The Stage on Screen: Dramaturgy and Distribution

Shen Xin, Brine Lake (A New Body) (still), 2020. Courtesy of the artist.

As film and video works circulate beyond their locations of production, “global” networks of distribution may impose a wholly new semantics on them depending on where and how they are shown. This text proposes looking at the use of dramaturgical approaches in film—achieved through performative vocabularies of rehearsal, reenactment, and iteration—as a means for countering the epistemic problems generated by the loss of context accompanying global circulation. Dramaturgical approaches as understood here interrupt the cultivation of a universal spectator as they circumvent, refuse, interrogate, or partially eclipse the global media environment in parallel to which the moving image is produced and viewed. Whether they assert a kind of time lag between a film and the extra-diegetic reality it emerges from or foreground a script’s unstable and untenable influence on actors, the presence of dramaturgy on screen performatively tie films to an original context that its subsequent distribution inevitably occludes. Here I focus primarily on problems of the so-called “subaltern” in the register of film and moving image, particularly on images as they circulate out of stateless populations, and the Arab world and into presentations in the West, where the hegemony of empire as expressed through contemporary media still threatens to unravel films’ artistic foundations and recode the moving image through a hostile ideology. I track films’ willful shift out of imaged performance and toward gestures that (self-)efface the moving image in order to insist on a film’s contextual incompleteness relative to spectators who will watch the work at a distance from where it was made. Here, dramaturgical performance is a strategy for confronting the limits of artistic translatability across different geographies and political contexts without assuming the universal legibility of any particular cinematic language.

In looking for a solution to the problem of decontextualization in distribution, artists may seek ways to expose the fact of a scene’s scriptedness without merely imaging it—without either letting image drown out voice or creating a work that is merely discursive. As André Bazin remarked in 1951 in his reflections on the adaptation of theater into film, text is naturally the litmus test of a film’s fidelity to its theatrical sources.1 Bazin posited, however, that film inevitably dilutes whatever dramaturgical thrust of a script one might be able to convey in live performance. “The dramatic force of the text, instead of being gathered up in the actor, dissolves without echo into the cinematic ether.”2 To ask whether the use of a dramaturgical register in film can target the pitfalls of globalizing decontextualization is perhaps to ask after ways that a script becomes un-imageable. Indeed, Bazin reflects on the context-specificity of theatrical performance in a similar vein: “The stage… where the action unfolds constitute an aesthetic microcosm … It is not the same with cinema, the basic principle of which is a denial of any frontiers to action. The idea of a locus dramaticus is not only alien to, it is essentially a contradiction of the concept of the screen.”3 To locate theatrical liveness within the filmic, we must register a divergence between filmed performance—so-called performance for camera—and the live, but latent, contextual pressures exerted on the moving image as it is being shot in real time. Some artists have achieved this dramaturgical discord between a script’s performance and its filmic dissolution through forms of expository partiality in captioning. This includes, for example, the intentional un-syncing of sound and on-screen dialogue and the interruption of the filmmaking process with cinematographic interventions that force the actor to improvise according to the live scenic context. The effect of foregrounding a film’s dramaturgical register is to create a chronopoeisis that ties the film to a primary site from which distribution cannot sever it. The histories of two significant precedents in this discussion, Rabih Mrouré’s On Three Posters and Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville Here and Elsewhere, help articulate the stakes for dramaturgy in relation to the circulation of moving image works. In both these works, the role of script vis-à-vis image comes to the fore as a hinge point between the liveness of an audience’s presence at a theatrical screening and the liveness of the initial performance documented in the film.

The proposition here is that dramaturgical performance in film deploys a mode of address of a live, theatrical nature, rather than a cinematic one, suggesting that certain material captured on film is nevertheless not fully cinematically translatable beyond its original context. This text is not at all an exhaustive account of this motif, nor is it an attempt to construct a nascent canon of a codified tendency. Rather, it attempts to motivate a line of inquiry in connection with contemporary moving image practices. Dramaturgical interventions, as understood here, cut into the ideological productions of “global” media and reconfigure conditions of reception. They advance an auto-critique of their screening environments and the institutional conditions of their mediation across distant screens. Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville famously addressed related issues in Here and Elsewhere (Ici et ailleurs) (1976), with scenes shot in France and Palestine that zeroed in on their casting of Palestinian fighters to perform revolutionary strategizing for camera. Many of these non-actors were subsequently killed—post-filming—by the very colonial violence they had gestured toward resisting. Originally titled Till Victory (Jusqu’à la Victoire) and made by the Dziga-Vertov Group, the film’s raw material later became Here and Elsewhere. In it, declarations of Palestinian revolutionaries’ commitment are repeated and rehearsed, betraying the real-time direction of the performance from behind the camera, until the filmed scenes seem to exhaust their authenticity. Voiceovers reflect on the filmmakers’ dramaturgical organization of the ostensibly documentary work.“First you should talk about the set and the actor in the set. About the drama. Where does this drama come from? … The little girl is acting… she is innocent, but perhaps this kind of drama is less so.”4

