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Notes on Acting in Cinema

Even a moment’s observation should make it obvious that the art of acting is extremely important to most films, and yet critical literature on the subject is relatively sparse. There are excellent sociological studies of the star system and of individual stars, but not much close analysis of what actors do in specific films. In one sense, of course, movie actors are merely agents of narrative who are assisted by machinery; Lev Kuleshov famously attempted to prove that their performances can be constructed in the editing room, and Alfred Hitchcock once described them as experts in the art of “doing nothing extremely well.” Nevertheless, the vast majority of films depend on a form of communication whereby meanings are acted out. The experience of watching them involves not only a pleasure in storytelling but also a delight in bodies, expressive movements, and familiar performing skills. Perhaps we also derive pleasure from the fact that films enable us to recognize and adapt to the fundamentally acted quality of everyday life: they place us safely outside dramatic events, a position from which we can observe people lying, concealing emotions, or staging performances for one another.

“Performance” is a much broader category than acting: we’re all performers, and anyone who appears in a film, even an unwitting passerby on the street who is caught by the camera, becomes a sort of cinematic performer. Films also make use of acrobats, dancers, and concert musicians who perform much as they would on a stage and act in only a qualified sense. A person becomes a theatrical or cinematic actor of the sort discussed here when she or he functions as a developed character in a dramatic narrative. As with any other art form, there are no hard-and-fast rules for what constitutes the best film acting of this type. Certain players of the classic Hollywood era—I would name Peter Lorre, Agnes Moorehead, and Mickey Rooney—create such vivid characters that they make every film they are in, no matter how good or bad, slightly better; but the dogs who played Rin Tin Tin, Asta, and Lassie were also fine actors in the context of their particular films, and nonprofessionals have given impressive performances in fiction pictures.

All good movie actors understand the characters they play, move to the marks that have been placed for them on the floor of the set, and have the ability to use props and costumes in expressive ways. Only occasionally do they abandon their normal mannerisms and impersonate recognizable historical figures: Helen Mirren’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth II in The Queen (2006) is a fine example of movie impersonation because it only suggests Elizabeth without slavishly imitating her. Awards are often given for this or any other kind of performance that makes the work of the actor clearly visible, as when the actor gains or loses weight, speaks with an accent, or pretends drunkenness or deformity. Acting is also made visible by dual roles or by performances within the performance. In Mulholland Drive (2001), for example, Naomi Watts plays two different personalities, one of whom is a perky young aspirant to Hollywood fame who auditions for a role in a movie at Paramount. When she prepares for the audition she interprets her lines literally and speaks in a big, angry voice; when she arrives at the studio, she whispers the same lines in a steamy voice and gives them erotic implication. We view the first performance-within-a-performance as “bad” acting and the second as “good” acting, but both are important to the film and Watts performs them equally well.

Film stars are actors (sometimes very good ones), but they are also iconic, extracinematic characters; their names circulate through all the media, their mannerisms become as familiar as those of the people we know intimately, and the screenplays of their films are often written to conform to the personality-images they’ve established. Their appearances on screen always create a double impression: it’s John Wayne getting on a horse in The Searchers, not simply Ethan Edwards (Wayne is “played” by a man whose real name was Marion Morrison). Because of this effect, the star can show off acting skill by occasionally changing the sort of character she or he plays. Many of the best actor-stars—Marilyn Monroe, for example—create a single character type that they play brilliantly and definitively over and over, sometimes becoming prisoners of their creation. At an opposite extreme is a figure such as Johnny Depp, a “postmodern” performer who has managed to become a chameleon and a star at the same time. There would seem to be no recipe for what makes a star, beyond a certain level of charisma. In most cases the performer needs the requisite glamour and sex appeal to play leading roles in heterosexual romances and action-adventure pictures, but there are many exceptions: Shirley Temple, Marie Dressler, Will Rogers, and Bob Hope were all leading players and major box-office attractions in their day.

