A performer's gestures, in all kinds of films, can also appear as part of a hidden web: they can hint at a secret coherence awaiting intuitive discovery, other ways of seeing a film.

Bogdanovich's own account of the postproduction of They All Laughed suggests that the film appeared in cinemas as something less than what he fully intended. In The Killing of the Unicorn (1984), his book about Dorothy Stratten's murder and the circumstances surrounding it, Bogdanovich starkly describes They All Laughed in the wake of Stratten's death. This writing becomes even more melancholy in relation to Bogdanovich's earlier writings on the cinema, which are more celebratory in their tone. “Then suddenly I remembered the movie Dorothy and I had made,” Bogdanovich writes. “It had been killed as well, its two hours a moving photo album of our days together.” Bogdanovich's words suggest an ambiguous suspension of emotion in watching They All Laughed upon its completion in 1981, wherein its new status as a “moving photo album” upon Stratten's death pivots around two possible meanings of “moving”: either as a film that might still possibly “move” a viewer emotionally, even after the tragedy surrounding its making; or in a more literal sense, in the idea that the film was now, in the wake of Stratten's death, little more than a “moving” collection of photos, unfolding one after the other, but no longer animated by joy. Writing these words so soon after Stratten's murder, and acknowledging in his sentence that the film had been for him “killed” by its sad circumstances, it is undoubtable that “moving” in Bogdanovich's intended meaning refers to the latter. But as time went on, Bogdanovich rediscovered something life-affirming in They All Laughed: in later interviews, the director will mention the film as his favorite of those he has made, and in one interview even refers to an especially personal version of the film, a private cut existing on a single 35 mm print only he possesses, and which is rarely screened for others.

Bogdanovich's eventual rediscovery of his love for They All Laughed cues us to recognize the ongoingly incomplete status of the film, beyond the incompleteness of Stratten's sadly shortened career in cinema, in the sense that the auteur's own private affection for it remains separate from the film's continued public circulation on home video, and at occasional retrospective screenings, given that the director's own preferred version of the film is kept privately tucked away.

Argentinian filmmaker Leonardo Favio's Crónica de un niño solo (Chronicle of a Lonely Child, 1965) poeticizes the experiences of young boys subject to the repressive conditions of reform schools on the outskirts of small, impoverished shantytowns. Favio's aesthetic blends influences from romantic varieties of European art cinema (particularly François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, to which the film explicitly refers) and a filmmaking approach sensitive to the interactions of the people in front of the camera. His actors in Crónica are mostly young boys, and when Favio's viewer first sees them it is in the reform school, an institution designed to keep desire under lock and key; the boys encounter long and seemingly endless corridors, in an architecture of steel bars and twisting staircases. In one scene, Favio's camera shows us several boys, scattered in a cavernous room that reverberates with the echoes of playing, yelling, crying. Most of these little gestures and expressions convey frustrated desire, stuck in a loop of repetitions: one boy cradles the head of another in his lap, as they pass the time; another spits again and again, onto the floor; two boys, in close-up on either side of the screen, blow a marble back and forth; another kicks a little ball against a wall.

One of these boys, holding before him a magazine page engulfed by Monica Vitti's visage, very cautiously glances for a few seconds across the room; his eyes nearly meet the camera directly, as if the very viewer of Crónica were policing his behavior, too. After a moment, he brings the Vitti photograph to his face; bending the pages of the magazines backwards, as if in imitation of the lover's caress of the head, he kisses the paper on which are reproduced Vitti's lips. A cut to a shot of some other boys leaves him in the middle of this kiss, as if suspended in private, confused ecstasy. Later in this montage, the film will return to this boy, who is now asleep (or feigning it), his head resting next to the photographic image of Vitti, the palm of his hand frozen in a caress of the magazine page (Figure 5).

Everything about falling for an actor seems obvious. But nothing about it is.

