Film Acting

This chapter draws on cognitive psychology and neuroscience to explain how the cinematic kiss turns the film experience into a sensuous and intimate experience. By analyzing a series of cinematic kissing scenes selected from dramas with British actress Keira Knightley as the main female character, I argue that the spectator’s desire and sense of intimacy are influenced by prereflexive perceptual dynamics and their neural correlates, in particular on the perception of affordance, as psychologist James J. Gibson posited it at the core of his ecological approach to visual perception.

‘There are no new stories … We see them on the screen or on the stage reflected through the personalities of men and women whom we have learned to love and respect.’ So wrote Lillian Gish in an unpublished work on the role of stars in early cinema. While most know Gish as a silent film star, and some know her as an autobiographer and lecturer on the history of early cinema, very few regard her as a film theorist. In this paper, I analyze the theoretical dimension of Gish’s manuscripts, essays, and lecture notes, many of which are unpublished and held in the New York Public Library’s Lillian Gish Papers. In asserting the role of the actor or star as filmic author, Gish speaks directly to abstract questions of art, authorship, and cinema as a ‘universal language.’ Gish’s work engages with the work of such early film theorists Vachel Lindsay, Hugo Munsterberg, and Rudolf Arnheim, as well as that of contemporary scholars of stardom and performance studies. I will conclude my argument by reading the 1927 film The Wind as the culmination of Gish’s philosophies of acting on screen.

Claudio Vicentini, La teoria della recitazione. Il distacco dell’attore dal
personaggio
The article (in reference to a previous work, Per un’ecologia delle nozioni di
lavoro. L’identificazione dell’attore con il personaggio, «Acting Archive
Review», n. 7, May 2014) explores two notions: «distacco» (detachment: to
express the character’s feelings the actor must make no recourse to his own
feelings), and «dislocazione» (dislocation: the actor’s presence remains
visible beside the performed character). The two notions, mostly confused
and related to Brecht’s alienation-effect, were actually independently born
in the late XVIIIth and early XIXth centuries, well before Brecht’s a-effect
theory was conceived. They were both developed to answer a key question
of the theory of acting of the time: how to perform on stage a character that
is hardly representable (a tragic character whose powerful expressions,
acts, attitude cannot be performed with the actor’s simple human means; or
an evil character whose wickedness is unbearable to the audience moral
delicacy). The «distacco» was firstly introduced by Antoine-François
Riccoboni in 1750, and then developed by Diderot in his Paradoxe sur le
comédien, the «dislocazione» was described by Charls Lamb who in his
article Imperfect Dramatic Illusion (1825) put in question two effects usually
required to the acting: the «dramatic illusion» (the spectator must to some
degree feel like real what happens on stage), and the «fourth walls» (the
actor performing the character must look totally unconscious of the
audience presence).

To account for the complex performative and cultural phenomenon of cinematic sex appeal, this article investigates Chinese actor Tony Leung Chiu-Wai Leung as a regional and global star, focusing on attributes of his acting that convey sex appeal or have been received as sexy. Leung appears as a popular star in a regional Asian context but as a more rarefied, art-cinema performer internationally. Despite this bifurcated reputation, his sex appeal provides a powerful symbolic currency bank- able in local as well as global contexts. Through attention to the elusive category of sex appeal, I identify features of Leung’s acting and stardom that inform his overall career activity.

