Gesture in Orphan Black

David F. Bell

When I was 14, I had a crush on Hayley Mills. It was 1961, when the original version of The Parent Trap opened, and I went to see it repeatedly, charmed by the young English ingénue. There were no VCRs or DVD players or Netflix streaming then, and viewing meant paying the price of entry each time I saw the film. I was spellbound by a movie in which the same actress played the roles of twin sisters. Precisely what portion of the charm was generated by the features of the actress or by the magic of the caching technique, which allowed her to appear simultaneously as different characters within the same frame, I cannot say for certain now. My recollection is veiled by what I have subsequently learned about cinema and did not know at the time. Little did I realize then, for instance, that Bette Davis had already accomplished the feat of playing twins long before The Parent Trap.A Stolen Life (1946) featured her in the dual role of twin sisters in a film focused more on Davis's portrayal of the contrasting characters than on the cinematographic technique that so intrigued me in The Parent Trap. Davis was to reprise the double role motif in Dead Ringer (1964), with the emphasis once again on her bravura portrayal of twins with quite different psychological traits in a film that was viewed at the time as a vehicle for her acting gifts. But even before the Davis films, Danny Kaye had played twin roles in Wonder Man (1945), and Betty Hutton did the same in the 1944 film Here Come the Waves, and indeed the theme was already well established in the silent period, with Dorothy Phillips as 'twins' appearing together in trick shots in the 1919 The Right to Happiness. In short, there was a cinematic history of twin roles played by the same actor of which I was blissfully unaware.

As for the younger me, I remember well that the cinematographic caching technique played a prominent role in the way I understood The Parent Trap. I did not have the slightest inkling then how it worked – I simply felt its effects. There was a long road to travel before I was to realize that far from being a technical discovery along an idealized evolutionary timeline in the history of film, caching was, quite to the contrary, at the very origin of cinema history. The radically darkened Parisian stage theatres of the late nineteenth century, where Georges Méliès learned his craft, were the sites of trick lighting effects, completely obscuring parts of the visual frame on stage to simulate, for example, guillotined heads separating preternaturally from their bodies. Pre-cinematic theatre already used caching as a key special effect, and the gestural violence of cutting the body into parts, made possible by the illusion, was a ready-made motif.

The simplest caching effects achieved in early cinematography involved blocking out half of the frame by obstructing the camera lens and filming a shot with action in the exposed half field, then rewinding the film stock to the beginning of the shot and reversing the procedure, blocking out the opposite half of the lens and filming action in the other half field (hence the term 'caching' from the French verb cacher, to hide). The two half-frame shots combined into a full frame on the film stock create the illusion that the action in each half frame, temporally divergent in the filming process, is simultaneous. There are important constraints on shots composed in this simplest of manners, and those constraints carry over into more complicated techniques. The background must remain completely stable. Movement in the scenery that disturbs the fit between split frame parts undermines the effect of simultaneity. Moreover, if shots using the same actor are at stake, a stand-in double is often positioned in the cached portion of the frame, because the naturalness of a supposedly concurrent social interaction between two people is otherwise difficult to simulate. Playing to a void while maintaining a sense of dialogue and interaction will falter at some point, but even the attempt to resolve this difficulty by using a stand-in double does not completely solve the problem. Something crucial about animate movement and gesture is at stake here. Gesture is an intensely social interaction: forced to imagine an absent other, or to interact with a substitute other in the form of a stand-in, an actor invariably misses the mark at some point. A perceptible artificiality and occasional timing faults haunt the frame – the ghost of a missing spontaneous social exchange.

Therein lies the rub, which was to become the centre of my reflections on gesture and movement in cinema: as much as I enjoyed watching sequences where caching made it possible to present twins played by the same actor on screen simultaneously, there were always moments when the illusion was broken. In The Parent Trap, twins Susan and Sharon, facing each other in synchronized shots, occasionally did not make eye contact in a way that matched what one might expect – the angle of the gaze was slightly off. Or a reaction gesture after a dialogue line was slightly ill timed and did not quite fit the flow of the conversation. Why? In 1961, I attributed those moments to errors, flawed synchronization, timing faults, technical glitches I thought could be corrected. Why had these slight fissures in the continuity of such scenes not been properly fused? It seemed easy enough to me at the time.