A film lover knows when it happens: the heart beats faster, fluttering alongside the undulations of an actor's gestures, movements, voice. These feelings have parallels in experiences outside the cinema, in everyday lives, when someone's way of moving and speaking fascinates or beguiles. The eye knows intuitively when it is charmed—every eye has its types, people who enthrall and surprise, in films as in life. This is not only pleasure. In the cinema, at least, it also involves labor. An actor toils to achieve a performance, and filmmakers work to arrange and orchestrate the actor's effort through mise en scène, framing, and cutting. The actor isn't doing it alone, even as she sometimes seems to be—during those moments of viewing when she overtakes the composition of the film, becoming its dominant, and most human, motif. An actor's overtaking of an eye is an enchantment. And it is the result of a process of behind-the-scenes craft to which the viewer is not directly privy. Putting words to paper to think about performance is also creative work, which may contain in response to the actor's charms some fresh discovery within the viewing self. That lightning flash of sudden affection—fleeting and intense—that a performer in the art of cinema impresses into thought is the subject of this book.

Even actors a viewer knows well can mesmerize in freshly dizzying ways, repeatedly. And this vertigo can be provoked by a very simple movement— an actor's way of entering.

Bernardo Bertolucci's Luna (1979) begins with a sequence attentive to intimate gestures. A child drips honey on its leg; a woman, played by Jill Clayburgh, kisses and sucks the honey off his flesh, and brings her lips, still licking the honey, up to his face. These frames are intimately situated alongside the bodies of the players—very close to a child with no capability for knowing he is being photographed here for a movie, and closer still to Clayburgh, who by contrast is aware of her status and capacity as a professional actor. Bertolucci's frame becomes engulfed by the intimacy shared here between two bodies, in the fiction a mother and child but in our initial perception of the images more immediate and physical (words defining the precise relationship between these two bodies are just slightly beyond our in-the-moment experience of their undulations). A cut away from this intimacy, briefly, as the camera pans across several objects—milk, coffee, a beach ball: there is a little world surrounding these two people—before returning to the mother's face, and from there panning to her honey-dipped finger, which guides itself into the son's mouth (Figure 4). A pause, a breath: Clayburgh looks down at the small child as he begins to cough, to choke a little on this honey, as the soundtrack is engulfed by her breath. Bertolucci's post-synch mixing has the effect, here, of raising Clayburgh's sighs and caring whispers to our attentive ears, as she becomes, momentarily, the lungs of the film itself. Eventually, she coaxes the baby's breathing back to normality. She then brings to his lips a glass of milk, which he rejects.

This bodily quivering in Luna is shared between two actors (one an adult possessed with self-awareness, the other a child who cannot be), and occurs prior to words, knowledge, and conceptual signification. The images are presented less as building blocks for a story event and more as inhalations and exhalations, life that breathes as the celluloid flows through the projector. This shared intimacy between mother and son, outside of language, and yet at the same time inscribed within it, is generated by Bertolucci's language, his way of arranging images.

Anna (Isabelle Adjani) is having an affair. Her husband, Mark (Sam Neill) has hired a private investigator (Carl Duering) to follow her. This is the outline of a very familiar narrative situation, but the cinematic proscenium created by Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (1981) cracks convention apart, freeing the film and the performances to thrive on edges and fissures. Isabelle Adjani's performance dances on Żuławski's aesthetic as if it were broken glass, her characterization of a damaged, and damaging, woman jaggedly in tune with the filmmaker's discordant style. Żuławski catalyzes this dance between auteur and actor, his reputation as a filmmaker who brings his actors to the brink of physical and psychological exhaustion metaphorized in his cinema through the occasional tracking-forward of the camera toward the body of the performer, as if pressing against her. And this is how the confrontation between Anna and the investigator who has tracked her down to her hiding spot in a dilapidated apartment begins: as he enters, claiming he is there to check up on the windows, the camera tracks along to meet him at the door, eventually revealing Adjani on the right side of the frame, standing still against the side of the wall. A cut to a frontal shot of Adjani, the camera slowly and persistently pressing toward her face as she expresses wild-eyed, gaping fear. The camera in this scene is not quite assuming the detective's perspective; at two points during this moment, Żuławski will cut away from this frontal shot, which presses ever more intensely to an eventual close-up of Adjani's anguished expression, to a pair of shots, taken from different sides of the wall, in which the camera describes a half-circle around the pair as the detective moves closer to Adjani. Arranged this way, the cutting links the moving camera with the invasion of a private space, but only loosely, reminding us that the real dance here is not between Anna and the investigator, not even between Adjani and Duering, but between Adjani and the surrounding form of the film. The filmmaking choices generate a sense of a shattered world, one that can only be glimpsed through sudden changes in angle and unexpected framings, a world within which Adjani's Anna, ill-suited to the domesticity from which she has fled, can breathe and thrive.