Film Acting, Czech Silent Cinema, and Questions of the Film Style Research / This article focuses on formally analytical research of film acting and raises two questions. (1) To what degree it is a feasible approach towards film acting outline and how does it explain the continuities and discontinuities of a stylistic history of Czech silent cinema till 1922? (2) To what degree such aim is or is not attainable with the help of existing knowledge in the field of international film style historiography? In its first part, this study follows top-down argumentation. It reflects the already existing interpretative frameworks associated with the early history of film acting, mainly in large foreign cinemas (for example the American and the French). These are related to the cinematic practices of Czech cinema in this particular era on one side, and the constructive principles of preserved Czech films from the late teens and early 1920s on the other. Instead of mechanically identifying the similar or even the same features, this article attempts to critically examine the validity, usability and explanatory value of these interpretative frameworks vis-à-vis the stylistic history of Czech cinema. The second part of this article reverses the previous process of the argumentation as it moves from the bottom to the top. It focuses on a thorough stylistic and narrative analysis of particular Czech films on the background of identified period filmmaking practices in Czech cinema. The article thus offers a synchronic explanation of certain stylistic aspects of a one year of Czech film production (1918) and discusses three three-reels films with a strong female protagonist: Čertisko (The Little Rascal), A vášeň vítězí (And the Passion Triumphs), and Učitel orientálních jazyků (The Oriental Languages' Teacher). In connection with these films, the article analyzes the principles of the acting techniques, explores the questions of cinematic staging and, above all, explains their functions in particular film works, which are compared one to another and put in a broader historical context.

This dissertation undertakes a textual analysis of two recent A24 films, Moonlight (2016) and Waves (2019), using the strategies of film acting/performance regarding the central Black male characters. This analysis considers how, in specific moments of these films, the actors' performances speak to the characters and how they navigate what this study refers to as the intra-colonizing effects of contemporary Black masculinity. By focusing on two recent products of the independent cinema industry, this study explores how the multiplicities of Blackness and masculinity are manifested through acting and specific uses of the actor's voice and body. The primary goal of analysing the performances of the central Black actors in these films is to propose the notion that the study of film acting and performance is an integral component of film form. This study highlights differences in representations of Black masculinity on-screen that maintain colonialist white supremacist stereotypes imposed upon Black males to those that seek to challenge and reimagine identities of Black manhood, with an emphasis on film acting and performance. This particular approach to examining these films centralises performance as a means to express human identity and experience within filmic narratives.

F or many years considered the posterboy for Generation X, Ethan Hawke has carved out a career that defies simplistic categorization. Though he briefly flirted with studio-manufactured superstardom during the late-Nineties-starring in the literate yet flawed Great Expectations (1998) and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999)-his career since then has been defiantly "personal" and virtually without compromise. His cinematic ventures are born of an eclectic intellectual curiosity: he adroitly alternates popular genre fare (such as Sinister [2012] and The Purge [2013]) with ambitious independent productions (most fruitfully his enduring collaborations with director Richard Linklater). Not that Hawke's genre work is simply a placeholder for heartfelt indie projects. From Gattaca (1997) and A Midnight Clear (1992) to Predestination (2014) and Good Kill (2014), Hawke has consistently gravitated toward concept-based rather than effects-driven genre cinema, bringing the same commitment to veristic performance that characterizes his work with Linklater. In short, Hawke has far surpassed the straitening label that tethered him to a particular moment in time. His earliest and most perceptive critics observed the complexities within his multifaceted persona. Robin Wood, for instance, composed a paean to the actor that located "sincerity," "seriousness," "vulnerability and [a] capacity for hurt" at the heart of Hawke's star image. 1 These qualities, among others, find a legacy in the generation of actors that came to prominence during the New Hollywood era (roughly, 1967-1981).

