Masculin/Feminin. Notes on the modern actor’s body.

Domènec Font

Masculin/Feminin. Notes on the modern actor’s body

Domènec Font

“Actors are film-makers’ essential element of dialogue…The actor’s body pervades the
cinema until it becomes its true history. A history that has never been told because it is
always intimate, erotic, made up of piety and rivalry, of vampirism and respect.
However, as the cinema ages, it is that history films are witnesses to…” (Daney, 1996,
201). Serge Daney’s reflections come from a study of Wim Wenders’ Lightning Over
Water or Nick's Movie, 1979, a programme on lineage, vampirism and the spectral
body of the cinema if ever there was one. Daney’s story may have difficulties adjusting
to the history of ideas because of the amount of interplay it generates. However it
encourages us to think of the actor as the agent of historic mutations and, naturally, to
analyse the modern cinema of the sixties —the core of my present research— as a
particular chapter in the confrontation of bodies and gazes, before the beginning of the
indeterminate process of serial reproduction that is television and its clonic types.

That journey of merging could begin in 1948 from a small legend: the telegram Ingrid
Bergman sent to Roberto Rossellini (on his birthday) proposing that they should work
together after her discovery of Roma Città Aperta and Paisà (1). We know the
background to that call: Rossellini could not recall ever having seen one of the actress’s
films, though she was at the height of her career in the American cinema, but they met
in Hollywood and later she began her own particular “viaggio in Italia” and became his
wife and the heroine of his films between 1949 (Stromboli, Terra di Dio) and 1954
(Giovanna di Arco al Rogo and La Paura). That decision, as sublime as it was painful,
was to stir up a worldwide controversy (illustrating in a way aspects of the
confrontation between classicism and modernity, America and Europe, and obviously
confirming Rossellini’s own statement when he said that many film chroniclers are no
more than the militia of the established order) and, at the same time, ruin both their
careers: her popular success in the American cinema and his critical neo-Realist
strength (all the so-called “Bergman-films” were total commercial flops).

The first effect of Ingrid Bergman’s arrival was the director’s separation from Anna
Magnani, his companion and favourite actress, and from everything directly linked to
the neo-Realist canon. In the context of a morality and an aesthetic like those of neo-

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Realism, the actor seemed an object of repulsion. The cast of Paisà were chosen from
barracks, convents and streets at the moment when the locations were set up. In
practice the only recognisable actors in that non-professional game were Aldo Fabrizi,
an actor who spoke Roman dialect, and Anna Magnani, a music hall singer, two
concentrated examples of the synergy between the comedian and the popular figure.
With high precision gestures and mime, Magnani was the living representation of the
Roman wolf: she was the image of the resisting city (Roma Città Aperta) and would be
the postwar Italian mother with Visconti (Bellisima) and Pasolini (Mamma Roma)
before she ended up retiring to her mansion. Before that, however, she responded to
Fellini’s pursuit of her for his collage of Rome with a “Lascialo stare, Federico, va
dormire…”. In short she was a “landscape body”, as Giovanna Grignaffini points out in
his excellent study “Il femminile nel cinema italiano”, framing the symptoms of a
historic change in Italian culture and life, but above all in the structure of the cinema
and its relation to what can be seen. Its conventions are perfectly explained in the
actors’ bodies and gestures (Brunetta 1996, 376).

The switch from Magnani to Bergman in Rossellini’s life and work is something more
than a substitution of leading ladies. Above all it heralds Rossellini’s distancing from
his own mystique and imposes a new relation with reality, in which strangeness and
fear are superimposed on any idea of photographic documentation. Karin, the female
character in Stromboli, exchanges the refugee camp for an island where she is even
more enclosed and where she is incapable of understanding the inhabitants. From her
arrival in Italy, Ingrid Bergman said that she felt anguished by her projection into an
anthropological, cultural and linguistic universe which she did not understand. It was
therefore a merging relation, a shared, if diverse, feeling of strangeness which was to
be explosively inscribed on the “family films” of the fifties which were the prelude to a
new poetics of modern cinema.

