Film Acting

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?

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.

_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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.