Fast forward to Orphan Black. And then imagine the star-struck teenager of 1961 morphing into an Orphan Black fanboy of 2017. Indeed, one of the ways of consuming a popular contemporary television series is to join the fan base. Loyal viewers exchange information and comments online, often imagining different narrative directions that the story lines could take and writing different scripts to explore them (see, for example, Jenkins 2006). For Orphan Black fans, Tatiana Maslany's evolving performance, embodying multiple clones, is a constant source of discussion and admiration. It far surpasses the extreme simplicity, in hindsight, of the twin characters in The Parent Trap. And the high-tech caching techniques employed by the producers to display the cloned roles simultaneously on screen also receive strong billing in fan discussions. Accompanied by these incessant social media exchanges focused on key features that characterize the series, I am plunged back into the fundamental elements that defined my early experience of The Parent Trap – but this time to the nth degree. Moreover, the Orphan Black producers, Graeme Manson and John Fawcett, have seemed hell-bent from the outset to highlight their own technical prowess for their fans, creating season-ending scenes that put as many of the clone figures into the same frame as possible: the dancing sequence at the end of Season 2, in which the four main clones (Sarah, Alison, Helena and Cosima) dance together in the same space (BBC America 2014b), or the dinner sequence at the end of Season 3, in which they are seated at the same table, have become iconic (BBC America 2015). Manson and Fawcett go further: they take an almost perverse pleasure in peeling back the surface and revealing features of the sophisticated manipulations that create the illusion of simultaneous presence of several clone characters on screen, posting behind-the-scenes videos on YouTube – the Wizard of Oz (1939) unmasked. There are no more secrets about how the caching is done. We are shown green screen shots onto which backgrounds will be layered in post-production, as well as the TechnoDolly robot mechanism with its mounted camera that allows complicated camera motion to be duplicated with great precision by repeating a computer-programmed sequence of movements as many times as necessary (including automatic focus and zooming). No less crucial are the simpler spatial marking techniques revealed in these clips, since they allow Tatiana Maslany to situate her body and gestures correctly in the complicated spatial arrangements and angles necessary to establish the continuity of the cached shots in which she plays two or more clone roles in the same frame (actually four in the two scenes mentioned above).

The spell created by my experience as a 14-year-old is broken, but simultaneously – and unexpectedly – intensified. The teenager knew nothing about the technical magic required to construct a video image in a frame; his present counterpart knows markedly more and revels in arcane information about the techniques employed. Could this be a parable about what it means to become a critical (suspicious?) reader of texts, or images? Pleasure in exposing the technological marvels that allow the intricate staging that is such a vital part of Orphan Black is an undeniable dimension of this most modern of viewing experiences. Appreciating the mechanics of the techniques, as they are exposed in various YouTube videos about the series, corresponds strikingly to the gratification produced by exploring the sophisticated literary mechanisms that induce readers to lose themselves in a narrative or poem. Importantly, fundamental lessons about human interaction lie at the heart of caching techniques. Understanding these is the fruit of a critical labour originally triggered by my fascination with The Parent Trap. When assembling the layers of images to create the synchronized shots that display multiple clones in the same frame in Orphan Black, the illusion of actual social interaction can never quite be fully realized. Re-creating the embodied nature of social interaction, the fact that interlocutors move in what one might describe as an elaborate gestural dance in the presence of one another, is an aesthetic goal that can be attained only imperfectly, despite the extraordinary richness of the means now available to the filmmakers.

One of the early YouTube videos posted by the series producers highlights the difficulties of staging social interaction in shots when Tatiana Maslany plays more than one clone role and when the clones exchange dialogue while engaging in complex movements (BBC America 2013a). At stake in the clip is one of the first scenes in Season 1 of the series when Maslany actually plays three clones at once in the same frame in the family room of Alison's house, where Sarah, Alison and Cosima discuss the dangers that confront them. Graeme Manson begins with a statement of principle: 'That scene where Tatiana is playing three characters within the same frame is not conducive to organic acting'. The composed shot features two stand-in doubles with whom Maslany must interact as she alternately plays the roles of Alison, Sarah and Cosima in a series of different takes. She must switch roles and do new shots with a stand-in double now placed in a position she herself has just occupied. Manson lists some of the elements that must be combined in such shots: 'Getting all the timing down in that motion control, changing her wardrobe, playing the whole scene again with all the timing, getting it right, playing the scene empty and then doing it again, switching all the wardrobe and everything and getting into the third character'. The caching and layering that compose the frames require not only timing, but the ability to play off the stand-ins to maintain a sense of continuity in dialogic exchanges. Maslany reinforces the description of the degree of acting difficulty. She must position herself with respect to an intricate series of 'marks', which indicate the precise angles of her body when she turns, where she should look, where she should move and stop. As she puts it, she must replicate the 'motions I'm supposed to do', presumably meaning both the movements of the characters through the frame and also the sets of gestures accompanying those movements: 'I'm talking to, like, a mark on the wall over there, and then I look over here and I'm talking to this mark [...] and I'm trying to, also, like, do the motions I'm supposed to do, be on my cues, like, it's very, very, very, very, very technical'. Manson reasserts the essential points in his own summary: 'The dialogue has to be matching, all the timing has to work. It's incredibly difficult and requires, like, extremely technical acting on her part'.