That woman who climbed the volcano in Stromboli until she found reconciliation, that
Irene who descended into hell and stirred up a scandal in Europa 51 or that Katherine
lost in Naples in Viaggio in Italia are the exalted bodies and faces of a character and an
actress fascinated by heterogeneity. An encounter with otherness which is not far
removed from violence, as happens in La Paura, where the fictional character, Irene
Wagner, and the actress Ingrid Bergman are subjected to an exhausting interrogation
by a husband whom we only see foreshortened and through a camera that moves
gloatingly around her, until they both decide to abandon their inquisitors. The film,
based on Stephen Zweig’s The Angst and filmed in Munich, was the extreme example
of that merging process and, one need hardly say, the last film of their marriage (2).

Among Rossellini’s writings collected by Alain Bergala there is an extraordinary tête à

tête between Renoir and Rossellini organised by André Bazin in 1958. In it the French
director refers to the camera as the religion of the cinema. “There is a camera,” Renoir
points out, “stood on a tripod or a crane, which is exactly like the altar of the god Baal:
around it the high priests, who are the directors, lead children as burnt offerings to the
camera and throw them into the flames. And the camera is there, almost motionless,
and when it moves it follows the instructions of the high priests, not the

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victims.” (Rossellini, 1984, 151-152). If their condition as progenitors of modernity

was not enough to bring the two authors together, there was no lack of reasons to link
them in that practice of torture. Besides working majestically with Rossellini’s two
actresses after their separation —Ana Magnani in Le Carrosse d’Or (1952); Ingrid
Bergman in Eléna et les Hommes (1956)— and, like him, turning to television, as if it
were an laboratory for experiments with mise en scène and the new acting registers,
Renoir carried out one of the toughest and most exuberant exercises on the suffering of
the actor: a 27-minute gem in which he put the stage actress Gisèle Braunberger though
a series of tormented improvisations in the television documentary La direction
d'acteurs par Jean Renoir (1968).

The camera as instrument of torture. Bergala is right when he sees that one of the great
concerns of modern cinema is that concept of the camera as forceps. The camera has to
drag out of the actor a more or less controlled statement of his truth in a process of
contamination-merging with his character, whilst recording the effects of its own
violence for the audience, who thus have their position as impassive voyeurs shattered
(Rossellini, 1984, 14). The films of Jacques Rivette are largely a confirmation of that
thesis, which is not surprising when dealing with a film-maker somewhere between the
discovery of Rossellini as the beacon of modernity —his Lettre sur Rossellini was
published in April 1955— and praise of Jean Renoir as the mise en scène of relativity
—his programme in the series Cinéastes de notre temps. Jean Renoir le patron, 1967.
Rivette is a modern film-maker interested in the actor’s body and the rules of the game,
a twofold movement that has enabled him, among other things, to produce two
masterpieces linked to an endless drift: a Renoiresque work like Céline et Julie Vont en
Bateau, in which two women and two actresses (Juliet Berto and Dominique
Labourier) curl up in a ball and create phantasmagoric children’s games in a kind of
outdoor picnic in Montmartre, and a Rossellinian film, secret and corrosive, like
L'Amour Fou, where the show (an interrupted performance of Racine’s Andromaque)
and private life (the break up of the couple formed by Claire and Sebastian, Bulle Ogier
and Jean Pierre Kalfon) are constructed as radical experiences and physical clashes
recorded surgically by Rivette’s camera (like that impressive sequence of the couple at
home in which Kalfon, standing in front of the mirror, slashes his clothes with a razor
and scissors whilst weeping bitterly, a process that is quite the equal of the poet’s tears
in Gertrud or those of the lovers in L’Avventura, trying to drown between emotional
disturbance and fiction.

Theatre of Cruelty, perhaps. But most of all a process of vampirism between actor and
character, an encounter between the cinema and individual conscience, two shameless
forms of capture. It was the basis for the personal and cinematic encounter between
Rossellini and Ingrid Bergman and was to be the axis of the great tandems of modern
cinema: Godard / Anna Karina, Antonioni / Monica Vitti, Bergman / Liv Ullmann,
Rivette / Bulle Ogier (or John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands on the other side of the
Atlantic). A particular alchemy based on the actor’s work —on his inner truth, rather
than any outer direction, which is extremely nebulous— and in trust in mise en scène
as an aesthetic process.

