Screen Acting

Peter Kramer, Alan Lovell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317972495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

While not everyone would agree with Alfred Hitchcock's notorious remark that 'actors are cattle', there is little understanding of the work film actors do. Yet audience enthusiasm for, or dislike of, actors and their style of performance is a crucial part of the film-going experience. Screen Acting discusses the development of film acting, from the stylisation of the silent era, through the naturalism of Lee Strasberg's 'Method', to Mike Leigh's use of improvisation.
The contributors to this innovative volume explore the philosophies which have influenced acting in the movies and analyse the styles and techniques of individual filmmakers and performers, including Bette Davis, James Mason, Susan Sarandon and Morgan Freeman. There are also interviews with working actors: Ian Richardson discusses the relationship between theatre, film and television acting; Claire Rushbrook and Ron Cook discuss theri work with Mike Leigh, and Helen Shaver discusses her work with the critic Susan Knobloch.

1

INTRODUCTION

Peter Krämer and Alan Lovell

Recently there has been a revival of interest in film acting. Books like James Naremore’s Acting in the Cinema have provided thoughtful and detailed analyses of actors’ performances. Collections of interviews, such as Carole Zucker’s Figures of Light have encouraged film actors to discuss their work in an illuminating way.¹ However, it’s still a limited and relatively undeveloped area of film scholarship. Our collection of essays is designed to support development of the area.²

The starting point for our work is a concern with the basics of film acting. What do actors do to create a performance? What are their specific skills? What are the general ideas which inform the use of those skills? We have organized the book so that the concern is expressed at two different levels. At one level there are studies of, or interviews with, individual actors like Bette Davis, Fredric March, James Mason, Ian Richardson, Susan Sarandon, and Helen Shaver. At the other level, there are accounts of the general context within which actors have worked. These accounts include discussions of the relationship between early film and theatre acting, the work of studio drama coaches, the adaptability of ‘the Method’ for cinema acting, the importance of the voice, and the distinctive ways in which directors use actors.

Taking advantage of the range and depth of recent scholarship on American cinema, this collection focuses primarily on Hollywood acting. Although the essays do not constitute a systematic history of Hollywood film acting, they do cover the major developments within it, from the very beginnings up to the present day. In doing so our contributors establish links with traditions in British acting, in particular its influence on early American cinema and with acting in other media like theatre and television. In fact a strong theme running through this collection is the intimate relationship between theatre and film acting with performers, teachers, and ideas moving freely between the two media. Not coincidentally, several of our contributors have a background in Theatre Studies, where acting has been a much more central preoccupation than it has been in Film Studies.

Why has acting been neglected by academic film scholarship? After all, it was an important concern for early theorists of the cinema like Vsevolod Pudovkin, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Bela Balazs, and Rudolf Arnheim. The main reason for its more recent neglect was the way Film Studies as an academic discipline grew out of the second wave of theorizing about the cinema. That theorizing was powerfully stimulated by writings of the Cahiers du Cinéma critics in the 1950s and 1960s. From these writings, Film Studies took authorship as a central concern.³ Authorship made the director the key figure in film making. As a consequence, the creation of a film became increasingly regarded as an individual rather than a collective process. The contributions of actors, along with cinematographers, editors, sound recordists, production designers, etc. was, if acknowledged at all, subordinated to the director’s genius.

As part of the discussion of authorship, mise-en-scène came to be accepted as a basic tool for the analysis of films. It’s a tool which isn’t particularly amenable to a discussion of film acting. In so far as actors play a part in it, they are one of the elements, along with setting, lighting and costume, which are ‘put into the scene’. This encourages actors to be regarded as visual objects. This can easily lead to their being regarded as puppets of the director. However Hitchcock meant it, his remark that ‘actors are cattle’ captures this view exactly. The work of actors is further neglected because of the way the notion of mise-en-scène either excludes or downplays sound. By principally regarding actors as visual objects, the use of the voice – a key part of acting – is neglected.

Mise-en-scène isn’t a precisely defined analytical tool. It has a looseness which comes from its place in the development of film criticism since the term was appropriated from the theatre by French critics in the 1950s. It emerged out of the important struggle to free film from literature, to direct serious attention to a film’s visual quality. In the struggle to demonstrate how important the visuals are in a film, mise-en-scène was often equated with the ‘writing’ of a film. It is through the deployment of mise-en-scène that a film is created. The enemy, of course, in this struggle was the script because it was equated with literature. Put crudely, a film wasn’t written with words but with images.

