[in]Transition

Jacob Smith’s 'Extra Local' combines an eloquent voice-over with an expertly edited set of clips and supporting materials. The result is an insightful essay about the labor of several young extras who appear in the background of a scene from the 1979 movie Breaking Away. As Smith notes in his supporting statement, the organization of the video combines two modes: the recursive mode, which replays the same clip in various ways, and the cumulative mode, which situates that clip within the context of several supporting materials. With these modes in mind, I think of the video as having a three-part structure: recursive, cumulative, and recursive.

This three-part structure does argumentative work. In brief, the first section introduces some useful terms from Michael Kirby’s theory of acting. The next section provides background on the film’s production, with a particular emphasis on the production’s use of non-professional locals as extras. The third section ties these two previously separate ideas together, using Kirby’s theory of acting to make sense of the extras’ contributions. 

I do not want to reveal too much about the argument here; instead, I would like to comment on the way that the video’s recursive-cumulative-recursive structure echoes the structure of the video’s argument on a formal level. As the video unfolds, it plants several different visual and aural ideas; then it ties those visual and aural ideas together in the final segment. The result is a kind of formal synthesis, artful in itself, but also very effective at reinforcing the argument’s progression. 

1. The initial recursive section runs for approximately three and a half minutes, and it shows a single clip from Breaking Away, or a portion of it, three times. First, we see the clip relatively unaltered; then we see a freeze frame with a zoom effect applied; then we see the entire clip again in slow (and progressively slower) motion. 

2. Over the next five minutes, the video shifts to cumulative mode, featuring a wide variety of materials, as when a passage from Breaking Away’s classically inspired score plays over an actuality from 1901 and then over photographs from Breaking Away’s premiere. 

3. Then the video shifts back to the recursive mode for the remaining five minutes, replaying the original scene half a dozen times (depending on how one counts the recursions). This final section begins at around 8:20 with the fourth iteration of the scene so far—that is, with a continuation of the repetitive series that had been interrupted by the cumulative portion several minutes before. And here I come to my key point: this new iteration synthesizes at least three distinct audiovisual ideas that had been planted before. It slows down progressively (like the third iteration), it freezes and zooms in (like the second iteration), and it does all this while continuing to play the classically inspired score from Breaking Away (introduced in the cumulative section). The result is an elegant fusion of form and argument. Formally, this gesture of pulling-together prepares us for what the video is doing rhetorically: it is pulling together the earlier exposition of Kirby’s theory with the recently introduced anecdotes about the extras. In so doing, the video is preparing us for a new turn in the argument. 

The video repeats the original clip several more times before it concludes. Each time, Smith adds another layer to the argument, and, each time, Smith adds another layer to the formal pattern. The result is a video where the eloquence of the audiovisual form echoes the eloquence of the argument itself. 

Far too often in performance studies, extras (to say nothing of day players, stunt performers, stand-ins, body doubles and other performers on the lighter end of the pay scale) get short shrift. The lion’s share of scholarly and critical literature on screen acting is devoted to star performance. Indeed, an entire subfield of cultural studies concentrates exclusively on celebrity performers as if the vast majority of performing artists and creative laborers working in various media industries were mere peons beneath scholarly notice. Smith’s excellent video essay is a welcome arrestation of a collective critical vision with a penchant for sweeping oversight. The attention and devotion paid to extras here blends the political and the personal in surprisingly moving way ways (the big 'reveal' midway through the essay had me grinning ear to ear). His analytical prowess is remarkable as he honors 'background' figures with the same lovingly careful close reading usually reserved for more privileged, 'foregrounded' movie stars. 

From the standpoint of videographic criticism, there is much to admire here: the canny use of zooming to enable our apprehension of different categories of acting; engagingly direct and colloquial narration (I like how Smith charmingly employs the recurring phrase 'I like how…'); the novel way of incorporating archival research; the celebration of the unsung contributions of local performers by juxtaposing newspaper photos with their artificially enlarged or emphasized appearances in the film; the concise thickening of the scene by connecting it visually to the preoccupation with local scenery and local residents evident in mid-20th century neorealists and early actualités. Above all, 'Extra Local' is an excellent reminder about the potential meaningfulness of even the most innocuous or overlooked of filmic elements—including the specificities of particular types of extras and the particularly of their activity. In this way, the essay actually reinforces certain production practices. Extras, once suitably costumed, are often lined up before a director (or AD) and particular extras are assigned to particular areas of a set based on the shot being captured and/or the situation depicted—not just to cultivate verisimilitude but to tacitly reinforce a particular feeling or idea. Not only is the expressive activity of an extra (and not just a star!) meaningful; their expressive bodies are always-already meaningful too.

One possibly significant query remains: what can be made of the tacit notion in this video essay that acting is 'feigned' behavior? There is an implication that if the extras in the scene Smith analyzes were only pretending to play a choreographed game of basketball (rather than practicing drills, as we see here), they’d be acting. But we also know that a great deal of (filmed) acting includes behavior that isn’t feigned—e.g., in this scene, Dennis Christopher isn’t pretending to ride a bike; he's actually riding it! By extension, if the extras had been filmed playing an actual game of basketball (say, in a representation of an outdoor gym class), would Smith say they were undertaking 'received' or 'simple acting?' (In the essay by Michael Kirby from which Smith is working, Kirby references real card games being played by extras in the background of theatrical productions as an example of received acting.) Perhaps, then, Smith unintentionally reveals the limitations of Kirby’s oft-cited taxonomy—especially if simple and complex acting can, at once, involve both simulated and actual behavior (and at the same time).