Tématem diplomová práce nesoucí název Filmové herectví a teorie filmu je reflexe filmového herectví rozvíjející se na poli teoretických úvah v rámci teorie filmu. Jejím cílem je zmapovat, kriticky vyhodnotit a zejména pak komparovat jednotlivé tendence, které jsou v souladu s vývojem teorie filmu řazeny v chronologickém pořadí. Stěžejním bodem práce je zejména moment komparace, díky němuž je možné postihnout teoretický dialog odehrávající se na poli teorie filmového herectví. Metodologickým východiskem práce je moderní komparatistický koncept Petra Václava Zimy umožňující navázat širší interkulturní dialog jdoucí po hlubších vrstvách teorie filmového herectví. Prostřednictvím dílčích komparatistických úvah je tak docíleno vykreslení teorie filmového herectví jakožto interkulturního dialogu, jenž navíc podléhá historickým, společenským a ideologickým vlivům. Teorie filmového herectví tak představuje dynamicky se vyvíjející teoretický konstrukt, který je utvářen vzájemnou interakcí jednotlivých teoretických tendencí a přístupů.
The main thesis of this work, called Film Acting and Film Theory is a reflection of film acting being developed on the field of theoretical assumptions within film theory. The main goal of the thesis is to qualify, critically evaluate and most importantly compare individual tendencies that are with respect to the film theory development introduced chronologically. The key point of the work is then the moment of comparison, thanks to which the discussion of theoretical dialogue within film acting theory is made possible. As for the methodology, the modern comparative concept of Petr Václav Zima is used to enable spreading of intercultural dialogue that reaches into deeper levels of film acting theory. Via individual comparative reflections, we get to present film acting theory as an intercultural dialogue that gives in to historical, social and ideological influence. Thereupon, film acting theory represents dynamically developing theoretical construct which is being created through interaction of individual theoretical tendencies and mindsets.

A problem seems to undermine the research on history of acting: the scholar cannot get in touch with what he is supposed to study. The actor’s work disappears as soon as the performance ends: according to a famous dictum, the actor «is  forever carving a statue of snow» (Barrett, Matthews 1914, Duerr 1962, Cole and Chinoy 1970). That happens however not only in the history of acting. In any research  concerning the past (the life of Napoleon, the tea trade in England at the end of the XVIII century) the scholar does not face the «real thing», but only documents that allow him to build up a mind-image of his subject-matter (Vicentini 1988, Fazio 2006, Pietrini 2009). The point is then the amount and the quality of the information the documents can offer in any research field.
As far as the actor’s art, the subject- matter of the study is obviously what the actors do on stage. But the books on the history of acting mostly dwell on something else: the social and economic condition of the actor’s  life, the job contracts, the companies organization, and above all the scholars tend to reduce the history of acting to the history of the theory of acting (see by example Duerr 1962, Allegri 2005, Benedetti 2007). The reason is simple. Usually  the documents we dispose of,  give us a scanty information on what the actors do on stage, and we cannot build up a certain and detailed image of their acting. The scholars are then tempted to study not what they should, but what they can, and they eventually offer to the reader a kind of «surrogate history» of acting.
The amount of information we can get on the actual acting, however, changes according the period of time we are considering. Until the XVIII  century (when a well aware and quite sophisticated critique of acting began) the information is quite rhapsodic  and undetailed. From the XVIII century on we dispose of a very large number of articles, essays, letters, that offer detailed descriptions and analysis of the performances of the most important actors of the time. Then technology in the XX century opened the way to record the actors’ performances on tapes and more sophisticated multimedia. That sets the standards of any possible history of acting: uncertain and undetailed so far antiquity, middle ages, renaissance and baroque acting are concerned;  more and more analytic and specific through the XVIII and XIX centuries. Eventually, when we will actually master the new recording techniques and develop the methods of analysis of the actor’s art they allow, a new era of acting studies will open.

Introduction: The Speech, Language and Hearing Science favors the performance of voice professionals, including actors. The movie actor has different demands of the stage actor, due to the influence of film language. There is a new field of activity for the speech therapist, whose work has developed in recent years. The aim of this study is to investigate the work with voice and speech in cinema, from the standpoint of professional environment, with emphasis on the speech session. Method: We conducted semi-open with three actors, four speech therapists and a director. The interviews weretranscribed and divided into the following categories: building character in the film, film interpretation,
the relationship with the director; fragmentation of interpretation; utterance in the film; specific vocal techniques, speech therapy, speech therapy and demand. Results: The work with oral expressiveness in cinema involves improving fitness and vocals, the intentions of the director and the actor. The demands are specific and involve actor, character, cast and direction. The audiologist is flexible to adapt to the needs of their knowledge and context is needed in the health care of the voice, the construction of the oral expression of the character - in the development and adaptation; continuity in vocal character; issues corner; at work issues of linguistic and para-linguistic, involving voice and speech, and communication mediated by the body in harmony with the voice. Conclusion: The role of speech therapy is still unknown, in their entirety by the professionals of the cinema, has brought many important solutions for domestic films, is in development.

