There’s nothing more fascinating than a movie star—except, perhaps, trying to figure out the fascination that stars exert. The playwright and essayist James Harvey’s new book, “Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen from Garbo to Balthazar,” is a valuable effort in that direction, and the splendidly curated film series at the Museum of the Moving Image that’s devoted to it (most of which takes place this weekend) shows why. The title and the thesis of Harvey’s book come from a line by James Baldwin about movie stars: “One does not go to see them act: one goes to watch them be.” I agree with Baldwin, and I applaud Harvey’s bold attempt to describe that idea in action. But the difficulty of Baldwin’s idea is clear from how much trouble Harvey—a formidable critic, the author of the essential study “Movie Love in the Fifties”—has keeping up with it.
Harvey dashes through the careers of some of the great performers—Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman, John Wayne, Robert De Niro, and the donkey at the center of Robert Bresson’s 1966 film “Au Hasard Balthazar”—and discusses a few pictures (including Robert Altman’s “Nashville”) that offer over-all feasts of performance. Harvey’s film studies are detailed and extended, largely following the action from beginning to end, with particular attention paid to how stars’ performances are mapped onto plot and character—which is to say that, despite his intentions, he doesn’t watch them be, he sees them act.
That’s because the real story of star power isn’t that of acting or of being—it’s of directing. Actors are what we see onscreen, but directors are what we feel; they are the ones doing the watching. The first and most important impression that a movie viewer receives is of the director’s view—outward and inward, visual and emotional, and, ultimately, existential. The actor’s being is found where the actor is; the director’s being is everywhere in the movie—and also beyond it, in the world that the movie conjures.
It’s no coincidence that most of the performances which Harvey exalts in “Watching Them Be” are from movies by directors with extraordinarily original visions. (For instance, he praises Garbo’s work in “Camille” (1936), by George Cukor, and “Ninotchka” (1939), by Ernst Lubitsch.) The best directors make movies in which stars can’t help but shine brightly—or, rather, such directors turn their actors into stars by dint of a creative, transformative gaze. Harvey certainly doesn’t ignore directors—the book devotes several chapters to them and is studded with sharp aperçus regarding their work—but his focus on their way of eliciting fine performances often filters out much of their distinctiveness. The films included in Harvey’s book and in the series at the Museum of the Moving Image don’t suggest any crucial relationship between director and star, or even between director and actor; these works—by Roberto Rossellini, Josef von Sternberg, Martin Scorsese, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Jean-Luc Godard, and others—could just as easily appear in an annex to MOMA’s ongoing series “An Auteurist History of Film.”
When it comes to grasping the distinctive power of movie stars, drama is often beside the point. It serves merely as a framework for special moments of being, for what François Truffaut called the film’s “privileged moments.” Great filmmakers—directors, screenwriters, producers—work in the guise of dramatists to become creators of such moments. F. Scott Fitzgerald illustrated this principle in his unfinished Hollywood novel, “The Love of the Last Tycoon.” His protagonist, the inspired and doomed producer Monroe Stahr, gives a British novelist a justly famous lesson in screenwriting. Stahr’s example of a great scene involves a series of gestures, gazes, and intimations; he himself has no idea what the underlying story is.
For all the cosmetics and the costumes, the scripts and the sets, that adorn movies with their air of artifice, cinematic performance is essentially documentary. That’s why participants in documentaries are often as vivid and memorable as movie stars, why reality-television shows and YouTube videos become such sensations, and why some of the best modern cinema fuses documentary with fiction, as in Robert Greene’s “Actress,” in which Brandy Burre, best known for her performances in “The Wire,” plays the role of a lifetime: herself.
A friend who was new to New York City once told me that she loved to wander the streets because she was “hooked on the faces”; that’s the essence of the movies, too. The corollary to Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame is that everyone is worthy of being famous, everyone has star quality—an element of intrinsic fascination, an inner life that comes through the face—that can be conjured, by way of images, at least once.
There is, however, something special about actors. They’re the ones who put themselves on the line, physically and morally, in movies (which is why the direction of actors is deeply revealing of a filmmaker’s character and moral fibre). Anyone who has had the privilege of meeting movie stars is likely to be struck at once by their mysterious complexity, their almost blinding emotional intensity, and their electrifying liveliness. That’s what it takes for stars to be able to be, at the same time, both themselves and their many onscreen characters. Stars bear within themselves the same kind of heroic passions that mark the characters whom they portray. They have the power to sustain those multiple selves in the course of a movie, to sustain a persona in the course of a career, to sustain themselves in the harsh light of fame.
Yet the mark of good acting isn’t the intentional display of such passions by actors but, instead, the radiating of those passions from the actors, even against their will. As I wrote several years ago, the paradox and pathos of movie acting, as opposed to theatre acting, is that in the theatre the actor gives; in the cinema, the actor is taken from. It’s the camera that makes the star and the director who sees through the camera. (This is why directors who also act in their films—from Charlie Chaplin and John Cassavetes to Miranda July and Joe Swanberg—have a special place in the art form.)
That’s where Harvey’s book is especially valuable and insightful. In highlighting the poignant and painful struggles that many great actors faced throughout their careers, Harvey suggests the peculiarity of an art that’s essentially involuntary, despite the fanatically willful intensity with which actors pursue their artistic labors and their place in the industry. An actor’s efforts to cope with what is essentially the camera’s soul-stealing—whether those efforts are constructive or self-indulgent or even self-destructive—get pulled into a feedback loop that amplifies the image onscreen. This vertiginous psychological complex, joining the public and the private, the actor and the director, the onscreen vision and the world offscreen, makes for the irresistible allure of the star—or of the image of the star. And this image of the star is no mere vestige of the twentieth century; it’s the foundation of cinema.