Here and Elsewhere ultimately became, in part, a mea culpa regarding the problem of documenting political resistance from a subjective distance and when filming from a comparatively dominant region and class position. Its subject shifted from the Palestinian struggle itself to the issues with Western filmmakers attempting to mediate those whom the Western media environment immediately renders subaltern. The initial filmmaking process had imposed a representational burden with the false promise of foreign persuasion. In doing so, it also obscured its own entanglements in foreign media politics that underwrite imperialist intervention. Irmgard Emmelhainz has already offered incisive commentary on some of these problems, noting: “In Here and Elsewhere [Godard and Miéville] posed the new problem of the propagation of leftist doxa by the becoming-information of leftist discourse.”5 She continues: “Privileging the act of seeing that underscores the distinction between speech and discourse in Here and Elsewhere, Godard and Miéville… [call] for an ethics of enunciation that accounts for the intransitivity of mass media and undermines the code of objectivity proper to the media.”6 Here and Elsewhere approaches the problem of mediating subaltern political struggle in Western media environments through imaging the ways the voice of its subjects gets lost in the moving image. As Emmelhainz offers, the retroactive solution pursued by the filmmakers in editing was “to speak images and acknowledge authorship over them.”7

Even if this enunciation of the image responds adequately to the problems film encounters as it enters the jaws of Western media—here, the Palestinian cause flattened across the televisual circuits of France—might there be a way to address that problem in a manner that isn’t retroactive, and rather is embedded within film from the start? Are there dramaturgical gestures that break through what Emmelhainz calls the “intransitivity of mass media” such that foreign distribution does not muddy the waters of political urgency? In Jumana Manna’s use of scripted fiction in her work, the effect of dramaturgical intervention appears completely opposed to that of Here and Elsewhere. Writing of Manna’s 2022 film Foragers, critic Maddie Hampton remarked that “scripted court scenes make it more explicitly a film about protest, with fiction providing the foragers—both found and cast—a secure venue for rebellion. In front of the camera, the foragers speak their minds.”8 Here, the dramaturgical rewrites the real, while retaining the documentary force of the film. Protest is not merely the work’s topic–it is what the work does and enables through the actors’ performances. Theirs is not performance for the camera but an aspirational performance on their own behalf, which works against the terms on which their struggle is mediated. Beirut-born artist Rabih Mrouré’s On Three Posters offers another example of a dramaturgical approach that challenges the terms of video’s circulation in a hostile media environment. The piece contends with specific political questions facing Lebanon throughout and in the aftermath of its Civil War. In Three Posters, the 2000 performance of the work, Mrouré used re-performance to process found video testimony made by a political martyr in his final moments prior to carrying out an operation against Israeli military forces. When Mrouré came into contact with the original footage of this fighter, he was struck to find that multiple tapes of his testimonial existed beyond the ultimately circulated version, which revealed the fighter had rehearsed his performance and calibrated his affect multiple times. Mrouré reenacted these test takes through three distinct subjectivities: that of “an actor, a resistance fighter, and a politician.”9 Writing of Mrouré’s On Three Posters (2004)—the artist’s subsequent video adaptation of the project —Chad Elias summarizes the emerging significance of theater in Mrouré’s birthplace of Beirut through the eyes of writer and theater director Elias Khoury, who had collaborated with Mrouré on the original performance. “While the outbreak of internecine conflicts in 1975 is seen as signaling the demise of Beirut’s image as a cosmopolitan and touristic capital, Khoury argues that the onset of war had been integral in stimulating artistic experimentation in the city, most particularly in the domain of theater. ”10

In taking rehearsal as the content of Three Posters, Mrouré dramatized the multiple registers of social and political pressure faced by Lebanon and its political contingencies at that time. The questions at stake were myriad: The question of a shift from a secular to fundamentally religious resistance to Occupation, as well as–in Mrouré’s words–“…the question of why the Left failed. The question of the media in politics and their relationship to, or correlation with, death…”11 After traveling the work internationally, Mrouré eventually opted to withdraw the performance from this presentation circuit, citing the inappropriate politicization of the work in relationship to post-9/11 politics, which effaced its close ties to the situation of the Lebanese Civil War and its reflections on the country’s internal politics. Mrouré explained that, initially, “Three Posters seemed to be received well abroad … [Audiences] grasped that the history was too complex to be summarized and more important, they appreciated the differences between our portrayal of the Civil War and the official discourse that had hitherto fed them simplistic outlines of Lebanese history … Unfortunately, the foreign press inevitably linked the performance with ‘current events’ …The press was stronger than our discourse.”12 Mrouré’s decision to discontinue the piece in the face of this “zero-sum game” of reception led him to make the wholly video version On Three Posters (2004), in which the artist directly narrates the contextual issues raised by the performance and its subsequent circulation.13 Perhaps paradoxically, Mrouré’s project found form as video not to counter the limitations of distribution but to heighten them. By losing its contextual backdrop, the original performance piece in effect lost its liveness as it traveled. Subsequently, On Three Posters was in effect a dramaturgical intervention of the most extreme kind, using video to completely rewrite the terms of the original performance but also linking itself back to the liveness of a source material from which it had been originally severed. After the contextual dislocation of Mrouré’s Three Posters by foreign media, the reparative work of On Three Posters was achieved through a kind of dramaturgical maximalism. This video sequel is almost entirely an annotation of the work’s original scripting. Dramaturgical interventions of this kind stand in for an original voice whose liveness and its relationship to real urgencies was eclipsed as it shifted out of its original context.