La Ciociara: Analisi dell’espressività nella recitazione di Sophia Loren come Cesira
Priscila Haydée de Souza
Valentina Valentini
Il cinema ha un linguaggio costruito tramite l’uso tecnologico audiovisuale, con il quale l’attore si relaziona in una nuova prospettiva di recitazione. Sia l’ambientazione, l’illuminazione, i movimenti e gli angoli della machina da presa, la ripresa dei suoni, la colona sonora, i rumori, la sceneggiatura, che l’abbigliamento, il trucco, il corpo, la postura, i gesti, le espressioni faciali, la voce e la parola dell’attore compongono la mise-en-scene, veicolano informazioni e, principalmente, emozioni.
Ricco di significati, gli aspetti visivi e udibili, scelti da un gruppo di professionisti, diretto dal loro regista, cerca di costruire una narrativa, dove vengono espresse delle informazioni sul personaggio e sulla sua storia, ma pure informazioni che vanno oltre, riprendendo un contesto storico e artistico, che rispecchiano sia lo stile dell’attore-divo, del suo ruolo, del regista e del genere cinematografico.
...

Frank Sinatra is primarily known as a singer in live performances and recordings. However, his career as a film actor has received little attention.

This essay explores a number of his movie roles as his persona changed over a 40-year career in a variety of genres on the big screen.

The acting style in Stanley Kubrick's films can be regarded as a symptom of the "other minds problem" and its ramifications for the cinema. Performances in Kubrick's work reveal the complications involved in positing narration as a rhetorical system with a priori claims to direct and accurate evaluative knowledge of characters. For Kubrick, narrative discourse is not a systemic correlative for authorial mastery over characters, and so, his actors help establish narrational patterns that collide with the intricacies of fictional subjectivities. The performative techniques that complicate our ability to conceptualize and engage with characters' emotions are itemized with the aim of precisely conceptualizing the director's unique approach to performance. These strategies include strategic improvisation, excessive ostensiveness, expressively neutral action, and artificially immobilized expressions. Such techniques allow us to appreciate Kubrick's "skeptical classicism": a mode of narration whereby we negotiate various avenues and impediments surrounding our longing for knowledge of an other's mind.

This essay offers a close examination of Jack Nicholson's "imploded" performance in Antonioni's slow thriller, The Passenger. This is a book chapter featured in Close-Up: Great Cinematic Performances Volume 1: America, ed. Murray Pomerance and Kyle Stevens. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 199-211.

acting, film acting, performance, gesture, slow cinema, slowness, modernism, suspense, Italian cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni

Not just the defender of your friendly neighborhood, he is the nerd whose labor supports an age of marvels. And why shouldn't the exploits of this nebbish teen from Queens inspire delight, play, creativity, lunchboxes even? Like Billy Batson and Steve Rogers before him, he is the ninety-eight pounder's revenge, the secret hope of every locker-stuffed milquetoast, the ugly duckling's swan song. Consequently, he heralds a Silver Age because he embodies a simple narrative truth: power fantasies are not universally palatable visions of infantile wish-fulfillment; rather, they are illusions that only render the helplessness of one's everyday circumstances more salient. Simply put: superpowers wouldn't make things better; they'd only limn the ordinary pain we struggle to overcome. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's profound revision of a basic superheroic trope is arguably the conceptual cornerstone upon which Marvel was built, and it is certainly no accident that the child of their insight -Spider-Man -is the company's most public face.