As we begin to unpack the comments by Graeme Manson and Tatiana Maslany accompanying this brief video, the first thing to note is the binary opposition proposed between 'organic acting' and 'technical acting' – a distinction excellently discussed by Grobe in this volume. 'Organic' indicates the tenor of a shot in which actors exchange dialogue and move in tandem in the presence of each other on the set and in the frame. It refers to something like the continuity that is possible when actors interact with one another, playing off each other as the shot unfolds. In the remarks by Manson and Maslany, the notion of the organic becomes an ideal towards which the filmmaker and actor strive – easier to approach when an actor plays a single role accompanied by another actor, or other actors, in a shot. 'Technical' acting, on the other hand, is required when filming shots without the benefit of the continuity of an unfolding dialogic relation in real time, and it incorporates the full panoply of sophisticated caching techniques: playing to the correct marks; turning in the right direction, at the proper angle, in order to acknowledge the presence of another character, who may be there in the form of a stand-in, or may not be there at all ('playing the scene empty', as Manson puts it); placing the stand-ins in positions that will later be occupied by Maslany herself as she embodies another clone; hitting the timing of the intricate movements, face offs and dialogue exchange exactly right – or at least right enough to pass the viewing test. To reach a level of seamlessness that fools the viewer gives pleasure to the crew, as Maslany candidly admits: 'But there's something cool about being able to sell that shot with the three people in it. You want to get it, like, perfectly right. It's a kind of totally unnatural way of working, but it's, like, finding the freedom in that is the challenge'. The key is to naturalize the tricks, and then, within the multiple constraints they impose on the filmmaker and actor, to find some freedom, as Maslany puts it.

Unspoken by Manson and Maslany in this clip is an extended debate about continuity and montage dating back to early cinema, just like the caching technique itself. Broadly speaking, assembling individual shots into sequences can, on the one hand, make the cuts between shots extremely visible. For example, if the filmmaker juxtaposes shots of an unfolding action with shots that suggest symbolic meanings, shots that do not belong at all to the setting or the developing diegetic action of a scene. What Sergei Eisenstein first called a 'montage of attractions' confronts the spectator with emotional shocks elicited by unexpected associated shots grafted into a sequence to suggest ideas beyond immediate actions. Or, alternately, the filmmaker seeks to minimize the shocks that occur while assembling the shots into sequences by limiting to the maximum extent the spectator's perception of shot-to-shot transitions. The goal would be an ideal of continuity in which the spectator would not notice that sequences are always composed of separate shots. Montage is located on a spectrum that spans the gamut from the highly visible (Eisenstein's emotional shocks, for example) to near invisibility (the continuity tricks that every film school teaches budding filmmakers). If montage can never completely disappear, it can be occulted if the filmmaker so chooses.

The assumption at work in the intricate caching techniques used to construct the scenes in which multiple clones appear is that continuity, the very invisibility of the techniques, is the ultimate goal. But the artificial manufacturing of continuity in cached scenes comes at a cost and leaves traces. A quick detour into the French director Jean Renoir's film aesthetics, under André Bazin's guidance, highlights the problem. Bazin's analysis of Renoir's technique in La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) (1939) goes to the heart of the complex notion of continuity. Bazin emphasizes the fundamental interplay of actors with each other and with their surroundings – in a supposed continuum – as extended shots unfold in La Règle du jeu:

Technically this conception of the screen assumes what I shall call lateral depth of field and the almost total disappearance of montage. [...] [T]he mise en scène cannot limit itself to what is presented on screen. [...] The action is not bounded by the screen, but merely passes through it. And a person who enters the camera's field of vision is coming from other areas of the action, and not from some limbo, some imaginary 'backstage'. Likewise, the camera should be able to spin suddenly without picking up any holes or dead spots in the action.

(Bazin 1992: 89, original emphasis)