By Saumya Liyanage –

The modernist approaches to acting and theories pertaining to actor’s work have always been fascinated by the ways how the actor represents certain meanings, images, and values pertaining to a particular social or cultural context. Actor’s body as a device of acting or a tool of communication has been defined as a projector or rather in some extreme situations, a marionette of an author whose artistic practices and aesthetic sentiments are brought forward to spectators.

At this particular juncture I will consider actor Malini Fonseka’s particular appearance in Sri Lankan film called Punchi Baba (1968) and suggest an anti-representational ways of understanding the actor’s work in film medium. However, it is not my intention to deny the discussion of representational ways of defining acting and how the actor’s body becomes a semantic representation in diverse performance contexts. This paper, as it has been customarily done in the past, does not further intend to glorify Malini’s work as a representation of Sri Lankan female identity or virtue of Sinhalese ethics. Rather my intention in this paper is to develop a few key ideas via which the contemporary film acting can be explored through an anti-representational way of looking at the actor’s work. For this purpose, I will introduce four ontological categories which I prefer to call them “modalities of the lived body”: 1. Embodiment, 2. Experience, 3. Enactment, and finally, 4. Encroachment. While introducing these four areas of lived body in acting, I will draw Malini’s debut film Punchi Baba and re-contextualise these ideas within Malini’s early stage of acting practice.

Filmic Performance

In fact, acting in general and film acting under scrutiny here in particular have been discussed, analysed, taught and perhaps celebrated in relation to the notion that the acting is a way of representing thing in the world.  The actor who is capable of representing definite values and sign systems (social gestus) akin to a particular social era is highly appreciated and honoured by aesthetic regimes via which these values and aesthetic discourse are produced and continued to be maintained. The actor’s responsibility within this model of gesticulation is to represent her social interactions and reproduce and replicate those aesthetic values via her body to inform and entertain audience members’ aesthetic needs. What this mode of acting practice and appreciation unwittingly neglect is the way how the actor experiences her own ways of embodiment of acting before her performance is interpreted and celebrated in those established aesthetic discourses.

In those discursive formations, we are not very much interested in exploring how the actor embodies a particular role, what relationship does she cultivate with her partner-actor and the surrounding or what is going on with the process of performing her role. What matters in general is how the actor represents a particular character, a particular emotion and perhaps a particular value system pertaining to the role she represents.Acting as a representation germinates through the dominant epistemological paradigm imposed by the Western tradition of thinking. This formula is known as the stimulus-idea-response model (Barnacle, 2009). According to this model, knowledge acquisition is a cyclical process which starts from stimuli (outside). It is no surprising to see how this stimuli-idea-response model is easily adaptable to define the process of acting. The actor’s work, her emotional expressions, bodily action and the meanings have been regarded as a representation of certain ideas, thoughts and passions which germinate inside the actor (in the psyche) and expressed through the physical means (body) to the outside world. In this sense, the actor is a mirror placed against the society through which spectators read and extract certain social meanings.     

Merleau-Ponty challenges every mode of representational meanings of the human body. For him, human being is not a dual existence, or a combination of body and mind. He does not believe that there is a particular consciousness or an inner world that exists apart from the physical existence of the body (Olkowski & Morley, 1999). Mind and the body are holistically intertwined and it is the body as a consciousness which operates in the world. The actor’s experience of performing is lived, temporal, spatial as well as communion. In other words, her experience is pre-lingual or pre-reflective. No language is capable of interpreting what it is to be an actor or how the actor feels and experiences the performing body because the actor’s experience is holistic and embedded with the performance score.

Embodiment

The notion of embodiment has been widely used in phenomenological literature, particularly in feminist writings, cognitive phenomenology, dance, and performance theory (Blair, 2008; Parviainen, 1998; Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1992). The term embodiment generally refers to an individual’s ability to engage with her ever changing environment and the process of being in a particular moment as a unified wholeness. The idea of embodiment therefore encapsulates Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the phenomenal body and its interrelatedness with the environment.

In the field of acting, Russian pedagogue Stanislavski is the first one to identify the importance of the holistic experience of the actor. As the father of modern acting and the founder of psychophysical acting tradition, he saw that the imitation of the real-life situation or replicating daily natural behaviour kills the authenticity and truth claim of acting. He believed that his ideal actor should experience her own self, passion and emotions while portraying a role on stage truthfully and sincerely (Blair, 2009; Johnson, 2007). Therefore, his later research works and theorisations of acting largely focused on these embodied ways of approaching to acting.

Experience

Unlike theatre acting or other modes of live performances, film acting is very often evaluated after it is shot, edited and developed into a cohesive filmic narrative. Theatre acting and acting for the camera are placed as opposite approaches due to its very nature of practices and technology involved with. Theatre actor’s experience is more vulnerable than a film actor whose performance is directly exposed to the audience members because of their responses to the performance is spontaneous as well as instant.