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Modern cinema has never ceased to tell stories and variations on the couple wondering
about their limits and troubles, making up different pathologies in a clash with a reality
packed with enigmas. That idea of the married couple, however, has a quite particular
dimension insofar as it rests on the female point of view. In the interview-book
Persévérance Serge Daney pointed out that the modern cinema, especially the Nouvelle
Vague, changed the cinema of the ideal (only men have ideals) for the cinema of
otherness (women move in search of a certain truth). And so the cinema of the couples
we have mentioned feeds on that idea of the female condition in which women
personify ways of being and existing. And in that kind of “identificazione di una
donna” those actresses became their authors’ partners and the dissonances of their
discourse, “Trojan horses in the citadel of the metteur en scène” in the words on one of
the directors most involved in that dialectic between intelligence and instinct,
Michelangelo Antonioni in Réflexions sur les Acteurs (Antonioni, 1990, 262-263).
With a secret pact, a conspiracy with the clinical eye of the camera, as Bergman said of
his actors, even though, like Elisabeth Bogler in Persona, they became actresses snared
by doubt (the vulnerability of the artist is one of the great modern themes, not only
Bergman’s) and are struck dumb by the powers of mise en scène.

Those couples turned that axiom into an absorbing, even painful, programme. Naturally
they start from different points. It would be enough to compare Bergman’s journey
through the desolate volcanic island of Stromboli, with a crew given up to a hostile
nature, with no outside communication, waiting several days for the tuna fishing, with
Mònica Vitti’s on the rocky archaeological reef of Lisca Bianca, without any
communication, without supplies and with a crew in a situation of forced
unemployment; or, so as not to move out of island territory, Harriet Anderson’s
summer escapade on Ornö Island in the Stockholm archipelago filmed by a small crew,
snapped at random by the camera lens. We would obtain different narrations of life and
the cinema, but an identical result: a freeing in which the act of filming, like the act of
living, loses its condition as an innocent gesture and becomes a moral question and a
subterranean tumult underground upheaval. There are differences between the mystical
concept of Irene in Europa 51 going into a Moloch factory to reach the truth of a
trauma (her son’s suicide) and that of Giuliana in The Red Desert, going into a factory
and an industrial wasteland with her son to explain her neurosis. However, in both
transits we shall find the same inexplicable composition between figure and space
which affects the territory of symptoms and which the actresses’ bodies and faces
transform into a feeling of impotence between the ego and the world.

It is impossible to imagine a radical aesthetic change that does not alter the idea of
figuration / composition and through it our relation to the image. Hence the fact that
many of the changes proposed by modernity refer to the characters’ ways of appearing
and being there, their entry and composition in the shot, as well as the decoding of their
visible and invisible effects on the frame. The confluence of body/actor/character in
modern cinema rings deep changes both in the way of acting and the way of being
filmed (3). The alchemy between Godard and Anna Karina, a brand image of
modernity, becomes that particular accommodation to the shot, that capture of the
fragility and fleetingness of the gesture. Something similar could be said of the relation

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between the transitory figures and the framing of Antonioni, Fassbinder, Wenders,
Resnais or Bresson. A bodily figuration enlivened by a simple physical behaviour that
shows their condition of mystery and fragility within an also unstable composition and
story.

If we look in the modern actor of the sixties for the formulas of training and glamour
that adorned the classical cinema, it will be in vain. Jacques Aumont refers to the
furniture-actor of classicism, regularly trained, with a brief outline of the requirements
of the plot. “The body of the classical actor is there, in the place of any other body the
audience would like to superimpose on him or replace him with (their own, that of their
“race”, their class or their type). That ‘in the place of’ is neither innocent nor
spontaneous; it is obtained by considerable labour, well represented by the formula of
the tree-actor…” Something similar could be said about the talking face: “The ordinary
face of the cinema is a place of images where meaning is inscribed fleetingly and
superficially by a circular power… The ordinary face is ideally straight, the encoded
signs of some emotion have to pass across it like ripples on water…” (Aumont, 1998,
54-55). And so in the field of composition the new poetics of modern cinema would try
to move away from the theatrical tradition towards the photographic-pictorial lineage
of the portrait. At least in two circumstances: working the body in its plastic aspect
(without the contortionism of the schools of the Actor's Studio variety) and capturing
the face as a form of revealing time… The everyday body has to be incorporated into a
field of psychological operations, along the lines indicated by Deleuze: that the
categories of life are the attitudes of the body, its postures, and not direct thoughts
(Deleuze, 1987, 251). Outburst, exhaustion, hope, despair and poverty, rage and
masquerade, naturalness and affectation, mime and grimace (so frequently practised by
the directors of the Nouvelle Vague, to Bresson’s despair, but also by a modern
director like John Cassavetes, the promoter of a real gestural “maladie”)… a set of
attitudes of the modern body, the body as representation and theatre of the inner
experience. “That representation I call my body and which I am aware of as will,” says
the transsexual Elvira playing with Schopenhauer in In A Year of Thirteen Moons by
Fassbinder, undoubtedly one of the great modern directors engaged in the staging of
the human body.