On my subsequent viewings of The Thing Called Love after first seeing it in a cinema upon its initial release, after the film became available on home video, I was aware that River Phoenix had died just a few months after the theatrical release of the film. I was unfamiliar with Phoenix's other performances; I was too young to have seen his celebrated work in My Own Private Idaho when it was released in 1991. The Thing Called Love, in this way, was both the beginning and the end of (at least during Phoenix's own life) my encounter with his performances. Where my initial viewing of the film in a theater fell under the spell of Mathis's radiance, my subsequent viewings on home video were my first self-conscious encounter with death in and around cinema, given my fresh attention to Phoenix's presence in the film as the character James Wright. On some level I had an awareness that the person onscreen, in a movie that was already very much part of my life, was now quite literally gone, his animation in the frames of a film no longer corresponding to any existing human outside of it. The absence of the actor, as described so beautifully by Cavell, was now ineluctable and permanent, an emotional attachment to a performer now tethered to a melancholy awareness of that performer's death.

My desire to see and perpetually re-see The Thing Called Love was born out of an attraction, which developed at different times and for different reasons, to two actors who did not quite become the stars they might have become— Phoenix, having died so heartbreakingly young, and Mathis, facing a future of mostly supporting roles in big movies and leading roles in small movies none of which, for me, were as enchanting as The Thing Called Love. Early death and the cutting short of stardom—of course not equivalent things, but in their way each a kind of loss—were also, as I discovered later, part of the context that accompanied the release of Peter Bogdanovich's earlier film, They All Laughed.

In Alan Rudolph's 1976 film Welcome to L.A., Geraldine Chaplin plays Karen Hood, a housewife who spends her days riding around in taxi cabs, imitating Greta Garbo. Her love for Garbo could belong to the same pantheon as Sal Mineo's quiet affection for Alan Ladd in Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955) or Constance Bennett's playful flirtation with a magazine photo of Clark Gable in What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor, 1932). But this is a remarkable case in which a character's love for an actor emerges from the actor's own: according to Rudolph, the idea that her character would imitate Garbo was Chaplin’s.

In Welcome to L.A., Chaplin shapes Karen as a character who uses performance to imagine a more satisfying life. Her self-styled personal drama eventually finds an audience in Carroll Barber (Keith Carradine), a playboy songwriter in Los Angeles to attend new studio recordings of his songs. Carradine first encounters Chaplin sitting on a curb on a quiet street. As he drives up, she's jotting something down in her notepad—Karen is a writer, of the most private kind, and the words she speaks, sometimes to other characters but also sometimes in a direct address to the camera, are quite arcane, as if she were conducting an experiment in the ability of words to describe an emotional state, as if her text were still in the process of being worked-out even as she speaks it. She is wearing the same red beret and fur coat she always wears as she travels around Los Angeles. But here, for a moment, she rests; killing time, writing. Barber is curious, so he pulls up beside her. Rudolph frames much of their conversation from the passenger side of the car, as Carradine looks out the window at Chaplin (Figure 2). Carradine asks if she wants a ride. Karen pretends not to hear, and then, bringing her eyes to his, claims she can't go with him because she can't drive. Karen, rather than communicate soberly, prefers instead to perform, sliding into her Garbo cough—again an homage to the film she adores, Camille (George Cukor, 1936)—as she looks back down at her notepad.

Keisuke Kinoshita's film The Girl I Loved (1946) is beautifully attentive to its performers: it sees them not only as people playing characters, but also as generative contributors to a cinematic tapestry. Kinoshita's cinema looks at people with languorous attentiveness, not possessive but lingering, open to the continual challenge of gesture and movement, and to the possibility of performance to create rhymes with the film's own movements and gestures. In one sequence, Kuniko Igawa (Figure 3), playing a young woman named Yoshiko, is washing up after a day of work, cleaning her face, and changing her dress, a transition from her character's workday in her rural village to something more interior, a little more private. After spying something on the top shelf as she goes about this business, Igawa looks outside. She then grabs a small suitcase from the shelf. Kinoshita cuts to a long shot of Igawa taken from an opposite angle outside the house, as she runs out of the house and toward the other side. As Igawa runs, Kinoshita slows the framerate slightly—he will do this for poetic effect at various junctures throughout the film—and throws the middle and background out of focus, which renders Igawa's temporarily slowed movement toward the camera very like a dream; she eventually drifts closer to the camera, ending the shot in a focused close-up (and in a framerate restored to normal speed) as she removes a dress from the small case. Here it is the actor's movement, and not the camera, which creates a change in shot distance, giving the performer pride of place in the gradual unfolding and modulation of mise en scène and the frame. But it is also the effect of the camera, and here of its shallow focus, to fetishize the movement of the body toward the lens even as Igawa herself remains, for a moment, slightly blurry, visually inaccessible. Kinoshita’s, and our, attention is then diverted for a moment to the dress, which once belonged to her mother, and which Yoshiko plans to wear the day she gets married. She hooks the dress to a tree branch to air it out; shadows of the dress and of the branches play across her face.

The final third of this book looks at performances in two films directed by Peter Bogdanovich (1939–2022), They All Laughed (1981) and The Thing Called Love (1993). These films, I think, profitably resonate with many of the ideas about performance explored in the preceding pages. Just like many of the other films and performers discussed in this book, They All Laughed and The Thing Called Love have become central to the time I have spent experiencing and thinking about performance in the cinema. And a relatively objective reason for looking at these two films in this book can be found in Bogdanovich's own history as a filmmaker, critic, and actor. As a director, Bogdanovich practices a filmmaking style more classically actor-driven than the comparatively baroque cinema created by his contemporaries who emerged during the moment of the Hollywood Renaissance in the 1970s. Those directors, all of whom deploy a more stylized approach to filmmaking than Bogdanovich, include Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, and Robert Altman, the latter of whom, while in many respects an actor's director, does not employ a self-effacing style. Bogdanovich, more than his colleagues, is a classical filmmaker, whose style is energized by the presence of performers with whom his camera is frequently smitten. Bogdanovich, further, was himself a part-time actor, trained in his youth by Stella Adler and has appeared from time to time in his own films—see Targets (1968) and Saint Jack (1979)—and in screen work written and directed by others (most notably a seven-year supporting run as the therapist to Tony Soprano in the cable series The Sopranos). His understanding of acting as a director is in this way at least partially the product of having done a little bit of it himself. As a critic and historian, Bogdanovich, although known for his auteur studies of John Ford and Allan Dwan, also has a sharp interest in the art of acting.

In The Thing Called Love, Samantha Mathis plays the main character, Miranda Presley. Mathis is the central focus in an ensemble of actors. Her Miranda is a New Yorker traveling to Nashville to write and sing country music. (Miranda's last name would seem to divine a successful career in country music, but as she tells other characters in the film, there is “no relation” to Elvis.) In the opening shots, Mathis nods away sleepily in a Greyhound bus that takes her from the big city to the American South. The film's opening montage is comprised of traveling shots of the New York City skyline—the city Miranda leaves—accompanied by country music, as Miranda is swiftly transported to The Bluebird Café in Nashville, where she will eke out a living as a waitress while writing her songs while also developing relationships with two country singers, played by Phoenix and Dermot Mulroney, who compete for her affections, and a friendship with another would-be singer, played by Sandra Bullock. The end of the narrative, as Miranda nearly gives up in her struggle to become a noted singer before returning to Nashville to try again, strikes a playfully ambiguous note. After Mathis gives a sterling performance of an original song called “God's a Woman,” she leaves The Bluebird Café alongside both of her male paramours, and the film is as uncertain about which man she will choose, or if she will choose, as it is about whether any of the young singers in the film will achieve further success as artists or musicians.

There is one sequence in the film I always remember, and that I remember remembering with pleasure throughout the years in which I have spent time with this film; in the years before films were very soon available after release via digital download, and in which there was no available internet to look again and again at a trailer or a scene selected for publicity, I had to wait several months to see anything from the film again after I first saw it in a cinema during the summer of 1993. It is a moment of performative joy—the joy of gesture and music. Miranda is attending a country linedance in Nashville.