The struggle to free film from literature needed to be fought but it had some unfortunate consequences for film criticism. The primary one was the neglect of the script. Sporadic efforts have been made to direct attention to the work of screenwriters but there has been no serious analysis of scripts in terms of their narrative construction, the way characters are created, or the kind of dialogue that has been written.⁴ One result of this is that the discussion of scripts has come to be dominated by the simplistic accounts offered by Sid Field, Robert McKee, and other script writing gurus.

This neglect of the script has impoverished film scholarship generally and has had a particularly important effect on explorations of acting. A number of contributions in this book deal with the relationship between actor and script. It’s clear from these that there are different kinds of relationship, depending on such factors as acting philosophies of the approaches of particular directors and writers. Actors trained by studio drama coaches of the 1930s and 1940s were likely to be more respectful of the script than Method actors: the intimate contribution to the work of creating a script encourages the actors in Mike Leigh’s films to have a greater involvement with it than is the case in films by other directors. But however different the relationship is, there always is one. To understand acting properly, you need to know not only about the way actors work but also about the nature of the materials they are working with.

A proper understanding of the nature of scripts is important at another, more general, level. Acting doesn’t develop in a self-enclosed way. It develops in a close relationship with the way scripts are written. Stanislavsky’s approach was very much a response to the new naturalistic plays of writers like Chekhov. ‘The Method’ was a response to the social psychological drama which was written for the American theatre and cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. The relationship isn’t, of course, one way: writers are also encouraged to develop their writing by the possibilities opened up by new approaches to acting.⁵

The preoccupation with authorship and mise-en-scène in Film Studies undoubtedly limited the interest in acting. But from the mid-1970s, this preoccupation was subsumed into a broader semiological/psychoanalytic position. This development encouraged some interest in acting but its principal themes never made the interest anything but marginal.

Those themes might be broadly characterized as the specificity of the cinema and its ideological effects. Discussion of the specificity of the cinema proceeded from the modernist assumption that all art forms have their specificities. The cinema was taken to be essentially a visual medium. If it was close to any of the other arts, it was painting. Inevitably acting is of limited importance when such a comparison is made. If the assumption of art forms having distinct identities hadn’t been accepted, if the cinema had been regarded as a hybrid form, as much a dramatic medium as a visual one, with relations to theatre as well as painting, acting would have assumed a more important place.

The problems this creates can be seen in Laura Mulvey’s extremely influential article, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.⁶ For Mulvey, the cinema is a visual medium, so voyeurism becomes a key concept. The psychic mechanisms of mainstream cinema make actresses objects to look at. Mulvey doesn’t recognize that they have to use their faces, bodies, and voices expressively and that to do this demands intelligence and perception. The unintended consequence of this approach is that the considerable skills and abilities of a wide range of actresses, from Bette Davis to Susan Sarandon, go ignored. To take one example from our collection, Susan Knobloch’s discussion with Helen Shaver indicates the varied skills and sophisticated technical awareness a good actress employs in her work.

Ideology was a central concept for the semiological/psychoanalytic position. A fundamental critical operation has been the close analysis of films to identify their ideological meanings. This operation rather confused discussion of the cinema’s specificity. It encouraged a view of films as ‘texts to be read’. As such, the obvious analogy is with literature. The result is no more favourable to an interest in acting: if a film is like a novel, the dimension of performance is lost.

More broadly, any position which makes ideology central is likely to have a bias against forms of make-believe, like fictional narratives, which invent stories and use human beings to represent other human beings. In the most radical form of this position, all forms of fiction in the cinema were regarded with great suspicion. Obviously, actors have no place in such a position. In a more moderate form, the attitude to fiction associated with the work of Bertolt Brecht was valued; as a consequence, Brecht’s ideas about acting aroused interest.⁷ Since these ideas had little impact on the cinema – no school of Brechtian actors developed to match the impact of the Method – they didn’t stimulate a sustained interest in problems of film acting.

Not all the responsibility for the neglect of acting by Film Studies can be put on the semiological/psychoanalytic approach. Ever since Richard Dyer’s book⁸ was published in 1979, there has been a considerable interest in stars amongst film scholars of varying intellectual positions. Such an interest might reasonably be expected to generate a strong concern with acting. It hasn’t done so for two main reasons.

1 The discussion has never properly freed itself from the belief that stars are a special category, differentiated from other actors by some ineffable ‘star quality’. Nor has it freed itself from a residual acceptance of the popular belief that ‘stars can’t act’. The consequence of this has been that stars have been separated off from the general run of film actors. They haven’t been seen as facing most of the same problems, or of having similar skills for dealing with those problems, as other actors.

