Starstruck, National Portrait Gallery: whose face do we see?

These images raise a basic question: who is looking out at us from these photos, the actor or one of their characters?

Helen Morse as Caddie, 1976. From Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits, National Portrait Gallery.

Acting is a mysterious, rather disturb­ing art in which things are not always what they seem. In the history of Greek theatre, it is believed­ to have begun when the leader of a dithyrambic chorus stepped out of the group to impersonate the god or some other figure central to the myth that was the subject of the choral song. The classical theatre tradition proper started with Aeschylus’s addition of a second actor, and Sophocles later added a third, making possible tense triangular confrontations such as those at the climax of Oedipus Rex.

The very word “person’’ comes from the Latin persona, originally the equivalent of the Greek prosopon, meaning a mask. The Greek word for an actor is even more suggestive: hypocrites. What we mean today by a hypocrite — that is, someone who professes beliefs which do not correspond with his actions — was partly covered by the Greek eiron, the root of irony. By the time Jesus accused the Pharisees of hypo­crisy, centuries after the classical period, the word had largely acquired its modern meaning.

But one of the great questions about actors has always been whether they really experience the feelings they are performing. Is it necessary to be angry to act the passion of anger on stage? Is it necessary to work oneself into real sadness in order to perform the emotions of sadness? Horace observed that poets must feel or have known sorrow if they want their readers to weep, but it is not clear whether this means feeling­ sad at the very moment of composition; Wordsworth, much later, spoke of “emotion recollected in tranquility”.

A remarkable discussion of this question, but one relatively little-known to an English-speaking readership, is Denis Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comedien, composed between 1773 and 1777, but published, like several of his most thought-provoking texts, posthumously in 1830. The work, in the form of a dialogue, is called a paradox because the author concludes that, contrary to the general assumption, actors do not have to feel the emotions they perform on stage.

Shirley Ann Richards in Lovers and Luggers (1937).

Diderot reflects, among many other examples, on the case of a great actress who has been sublime in the tragic roles of the classic French theatre but who is not at all, in herself, larger than life, overpowering or subject to terrifying passions like the characters she performs. Like many actors, she is actually rather ordinary offstage. But this is just the point. She is not a grand and tragic figure and she does not personally need to have very remarkable or transgressive emotions; she is an artist whose special skill consists in imagining, simulating and above all conveying these things to an audience.

Actually experiencing strong emotions when on stage, far from helping actors to perform more effectively, could make it harder for them to concentrate on the artifice of the role, and harder, crucially, to make a strong and consistent impression on their spectators.

As Diderot rightly points out, an actor can affect us more strongly than a person who is really in the grip of deep emotion; and conversely, when we are feeling real joy or grief we are not thinking of how to express this to third parties. And here he expands his theory from the specific question of acting to a broader consideration of how people in a social environment experience and convey feelings.

Essentially, he suggests that some of us are weak and receptive to emotional impressions — he considers this trait feminine but ascribes it also to himself — while others are strong and instead of receiving impressions tend to emit them, dominating the first group. Not only actors­ but also charismatic political leaders tend to be insensible, unemotional in themselves, but capable of whipping up emotions in the audience or the public. It is a notable insight, written only years before the demagoguery of the French Revolution, and one we can apply equally to the demagogic politicians and rabble-rousers of both left and right in our own time.

Diana Du Cane, best known for The Broken Melody (1938).

The National Portrait Gallery’s current exhib­ition Starstruck, a collection of photographs of actors from Australian cinema over the past century, immediately raises questions about acting, performance, personae and characters. It is a large exhibition, filled with memories and entertaining anecdotes, especially for those who remember these films when they first came out, or who have taken a special interest in Australian cinema. But the broader questions are perhaps even more apparent to those who are not as intimately familiar with films made in Australia in the past 100 years.

And the first of these questions is this: who is looking out at us from these photographs? Is it the actor or is it one of their characters? The more we ponder this question, the more elusive the answer becomes.

At the most straightforward level, there is the contrast between a still from a film, in which the actor is clearly in character, and a shot of the same man or woman walking down the street or attending an opening or some other social function. But when we look more closely, there is the further distinction between stills from the film and separately taken, specially staged produc­tion shots.

