#3: Acting Old: Ageing as Screen Performance
Free in-person public lecture by our team member Dr. Alexandre Moussa, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris-3
29.11.2023, 6-8 p.m.
Goethe University Frankfurt, Campus Westend PEG-Building, Room 1G191
In recent years, several European films released in movie theaters have cast middle-aged stars in order to portray characters of an older age: relevant examples that come to mind are Alex Lutz playing a washed-up pop singer in Guy (Alex Lutz, 2018), Tilda Swinton embodying her character’s mother in The Eternal Daughter (Joanna Hogg, 2022) or Elsa Zylberstein as an ageing Simone Veil in Simone, le voyage du siècle (Olivier Dahan, 2022). This presentation would be the occasion to build a corpus of those films in order to answer several questions, the first of which is: how does one ‘act old’? How much do actors rely on external support such as make-up, costume and accessories (McLean, 2022) or, more recently, CGI? What ‘eloquent’ gestures (Pearson, 1992), postures or voice alterations do they use to express the transition to old age? What kind of narrative and visual frameworks allow these performances to be believable and how well are they received? More broadly, this presentation would not only question the shape that those transformations take in films but also their underlying ideology: because of their excessive nature, they indeed tend to rely on, reinforce or make a caricature out of gender norms of ageing. What perception of old age they tend to build? In order to explore those issues, I would blend textual analysis of film acting in the tradition of James Naremore (1988) and interviews with the professionals behind these spectacular transformations (makeup and CGI artists, costume designers, and if possible, actors and actresses).
Image credit: “Claire Darling”, directed by Julie Bertuccelli, produced by Yael Fogiel and Laetitia Gonzalez, 2018.
Here you can find a brief summary of the lecture written by Dr. Alexandre Moussa:
Here you can also find the audio recording of the lecture:
Related films:
1. Guy is a 2018 French comedy film directed, written and starring Alex Lutz.
2. The Eternal Daughter is a 2022 Gothic mystery drama film produced, written and directed by Joanna Hogg. It stars Tilda Swinton in a double role.
3. Simone Veil, A Woman of the Century is a 2019 French biographical drama film written and directed by Olivier Dahan. The film stars Elsa Zylberstein.
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