It has often been argued that the most cinema-specific form of acting is much less ostentatious and gestural than acting on the stage—more like Naomi Watts’s studio audition in Mulholland Drive. V. I. Pudovkin, who wrote an early treatise on the subject, contended that films were ideal vehicles for what the celebrated theatrical director Konstantin Stanislavsky had described as “gestureless moments”—scenes involving “extreme paucity of gesture, often literal immobility,” as in the cinematic close-up, when “the body of the actor is simply not seen” (334–35). One can think of many examples of film stars who seem to be merely thinking for the camera, or of performers who achieve an emotional subtext through minimal gestures. Yet the exhibitionistic Fred Astaire is as important a screen actor as the supposedly introspective Marlon Brando, and Astaire’s work is entirely dependent upon graceful, highly stylized movements of his body—not only in dance scenes, but also when he merely lights a cigarette, sits in a chair, or crosses from point A to point B.

Realistic films favor restraint, as one can see in Heath Ledger’s performance in Brokeback Mountain (2005), in which the character’s tumultuous emotions are as tightly controlled as a closed fist; but comedies, musicals, and costume pictures often encourage a “stagy” style, as in the case of Steve Martin’s wild abandon in The Jerk (1979). In fact, most movies contain a heterogeneous mix of performing styles and skills. Hollywood in the studio period usually required that supporting players, ethnic minorities, and women act in more vividly expressive fashion than white male leads, and the range of expressive behavior can be quite broad even in Method-influenced pictures: in On the Waterfront (1954), Marlon Brando is recessive but Lee J. Cobb chews the scenery. Notice also that certain directors impose differing styles on ensembles. By most accounts Fritz Lang was a sadistic personality who moved actors like puppets and Robert Altman was a sweetheart who gave them a great deal of freedom; this may explain the geometric rigidity of the blocking in a Lang film versus the roaming, freewheeling movements in an Altman film. Orson Welles wanted his players to execute actions quickly and overlap dialogue in a carefully planned fashion; Stanley Kubrick, who resembles Welles in some respects, favored an unusually slow, measured pace and actors who displayed over-the-top mugging (George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove [1963]) or deadpan minimalism (Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]).

These qualifications and variations aside, the history of both stage and film acting since the late nineteenth century can be said to involve a movement from a semiotic to a psychological conception of performance, or from what Roberta Pearson terms a “histrionic code” to a “verisimilar code”—a phenomenon determined by changes in dramatic literature and the culture as a whole. The shift appears to have begun in the theater of the 1850s, with the rise of the “well-made” drawing-room drama, but it became most apparent in the period between 1880 and 1920 in the work of Stanislavsky and his followers. For at least two thousand years previously, acting was closely related to dance and oratorical rhetoric (the very word actor originally suggested the actions of oratory), and the major form of actor training was instruction in elocution and pantomime, in which the actor learned “proper” diction and a vocabulary of bodily and facial expressions. One of the most important representatives of this pantomime school in the nineteenth century was François Delsarte, a Parisian elocutionist who made one of the earliest attempts to codify expressive gestures and who exerted an indirect influence on the whole of silent cinema. The Delsarte system was adapted to American theater by Steele MacKaye, the immediate predecessor of David Belasco, and it resulted in numerous “cook-book” manuals of acting, such as Edmund Shaftesbury’s Lessons in the Art of Acting (1889) and Charles Aubert’s The Art of Pantomime (translated into English in 1921). The system often reinforced social stereotypes or genteel mannerisms, but it was well suited to silent cinema and at its best produced remarkable performances: Lillian Gish’s eloquently expressive close-ups, Charlie Chaplin’s balletic comedy, Lon Chaney’s grotesque movement in horror films, and so forth. Its last flowering was in German expressionism, which arrived at an approximately Delsarte-like technique via a different, modernist aesthetic; examples include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which Conrad Veidt moves with the languorous rhythms of a trained dancer, and Metropolis (1927), in which the entire cast gestures in the boldest, most elemental fashion.

