Pantomime in Stone: Performance of the Pose and Animal Camouflage

Under the influence of J.-F. Delsarte, the performing arts in the United States took the pose in the first instance as a part of an actor’s training and then as a stage number in its own right, whose charm was that the public was challenged to discriminate between statue and body, object and subject, stone and flesh. The essay interrogates the meaning of this type of spectacle at the cusp of dance, theatre and cinema within the wider process of the de-humanising of the actor’s body in the era of silent fijilm, in which the leading model is that of animal mimicry. Charlie Chaplin’s work with gesture is situated among pantomime, mimesis and mimicry, as we see in his encounters with statues in his first films and which is the underlying allegory of City Lights (1933). This last was being filmed in precisely the years that Roger Caillois was developing his theory of animal mimicry as at once creative and psychasthenic. More in general, this was a period in which aesthetics and anthropology were investigating imitative processes, their pathological roots and their potential for knowledge gathering. Chaplin’s body, at once animal and mineral, camouflages itself in a marble group, bringing to the screen in a wholly novel way the dialectic between the actor and his archive of gestures; this is then the highpoint of the reassessment initiated by modernity of the statue as an emblem of a state that is only partially inanimate.