Phenomenology of an actor’s experience in filmic performance: a case of Malini

Abstract

Modernist approaches to acting practice has always been fascinated by the ways that the actor’s work in live theatre as well as on screen is understood, interpreted and further appreciated as a representation of meanings. The actor’s body is thus a tool or a communicative device via which the author’s ideas, conceptions, and thoughts are brought forward. This paper questions this representational ways of understanding acting in filmic performance and suggests an anti-representational modes of perceiving the actor’s work via phenomenological reading. Influenced by Melreau-Ponty’s phenomenology and its contemporary developments in cognitive sciences, this paper further proposes an enactive way to understand the actor’s art, while bringing the actor’s experience to the centre of the discussion. In order to do so, I shall introduces four ontological categories of the lived body via which, I will explore how the film actor’s performance can be seen as a lived temporality, spatiality, and intersubjectivity within filmic performance. Building upon such phenomenological interpretation of the body, I further elaborate one of the leading film actors’ works in Sri Lanka and argue how these phenomenalities of film acting can be applied to understand non-representation ways of enacting and perceiving acting.