In this vein, works by filmmakers Shen Xin and Bassem Saad, for example, collapse the architectures of their script on their actors in a way that gestures to a source environment of performance—a “locus dramaticus”—even when the work circulates beyond its original context. Shen has remarked on such a filmmaking process for projects like Brine Lake (A New Body), (2019), which dramatizes the experience of statelessness experienced by Korean immigrants in Russia and Japan, slowly uncovering this context through a fictional account of an iodine factory. In Brine Lake, the actors shift between Korean, Japanese, and Russian, act out multiple characters, and often turn to the audience during long pauses of dialogue. At these silent moments, the actor on screen has posed a question or provocation —and rather than the translated captions that have up to that point been shown alongside the dialogue, a black bar appears. Whether the characters are querying themselves or the audience is often ambiguous. Shen has explained that the filmmaking process for such work involved inciting moments of live improvisation during the recording. Indeed, during Brine Lake, the actors seem to have to turn to meet the camera, perhaps revealing this in-the-moment reorientation by the camera. Even more potent is the actors’ repeated turn to us viewers to fill in the gaps in dialogue, to which they then respond as though they had indeed heard what we were thinking. This pulls us deeper into the iodine factory’s logic of command, and deeper, in turn, into the film’s implicit political conditions. In Bassem Saad’s Congress of Idling Persons (2021), some scenes of which were originally shot in a Beirut cabaret theater, segments of staged dialogues address the dynamics of local protest in Lebanon and elsewhere, reflecting on potential barriers to solidarity across groups. At one point in the film, Palestinian writer Islam Al Khatib gestures toward the multiple roles she and her peers are cast in within the local context: “Let’s call it a provisional spectrum of possible subject positions from the feda’ee to aid recipient, and the middle ground—the impossible middle ground—being total assimilation.”14 The actors play themselves, yet the work contains various moments when sound and image are suddenly out of sync, or multiple tracks are layered as though an aside or a rehearsed remark were being re-recorded or played back. As the script flowers periodically into multiple recordings, we get a sense of how suddenly shifting social conditions dislocate resistance in real time, and call for new political formations to be made, live, in response.

The deployment of rehearsal, scripting, and reenactment in artists’ moving image works has the potential to create a register of dramaturgical activity that betrays a world outside the mise-en-scène, without forcing it to cohere to the terms of global media. Shen and Saad’s works operate on problems of reception through their use of iteration, reenactment, and rehearsal, and in turn puncture the failed ideal of global communicability. When artists emphasize the dramaturgical register as they do, a contextual instability in film is scaffolded and offered up as an aporia that the viewer must confront (rather than explain away or reject). Such shifts between stage and cinema enable a jamming of the airwaves, collapsing images-of-record into a contextual ellipsis that must be reimagined with reference to a locality viewers may or may not have access to. Through this sort of dramaturgical approach, performance is absorbed into film as a low-fidelity technology of recording, such that the false coherence of “global” media and its partial views can perhaps be penetrated and redirected. As artist and curator Ian White—who wrote extensively on liveness in cinema and artists’ film—summarized in an essay on the concept of the “Foyer,” the live experience of film often pulls us back into a theatrical “antechamber.” Wondering if industrial cinema might “occupy its own Foyer, the Antechamber described by Roland Barthes, the arena of Racinian tragedy,” White quotes from Barthes’s On Racine (1963): “The Antechamber (the stage proper) is a medium of transmission; it partakes of both interior and exterior, of Power and Event, of concealed and exposed. Fixed between the world, a place of action, and the Chamber, a place of silence, the Antechamber is the site of language.15 Whereas White focused on liveness as a moment of encounter, in this text I’ve focused rather on liveness as a quality folded into the filmmaking process, when dramaturgical interventions into filmic works pull subjects’ performances away from the recordings on screen and into the register of a live elsewhere.

Contemporary artists’ film has the potential to produce a sort of proxy stage, and to do so in a way that does not, as Bazin warned, “dissolve without echo into the cinematic ether.”16 The assertion of this dramaturgical register tends to cut filmic performance away from any cohesive image, and subsequently away from global media networks. It gives us a flicker of the epistemic gap between what we see mediated through the screen and the real urgencies of a film’s present, the future anterior of the performance undertaken in the course of filming. Its introduction of cinematic gaps forestalls the presumptiveness of viewers who might read the work against its implicit material conditions. Its dramaturgical aporia cannot be exhausted by more intense circulation. It makes explicit that there are always layers of different audiences, some of whom will be fully addressed by the work and some of whom remain partly outside the conversation. We witness both the trace of the film’s stage and the stage’s unmaking in real time. The film can resonate everywhere, fully, while there remains a layer of performative context that a viewer can only be fully present for to the extent that they move “inside” the struggle. Rather than seducing a universal subject, such works invite us to become aware of that which remains unspoken.