In their early days the Nouvelle Vague admitted two constructions, the vegetable body
(Brigitte Bardot) and the ordinary face (Harriet Anderson), to take a new look at the
human body. The future directors of the movement justified their affection for Bardot’s
body in And God Created Woman as if it were the source of certain modern gestures
(youth, freedom, sensuality). However it is easy to deduce that their devotions were
aimed in a different direction which they could not acknowledge, as it coincided with
the morality of censorship, i.e. the morbid fascination arising from the fact that it was
her husband, the former photographer Roger Vadim, who stripped her, transferring
Rossellini’s correlation between private life and cinematic life to the level of a spread
from Paris Match (4). Godard, one of his first enthusiastic critics, did not do the same
with Anna Karina, his “muse”, in seven films, in spite of the nature of his female
characters and the constant reflections on cinematic obscenity (strictly speaking, the
first nude shot of a heroine did not come until 1984 with Miriam Roussel playing the

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Virgin Mary) (5). In 1963, however, Godard took over from Vadim and stripped
Bardot in Le Mépris, with no hint of daring or complaisance (of the kind showed by
Louis Malle two years earlier in Vie Privée through a fable on the servitude of fame,
making BB the European equivalent of Marilyn Monroe). In that case the invocation of
the erotic myth could not be more curious: a full nude shot and an oral découpage of
Bardot herself on each fragment of her body in front of her lover-voyeur-audience
before turning into a block of marble as powerful as the statues of the gods that people
the film.

The other crucial moment is provided by Harriet Anderson in Ingmar Bergman’s

Summer with Monika (1952) . On the one hand it is an affirmation of sensuality and
the generous curves that create a red hot myth for Antoine Doinel in Les Quatre Cents
Coups (stealing the photo of the actress’s bust from the foyer of a cinema) and for
François Truffaut (taking Bergman home). It is also a libertarian way of understanding
human relations. Rohmer took advantage of it in his moral confessions (it would not be
difficult to find connections between Bergman’s film and Rohmer’s Comedies and
Proverbs, starting with Claire’s Knee). Lastly there is a fascinating sustained shot of
Harriet Anderson looking at the camera which establishes a direct communication
between the actress and the audience (twenty years later it would be the dying face of
Cries and Whispers). Here is a gaze that dazzles Godard as an accidental but live
incident, a kind of attack on the status of the classical face and its prohibition to look at
the camera (6). We can thus understand the insistence of the extraordinary sequence in
Vivre sa Vie, which confronts the wet faces of Ana Karina, Nana, and Maria
Falconetti, Joan of Arc, in a kind of mystical exchange between an audience and an
emotional image. And, outside that nature as icon, Godard’s characters’ gazes at
camera which interfere with the continuity of the “story” with the dizziness of a direct
inquisition, systematic after Pierrot le Fou (which not by chance Bergala situates in a
spiral of reminiscences with Summer with Monika (Bergala, 1999, 183-210).

Just after moving into the market, the Nouvelle Vague directors invented their own
actor on the basis of a generation overlap and shared positions (Emmanuelle Riva,
Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Stéphane Audran, Jean Claude Brialy), although the “burning
years”, that convergence of metteur-en-scène and leading actor, were seen as a Sadeian
relationship that ideologically determined the film-makers’ “petit bourgeois
writing.” (7) At the opposite pole from the Nouvelle Vague was the cinema of Bresson,
which pointed up the differences between cinema and cinematography, between the
actor with all kinds of psychological appendages and the model, a non-professional
actor doomed to disappear after the film. A glacial but epidermic face, with persevering
gestures and behaviours, a declamatory, monotonous tone, a broken body, a mask and
on occasions armour…Naturally we are looking at two antithetical constructions, but
Alain Philippon is right when he says that it may have been Bresson’s coherent and
inimitable seal that helped the directors of the Nouvelle Vague to look for support in
the diametrically opposite direction, that of Renoir (8). It is not difficult to identify that
inclination in two of the most singular prototypes (Anna Karina apart) of modernity:
Jean Pierre Léaud (1944) and Jean Paul Belmondo (1933). The former is a ritual body
that guarantees a set of physiological and emotional ideas in the case of Truffaut’s