2 The study of stars has been powerfully affected by the concern with identifying ideological effects. Individual stars are regarded as texts to be analysed. The analysis then integrates the star into the film’s ideological meanings or connects him/her with more general ideological systems. So a great deal of interest has been shown in other textual areas like those created by publicity and advertising. Whatever the merit of these analyses, they direct interest away from performance.

As well as unfavourable theoretical paradigms, there are practical problems which hinder the development of the study of film acting. Discussion of theatrical acting is greatly helped by the fact that there are many productions of a central core of plays. It then becomes possible to compare actors’ performances, to distinguish what an individual actor brings to the role and to make judgements about this. The comparison is given weight by the easy availability of definitive versions of the play scripts. The nearest film comes to this is with occasional remakes. In her essay on the two versions of A Star Is Born, Roberta Pearson takes advantage of one of these remakes to compare the performances. But as her discussion makes clear, the differences between the two versions are considerable. The relationship between a film and its remake is much looser than the relationship between different productions of the same play, even when allowances are made for the script alterations which are common in the theatre.

Both in theatre and cinema, acting is an elusive art. A performance is made out of a large number of actions, gestures, facial and vocal expressions. It’s made all the more elusive when the dominant acting convention is a naturalistic one.⁹ Viewing a naturalistic performance, it’s easy to assume that the gestures, actions, and expressions are the only appropriate ones – anybody would have lit a cigarette at a moment like that! The decisions the actor has made are invisible. Given this, it becomes almost inevitable that the actor disappears into the character or, vice versa, the character disappears into the actor: it is assumed that Humphrey Bogart was brave, had a strong personal code of honour and a nice line in wit! Many analyses of film acting are in fact discussions of a fictional character (whose creation is the work of a writer) rather than analyses of how that character is embodied (the work of an actor).

To add to ail these practical problems, the way technology mediates acting in the cinema is a disincentive to taking it seriously. The effect of camerawork and picture editing, sound recording and editing have to be taken into account in the discussion of film acting. In such a context, it is all too easy for the work of the individual actor to be discounted.

As we’ve indicated, our collection hasn’t been designed as a systematic or comprehensive collection. However, the connections the authors make at various points do suggest how a more substantial account of film acting might be developed. In their respective essays, David Mayer, Cynthia Baron, and Sharon Carnicke deal with key periods in the history of film acting. Taken together, they constitute the basis for a serious history of American film acting.

Understanding how acting developed in the early cinema is obviously crucial to constituting a proper history. David Mayer questions existing accounts which have opposed an excessive melodramatic style of acting to a more restrained, ‘naturalistic’ one. He also questions an account that sees the more restrained style beginning to become dominant from around 1910. Against this, he points to a variety of theatrical traditions which informed silent film acting and the persistence of extended gesturing into the 1910s and possibly throughout the whole of the silent period.

The studio era of film making in the 1930s and 1940s is often seen as a bleak period for film acting, only warmed by individual genius. Through her discussion of acting coaches, Cynthia Baron’s account demonstrates this to be a limited view. Generally, there was a conscious concern with the demands of film acting. The driving force for much of this concern was people formed by the Stanislavsky-influenced American theatre of the period. Many of the ideas, still dominant in contemporary film acting, were first put into practice then. Given this account of studio era acting, the break with the Method seems much less dramatic than is presented in established accounts.

Any history of American film acting obviously has to engage with the impact of the Method. Sharon Carnicke outlines the ways in which it was a particular reading and appropriation of Stanislavsky’s ideas by Lee Strasberg. She suggests this reading encouraged a downgrading of the importance of the script, an emphasis on emotional memory and sense recall, and an upgrading of the role of the director, working closely with and on the actor. Carnicke goes on to suggest reasons why this approach became influential in Hollywood cinema, despite Strasberg’s attempts to distance himself and his actors from Hollywood.

Clearly the Method did have an important influence on Hollywood film acting. However, if some of the other essays are read in the context of Baron and Carnicke’s essays, it seems likely that this influence has been exaggerated. The ideas which underpin Helen Shaver’s and Susan Sarandon’s approaches to acting owe more to the basic Stanislavskian ideas established in the st...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Acting in silent film: Which legacy of the theatre?
• 3 Crafting film performances: Acting in the Hollywood studio era
• 4 Bette Davis: Malevolence in motion
• 5 A star performs: Mr March, Mr Mason and Mr Maine
• 6 Lee Strasberg’s paradox of the actor
• 7 Susan Sarandon: In praise of older women
• 8 Helen Shaver: Resistance through artistry
• 9 Actors and the sound gang
• 10 Secrets and Lies: Acting for Mike Leigh
• 11 An interview with Ian Richardson: Making friends with the camera
• 12 Bibliographical notes
• Bibliography
• Index