A still will not necessarily have the right composition or the clear lighting that can be obtaine­d in a studio. Thus the production shots used in the publicity of the film may not corres­pond precisely with any actual scene or frame in the film. It is a kind of meta-filmic image that tells us about the film rather than being a sample of the film. And one may wonder whether the actor is in character in quite the same way in such shots, or whether he is not sometimes, odd though it may sound, pretending to act the role.

Posters are a special case, since they are meant to arouse our interest and convey something of the essence of the film, its story and its mood. Thus one poster may be more complex and animated in its composition, suggesting excitement and energy, and possibly using a composite of images, while another may be simpler­, evoking intensity and drama, and typic­ally based on a single image. The posters of Strictly Ballroom (1992) and In Search of Anna (1979), respectively, are examples of these different approaches.

Elaine Hamill in Lovers and Luggers (1937).

Shots taken on set, in costume, but during breaks in shooting, are in another category again. What are we to make of the picture of Mel Gibson and Mark Lee on the set of Gallipoli (1981)? It is clearly not part of the narrative, and yet the costumes, the location, even the composition and the expressions of the two young men seem vividly evocative of the film. There is a kind of pathos in the way that, without in fact performing, they become modern analogues of the characters they are meant to represent.

The picture of Paul Hogan and Linda Koz­lowski on the set of Crocodile Dundee (1986), on the other hand, is less evocative of the story or the specific characters and seems rather to reveal­ the romantic attachment developing on the set between the two actors — a case of real feeling interfering with performance — althoug­h our reading of such an image is necessarily conditioned by our knowledge of subsequent events.

Publicity portraits were issued by studios to promote their male and female stars, and were especially popular in the days before the proliferat­ion of photography and photographic reproduction in magazines rendered them virtually­ obsolete. In the history of art, the most famous is no doubt the publicity shot of Marilyn Monroe, based on her role in Niagara (1953), which Andy Warhol bought just after her death in 1962 and used as the basis for his famous Marilyn series of works.

As this case suggests, the distinction between­ studio portrait and production shot from a film is blurred at the edges, although normally a studio portrait would focus on the head and shoulders of the actor and not include­ other characters or details of the film’s setting. What is more interesting about studio portraits, apart from their attempt to evoke an image of glamour, is that they suggest the kind of role that one might expect the actor to take.

This is even more striking in a particularly interesting category of images in the present exhibition, which includes several scrapbooks put together in the 1930s by the production company Cinesound, which also ran a talent school. These large volumes are filled with shots of aspiring actors and actresses, and even a surprising number of children, all hoping to make it in the moving pictures.

Rachel Griffiths in Cosi (1996).

There is something poignant about the pages after pages of hopeful, pretty faces, dreaming of leaving their suburban lives and mediocre jobs in city offices for an imaginary fairyland, but doomed in almost all cases to sink back into the obscurity from which they came, and yet also to a world of real human responsib­ilities and family relationships. No doubt decades later a grandchild would come upon a copy of one of these snaps in an old chest and be amazed to realise that this was once grandma.

In a later period, actors and actresses would have their portraits included in a casting directory, Showcast, which was published in phys­ical form from 1966 to 2013, and today exists online. Here too there are many entries of ­different ages and sexes, listed under various categories according to their specialist skills.

It is clear that there are no truly neutral image­s, or pictures devoid of any kind of meaning and association. Even when we look at family­ shots or pictures of ourselves, they are never innocent of context: one is taken at a wedding, another at a birthday party or a graduation, another at a funeral. But in all these situations, in family group photos, we are almost always smiling.

These pictures never show us in what we might think of as our truest guise: when we are quietly absorbed in something that interests us, such as reading. Instead, we are grinning for the camera, with all the other grinning faces. But when we are obliged to be impassive for a portrait, as when we are having a passport photo taken, somehow it is not that stillness of self-possession that comes across but an obtus­e and stultified blankness.

Actors too, even in their directory photos, can never quite stop playing a part. When they are least overtly expressive, they are suggesting how plastic and malleable they can be.

Character actors, on the other hand, are ­always evoking the type they do best; the ­glamorous are hinting at the dreams they can evoke; but all of them are trying, even unconsciously, to convinc­e us, as in Diderot’s theory, that they possess the actor’s magic power of conveying powerful and bewitching impressions to an audience.

Starstruck

National Portrait Gallery. Until March 4.