Article published in the «Cinema Journal» — 2012 — Vol. 51 — #3 (Spring) — pp. 129-136Our Dancing Daughters (Harry Beaumont, 1928) opens with a shot of an art-deco gold statuette of a dancing woman frozen midkick, her elbows jutting and her hair swinging. Dissolve to a pair of shoes in front of a three-way mirror. Then, another dissolve adds a woman's feet and legs. They begin to dance, fast, and soon we see that they belong to Diana (Joan Crawford), and she and we watch her dance into her clothes. In the mirror images she shares with the spectator, and in her exuberant dance, which she will not pause even to slip into her modern step-in underwear, Diana embodies a modern kinetic aesthetic—a kinaesthetic—of an active ludic femininity that encourages viewers to imagine and
emulate a playful subjectivity based on the lived, bodily experience of the dances and movement shared by both flapper spectators and flapper actresses. Joan Crawford's performance in the mirror reveals the character's sense of self as a fusion of being visible and kinetic. Diana is her body, and it is a moving body; she knows and experiences the world through its movement, even in the private moment of dressing in the mirror. Yet this moment it is not private but, rather, shared by the spectator, who is also herself engaged in the gaze at Diana's performance of herself for herself. The definition of "performance" is contested by Performance Studies scholars, but common ground emerges around the idea that performance, whether on stage, before a camera, or in everyday life, is an action done for someone, even if that person is the performer him- or herself. And so there is a doubling, a sense of an Other, either in the actor taking on a character or in the idea of performance for an audience. Watching a film is both a direct and mediated experience of direct experience as mediation. We both perceive a world within the immediate experience of an "other" and without it, as immediate experience mediated by an "other." Watching a film we can see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as see the moved. As viewers, not only do we pontaneously and invisibly perform these existential acts directly for and as ourselves in relation to the film before us, but these same acts are coterminously given to us as the film, as mediating acts of perceptioncum expression we take up and invisibly perform by appropriating and incorporating them into our own existential performance; we watch them as a visible performance distinguishable from, yet included in, our own.
