The Actress

Hollywood Acting and the Female Star

Karen Hollinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135205881
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star investigates the contemporary film actress both as an artist and as an ideological construct. Divided into two sections, The Actress first examines the major issues in studying film acting, stardom, and the Hollywood actress. Combining theories of screen acting and of film stardom, The Actress presents a synthesis of methodologies and offers the student and scholar a new approach to these two subjects of study.

PART I

Acting, Stardom, and the Hollywood Actres

CHAPTER 1

The Hollywood Star–Actress and Studies of Acting

Scholarly considerations of film acting invariably begin by asserting that screen acting has been and still remains a neglected area of film scholarship, but this is really not the case anymore. There have been several book-length considerations of film acting,¹ some important anthologies,² a significant number of journal articles on film acting, and an abundance of collections of actor interviews.³ I would still agree with Scott McDonald, however, who asserts that “film studies has yet to provide any sustained inquiry into film acting,”⁴ and I would add that the work of the film actress has been particularly ignored. This chapter considers at some length why this is the case. It seeks to move beyond the mere assertion that screen acting, and in particular the study of the film actress, is neglected, to examine a number of problems involved in the study of acting in film and the screen actress in particular.

As Alan Lovell and Peter Krämer have suggested, the problems that plague investigations of film acting stem from practical issues and unfavorable theoretical paradigms in film scholarship.⁵ As critic after critic has pointed out, acting is a crucial aspect of the filmmaking process, yet even with a recent revival of interest in the subject, screen performance inexplicably remains one of the most undertheorized areas in film study. There are several reasons for this scholarly failure to interrogate successfully the complexities of the phenomenon of screen acting. First of all, it is exactly this view of acting as a phenomenon and a mystical art beyond the scope of methodical investigation that has prevented scholarly analysis. Early considerations of screen acting and even those currently found in the popular press approach film acting from what can be called the reverie approach, which sees performance as ineffable and seeks to discuss it through “adulation, anecdote, and reminiscence.”⁶

This approach led to the foregrounding of actor interviews in studies of film acting, which in turn resulted in acting being understood not as a “systematic or standardized process” that can be carefully examined with some objectivity by scholars, but instead as an intuitive, quasimystical, elusive art that is the particular individualized practice of particularly gifted individuals who consider it an almost religious experience.⁷ This reverie approach has been applied extensively to actresses, who are most often characterized not as skilled craftswomen, but rather as screen goddesses naturally gifted with the beauty and charisma that has made them stars.

A quote from Meryl Streep, who has even been referred to as “Magic Meryl” by journalists attempting to praise her acting talent, exemplifies this attitude perfectly. When asked by that guru of the reverie approach to screen acting, James Lipton, to describe her acting process on Bravo’s popular television interview program Inside the Actor’s Studio, she demurred:

I’m not really articulate about this subject because it is like church to me. I mean it’s like approaching the altar. I feel like the more I talk about whatever it is, the less … something will go away. I mean there is a lot of superstition in it. But I do know that I feel freer, less in control, more susceptible. I don’t know. I’m always accused of being a technical actress, and I am, I think, probably the least technical—what people think of as technical—actress in the world because I have really no way to talk about what we are talking about. I mean honestly.

She went on to claim that, when acting, she enters a “zone” in which she feels “really happy, somewhere deep, deep inside…and transported on some level to a place that [is] really like being in love.”⁸ One can see how difficult it is to enter into a methodical inquiry into acting described as such.

In fact, actor interviews are notoriously unreliable as sources for the methods used by screen actors. When actors talk about acting, they often do so in ways that are anecdotal, elliptical, mystifying, and indirect. No single approach seems to suit all actors, so reading actor interviews reveals startling disagreements. For instance, early movie actors repeatedly proposed that one of the major difficulties they had in acclimating to working in film, as opposed to acting in the theater, was getting used to the camera’s intrusive presence. They insisted that, to work effectively in film, it is necessary to disregard the camera entirely, pretend it is not there, and never under any circumstances play to the camera. Then, one comes across the words of Lillian Gish (not exactly a minor figure in the silent period), who insisted that she played directly to the camera and even had a mirror attached to its side so that she could see herself as she acted.⁹ What is one to make of that? Is she lying to tell a good story or are there really no consistent rules for effective screen acting?