Contraddistinto da un duende attoriale capace di attraversamenti osmotici fra dispositivo teatrale, cinema e televisione, Renato Carpentieri ha sperimentato, nel corso della propria carriera, le diverse funzioni del processo di creazione-per-la-scena. Il saggio ne ricostruisce il percorso artistico, servendosi di materiali d’archivio e di interviste inedite. Viene fornito, in primis, un profilo biografico teso ad illustrare le tappe cruciali di un iter formativo “irregolare”. Si analizza quindi il tragitto attorico di Carpentieri, attraverso la disamina di una rosa di ruoli approntati per la scena e per il grande schermo. Si dà infine conto della sua variegata e in gran parte inesplorata attività di regista, autore e dramaturg. Completano il volume una teatrografia e una filmografia aggiornate ed un’appendice fotografica.

_Tony Leung Chiu-Wai_ investigates the rich, prolific career of an acclaimed leading man of Hong Kong and Chinese film and television: the star of more than 70 films and dozens of television series, and the only Hong Kong actor to earn the Cannes Film Festival’s best-actor award. This book addresses the dynamics of media stardom in Hong Kong, mainland China and the East Asian region, including the importance of television series for training and promotion; the phenomenon of regional, transmedia stardom across popular entertainment genres; and cultural and political considerations as performers move among different East Asian production environments. Attentive to Leung’s position in both East Asian and global screen cultures, the book addresses relations among acting, global stardom and internationally circulating film genres and acclaimed directors.  Overall, this unique study of Leung illuminates challenges and opportunities for Chinese screen actors in local, regional and global cultural and industrial contexts.

This article interprets Wojciech Jerzy Has’s Jak byc kochana˛/How to be Loved (1962) as a film about the sociopolitical situation prevailing in Poland during the 1960s. The main focus is on the leading heroine and her acting, understood both as professional acting and acting in everyday life. The figure of the actress links the times before the war with the Soviet-influenced Poland of the 1960s. The article analyses this figure by drawing on Witold Gombrowicz’s writings on Polish collective identity, the ‘Stanislavskian aesthetic’ of acting and Judith Butler’s understanding of identity as performance.

... For instance, in Hindi cinema, as Neepa Majumdar has discussed, there is a double ar ticulation in the use of playback singers such ... and then fragmented or manipulated, I argue?along with sound theorists Sterne and Jim Lastra, and performance theorist Philip Auslander?that ...

Read at the conference “Film as Film Today: On the Criticism and Theory
of V. F. Perkins,” Warwick University, September 4-5, 2018.

"While reading the various tributes to V. F. Perkins' life and work collected on Warwick's website, I was especially struck by a line in Adrian Martin's.... [which] reaffirmed what I had long felt to be a central aspect of all Perkins' writing: the unspoken concept of fictional character. What a character is, remains to be seen; yet the work it performs is in some ways clear and obvious. Characters give to film a certain moral force. We look at a scene not of hominids but characters, who live and love and act out their passions. And more: for the force of a character gives shape to its story, justifies what happens as the result of human action. It even helps to organize the details of an image, from the pertinence of backgrounds to the aptness of a framing. In this paper I wish to use Perkins' work as an occasion for rethinking the concept of character: a concept so commonly used by us all as to seem not a concept, but a datum or given."

email: [email protected]

Editorial for guest edited issue on acting and performance.

Acting and performance continue to grow as significant areas of film scholarship although studies have predominantly focused on Hollywood and the West, or largely exploring actors and performers in their national contexts. The topic of transnational
stardom has received an increasing amount of critical attention, with such studies foregrounding key issues surrounding the transnational processes of stardom, the crosscultural
construction and reception of stars and the relationship between transnational authorship and stardom. The part played by acting and performance in such global
processes has received relatively little consideration. What is the function of actors and performers in transnational cinema? As the boundaries between nations, cinemas and screens become increasingly blurred, how do we make sense of the actors who populate them?

In den 1920er Jahren wollten viele junge Menschen nur eines: KinodarstellerIn werden! Geblendet vom Glamour der Stars rannten sie aber in ihr Unglück. Wie sich der Beruf des Stummfilmschauspielers zum Traum- und Modeberuf des Jahrzehnts entwickeln konnte, erforscht Anna Denk in ihrer Dissertation.

