May 2020 | Sight&Sound | 45Above all, it reigned in Al Pacino’s Michael in The Godfa-
ther, one of the most influential performances in cinema,
as a man trying not to be there, hoping to make ‘laconic’ or
‘impassive’ the measure of a dead or isolated spirit.
“How can an actor not be there?” I can hear Penelope
Houston asking. She was right enough for her time. But
Houston could have been persuaded about precedents.
The famous but often overlooked experiments by Lev
Kuleshov in Russia a century ago are a more lasting
lesson than any montage spectacle from Eisenstein.
Kuleshov had shown that the same shot of an actor, Ivan
Mosjoukine, without any directed expression, could
be cut against other shots – a bowl of soup, a child in a
coffin, a woman doing nothing – to produce feelings in
us, the viewers. That sustains the principle that cinema
is a filmed situation that provokes our reaction – and
which does not require acting or italic performance.
If you need a more illustrious proof of that theory, just
look at Robert Bresson and his sense of how a human
figure in a film was cast, arranged and maybe encouraged
to think about his or her situation, but to avoid acting at
all costs because that speciousness alerted an intelligent
viewer to the prospect of lying. Think of Fontaine, the
Resistance fighter imprisoned by the Gestapo in A Man
Escaped (1956) and living under threat of death. François
Leterrier’s Fontaine is one of the most intense presences
in film. I will not say ‘performance’, because that word
cheats the concentration Bresson was intent on. We do
not think to ask whether Fontaine is a ‘good’ man, decent,
honest, sentimental, someone we’d like to know, because
we have to abide by his passion to survive, his situation.
And maybe in the history of film, we have lost sight of that
urgency in the masquerade of wanting to ‘like’ characters.
So I was thinking along these lines for an essay before
REX FEATURES (5)I became conscious of the virus or the suddenness with
KNOWN UNKNOWNS
(Clockwise from top)
Christian Bale in The Big
Short (2015), Al Pacino in
The Godfather (1972), Jane
Fonda in Klute (1971) and
Marlon Brando in On The
Waterfront (1954)