Relatively few actors in talking films worked along such lines (Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich are qualified examples), but the pantomimic or histrionic style was sometimes adopted for ironic or thematic purposes, as in Gloria Swanson’s flamboyant behavior in Sunset Blvd. (1950) or Robert Mitchum’s frightening performance in Night of the Hunter (1955), which is a particularly clever fusion of old-fashioned melodrama and Germanic expressionism. These, however, are distinct exceptions to the rule. In general, a certain tendency toward verisimilar or naturalistic acting—a movement from “presentational” to “representational” performance—was at work from the origins of the classic narrative cinema. Like Stanislavsky, D. W. Griffith was interested in making blocking less artificial and acting more intimate and emotionally charged, and at each stage of cinema’s technical history these general aims were increasingly facilitated. The earliest, so-called “primitive,” films were devoted to straightforward action sequences, paying little or no attention to psychological motivation; the camera was usually situated at least twelve feet from the players, who moved parallel to the camera, stood in three-quarter profile when they addressed one another, and gesticulated broadly. After 1909, the camera began to move closer; the subsequent development of continuity editing, and especially of shot/reverse shot, enabled directors to reduce the amount of visibly rhetorical blocking and track the psychological nuances on the actor’s faces in a pattern of action and reaction. When sound was introduced, an elocutionary style of speech was favored, but the invention of sensitive directional microphones eventually transformed the “grain” of the voice and the subtler levels of timbre into important expressive instruments. A wide range of rural or working-class accents became acceptable, and multitrack sound editing, looping, and sound mixing were used to record ordinary, low-key behavior in ways that would have dazzled Stanislavsky.

Films continued to use wide shots, and directors such as Howard Hawks and John Ford were especially good at bringing the actors’ bodies into play. In a Hawks film, as has often been observed, characterizations usually arise from the way characters walk, sit, or perform small actions such as tossing a coin or striking a match; and in Ford there are many family rituals and communal dance scenes in which sharply individuated characters interact in the same shot. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the conjunction of digital editing systems with television-style shooting techniques, in which scenes are photographed with multiple cameras and long lenses, led to what David Bordwell calls “intensified” continuity editing, especially in large-budget Hollywood features. “Continuity cutting,” Bordwell observes, “has been rescaled and amped up, and the drama has been squeezed down to faces—particularly eyes and mouths” (Figures Traced in Light, 27). Big-budget movie directors usually strive for close-up “coverage” of each line of dialogue and facial reaction, using multiple cameras and small wireless microphones attached to the bodies of the actors. As a result close-ups dominate, space is flattened, backgrounds are blurred, and the average shot length is shortened (most images are held on the screen for somewhere between two and eight seconds). In this environment movie stars such as Tom Cruise are valued for the intensity they bring to the smallest twitch of an eyebrow.

The apotheosis of what might be called the inner-directed, Stanislavskian approach to acting, which can be a useful training for the kind of movies that center on microscopic facial expression, was the American “Method,” particularly as taught by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. Much was written in the popular press in those years about the “mumbling” and “shambling” of Actors Studio–trained actors, but such behavior was more advertised than practiced. Brando’s clever performances as an inarticulate, sexy proletarian in On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and The Wild One (1953) inspired the popular conception of the Method, but his greater importance was as a rebel celebrity who indicated a seismic shift in U.S. popular culture; he represented a new personality that was related not only to the emerging postwar bohemia and the fashion for existential Angst, but also to the rise of rock-and-roll figures such as Elvis Presley. Where Brando’s acting style is concerned, Richard Dyer is correct to say that “the formal differences between the Method and, say, the repertory/Broadway style are less clear than the known differences between how the performances were arrived at” (Stars, 154). Shelley Winters, for example, was much more closely connected to Strasberg and the Actors Studio than Brando ever was, and yet Winters is seldom described as a Method actor.

Method training undoubtedly contributed to “lifelike” performances and enabled actors to fine-tune their delicate psychological instruments. It inspired a large number of extremely talented players over the next two generations (see virtually the entire cast of The Godfather [1972] and The Godfather: Part II [1974], in which Strasberg makes an effective appearance), but it also fostered a neglect of the physical training associated with the older pantomime tradition. In Strasberg’s hands, it was narrowed down to a quasi-Freudian or therapeutic preoccupation with “emotional memory,” and most of its jargon—“private moment,” “freedom,” “naturalness,” “organic”—had a familiar ring, as they were the keywords of romantic individualism. There was, however, another form of acting, developed by the twentieth-century avant-garde and inspired by such popular institutions as the music hall, the circus, and vaudeville, which represented a counterapproach to Stanislavsky. In the period of the Russian Revolution, for instance, Vsevolod Meyerhold tried to create gymnastic actors who represented a proletarian ideal, and in the same period the Soviet and Italian futurists advocated styles of performance drawn from the variety theater, the early “cinema of attractions,” and the American comedy films of Mack Sennett. The Stanislavskian actor and the Meyerholdian actor worked from different physical assumptions (Stanislavsky stressed relaxation and Meyerhold stressed dynamic, machinelike action), and in practice they could look as different from one another as Brando and Buster Keaton. In subsequent years Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht, who were both influenced by futurist theater, became interested in the stylized acting of ancient Asia. Brecht was an especially important theorist of an antinaturalistic, antibourgeois form of performance in which ideology was never concealed by realistic illusion.

