Looking at Movies
Fourth Edition
Richard Barsam  Dave Monahan
CHAPTER SEVEN
Acting
What Is Acting?
• An art in which an actor uses imagination, intelligence,
psychology, memory, vocal technique, facial
expressions, body language, and an overall knowledge
of the filmmaking process to realize, under the
director’s guidance, the character created by the
screenwriter
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The Performance and Effect
• Initial interest – Our interest in a movie is almost
always sparked by the actors featured in it
• A movie’s financial success – The power of some
actors (Angelina Jolie or George Clooney, for
example) to draw to draw an audience is frequently
more important than any other factor.
• Essential relationship – Screen actors know that the
essential relationship is between them and the camera
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Stage versus Screen Acting
• Stage actors play to the audience / Screen actors play to
the camera
• Stage actors must project vocally and physically /
Small gestures are fundamental tools for the screen
actor
• Stage actors memorize their lines and then speak and
act them in the story order / Screen actors learn only
the lines need for the moment and act out of sequence
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Movie Actors – Four Main Types
• Personality actors – actors who take their personae
from role to role
• Actors who deliberately play against our expectations
of their personae
• Chameleon actors – actors who seem to be different in
every role
• Nonprofessional actors, cast to bring verisimilitude to a
part
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Early Screen-Acting Styles
• The first people onscreen were not actors but ordinary
people playing themselves
• The first actors adopted the acting style favored in the
nineteenth-century theater
• Exaggerated facial expressions, strained gestures,
bombastic mouthing of words
• Société Film d’Art (1908) – Its glory was the ComédieFrançaise, the French National Theater
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D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish
• Lillian Gish invented the art of screen acting under
Griffith’s guidance
• Lillian Gish established a viable and successful style of
screen acting
• Lillian Gish as Lucy Burrows in Broken Blossoms
(1919) was the first great screen performance
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Influence of Sound
• Monumental conversion with awkward transitions
• Allowed more human expression and complex
narratives
• More screenplays with dialogue, need for dialogue
coaches and more rehearsals
• Use of more technology to record sound and mix sound
tracks
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Acting in the Classical Studio Era
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Golden age of Hollywood, 1930s–1950s
Standard seven-year option contracts
Movie stars as a product of the studio
Four classes of performers: supporting players, stock
players, featured players, movie stars
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Method Acting
• Based on the theory and practice of Konstantin
Stanislavsky, founder of the Moscow Art Theater
• Actors bring their own past experiences and emotions
to the role in an attempt to become a realistic character
• Encourages actors to speak, move, and gesture not in a
traditional stage manner but just as they would in their
own lives
• Led to new levels of realism and subtlety
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Screen Acting Today
• Actors and directors synthesize various movie-acting
approaches
• Transition from studio production to independent
production
• Greater box-office power equals greater star power
• Freedom to choose roles and negotiate earnings
• Typecasting
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Technology and Acting
• For every advance in the world of special effects, the
narrative and the acting that propels it lose some of
their importance
• The future of acting is at stake as more and more
performances in narrative films are the product of
computer-generated imagery (CGI)
• May enrich the illusions that movies create at the
expense of film artists themselves, including actors
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Casting Actors
• Casting – the process of choosing and hiring actors for
a movie
• Casting directors – Casting Society of America (CSA)
maintains files of actors’ résumés and photographs
• Screen tests – may be done alone or with other actors
• Other organizations: Screen Actors Guild, American
Federation of Television and Radio Artists
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Factors Involved in Casting
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Budget and expected revenues
Gender
Race
Ethnicity
Age
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Aspects of Performance:
Types of Roles
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Major roles versus minor roles
Stand-ins and stuntpersons
Character roles
Bit players and extras
Cameos and walk-ons
Animal performers
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Aspects of Performance:
Preparing for Roles
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Different types of roles and their different demands
Naturalistic and nonnaturalistic styles
Improvisational acting
Directors and actors
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Preparing for Roles
• Synthesis of basic sources: the script, their own
experiences and observations, influences of other
actors
• Collaboration with the director
• Different roles have different demands
• All actors have their own approaches
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Naturalistic Styles
• Actors re-create recognizable or plausible human
behavior for the camera
• Actors look like the characters should (costume,
makeup, hairstyle)
• Actors think, speak, and move the way people would
offscreen
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Nonnaturalistic Styles
• Seem excessive, exaggerated, even overacted
• May employ strange or outlandish costumes, makeup,
hairstyles
• Might aim for effects beyond the normal range of
human experience
• Often intend to distance or estrange audiences from
characters
• Often found in horror, fantasy, and action films
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Improvisational Acting
• Extemporizing or playing through a moment
• Often involves collaboration between actors and
directors in creating stories, characters, and dialogue
• Improvisations often involve actors and directors
creating stories and dialogue that may be incorporated
into the script.