Actors’ attitudes to the presence of the camera actually range from those who regard it as a foreign presence that must be ignored to those who see it as a friendly eye that must be acknowledged, cultivated, and even wooed as if it were a substitute for a live audience. Actors will also disagree considerably about the influence of film technology on screen acting, what they want from a director, whether they prefer to feel that they are working in an ensemble or alone, and how they prepare for a part. Really, actor interviews reveal disagreements about almost every aspect of film acting.

Film and Stage Acting: A Troubled Relationship

One aspect of film acting that often takes center stage in actor interviews is its troubled relationship to stage acting. One reason for film acting’s long history of critical neglect is film scholars’ tendency simply to follow the lead of many actors, who in interviews have compared, and still continue to compare, film acting unfavorably with stage acting. One can point to what amounts to a long crusade by stage actors to denigrate film acting as an unsophisticated amateurish second cousin to theater acting; this is portrayed, even by film actors, as the more sustained exercise in acting skills and commitment, the place where live performance offers the actor the ideal environment for perfecting his or her craft.

Yet, many scholars have pointed out that this bias against film acting is founded primarily on an antipathy to the technological aspects of filmmaking and that the characterization of stage acting as so much more liberating and enriching is really based only on anecdotal evidence from actors and on a long-standing denigration of film acting by actors dating back to the silent-film period. Others believe the compulsion actors seem to feel to compare film to stage acting could be the result of their difficulty in describing their acting process at all; therefore, they resort to saying what it is not.¹⁰ Unfortunately, the film- vs. stage-acting debate has spawned only impressionistic comparisons between the two acting forms, rather than the formulation of a consistent methodology to discuss film acting in ways that move beyond subjective description.

This is not to say that considerations of the differences between stage and film acting have not led to some useful analysis. One issue that has been discussed extensively involves exactly what defines acting in each medium. Scholars of acting have, however, found the matter of how exactly the work of the actor should be defined to be a rather thorny problem. For instance, acting has been described as having what Julia Kristeva termed an “anaphoric function,” which involves the construction of “a physical arrangement that arrays spectacle for persons in an audience role.” James Naremore added that it involves not only this high degree of ostentation or visibility by actors, but also the requirement that they must become an agent in a narrative.¹¹ As Paul McDonald has suggested, the actor must come together with a dramatic character to construct a believable, truthful, realistic performance (1998, 30). The task of the actor is thus to construct an inner model of a character and then convert that model into a believable enactment that gives the illusion of spontaneity for an audience, yet also allows for the creation of a repeatable performance.¹²

Building on this general definition of acting, critics have teased out numerous differences between acting for the stage and screen. They have argued, for instance, that the differences between acting for the two media are more quantitative than qualitative. The actor is said to do more on stage and less in film, adjusting vocally, expressively, and in use of gestures to the film medium by creating what some have called a narrower performance on film as opposed to the wider acting associated with theater. The prominence of the close-up in film is said to necessitate the actor’s greater concentration on facial expressions and acting with the eyes. The actor’s bond with the audience is also reputed to be different in film because the screen serves as an impenetrable barrier to actor–audience interaction, thus making the actor’s job of establishing some connection with the audience more difficult.

Yet, at the same time, the use of the close-up in film allows for a greater sense of audience–actor intimacy, creating what John Ellis has called the film medium’s “photo effect.”¹³ Because film actors have the appearance of being there and not being there, Ellis believes their fetishistic quality is heightened. As a result, their acting is transformed from the stage actor’s impersonation, attempting to become the character played, into the film star’s personification, seemingly playing oneself repeatedly in each performance (Naremore, 30). Even more negatively, other critics have proposed that because screen acting is so shaped by editing, technology, typecasting, and the star system, it is not acting at all, but merely the actor’s repeated presentation of a star image on the screen.

Clearly, the technical characteristics of the film medium do shape the contours of film acting. Because film scenes are customarily shot out of order so that scenes that take place in the same setting can be shot together, film performance is unquestionably more fragmented, discontinuous, and disunified than stage performance. Many critics have argued, however, that these characteristics actually make film acting more difficult than stage acting because it is hard to build a performance and maintain expressive coherence (i.e., create a unified character) on screen, where the actor performing in a particular scene has less sense of the work as a whole. It is difficult for an actor to live in story time, given the extremely fragmented nature of plot time during shooting, and the technical requirements of film acting also require specific acting skills.

