3. Pantomime in Stone: Performance of the Pose and Animal Camouflage

This essay addresses cinema slapstick stars as figures of the body poised between flesh and stone: by matching the gestures of stone with those both of the statue and of the mineral as such, the silent actor becomes the emblem of how a body can be de-animated in a way that evokes at once certain pathological states and the freezing of a mimetic animal. Analysing in particular Charlie Chaplin’s work with gesture in his first encounters with statues and in the famous “fight” with the marble group of City Lights (1933), the paper interrogates the aesthetic meaning of the pose within the wider process of the de-humanising of the actor’s body as theorised in early film theories, in which one leading model was animal mimicry.