Performer paradox captured at Magnum photographic exhibition

THE Magnum exhibition at the State Library of NSW presents a well-chosen selection of photographs taken on the sets of a number of significant films.

John Wayne

WHEN people think of the French philosophes of the 18th century - the precursors of what we would now consider intellectuals rather than academic philosophers - they inevitably recall Voltaire, the acerbic and witty author of Candide (1759), or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote political works such as The Social Contract (1762) and a great treatise on education, Emile (1762), as well as revealing all the complexities of a exceptionally neurotic inner life in one of the most remarkable autobiographies written, the Confessions (1769; published posthumously in 1782).

But there is a third figure - Denis Diderot - who tends to be forgotten perhaps because many of his writings most admired by subsequent generations were published after his death. In his lifetime, he was best known as the editor of the monumental Encyclopedie, which came out in 28 volumes from 1751 to 1772: originally intended as a version of the earlier British Cyclopaedia (1728) published by Ephraim Chambers, the first modern reference work of this kind, it grew far beyond its initial brief and sought to epitomise, in words and copious large-scale technical plates, all human knowledge and technology from the university to the workshop. The enormous success of this project led in turn to the Encyclopedia Britannica, first published in Scotland from 1768.

Diderot ran into opposition from church authorities over the content of some of the articles in his great work, although fortunately for him the project was protected by the powerful and intellectual Comte d'Argenson, who was in effect the overseer of government censorship as well as minister of war. But some of his most daring philosophical and scientific hypotheses were proposed in texts that remained unpublished in his lifetime, such as the extraordinary Reve de d'Alembert, in which he imagines himself sitting by the bedside of his co-editor, a great mathematician, who is tossing in a fever and whose rambling hypotheses about the nature of life itself - reaching well beyond either church doctrine or scientific consensus at the time - conclude in an involuntary sexual climax.

Diderot was also the forerunner of modern art criticism and was able to write unprecedentedly frank and witty as well as insightful commentary on the contemporary Salon exhibitions because the pieces appeared in a private newsletter, Grimm's Correspondance litteraire (1753-90), so private indeed that it was circulated in manuscript form to a handful of central and eastern European monarchs who were its exclusive and strictly confidential subscriber base. Again, it was only when these reviews were published after the author's death that they attracted the interest of Goethe and other great minds of the next generation.

And yet another work that fascinated these later readers was the Paradoxe sur le comedien.

This is the first modern treatise on the art of the actor, although it is less a manual than an attempt to correct a general misapprehension about performance, and to suggest a theory about how the actor makes an impression on an audience. The paradox of the title refers to Diderot's refutation of what was then, as it no doubt still is now, a common misunderstanding about the actor's art.

People assume when an actor plays a character who is angry, for example, he must himself be angry at the time. But in reality, as Diderot shows, the actor is almost certainly not really angry at all, and indeed if he were he would not be able to perform properly, concentrate on directing his voice into the auditorium, recall the blocking of the scene, etcetera. Nor is it his own anger, distress, love and so forth that he plays; for often he is called on to play an emotion that he has never known at this pitch of intensity.

Constantin Stanislavski - and the later school of method acting - would later reply that an actor uses the emotions that he has experienced, but only as the starting point for an act of imaginative creation.

Similar questions, incidentally, have arisen in the theories of writing and painting. Does an author have to be sad when writing a tragic scene, for example? But in any case the art of the actor is to feign, imagine and represent the appearance of emotions they may never have experienced in this form themselves. And this is why an actor can overwhelm us with the power of their performance on stage, but if we meet them afterwards seem surprisingly small and ordinary. If we are moved by a performance of the tragic role of Phaedra, it is not that the actress is a larger-than-life figure, but simply that she is a talented artist.

The age of cinema has brought the paradox of the actor, in a debased form, to the attention of even the lowest-brow reader of cheap gossip magazines, the feeding troughs of paparazzi around the world. Everyone is fascinated, often morbidly so, by the gap between the glamour projected in movies and mass media and the reality of the actor's life, with their broken relationships, drug habits and inexorably ageing bodies: envy of the glamorous lives that readers wallow in vicariously is assuaged through schadenfreude.

