Acting

Claudia Springer, Julie Levinson

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813572673
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Screen performances entertain and delight us but we rarely stop to consider actors’ reliance on their craft to create memorable characters. Although film acting may appear effortless, a host of techniques, artistic conventions, and social factors shape the construction of each role.  
The chapters in Acting provide a fascinating, in-depth look at the history of film acting, from its inception in 1895 when spectators thrilled at the sight of vaudeville performers, Wild West stars, and athletes captured in motion, to the present when audiences marvel at the seamless blend of human actors with CGI. Experts in the field take readers behind the silver screen to learn about the craft of film acting in six eras: the silent screen (1895–1928), classical Hollywood (1928–1946), postwar Hollywood (1947–1967), the auteur renaissance (1968–1980), the New Hollywood (1981–1999), and the modern entertainment marketplace (2000–present). The contributors pay special attention to definitive performances by notable film stars, including Lillian Gish, Dick Powell, Ginger Rogers, Beulah Bondi, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Nicholas Cage, Denzel Washington, and Andy Serkis.
  In six original essays, the contributors to this volume illuminate the dynamic role of acting in the creation and evolving practices of the American film industry.  
  Acting is a volume in the Behind the Silver Screen series—other titles in the series include Animation; Art Direction and Production Design; Cinematography; Costume, Makeup, and Hair; Directing; Editing and Special/Visual Effects; Producing; Screenwriting; and Sound. 
     

1

The Silent Screen, 1895–1927

Victoria Duckett

Vachel Lindsay’s Art of the Moving Picture was first published in 1915. One of the earliest attempts to assess acting in silent film critically, it today serves as an important guide to the nascent reception of screen acting in America. Lindsay not only asserts that acting on screen is an art form that must be taken seriously, but also argues that theatrical stars who exhibit the gestural style of the European theater have no place in the American cinema. Only those European films that can be recuperated through their impressive sets (Giovanni Pastroni’s 1913 Cabiria and later Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919, as cited in Lindsay’s 1922 edition of The Art of the Moving Picture) are considered innovative and cause for celebration.¹ Otherwise, it is individuals such as Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, William S. Hart, Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, and Lillian Gish who are presented as examples of actors who successfully negotiate the demands of the new medium. In 1915 (and also in 1922) these actors are all young, they all developed and honed their acting skills before the camera, and they together point to the ongoing development and success of film as both an artistic and a commercial industry.

Lindsay’s emphasis upon the “moving picture” reiterates the link he is drawing between the traditional fine arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, and architecture) and film. In his vision, the European theater and, with it, European actors have no place on screen. Lindsay cites Sarah Bernhardt’s performance in Camille (La Dame aux camélias, André Calmettes and Henri Pouctal, 1911), a film that was released in America in March 1912, as an example of Europe’s theatrical failure. He describes the film as a record of live stage acting and suggests that action was not modified for the camera, that it can be “compared to watching Camille from the top gallery through smoked glass, with one’s ears stopped with cotton.”² Lindsay was not just critical of the silence of Bernhardt’s film. He also believed that the film “lasts as long as would the spoken performance.”³ With the most famous living European actor thus cast as anachronistic intruder in an art form that Lindsay otherwise associated with youth and experimentation, Lindsay creates a division between continents, generations, and even art forms. Acting that had its provenance on the European stage and that was developed in the live theater not only stood in contrast to acting in the American cinema, it was its nemesis.

It has taken roughly a century for Lindsay’s criticism of Bernhardt in particular and of European acting more generally to be revised. Indeed, it is only recently, since the mid-1990s, that acting on silent film has been explored in terms of artistic exchange or collaboration with the live theater and that European acting on film has been explored as something more than a theatrical anachronism. Prior to the research of scholars such as Jon Burrows, Eric de Kuyper, Annette Förster, Christine Gledhill, and (in particular) David Mayer, acting on silent film was conceived in terms of a teleology that saw film take over the illusionism of the nineteenth-century stage, reaching maturity only when the American film industry dominated the world market during World War I. At this crucial juncture—which is precisely the moment in which Lindsay is writing—acting on film is associated with youthful actors trained in the cinema and screen acting becomes as “invisible” or “natural” as possible.⁴

In his pioneering article entitled “Acting in Silent Cinema: Which Legacy of the Theatre?” Mayer explains that acting on early film cannot be reduced to a single teleology and that film acting cannot be divorced from the live stage. Further, anachronistic “old style” theatrical acting expresses theatrical agency that we easily miss today. He states:

Conditioned as we are to performance through our late-twentieth-century experience of what we view as more-or-less realistic acting within a more-or-less realistic mise-en-scène, we are unable or unwilling to accept early actors’ work as an effective means of explicating narrative, clarifying character relationships, expressing appropriate or valid emotion, or providing aesthetic pleasure. We are conditioned to the camera as an instrument for recording truth and the actor’s performance as a means of validating that truth.⁵

Although Mayer focuses on the impact that Nicholas Vardac’s 1949 study Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith has had on sixty years of thinking about acting, his comments might also be addressed to the arguments that lace Lindsay’s book.⁶ Clearly, it is the separation between stage and screen acting, as well as the division between European and American actors and the Old and the New Worlds, that must today be redressed. Rather than repeat the model of an old European theater being usurped by a modern American cinema, or reiterate the idea that European actors and acting had no place on the nascent American screen, I contrast two of the actors that Lindsay himself isolates—the French actress Sarah Bernhardt in Camille and a young Lillian Gish—and explore the different acting styles they bring to American silent film. Both enormously famous for the idiosyncratic way they act on film, these actresses evidence very different gestures, acting tempo, and use of screen space. While Bernhardt’s films were developed against the backdrop of her experience on the late nineteenth-century stage, Gish’s films indicate the ways that acting began to capitalize upon small idiosyncratic actions and domestic props in the development of cinematic gestural language.

Rather than separate these actresses into a binary of old versus new, theatricality versus naturalism, good versus bad, and so on, I want to explore their differences in terms of their variety and change from the live theater. Indeed, we cannot discuss acting in the American silent cinema without acknowledging the very differences that were at play. Although today we consider “natural acting” appropriate to the screen, silent cinema is fascinating precisely because it illustrates both the directions taken and not taken in the development of screen acting. It is in this context that I have chosen to explore Sarah Bernhardt alongside Lillian Gish. I can think of no better way to illustrate that actors with different and even competing ideas were welcomed, celebrated, and even encouraged in the American silent cinema.

The European Enlightenment: Acting in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Acting in early American film must be understood not only within the context of diversity and difference; it must also be understood within the broader context of the Enlightenment. Indeed, as Joseph Roach demonstrates in his book The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting, theatrical gesture was rationalized in the seventeenth century when the human body was theorized as a machine. René Descartes, in his Les passions de l’âme (1649), decisively proposed that the human body is a machine moved by emotions. Identifying wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness as passions that functioned as triggers to external physiological expression, Descartes broke from earlier models by articulating a Cartesian division between body and soul. Later, Julien de La Mettrie in L’homme machine (1747) argued that “man is a machine.” As Roach explains, emotional expression was considered “the mechanical effects of internal physical causes, much like hours showing on the face of a clock.”⁷

The impact of this thinking on the theater and its reception was tremendous. The actor could imagine the body as a formal and regular mechanism with laws that mirrored the physical laws of the universe. S/he could therefore direct the physiological expression of the passions and these could be universally deciphered and understood. The old oratorical style of acting that had associated physical gesture with the animation of spirits that accompanied a song-like chant of verse was replaced by a new emphasis upon the physical body as an expression of rational intellect. This provided a paradigmatic shift in thinking that ushered in expressive gesture as the new language of theatrical performance. The Royal Society, responding to these changes in scientific thinking that swept away ancient physiological theory, adopted nullius in verba as its motto. Roach states:

