlands uses all her limbs and twitches every muscle in her face to exteriorize her feelings. Film critic and theorist Vincent Amiel notes in 1994 that:

Dans Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, Husbands, c’est le rythme des corps qui fait le montage, qui donne sa logique au récit : longs vomissements, luttes paniquées, étreintes rapides. […] Avec Cassavetes la perte de soi s’accomplit dans l’exercice du corps, dans la dépense physique revendiquée.³³

In Opening Night this corresponds with Myrtle’s endless attempts to keep her composure towards the end of the film and thus towards the actual opening night, yet instead being knocked to the ground by every other slight breeze coming her way. Also in combating Nancy, the ghost of Myrtle’s imagination, she loses her temper which results in a highly physical fight. Amiel points towards another memorable scene at the beginning of Opening Night where Manny, the director, is in his hotel room with his wife while on the phone with Myrtle. The first woman moves and dances, the second woman talks, Amiel writes. The first one is present, the second one can only reassure her existence through talking.

Actors, Directors, Audience … Everyone’s in on It

Going back to the first condition for absorption - which lies within the performance - the question arises: are the actors acting as if the audience is not there? This is true for the film, mostly true for the theater piece although both Rowlands and Cassavetes break character on the level of the play and address the audience when they don’t understand each other (as Myrtle and Maurice). Early on in the film, Cassavetes (as director) makes us believe for a first time that Myrtle will talk to the audience, as Todd Berliner had already described in 1999.³⁴ She walks onto the stage and is welcomed with loud applause. With her back against the set decor, she looks straight ahead and says a plain “hello” (see figure 1). Reversing the shot, for a brief moment, we believe we will see the audience staring at her, perhaps answering her ‘hello’, perhaps not. Instead, we receive a close-up of another actress, her contours muted by the stage lights, with the rest of the frame darkened, suggesting she is standing with her back towards the audience (figure 2). She says her lines and the play continues. It happens multiple times: when Gena is or appears to be looking straight at the audience, it is always an action entirely reserved for the theater audience. The look at the live and present audience does not once coincide with a look into the camera.

At a later point, Maurice is improvising on stage because Myrtle won’t say her lines properly. It appears as if he detects she is talking to him as Maurice and not to him playing Marty in the theater production. He does not know how to respond to her tampering, so he looks at the audience which is now part of his reality, with open hands and uplifted shoulders, indicating he does not understand her comedy either. In other words, he breaks the “suspension of disbelief” when Myrtle makes up her own story or falls back into her own truth. Myrtle in turn too confronts the audience again, smirking or even mumbling a few words at them. The audience is surprised or entertained and general laughter can be heard when Myrtle puts on a funny face, mocking Maurice. The laughter grows when the two contemplate their existence, coming to the conclusion that they have been “invaded”.

The extreme theatricality the play bears is accounted for by Rowlands’s idiosyncratic facial expressions and her grotesque gestures, her calling out to the crew to ask for a lighter or some matches, the tense jokes and the wild laughter that appear out of place on stage. The end scene is no longer that of chamber play, it rather resembles a farce. An interesting contradiction, most visible in this final scene, lies in the discrepancy between what the diegetic audience interprets as manifestly theatrical and what we, watching the film, understand as two actors absorbed in their own reality, which happens to unfold on a stage. Myrtle and Maurice embodying Virginia and Marty are fighting out a personal relationship on stage (perhaps inspired by real life couple Gena and John?), one of being ex-lovers, using their characters to give shape to their own frustrations – or so we believe. Myrtle’s personal and internal conflicts – being a woman and an actress – are tightly intertwined with her public life, a life on stage and on screen, which is magnified by her diva look with her fur coat and her dark sunglasses. When she addresses the audience they have no way of knowing who is turning to them. It could be Virginia, Myrtle or Gena (figure 3). It could be Marty, Maurice or John (figure 4). In an interview together with actor Ben Gazzara, Rowlands expressed the feeling one has when watching the films of Cassavetes in a precise aphorism: “I just think, you look at John’s pictures and you know they’re fiction but you know you’re not being lied to.”³⁵

Interestingly, in these moments where Myrtle breaks character, more often than not, there follows a close-up of her face set against the illuminated audience in the theater hall, accentuating the fact that the audience too is part of her reality, as opposed to the fiction of the play (figure 5). Apart from Myrtle, Cassavetes said that “the other character in the play, the most important character in the play, is the audience.”³⁶ The audience is the sole buffer preventing the narrative from collapsing into a single set of characters with a single set of actions and emotions. The audience in the film consists of unpaid extras only, none of them are actors, none of their reactions are staged. They were merely invited to come and watch the play, warned beforehand that there would be long hauls of waiting in between scenes. The response of the people in the audience contrasts strongly with what the producer and the writer of the play expected or had hoped for. They wanted to produce a serious piece (as scripted), but the crowd is laughing (figure 6). To the film viewer this contrast is a crucial armature to distinguish reality from fiction (within the fiction).³⁷

Author Biography

Kathy Vanhout graduated in Theater and Film Studies at the University of Antwerp and is currently preparing a doctoral proposal on a cinema of monumentality and the aesthetics of tragedy in late modern cinema. She has written for journals such as Screening the Past, photogénie and Sabzian.