Despite these contradictions between mediums, as Pichel Irving argues, the end result would be the execution of acting (Pichel, 1946). Theatre actor and the film actor similarly experience the flow during performance. But the duration of their flow experience can be limited for the film actor due to the various technical requirements of the process. Although Stanislavski’s articulation of the experiencing (pereszhivanie) of a role cannot be fully actualised during film acting, the film actor also experiences the flow of action while engaging with the score. However, this flow is customary being disturbed and fragmented by the disposition of the camera shots, angles, lenses and cuts. Yet, as Aaron Taylor suggests, there are two key things to be considered when film acting is evaluated as embodied process of acting.  First, film acting is an essential part of meaning making process of the movie. Second, it is vital to recognise film acting as ‘actual being – acting’ (Taylor, 2012, p. 93). Here, Taylor emphasises the term ‘actual being – acting’ akin to the theatrical live performance.

As I discussed earlier, the departure of live performance from the film acting occurs due to its discontinuation of the actor’s involvement with the performance score. But as Taylor further argues, film actor is also capable of experiencing the real – being acting, an authentic way of embodiment of acting similar to the theatre actor because film actor’s body is also an ‘instrument of comprehension’ (Ibid, p. 95). Unlike live performance, the film actor’s lived experience is not directly transported to the spectator as it is captured by the camera. Filmic acting is filtered, altered and further interpreted as fragmented body parts which will later become a cohesive narration.

Enactment 

The term ‘enactment’ signifies a particular shift occurred in the performance theories in the recent past. Theories involved with acting whether it is theatre or film have been primarily understood with the meta-theatrical narratives of how the body, mind, self, emotions and the others are interpreted, defined and articulated within certain cultural domains (Zarrilli, 2012, p. 45). Film acting has no exception. The interpretation of film acting has also been succumbed to such meta-theoretical narratives of acting which exemplify the third person’s view or representational ways of understanding acting. The shift that is imposed by the phenomenological philosophy and later development of post Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology implicate the importance of understanding the perspectives of the ‘experience’ or bring forth the doer’s perspectives to the centre of the discussion (Ibid, p. 45-46).

Among other post-phenomenologists, Francisco Varela and his associates’ research on embodiment reveal that the human cognition and experience is not a pre-given phenomenon but processual which means, the perceptual process (cognition) of the human being is a continual process, an ‘enactment of the world’ than an established, pre-given entity (Zarrilli, 2012, p. 46). They named this process as enactment. In this sense, the actor’s process in general is an enactment, where the actor’s bodymind is fully engaged with what she does before the camera or on stage.

Encroachment 

Merleau-Ponty claimed that the human is not a disembodied subject. The subjectivity and the objectivity are chiasmatically interlaced with each other. His idea of bodily reversibility explains this encroachment between the body and its otherness. In this sense, the term encroachment is vital to understand the actor’s involvement with the other – the counterpart of the actor’s subjectivity and how the self is intertwined with the partner-actor in executing a successful performance.  Further, this encroachment is operational within the spectator’s relationship with the actor’s work on screen. The spectator’s perception is thus attuned with the animated body of the actor and generates a system of co-existence within shared space and time.

The actor who enacts a particular scene demonstrates the ability to attune with the space, time, objects and other bodies through which her enactment is fulfilled. A skilled swimmer, who swims in the water, demonstrates the reversible nature of bodily engagement with the water and how the water engages with the swimmer’s body. The encroachment between swimmer’s body and the water needs to be fully intermeshed enabling the swimmer to cut through the water. The successful swimmer as it occurs in many situations, does not splash much water when the act of swimming occurs. Similarly, an experienced actor swims in the vast array of spatio-temporal stream; she blends her bodymind through actions she performs while engaging and heightening her continual involvement with being-in-the-enactment. The performance score she habituates enables the actor to familiarise with other bodies, and re-define the spatiotemporality through the body.

Further, the film actor does not directly get confronted with an audience. Her audience is also an anonymous existence, in the sense that she cannot experience direct responses of the audience. This inherent gap between filmic acting and its reception glorifies the disengagement of bodies in making of film and their appreciations. As a result of this disengagement and lack of reciprocity between actors’ bodies, the glorification of the stardom is further established in popular cinema. They are blind to the fact that a successful performance relies on the encroachment of bodies in enactive situations. As it is clearly evident, the reciprocity of actors’ bodies, their relations and communion, enhances the quality of performance practice either on stage or in cinema. On the contrary, it is assumed that the actor is the sole agent of making meaning in film acting. However, as phenomenology of film acting argues that the mutuality of the actor’s bodily engagement with the audience is further enhanced by the viewers of the actor’s image appeared on screen. The spectator takes the position of the actor’s subjectivity and passively enacts the situation while sitting in the film theatre.

