Listening to Thelonious Monk play I Surrender, Dear, or listening to Cecil Taylor play one of his own compositions, we are concern...ed with the struggle of the performer against the predetermined nature of his medium (the theme, the chord structure, etc.). Like jazz performance, film acting is improvisatory, on an almost metaphysical level. In the drama, the aim of performance is to achieve a kind of psychophysical translucence, whereby the potencies imagined by the author of the drama "shine through" the immitigable fasciculate of presence-on-the-stage. In film, however, the dramatic text is--rightly--only a pre-text for its eruption into the moving figures, the absurd images, who are not really there but whom the film, at the height of its artifice, can convince us do exist in their own lucid fasciculate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Much has already been written of the uncanny ways in which Chaplin and Keaton seem to divide so much of the world, so precisely, b...etween them. Charlie the sentimentalist and Buster the ironist, the dancer and the acrobat, the critic of capitalist society and the deviser of happy-ending Edens outside of society--all these distinctions are well-known and important. But the most richly creative difference between these geniuses is in their language--not the language in their films (how wonderful it is that they are forever silent) but the language that their films make real. For Chaplin the space of the world is always and insidiously dangerous, perhaps even murderous. For Keaton, that same space is, breathtakingly, his toy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »