Performance

This morning we had breakfast at Erik's. While eating I was pondering his casual dining area ceiling which I can touch with my hand. I forgot to ask Ben if Altadena is more lax about ceiling heights than Pasadena. Anyway, before I stole a big hunk of Erik's Toblerone, we had a long discussion about the nature of performance. I used the Destination Infinity document as a visual aid to talk about a couple of ideas. The few people who have seen it think it looks very authentic. My Dad, for example, thought it was an actual ad I had laying around. This case of mistaken identity reminded me of this quote in Michael Caine's book on acting:

...rehearsing can be a good test of your spontaneity: if you're running lines with an other actor and the assistant director comes up and says, "Sorry to interrupt your rehearsal," you've failed. If he comes up and says, "Sorry to interrupt your chat," then you're on the right course. Your lines should sound like spontaneous conversation, not like acting at all. And that comes from actively listening (pg. 69).

Similarly, you don't want someone talking about your "prop." You want someone talking about your perpetual motion device, or lobby card, or whatever. But while the Destination Infinity document apparently looks authentic, I don't believe that it would fool a specialist. There is probably something about the layout or the particular combination of images that wouldn't ring true. I'm not talking about knowing that the images come from the film Phantom Planet. It would be more along the lines of knowing that certain kinds of layouts or marketing appeals weren't used back then.

Note that I don't see this as a liability. Performance is not about fooling people. It is not about making a perfect counterfeit. Rather, it is a kind of embodied understanding. One observes carefully and then impersonates someone or something else but without losing a sense of oneself. The performance is the intersection between one's own understanding and the material expressed publicly. While there may be things to rehearse or research, the performance is made lively not by trying to be correct, but by the fullness and depth of one's knowledge and experience. It is as if one is swept away by a tide of understanding.

What this means is that as in certain kinds of actors' performances, one's consciousness is not set on various effects but on completing a hypothetical task. The liveliness and richness of the performance seeps out the edges of the task; it is not indicated. For instance, now that I look at the Destination Infinity document, I notice all sorts of things that I hadn't before. It is as if I unknowingly adopted the Freudian consciousness of the time. The rocket in the background is a sexual allusion. The tagline ("Do you dare make the journey") highlights an adolescent conflict between sexual longing and a fear of the unknown. If I had tried to put these elements in consciously they would have looked forced.

Therefore, when people comment on the authenticity of the lobby card, I think they are really commenting on several things. First, there is a certain amount of technical accuracy gained from research and training. I know from training that the type—Univers—was mid-century (1957). The images come from the public domain Phantom Planet released in 1961. The design/color of the card was derived from lobby card images I found on the web including 1957's Back From the Dead and 1963's Invasion of the Star Creatures.

The piece also embodies a lot of my own experience. I remember seeing lobby cards in theaters—the ones that looked like b/w photos. I also drew from my background in old-school graphics techniques. The woman's hair is cutout roughly partly because I was lazy, but also because that's what it looked like when you cut rubylith overlays—back then there were no bluescreens or bezier curves. I framed the small photos using lines slightly thicker than a point on purpose. I remember once, long ago, I got lightly reprimanded by a printer because I specified the insertion of a photo within a hairline frame: the tolerance was too tight. So the Infinity piece has a heavy, simple, opaque look. This appearance comes from designing with larger tolerances and a manually assembled plate in mind.

But beyond all this, is the sense of performance. For me, performance is not a loss of identity, but a presentation of identity. It is an analysis in which the result is not a typology of features but a kind of anthropology embodied within an artistic form.