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REMARKS ON THE ACTOR 95
life person caught in the act by the camera. He must seem to be his character.5 He is in a sense a photographer's model.
Casualness
This implies something infinitely subtle. Any genuinely photographic portrait tends to sustain the impression of unstaged reality; and much as it concentrates on the typical features of a face, these features still affect us as being elicited from spontaneous self-revelations. There is, and should be, something fragmentary and fortuitous about photographic portraits. Accordingly, the film actor must seem to be his character in such a way that all his expressions, gestures, and poses point beyond themselves to the diffuse contexts out of which they arise. They must breathe a certain casualness marking them as fragments of an inexhaustible texture.
Many a great film maker has been aware that this texture reaches into the deep layers of the mind. Rene Clair observes that with screen actors spontaneity counts all the more, since they have to atomize their role in the process of acting;6 and Pudovkin says that, when working with them, he 'looked for those small details and shades of expression which . . . reflect the inner psychology of man."7 Both value projections of the unconscious. What they want to get at, Hanns Sachs, a film-minded disciple of Freud's, spells out in psychoanalytical terms: he requests the film actor to advance the narrative by embodying "such psychic events as are before or beyond speech . . . above all those . . . unnoticed ineptitudes of behavior described by Freud as symptomatic actions."8
The film actor's performance, then, is true to the medium only if it does not assume the airs of a self-sufficient achievement but impresses us as an incident— one of many possible incidents— of his character's unstaged material existence. Only then is the life he renders truly cinematic. When movie critics sometimes blame an actor for overacting his part, they do not necessarily mean that he acts theatrically; rather, they wish to express the feeling that his acting is, somehow, too purposeful, that it lacks that fringe of indeterminacy or indefiniteness which is characteristic of photography.
Physique
For this reason the film actor is less independent of his physique than the stage actor, whose face never fills the whole field of vision. The