In spite of the notion that film actors are just playing themselves, there is nothing more natural about acting in film than on stage, except that actors do not need to accentuate their performances vocally and with gestures as they must do in theater because of the audience’s distance from the stage. At the same time, however, the camera in many ways calls for acting that is not only technically informed, but also quite unnatural, counterintuitive, and artificial. Film actors must learn how to adapt their acting techniques and adjust the scale of their performance to variously angled shooting, blocked movements, and changes in shot distance and framing. For instance, tight framing requires that actors show unnatural stillness and restraint, act in close proximity to each other, and stifle their automatic reactions to stay in frame (Naremore, 40). All of this is far from what might be considered natural, yet the myth still persists that film acting simply involves “making it real.” For example, in his manual of screen acting, Tony Barr recommends, “On stage you can give a performance. In front of a camera, you’d better have an experience.”¹⁴

Technical aspects of filmmaking, especially the importance of editing in film, also give much more creative control to the director, who is often credited with almost single handedly constructing actors’ film performances. Theater actors are purported to have a greater opportunity to mold a part to their own designs because they are freer from directorial control. Film actors’ performances are often considered so “muddied” by technology and so controlled by the director that actors are said to become almost part of a film’s mise-en-scene, like visual props or puppets.¹⁵

Significant in this regard is the early influence of the Soviet silent filmmaker Lev Kuleshov’s famous experiment in editing. Kuleshov reputedly juxtaposed identical images of an actor’s expressionless face with various shots that would be expected to evoke very different emotions, such as sadness, joy, and hunger. He claimed that audiences believed that the actor actually changed expressions. Although the exact footage that Kuleshov shot has been lost and no one has been able to replicate his findings,¹⁶ his experiment was extremely influential in propagating the notion that, in film, acting is largely passive, if not completely insignificant. At best, film acting was seen as a war pitting the actor against the film apparatus and director. At worst, it was believed to fall into the realm of “received acting” (Naremore, 24), in which the actors perform totally under the instruction of the director without even knowing the significance of their actions.

The Dominance of the Realist Aesthetic

Clearly, this comparative approach has led more to the denigration of the work of the film actor than to a methodological analysis of the craft of film acting. Attempts to develop this type of analysis have been plagued not only by this constant comparison of film and theater acting, but also by a long tradition of subjective evaluations of film acting stemming from what Virginia Wright Wexman has called the dominance of the realist aesthetic in evaluations of film acting.¹⁷ Because film acting has traditionally been viewed as an intuitive, almost instinctive, activity described in acting manuals as “whatever works,” critics have in turn responded by evaluating good acting as whatever moves them emotionally and describing it in what James Naremore calls “fuzzy adjectival language” (Naremore, 2). As Wexman suggests, realist theories of acting, which look for its true-to-life quality, fail as critical tools because they “disallow consideration of specific acting techniques in favor of a rhetoric that valorizes the actor’s inner feelings and their putative authenticity” (1993, 20).

Yet the realist aesthetic has been extremely influential in thinking about film acting because of the reputed prominence of Method acting in film. There is, however, significant disagreement about the exact influence The Method has had on screen acting, and this issue has become a major area of scholarly dispute (more on this later). Nevertheless, terms like “a believable performance” or “a true-to-life portrayal” are too often used to praise a film performance with little sense of their lack of specificity and methodological rigor.

As Wexman points out, The Method’s conception of realistic acting, privileging as it does the actor’s internal acting process, makes it extremely difficult to study this process systematically (1993, 20). What often happens is that discussions of film acting employing the realist aesthetic tend to merge actor and character, as Method acting advocates, resulting in plot summaries of the actions of fictional characters, rather than analyses of how those characters are embodied by actors. Also troubling is the fact that Method acting has been strongly identified with male actors and used as a means of validating the superiority of their acting methods to those of actresses, who are seen as incapable of the emotional intensity and philosophical dept...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• The Author
• Part I Acting, Stardom, and the Hollywood Actres
• II Case Studies of Contemporary Star—Actresses
• Bibliography
• Index