Malini’s Embodied Experience

I now take the reader to a specific case study via which I intend to demonstrate some of the arguments I have articulated in the foregoing section. In the previous discussion, an anti-representational way of embodiment of filmic acting is elaborated through a phenomenological reading of the actor’s body and experience. I now turn to Malini’s debut film, Punchi Baba to discuss these four key areas of embodiment and these assumptions have been realised through her performance within this particular film production. I have chosen this movie not to elaborate a particular representational value of her filmic performance, but to demonstrate a naïve self of Malini which has been overemphasised through the chores of her acting career over four decades. I further assume that her naïve self and vulnerable persona in front of the camera as an amateur actor, may help to analyse her embodied process of acting while neutralising her presence as a pre-text.

Punchi Baba is a movie which narrates a story of a clerk named Sena. He accidentally finds an orphan child left in his old car. With this finding, his life is beginning to twist with many social and moral issues.  Sena is in love with a wealthy girl named Mala and his relationship with her and his intentions to marry this girl become a contradictory task once he becomes a father for the child he found. Similar to much melodramatic structure of early films in Sri Lanka, this movie is also centralised with a puzzle of an orphan child and further questions the ethical and moral duties of an individual whose actions are polarised between the selfishness and the social responsibilities. As it is usually predictable, all the puzzles and the complexities of relationships are resolved once the child’s mother who works as a babysitter reveals her ownership of the child.  The film concludes with the happy ending after Sena finally marries Mala predicting how the melodramatic film ought to be concluded.

Malini, as a young and eloquent actress first appears in the movie as an upper-class girl whose affection directs towards a lower middle-class man, Sena. Although Malini’s role is somewhat secondary to Sena’s role which was played by much experienced actor Joe Abeywickrama, Malini’s embodiment of her role also predominantly plays a key role in the flow of the filmic narrative. Malini first appears on screen after eleven minutes of the movie starts.  First the camera sees her cooking something in a middle-class kitchen when the maid comes and informs her about Sena’s arrival. The camera sees her profile in this shot and we as spectators don’t know whether her figure is captured in a profile shot is executed purposely or not. However, her first appearance in the movie is not very much gripping as half of her body is captured through a profile mid-shot. After a few minutes, the film offers a wide-shot in the sitting room of the house where Sena is waiting to see Mala impatiently. Then Mala enters in the wide-shot making it a two-shot. In this, the camera captures her playfulness and the affection towards Sena for the first time. Sena straightaway expresses his love towards her in melodramatic gestures and vocal expressions while making Mala laugh at this act. Now the camera captures her face in a close-up where she reacts to Sena with a pleasing manner.

As an amateur film actor, Malini faces a few key challenges in executing her enactment in this scene. First, she needs to find the ways to embed with her scenic environment and the props she is given in the situation. She requires manipulating objects and uses that space in order to be able to behave naturally in this situation. Secondly, she is confronted with another subject, in this scenario, it is her co-actor, Joe Abeywickrama. Malini, as an individual subject also experiences an ambiguity between her “self” and the other actor’s selfhood in making the situation as an enactment. Malini’s challenge as a film actor is to redefine her body schema (the ways her body is integrated with her surrounding and how she perceives her corporeal changes) enabling her to integrate with the scenic environment. The more she demonstrates her integration with the given space, time and props, the more she is capable of blending her enactment with the situation. As Merleau-Ponty argues, one’s ability to change her body schema encapsulates how one rearranges her body schema within certain task environment (Merleau-Ponty, 2002). In this sense, Malini’s rearrangement of her body schema in the above situation demonstrates her immaturity of performance practice in the filmic context in relation to the opposite actor at the time.  As a much experienced actor, Joe usually takes hold of the situation and his performance instigates his ability to embed in the enactment overriding Malini’s naïve self.

In cognitive phenomenology, Shaun Gallagher contends that there are two modes of schematic embodiments that an individual experiences while being in a particular situation: first it is the body schema that informs how the individual experiences the sensory motor movements of the body. It encapsulates the interoception (inner sensations) and exteroception (sense of balance and positioning). Second, body image informs the individual, how she perceives her surroundings. It encapsulates the inner life of the individual generally identified as a psychical aspect of the body (Gallagher, 2005).

Thus, the filmic actor’s experience is consisted of two aspects of the embodiment. It is the actor who perceives through her senses and makes sense of her world constructing her own selfhood against the other subjectivities she confronts. Further her ability to behave in a scenic situation informs her sense of schematic modalities via which she integrates objects into her body schema while expanding and extending her bodily powers. For an actor this is paramount for executing a successful enactment which provides her a sense of flow of action in which she learns to inhabit. If motor movements and perceptual faculties are not adequately attuned and synthesised with the given enactment, the actor’s ability to persuade the audience’ perception consequently begin to diminish. Malini’s debut film appearance in Punchi Baba depicts such reality of the actor’s embodied experience.