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Doinel series and which is perpetuated through certain values of presence and mime in
all the films in which he has appeared: Godard (Masculin-Féminin, La Chinoise)
Skolimowski (Le Départ), Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris), Pasolini (Porcile),
Eustache (La Maman et la Putain) and Kaurismäki (I Hired a Contract Killer). As for
Belmondo, he is the closest figure to Renoir’s ape characters, who constructs a parodic,
existential role in French cinema (with Godard, especially, but also with Truffaut and
Resnais in two minor films related to genre, La Sirène du Mississippi and Stavisky,
before turning to the genre extravagance of Deray and Philippe de Broca. This is a
seesaw similar to another of the most renowned figures of sixties cinema, Alain Delon,
jumping from Visconti’s conscience-characters (Rocco and his Brothers, The Leopard)
and Losey (Mr. Klein) to the followers of the detective thriller, ending up in a singular
turn of the screw with Godard acting as a central character of the Nouvelle Vague.

Actors of the modern cinema have an extraordinary capacity for adaptation and
innovation (which is eventually called versatility), a coincidence between the precision
of the gesture and the distance, the warmth and the cold that can be summed up in
Diderot’s “actor’s paradoxes”. Many of their careers are a splendid journey of
intelligence and audacity and unconsciously or acceptingly they suffer all the shocks of
modern cinema. Such is the case of Jeanne Moreau (1928) and Marcello Mastroianni
(1924-1995), two singular cinematic bodies of modernity without whom many of the
summary images plugged into our memory cannot be explained. In the sixties alone
Moreau was the adulterous Florence in Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold, wandering
through the Paris night like a sleepwalker to the accompaniment of Miles Davis’ score,
and Lidia Pontano in Antonioni’s La Notte, surrendering to an inner monologue on the
outskirts of Milan, watching the wreck of her marriage; the ebullient Catherine, placed
between two men in Jules et Jim, and the exterminating angel of four others in The
Bride Wore Black, both by Truffaut: the religious mantis stalking the streets of Venice
in Losey’s Eve and Buñuel’s fetishistic servant in Diary of a Chambermaid, not
forgetting, among other parts, her great compositions in Welles’ last films, Chimes at
Midnight and Immortal Story, as well as her majestic appearance in Le Petit Théatre de
Jean Renoir (1969) as a Marlene Dietrich style chansonnière singing “Quand l'Amour
Meurt” in a sustained shot.

Marcello Mastroianni ranged over a good part of postwar Italian cinema and became
the outstanding chronicler of its social tragicomedies. We can say that he was a faithful
companion of the careers of Visconti (The Stranger, White Nights), De Sica (Marriage
Italian Style, A Place for Lovers, Sunflower), Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe, La Cagna,
Ciao Mascio), as well as Zurlini, Bolognini, Petri and Ettore Scola. But most of all it is
the association with Federico Fellini that gave him the status of actor-medium. From
Marcello in La Dolce Vita to the pathetic dancer in Ginger and Fred by way of the
phantom-like film director in crisis in Eight and a Half and the Kafkaesque visitor in
the erotic “Sistine Chapel” of La Città Delle Donne, Mastroianni has been involved in
all Fellini’s stages and crises, acted as spokesman for his anxieties and the sarabande of
spectres and dreams that make up the legacy of his cinema. In this actor there is no hint
of motiveless vanity, only a vital movement to breathe life into characters of great
depth. That would explain that a number of weak films only take wing with his

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strength, such as Black Eyes, after a story by Chekov, or Sostiene Pereira, based on a
story by Tabucci. And at the end of his life, faced with cancer, he produced an outburst
of emotional intensity in Manoel de Oliveira’s Journey to the Beginning of the World
and Theo Angelopoulos’ The Beekeeper and The Suspended Step of the Stork, where,
indeed, he was reunited with Jeanne Moreau in a powerful interplay of reminiscences
of the same errant feelings that had brought them together in Antonioni’s La Notte.