At a much more sophisticated level, the Magnum exhibition at the State Library of NSW presents a well chosen selection of mostly black and white photographs taken by members of the celebrated photographic co-operative on the sets of a number of significant films of the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition was shown in Turin in 2011 and is accompanied by a very useful catalogue - certainly a book that any film lover will want to acquire - with text in English, French and Italian.

Presumably it would have been easy to assemble a collection of individually memorable shots from a larger range of films, but here the much more intelligent curatorial choice has been made to present groups of photographs from a dozen films. Naturally this allows for more depth and subtlety, and it also turns this into an exhibition about cinema - a kind of anthology of notable and in some cases great modern films - and not just about actors.

The choice is broad, from late Chaplin (Limelight, 1952) to Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), and from John Wayne's The Alamo (1960) or John Huston's Moby Dick (1956) to Joseph Mankiewicz's Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). It is in some ways eclectic, perhaps inevitably, and yet all the films have in common a certain troubling, disturbing character, whether they deal with the fatal obsession of Captain Ahab or the dark and mysterious experience of evil at the heart of Suddenly, Last Summer, which contemporary censorship forced the director to reveal only in enigmatic, but all the more haunting fashion at the end.

Cinema, an art form reliant on mass audiences, tends of necessity to aim for a certain populist appeal, and yet even the Hollywood industry seemed then more open to reality and less exclusively the factory of illusions that it has become today. As a cinema professional observed to me recently, it's hard to find an American film these days without digital effects and stunts - not to mention the usual car chases, guns and explosions. The emphasis is on ever-greater physical, visceral impact, but the themes are feeble and escapist, endlessly rehearsing futile paranoid scenarios about catastrophe, struggles against caricatures of evil, or the perennial favourite, a single hero fighting against conspiratorial interests and a corrupted system to vindicate himself in the end.

So it is interesting to ponder the fact that even a comedy like Billy Wilder's The Seven Year Itch (1955) derives its bite at once from the moral standards prevailing before the age of sexual liberation and from the standards of censorship that, as already mentioned, limited what could actually be shown on film. These are the circumstances that make the famous shot of Marilyn Monroe with her dress blown up by the updraft from the subway so charming and so risque: it captures something of the joyous spontaneity of a momentary escape from repression.

The nightmarish narrowness - materialistic, prudish and spiritually barren - of American suburban experience is the subject of Death of a Salesman (1985) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), in which the banality of lower-middle-class culture is echoed by the brutal stupidity of the teenage subculture that it engenders, ostensibly rebellious but in reality governed by tribalistic conformity. The Misfits too (1961), the last film for both Clark Gable and Monroe, is about ideals foundering in a world of mediocrity.

 James Dean and Monroe each, in their own lives and deaths - in 1955 and 1962 respectively - embodied aspects of the stresses and repressions of contemporary America, and it is perhaps especially in their pictures that we are brought back to the idea of the actor and the relation of actor to the role.

Each set of shots, indeed, includes images of the actor both in and out of character - often momentarily stepping out of the action to take instructions from the director or, in cases where the actor is also the director, as with John Wayne or Orson Welles, to direct others while still in costume. The juxtaposition of a picture of Welles as the lawyer Hastler with another of him directing Anthony Perkins - smoking a large cigar in each case - evokes a particularly ambiguous boundary.

Two almost opposite effects are equally striking. One is the power of emblematic images, even when we know we are looking at illusion, as with the shot of Ahab tangled in the harpoon cables and effectively lashed to the whale that will drag him down to his death, and even though an adjacent photograph reveals the enormous flank of the animal to be a model. The other is that some of the most animated action shots - and this is particularly striking in the pictures from The Alamo - seem frozen and false, in part because we are not seeing them through the lens of the cinematographer, from the point of view at which all coheres.

But perhaps there is a deeper reason for the failure of illusion that is most apparent in scenes of movement, a reason that brings us back to the ambiguity between the actor and the part played. The specific illusion of acting depends on our propensity to identify sympathetically with an action - for action, as Aristotle pointed out, is more primary than character in theatre - but when time is stopped, the dynamic of action disappears too: and photography, by suspending time, suspends the art of the performer and reveals, as in Diderot's paradox, the actor suddenly stripped of his persona.

Magnum: On Set
State Library of NSW, Sydney, to June 23