In this discussion of the actor’s embodied experience in film acting, I would further prefer to discuss about the process of encroachment which occurs during this filmic enactment. As I argued earlier, the film actor’s process of encroachment can be elaborated in two modes: first the actor attunes with her enactment during the film shoot which demonstrates how her selfhood is a product of the Other. Secondly, the actor’s presence on the screen is attuned with the spectator who shifts her sense of self with the virtual actor’s self appears on screen. This phenomenological assumption reveals the actor not as an autonomous entity but a product of the other factors involved with the performance process.

In the first instance, that the actor’s self or the presence is a product of the Other, signifies that the actor’s performance presence does not arbitrarily germinate through her role or her spiritual soul. This idea further can be explained with Malini’s enactment in Punchi Baba. Malini’s performance body and her attractive presence is visualised through other female characters that are paralleled with her body presence.  In Punchi Baba’s case, it is her opposite female roles, two maids (Anula Karunathilaka and Thilaka Perera) are juxtaposed with her body to be able to construct Malini’s selfhood in the movie. Despite her bodily juxtaposition with Other female bodies in the movie, the main protagonist, Joe Abeywickrama undoubtedly plays a key role in making Malini as a performance text in the movie. Although, inherent ambiguities between opposite sexes are a major significance in early movies, one can still identify a successful execution of bodily intertwining with Joe and Malini in many scenes they appear together. Therefore, Malini’s enactment as a film actor needs to be recognised not as a single text which signifies her individual filmic self as an autonomic entity but an inter-textuality which is constructed and constantly been nourished by the absence of Other bodies.

The second mode of encroachment is occurred when Malini’s image is projected on the silver screen as a virtual construct of her role. The spectator’s role in the movie theatre is generally defined as passivity. It is believed that the spectator who sits in the dark theatre is isolated in a dream world where s/he does not actively participate with the aesthetic product offers on screen. Yet phenomenological reading of the spectator as a viewer and her/his relationship with the actor’s image projected on screen, is an active participation in the meaning making process. Malini’s bodily movements, gestures, expressions and her vocal work are highly provocative for the spectator whose visual perception is continually encroached with her body. This mutuality between Malini’s body and the spectator’s perceptual synthesis are intertwined allowing the spectator to shift her/his self and attune with Malini’s virtual self. In the movie Punchi Baba, Malini’s physical movements and bodily gestures virtually create the spectator’s body as a moving and enactive body with which s/he empathises with her gestures, postures and vocal modulations. I believe that Malini’s complexity of the performance is not enunciated through her emotions, gestures or postures in this particular movie but it is delivered through her work on vocal modulations. Her vocality is highly persuasive via which her visual and vocal structures are the key components of the spectator to simulate her/his self with Malini’s screen image. The voice which carries her auditory meanings and intonations of the dialogue also carries actional elements to the hearer. Thus, the auditory image offered for the spectator is not merely a second layer of the filmic image but a highly significant enactment which draws the audience member’s motile engagement with the actor. In summing up, I would argue that it is needed to re-read not only Malini’s performance but other actors’ performances on silver screen to configure how these bodies of images depict meaning through a shared networking of the actor’s embodiment and the spectator’s synesthetic perception.          

Conclusion

In this paper, I have introduced a counter-thesis to tackle the problem of representation in film acting. My intention was to articulate some of the importance ideas derived from phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and later developments of cognitive science to understand how film actor’s work can be an embodied mode of acting practice. In order to do so, I have presented four ontological categories of bodily existences of the filmic actor. Through these categories, I have tried to illustrate four ontological existences of the film actor and how the acting process in film medium is phenomenologcally viable process both on set and on screen. I have attempted to demonstrate how phenomenology as a method is useful for analysing and understanding the film actor’s work. I have further argued that the filmic body is not an autonomous entity of meaning making process of acting, but a relative phenomenon, which generates its meaning through the encroachment with the Other. I here suggest that it is important to understand the filmic performance not only as a single text, but an inter-textual, intersubjective occurrence in the sense that the film actor’s self is not an autonomous entity but a co-existence because there is Other exists.

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*Saumya Liyanage is an actor and a professor in drama and theatre, currently working at the Department of Theatre Ballet and Modern Dance, Faculty of Dance and Drama, University of the Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA), Colombo. He is the director of the Social Reconciliation Centre, UVPA Colombo. This paper is an extract of a paper written for the book titled Lamp in a Windless Place: Phenomenology and Performance published by the VAPA Press, University of the Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo in 2025.