The list could be extended to actors regarded as mediums for directors, but also
bearers, in their narrative and symbolic functions, of codes of identity of the cinema to
which they belong. Such is the case of certain actors of “free cinema” (Tom Courtenay,
Albert Finney, Rita Tushingham), of Fassbinder’s troupe and the powerful actors of
German cinema (Rudiger Vogler, Bruno Ganz, Edith Clever, Hanna Schygulla, Ingrid
Caven, Wolker Spengler) or the unmistakable Portuguese actors which Manoel de
Oliveira’s memory falls back on (Leonor Siveira, Diego Dória, Luis Miguel Cintra). In
short, modern cinema rests on an acting task often founded on a process of
“transubstantiation” with the character, thus preserving its phantasmagoric nature. The
active presence of Delphine Seyrig in Resnais’ cinema (and in certain works by
Marguerite Duras and Chantal Ackerman) would be a good example. Or, in a direction
more inclined towards make-up and affectation, Dick Bogarde, the prototype of British
gesture and a certain gay iconography which he represented faithfully in the perverse
game of the films of Losey (The Servant, Accident), Visconti (Twilight of the Gods,
Death in Venice), Resnais (Providence), Cavani (Night Porter) and Fassbinder
(Despair).

The Bergman troupe is worthy of special mention. They are actors familiar with the
resources of the theatre and mise en scène, endowed with an alchemist’s gift for
revealing Bergman’s court of ghosts and lighting up confessional therapies heavily
charged with emotions with their bodies, faces and voices (9). In a beautiful passage
from his book Bilder (Images) Bergman tells how Victor Sjöstrom, the old Isaak Borg
in Wild Strawberries, took over his text with the authority and passion of his
personality and, taking the shape of his father, occupied the director’s anima (Bergman,
1992, 25). A transfer relation he corroborates at the end of the book in the form of
direct questions: “What would Persona have been like if Bibi Anderson had not played
Alma, and what would my life have been like if Liv Ullmann had not taken charge of
me and Elisabeth Vogler? Or Summer with Monika without Harriet Anderson? Or The
Seventh Seal without Max von Sydow? Viktor Sjöstrom and Wild Strawberries, Ingrid
Thulin and The Communicants? I would never have dared to make Smiles of a
Summer Night without Eva Dahlbeck and Gunnar Björnstrand...” (1992, 270). So
important is the actor’s role that Bergman makes it a metaphor for the human
condition, as well as the stuff of fiction itself, from an underrated masterpiece such as
The Face (Ansiktet, 1958) to the small gem entitled After the Rehearsal (Efter
Repetitionen, 1983), a suite-epilogue to the whole of his work conceived as a duet
between an old metteur-en-scène, Erland Josephson, and a young actress, Lena Olin,
within the eternal entertainment-life antinomy, where the two sides of the mirror are
uncovered with unusual force and precision (10).

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Alongside a new arrangement with theatricality, modern cinema proposes a different

relation between body and voice (not only for direct cinema). The psychological
introspection process of modernity needs new ways of being and saying. In outline,
divergent ideas affecting the field of performance might be brought into this section:
Fellini’s carnival construction, animated by a troupe of anonymous extras duly adorned
and made up so that a tracking shot can grant them an imprecise, fleeting stretch of
image (like their corresponding performance straight to camera), and Pasolini’s
sacramental bodies in a kind of primitive anthropology which includes both the infinite
transvestism of Ninetto Davoli, the strength of two impregnable women such as Maria
Callas or Silvana Mangano or the “Raphaelite” figures of his Life Trilogy transformed
into pure merchandise in Salo; the asceticism and simplicity of Bresson’s characters
and Fassbinder’s or Buñuel’s mannequins, so close to Kleist’s “social puppets”;
Marguerite Duras’ sleepwalking, dissociative figures, still lifes close to a world of
statuary and ritual, and Straub-Huillet’s hieratic bodies, exposed to the sky, the earth
and the text with a rigid framing. In all cases we can speak of the body-space-word
conjugation and within it the actor is completely free, knowing that he has lost his
condition as actor-character in favour of the model-subject pair, to use Jacques
Aumont’s terms, which characterise a certain tendency of the modern cinema.
(Aumont, 1998, 139).

