Posing Modernism: Delsartism in Modern Dance and Silent Film

Abstract

This essay establishes a genealogy of modernist performance that foregrounds the popular movement based on the ideas of the French acting theorist and voice teacher François Delsarte (1811-71). Delsartism has been understood as either a short-lived, anti-modern histrionic acting style or an affected regimen of self-improvement and physical culture, and is virtually absent from discussions of modernism. Yet the movement established a modernist kinaesthetic—a movement ideal—and bodily technique based on a tension between stasis and movement: a pose modeled after classical statuary melting into another pose. This essay demonstrates that Delsartism provided the training regimen for modern dancers and silent film actors, who used Delsartean poses, coded with an emotional valence and a mythic narrative, as a method for making meaning in bodily expression. Examining the work of the early posers Emma Lyon Hamilton and Eugen Sandow, the dancers Isadora Duncan and Ted Shawn, the silent film star Louise Brooks, and the directors D. W. Griffith and Lev Kuleshov, Preston details the widespread impact of Delsartism on modernist performance. The Delsartean genealogy unites disparate strains of modernist performance, including ideas of the natural and mediated body, classicism, and the machine age.

Queering the Skeleton in Dance's Closet

“…Sleek and streamlined it looked backward and forward, simultaneously gesturing toward Taylorist efficiency and regulation as the body's natural state of being. At the same time, H'Doubler also primed her students to perceive the heightened corporeal awareness Moore describes (Ross 2000; Preston 2009). For H'Doubler, the skeleton was a proxy for the unmarked body; it was not only more neutral than demonstrating movement herself, but it also supported her classroom as building rational and self-regulating women with authority over their physical selves.…”

Análise do Comportamento e Cinema: Avaliação das evidências do Efeito Kuleshov e interpretação dos processos comportamentais envolvidos

“…Bruni (2015) menciona os cineastas soviéticos Dziga Vertov e Vsevolod Pudovkin como herdeiros das descobertas teóricas e empíricas de Kuleshov. Vale ressaltar também que o experimento influenciou outros campos além da indústria cinematográfica: ele foi mencionado como influência sobre o trabalho do premiado compositor clássico estadunidense Elliott Carter (Theisen, 2010); sobre a performance de dançarinos (Preston, 2009); e mesmo sobre pesquisas no campo da neurologia (Lee, 2006;Mobbs, Weiskopf, Lau, Featherstone, Dolan, & Frith, 2006). Assim, pode-se afirmar com segurança que o Efeito 3 Estilo de montagem no qual se "submete o espectador a uma ação sensorial ou psicológica, experimentalmente verificada e matematicamente calculada com o propósito de nele produzir certos choques emocionais" (Saraiva, 2011, p. 120).…”