In L’homme machine [“man is a machine”] of 1747, [Julien de] La Mettrie carried to its radical conclusion a scientific revolution begun over a hundred years before. This revolution emerged from the struggle of the new science to view the world afresh, to cast down the idols of received opinion and ancient authority. Its new policy was self-consciously dramatized by the uncompromising motto adopted by the Royal Society in 1662—nullius in verba, “on the word of no one.” The so-called “mechanization of the world picture,” which was the collective achievement of seventeenth-century science and philosophy, presented the universe as matter in motion. . . . Physics and psychology intersect in the study of the human body, identifying emotion with motion.⁸

This thought impacted visual literature. Printed publications that included sketches and diagrams circulated; these demonstrated the emotion that could be attached with a physical attitude or facial expression. For example, studies such as the painter Charles Le Brun’s Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (1702) depicted the passions in detail. For the first time, Cartesian physiology motivated the artist’s study of passions. A modern body of visual literature emerged upon which the actor could draw. The interplay between this literature and acting on the stage is extremely rich. Roach cites Franciscus Lange’s Dissertatio de actione scenica (Munich, 1727), François Riccoboni’s L’art du théâtre (Paris, 1750), Roger Pickering’s Reflections upon Theatrical Expression in Tragedy (London, 1755), and Goethe’s Regeln für Schauspieler (Weimar, 1803) as examples of the literature that can illustrate this interchange between Cartesian thought, drama, and the visual arts.⁹ For my purposes, it is sufficient that Le Brun’s images still circulate in acting handbooks in the late nineteenth century, even in books that argue that gestural language was not universal but “has its typical features in every nation.”¹⁰ As I discuss below, American silent film saw the coincidence of this idea that emotions can be visually relayed with the idea that emotions were universally legible. Although we cannot parallel the “homme machine” with the apparatus of the cinema, we can identify the ways that silent film became a particularly rich place for the physical expression of the passions.

Discussing Delsarte

Frenchman François Delsarte (1811–1871) had a strong impact on acting in America in the late nineteenth century. A bridging figure who illustrates the spread, application, and acceptance of Enlightenment thought and European aesthetic gesture in America, Delsarte taught a method of physical expression that gave attention to the expressive voice and the practiced used of gesture. Tired of the idiosyncratic and variable way that acting was taught to him in the Paris Conservatoire, he sought to establish a method of aesthetic acting that expressed naturalness, that was available to all artists (including sculptors, painters, and so on), and that could be shared as an acting method. His basic belief was that the body expressed inner thought and feeling and that every movement and gesture materializes inner thought.¹¹

Although he never published a book summarizing his teaching, publications explaining and translating Delsarte’s methods of physicalizing and therefore expressing emotion through an action or specific stance or look were published in America in the 1880s,¹² were reprinted into the early twentieth century, and made their way into simple middle-class acting manuals for home and school use.¹³ Diagrams of full-bodied gesture with titles such as “Horror,” “Listening,” “Admiration,” “Impudence” and so on detailed the pose and gesture that actors must achieve. In The Home and School Speaker, for example, “Bashfulness” is designated by a sketch that shows a woman with her right leg stretched out to the side, her foot peeking out from under a cascade of her draped dress. Her right hand reaches her mouth, wrist twisted inward, elbow bent. She does not look at us but faces slightly downward; her left arm, with its palm resting against her body, hangs languidly at her side. In gestures where emotions change, a negative inflection is always represented by the turning away of a head or hand from the direction initially adopted, so that the palm of a hand turns from upward to downward, or the body moving to one side turns back onto itself.

As the The Home and School Speaker indicates, these are “Delsarte exercises,” not poses or attitudes. Performers must move between gestures and not freeze the body into an unnatural and illegible stiffness. To emphasize the importance of movement,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Silent Screen, 1895–1927
• 2. Classical Hollywood, 1928–1946
• 3. Postwar Hollywood, 1947–1967
• 4. The Auteur Renaissance, 1968–1980
• 5. The New Hollywood, 1981–1999
• 6. The Modern Entertainment Marketplace, 2000–Present
• Academy Awards for Acting
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index