• An extension of Stanislavski’s emphasis on naturalistic
performance
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Director and Actor Collaborations
• Collaboration depends on individuals sharing in the
creative process. Each brings their own individual
work and aesthetic, and the collaborated results are a
part of a shared creative responsibility.
• Some notable collaborators are:
– Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro
– Tim Burton and Johnny Depp
– Spike Lee and Denzel Washington
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How Filmmaking Affects Acting
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Little time for (acting) rehearsals
Movies are shot out of sequence and fragmented
The character you are acting with may not be there
Actors must repeat the same action/line/emotion
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Framing, Composition, and
Physical Relationships
• Framing and composition – brings actors together or
keeps them apart
• Physical relationship – physical relationships of the
actors to each other and to the overall frame can
significantly affect how we see and interpret a shot
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Long Takes and Ensemble Acting
• Long-take and deep-focus cinematography – provide
the opportunity to create scenes of greater-than-usual
length and broader, deeper fields of composition
• Ensemble acting: Long takes – these takes encourage
actors to work together continuously in a single shot
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The Camera and the Close-up
• Creates a greater naturalism and intimacy between
actors and audience
• True close-ups isolate an actor, concentrating on the
face
• Active (commenting or reminding us) or passive
(revealing an actor’s beauty)
• Reveals both the process of thinking and the thoughts
at its end
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Acting and Editing
• Editors have considerable power in shaping screen
actors’ performances
• Selects, arranges, and juxtaposes shots to cover errors
• Controls the duration of an actor’s onscreen appearance
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Looking at Acting
• We identify with:
– the characters and the actors who inhabit those
characters
– characters who pursue a goal
– characters because of our own behavior as people
– behaviors consistent with our general state of mind;
we are engaged in role-playing
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Looking at Acting:
Criteria for Analysis
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Appropriateness / Transparency
Inherent thoughtfulness or emotionality
Expressive coherence
Wholeness and unity
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Looking at Acting: Barbara Stanwyck
in King Vidor’s Stella Dallas
• Stanwyck’s performance transcends the story’s
melodrama
• Balances character’s nonnaturalistic and naturalistic
qualities
• Natural appearance, movements, gestures
• Expressive coherence and emotional consistency
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Looking at Acting: Michelle Williams
in Blue Valentine
• A two-person story with the characters developing
from teenagers to disillusioned parents
• She uses intelligence and insight to create character
• Her physical appearance, facial expressions, speech,
movement and gesture are truthful, and she can make
us understand her feelings from vulnerability to
strength
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Review
1. The people appearing in the earliest films were
a. amateurs eager to break into the new industry.
b. rejects of the stage.
c. real people playing themselves.
d. stage actors disdainful of the new medium.
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Review
2. Who is credited with inventing screen acting?
a. Lillian Gish
b. Lionel Barrymore
c. Mary Pickford
d. Dorothy Gish
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Review
3. To suppress the distracting sounds made by early sound
cameras, filmmakers used what device?
a. case
b. blimp
c. wrap
d. soundproof booth
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Review
4. Which of these is generally NOT a major factor in
casting?
a. gender
b. race
c. height
d. expected revenue
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Review
5. Screen acting appears “naturalistic” when an actor
a. aims for effects beyond the normal range of human
experience.
b. re-creates recognizable or plausible human behavior
for the camera.
c. creates a highly stylized character who inhabits an
entirely artificial world.
d. Strives to make his or her face into a tabula rasa
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Review
6. Framing, composition, and the long take can
a. define relationships among characters.
b. require actors to work closely together.
c. encourage the audience to interpret characters.
d. All of the above.
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Review
7. Which of the following is NOT necessarily considered in
analyzing acting?
a. Unity
b. Expressive coherence
c. Preparation
d. Appropriateness
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