Abstract
The notion of ‘liveness’ has been endowed with importance in a wide range of intellectual fields, including most importantly theatre and performance studies, film studies, television studies, comedy studies, virtual performance studies and sports studies (with smaller debates within music, and most specifically opera, studies). But each of these fields has debated this topic in almost entire ignorance of other fields’ debates. Through a comparison of the debates, this chapter shows ‘liveness’ to be multi-dimensional, with each of the fields valuing different dimensions.
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Notes
My thanks to Alastair Oatey at Picturehouse for allowing me to see this unpublished research.
See, for instance, Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008) and Matthew Reason (2006), who astutely identifies how nervous adherents of liveness become over documentation of their performances.
I don’t wish to deny that there can be real pleasures associated with the unexpected in performances. An especially illuminating example is given by Penelope Woods in her PhD thesis on audiences at the open-roofed Globe Theatre in London. At one performance of Macbeth in 2010, a pigeon landed on the stage as actor Jasper Britton was about to deliver the famous speech ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Pausing, he fixed the pigeon with a gaze, spoke the lines — and then waited until the bird flew off, before ending ‘… and then is heard no more’. The story is marvellous in itself, but has the virtue of throwing light on the complexity of what is meant by ‘being there’. What counts as the reception environment cannot be predetermined. In principle, of course, this unexpected addition could have been appreciated just as much if this had been livecast, since its unpredictability would surely have remained visible (see Woods, 2007: 251–2).
It is interesting to read Feuer’s guarded protestation, no doubt prompted by her awareness of David Morley’s The Nationwide Audience, that she was willing to submit her claims to empirical testing. I say ‘guarded’ because by the end of her statement of this, she says in effect that she isn’t sure there is anything that could be tested, such is the virtual invisibility of the phenomenon she is depicting.
A very good summary of many of the tensions around this is contained in Brent McGregor’s 1997 book.
For a recent argument along the same lines, see Ytreberg (2006).
For a soon-to-be-published major re-evaluation, see Scannell (2012).
There have been one or two minor streams of thought about films which go in other directions. Most notably, there has been a current of interest in the concept of ‘ostension’ — that is, that we need to pay attention to the simple showing that films achieve. In the work of those who study pornography, the simple’ showing’ of bodies and sex is powerful and significant (Linda Williams’ notion of the ‘frenzy of the visible’ is a good example; see Williams, 2009). There is also a minor but persistent interest in the idea that films can be seen to enact things in front of us (see, for instance, Koven, 2008). This has also been present in the work of some star scholars who have addressed the idea of being able, in films, to see the star through and behind their performances (see, for instance, Drake, 2006; Bode, 2010).
Monaco’s title indicates his intended sweeping scope. Interestingly, although many other parts of his book changed in later editions, I could detect no changes or elaborations in the parts I consider here.
The concept of ‘off-screen space’emerged in the 1970s as scholars explored the operation of mise en scène within films. It references the many ways in which action on screen can point beyond the boundaries of the visible — by characters’ looks, by noises off, by implied presence (shadows, shifts in lighting, etc.), by ‘owned’ point of view shots and the like.
John Croft, personal email, 2010.
This search for an emergent form shows particularly clearly within her telling of the history of opera on screen when she writes of The Medium (1951) that its transformation from stage to screen, accomplished with the addition of extra music, amounted to the creation of a ‘truly new opera for the screen, tailored specifically for the medium … a new work for cinema’ (Citron, 2000: 38).
For an example of this kind of applied research, see Shin and Shin (2011). Here, ‘presence’ is something to be artificially achieved, in order to ease and encourage consumption.
See also Daniel Palmer (2000), who reflects on the slice-of-life webcams initiated by ‘Jenniecam’ and considers their possibilities as the basis for artworks which might simultaneously use and critique their promises of immediacy and ‘authenticity’.
See, for instance, Susan Kozel’s almost impenetrable reworking of Merleau-Ponty in her Closer (2008).
A particularly clear example of this occurs in an essay on dance and ‘liveness’. Its authors, Ivani Santana and Fernando Iazzetta (n.d.), propose a variation on Auslander’s model based on analysing their own dance production.
It is interesting to note that some years before the emergence of these high-culture streamed events, suppliers were already talking of the likely differences that might need to be considered. In 2002, Screen Daily carried a report on forthcoming developments: ‘“You have to figure out who you’re going to attract in to what type of alternative content,” said Wendy Aylsworth, vice president technology, Warner Bros. Technical Operation. “When you go to see a motion picture, you’re expecting to get absorbed into that setting — the sound and the image is the focal point. In some of the other alternatives that’s not what the whole experience is about — there’s something else going on in the mind of that person and you have to cater for that. In a movie, you’re going to be sitting quietly, getting absorbed in it. With alternative content, the experience is the focus.” UK exhibitor UCI has been screening live World Cup soccer matches in some of its sites, charging from around Euros 15 up to Euros 60 for a corporate package. “Given the fact that you can go to any pub or café in England and see the matches for free, it’s quite an achievement that we’ve seen significant audiences,” said Gerald Buckle, project director of UCI UK’ (Forde, 2002a). These insights have not, to my knowledge, been followed up in any more substantive way.
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© 2013 Martin Barker
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Barker, M. (2013). The Many Meanings of ‘Liveness’. In: Live To Your Local Cinema: The Remarkable Rise of Livecasting. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137288691_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137288691_4
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