It is not simple to identify with those models, at least in the traditional sense. They
remain resistant to any system of projection or demand by the audience precisely
because, in the face of all the formal conditions of the actor’s work —which, through
its own essence, tends towards disproportion— their quality of presence is boosted.
That anonymous, often ghostly presence that pervades the space like violence towards
representation and its masks.

Notes:

(1) “I have seen your films Roma Città Aperta and Paisà and I liked them very much. If
you need a Swedish actress who speaks very good English, who has not forgotten her
German, who can make herself understood in French and in Italian can only say “Ti
amo”, I am ready to go and make a film with you for the sheer pleasure of the
experience.”

(2) The relationship was seen in different ways by each of its members. Whilst in his
memoirs Rossellini talks about fear and refers to the reason-intuition equation as the
basis of the conflict, in hers Ingrid Bergman explains the vicissitudes of the framing
and the shoots to assure that nothing worked properly, in life or in the cinema. See
Ingrid Bergman, My Story, And Roberto Rossellini, Le cinéma révélé, Flammarion
Paris, 1984.

(3) The magazine Iris (Autumn 1997) is entirely given over to the character in modern
cinema, after a rather scant theoretical treatment. From a semiotic perspective, André
Gardies.

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(4) François Truffaut’s defence: “I would like to thank Vadim for having directed his
young wife by making her redo her everyday gestures in front of the camera, the most
trivial ones like playing with her sandal, and the least trivial ones, like making love in
full daylight, but both equally realistic.”

(5) In “Nul mieux que Godard”, Alain Bergala has discussed the nude in his films and
his disposition to consider women in a relation between the sexual body and the social
role, in addition to a kind of extraordinarily prudish figurative iconoclasm. (bergala,
1999, 125-141)

(6) Godard wrote a review in Cahiers du Cinéma no. 85 (1958) when Bergman’s film
was rereleased in Paris. See Godard par Godard. Vol Y. pp. 128-132.

(7) Cf. the series of articles by Jean Pierre Oudart, “L'idéologie moderniste dans
quelques films récents”, published inCahiers du Cinema nos. 234/235, 236/237.

(8) “Générations". Cahiers du Cinéma nos.407-408 (1988).

(9) Bergman deals with that in his passionate, severe work diaries, The Magic Lantern
and Images, written between 1987 and 1990 (see bibliography). Likewise references to
the actors run through the books of interviews with the director: Stij Borjkman, Torsten
Manns and Jonas Sima, “Conversations with Bergman”, and Olivier Assayas / Stig
Björkman, “Conversation avec Bergman”, Cahiers du Cinéma / Étoile, Paris, 1990.

(10) On the two epilogues to Bergman’s filmography, After the Rehearsal and In the
Presence of a Clown, both made for television, which essentially use theatrical staging
while exploiting the means of expression of the cinema, see: Domènec Font, La última
mirada: testamentos fílmicos. Edic. la Mirada, Valencia, 2000.

References:

-AUMONT, J. Du visage au cinéma. Paris: Cahiers / Étoile, 1992.

-BERGALA, A. Nul mieux que Godard. Paris: Édit. Cahiers du Cinéma, 1999.

-BERGMAN, I. The Magic Lantern / Images.

-BRESSON, R. Notes sur le cinématographe. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

-BRUNETTA, G. Storia del cinema italiano (Volume 3). Roma: Edit. Riuniti.

-BRUNETTA, G (ed). Identità italiana e identità europea nel cinema italiano, dal 1945
al miràcolo economico. Turin: Edit. Giovanni Agnelli, 1996.

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-DANEY. S. La rampe. Paris: Cahiers / Gallimard, 1983.

-DELEUZE, G. L’image-temps. Cinéma 2. Paris: Les Éditions du Minuit, 1985.

-DE VINCENTI, G. Il concetto di modernità nel cinema. Parma: Pratiche editriche,

1993.

-DI CARLO, C. (ed.). Michelangelo Antonioni. Roma: Ente Autonomo di Gestione pel
Cinema, 1987.

-LEUTRAT, J.L. Kaleidoscope. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1989.

-ROSSELLINI, R. Le cinéma révélé. Paris: Cahiers / Étoile Paris, 1984.

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