Film studies has interrogated the erotic appeal of male stars chiefly through attention to bodily display, addressing onscreen men's availability for or resistance to a theorized gaze. Yet cinematic sexiness depends not only on display of the body, but on a range of performance signs, narrative manoeuvres, industrial activities and viewer tastes. Focusing on contemporary Spanish star Javier Bardem, this article explores the manufacture and circulation of male sex symbols in global cinema. Bardem’s performances illuminate the ways male sex appeal functions as site of viewer interest, tonal feature of film texts, and exploitable asset in film financing and promotion. Addressing Bardem’s roles since 2004’s _The Sea Inside_, the article investigates sexy male stars’ commercial and aesthetic functions in global mainstream, middlebrow and art cinemas. In particular, it argues that sexual charisma underwrites Bardem’s presentation even in films that remove his characters from the sexual economy.

Studiare la recitazione cinematografica divistica – in questo caso, Anna Magnani e Sophia Loren – significa incrociare diverse problematiche e questioni che vanno oltre allo studio della performance attoriale, ma che riflettono le sue costruzioni e le sue veicolazioni polisemiche. Sono attrici, dive e protagoniste, che costruiscono attraverso il proprio corpo e la propria vocalità i suoi tanti personaggi, in trame di regie diverse e generi vari, rappresentando il loro stile personale, il loro modo di recitare, la propria cultura italiana, in un periodo importante per la storia del cinema italiano, quello del dopo guerra e del boom economico degli anni 60, che riflette inoltre il loro interfacciarsi con l’Audience, con la critica e con il cinema internazionale. Con la nascita del cinema e, in seguito, del cinema sonoro, udito, in opposizione al «cinema sordo», a cui fa riferimento Michel Chion , ebbe inizio l’ibrido tra arte e spettacolo, percorrendo il binario tra cinema d’autore e ...

L’acteur fut longtemps un mal-aimé des discours savants sur le cinéma : sa présence semblait un matériau précaire, fuyant, offrant peu de prise à l’analyse et à la théorie. Cependant les temps changent et, grâce aux efforts de nombreux critiques et universitaires, l’acteur s’est imposé au cours des dernières décennies comme objet légitime d’étude et de recherche. C’est de cette évolution qu’a voulu témoigner le colloque « L’acteur de cinéma, approches pluridisciplinaires », organisé à l’automne 2005 au Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle, et dont est né le présent volume. Il se compose d’études riches et diverses qui relèvent non seulement de l’histoire et de l’esthétique du cinéma mais aussi de la sociologie, de l’économie, de l’anthropologie, approches multiples qui assurent la vitalité des études cinématographiques contemporaines. On trouvera ici les grands motifs d’une pensée de l’acteur : héritages du théâtre, émotion et distanciation, mise en scène et mise en geste, analyse de la star comme signe culturel. On suivra les aventures du casting ou des retakes, une Dame de Shanghai pouvant en cacher une autre. On verra ce qu’apporte à l’écran français des années trente l’exotisme familier du jeu méridional, et comment nos acteurs nationaux voyagent d’une comédie bien française à son remake hollywoodien. On saura encore ce qui fait la valeur des stars, de l’entreprise Cruise à l’auteur Eastwood, et pourquoi les acteurs sont, autant en terme d’art que d’industrie, les forces vives du cinéma

_Tony Leung Chiu-Wai_ investigates the rich, prolific career of an acclaimed leading man of Hong Kong and Chinese film and television: the star of more than 70 films and dozens of television series, and the only Hong Kong actor to earn the Cannes Film Festival’s best-actor award. This book addresses the dynamics of media stardom in Hong Kong, mainland China and the East Asian region, including the importance of television series for training and promotion; the phenomenon of regional, transmedia stardom across popular entertainment genres; and cultural and political considerations as performers move among different East Asian production environments. Attentive to Leung’s position in both East Asian and global screen cultures, the book addresses relations among acting, global stardom and internationally circulating film genres and acclaimed directors. Overall, this unique study of Leung illuminates challenges and opportunities for Chinese screen actors in local, regional and global cultural and industrial contexts.