Although Brecht recognized that some degree of realism was essential to a committed drama and to popular taste, he emphasized that actors should produce signs (the most important of these he termed the gestus), and he wanted his players to feel an emotional estrangement from their roles, an “alienation effect” that made their performances presentational and didactic. Perhaps the best-known exponent of Brechtian acting in cinema is Jean-Luc Godard, especially in films such as Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966), in which Marina Vlady and the other actors step in and out of their roles and frequently address the camera directly. A different but equally radical style can be seen in some of the films of Robert Bresson, who often worked with amateur players and who advocated a form of “automatism,” in which the actor was instructed to think less about emotion than about gesture. (Alfred Hitchcock, who worked with Hollywood stars, resembled Bresson in the sense that he was impatient with Method-trained performers and was chiefly interested in actors who could produce elemental looks and gestures suitable for carefully edited sequences.)

Nearly all comic actors in film, especially “crazy” comics such as the Marx brothers and Jerry Lewis, employ a style that is entirely different from specialists in Stanislavskian drama. By its very nature comedy tends to be physically exaggerated, presentational, aimed at the head rather than the heart, and deconstructive of realistic conventions. Realistic acting strives for absolute expressive coherence between one shot and the next, or for a type of performance-within-performance in which the character’s “act” for other characters is plausible and convincing: see, for example, the poker-faced calm of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity (1944), when a man who might identify him as a killer is brought to his office for questioning. By contrast, broadly comic films often depend on exaggerated forms of expressive incoherence, as when Peter Sellers, in the role of Dr. Strangelove, has to keep beating one of his arms down to keep it from springing up into a Nazi salute.

Since the late 1960s, there has been something of a return to movement-based, physical training of actors, a tendency prompted by such diverse figures from theater as Rudolf Laban, Jacques Lecoq, Joan Littlewood, and Julie Taymor. By the same token, several developments in digital technology—in particular CGI (computer-generated imagery), green-screen techniques, and motion-capture devices—have contributed to an increased interest in pantomime. Some writers have reacted to these developments by suggesting that the new technology is a threat to the very profession of acting. In support of their argument they point out that crowd scenes larger than Cecil B. DeMille could achieve are now composed of nothing but computerized figures, and that the face of the dead Oliver Reed has been pasted onto the moving body of a stand-in. Industrial society has entered an increasingly “robotic” stage of development, and digital animators the world over have spoken of their desire to achieve the holy grail of “synthespians” who seamlessly interact with human players. Whether or not CGI is qualitatively new and will lead to such a future, it certainly increases the amount of animation in movies. We should recall, however, that animators have often worked in collaboration with actors: in 1938, for example, the Walt Disney animators copied the photographed movement of dancer Marge Champion in order to create the “lifelike” figure of Snow White. (For an important discussion of acting and animation, see Donald Crafton’s Shadow of a Mouse [2012].) CGI belongs squarely within this tradition, and even though it’s often used to show morphing androids and missing body parts, it probably won’t involve the elimination of human players. Most digital effects are recognizable, and from the time of The Golem (1920) and Metropolis to the time of Blade Runner (1982) and Bicentennial Man (1999), robots and simulacra have been acted by professional thespians. CGI has not so much replaced actors as required them to behave like animated figures or machines.

An obvious case in point is the Terminator series, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s visibly “manufactured” physique and stiff acting fit perfectly with the computer-generated effects. An even better example is the Steven Spielberg / Stanley Kubrick production of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Spielberg, who inherited the project after Kubrick’s death, knew that computer animation has yet to prove that it can create believable human figures in speaking roles. (One of the most elaborate attempts to do so is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within [2001], a sci-fi adventure based on video games, which uses the voices of several well-known players but looks animated.) As a result, the robot is played by Haley Joel Osment, whose performance is especially interesting for the way it starts with a slightly digitalized, pantomimic style, very similar to what the Russian futurists called “bio-mechanics,” and then shifts, at the moment when the robot’s circuits are imprinted with Oedipal desire, into an analog, Stanislavskian style that supposedly reveals his inner life or soul. (Even in the final stage of his development, he never blinks his eyes.)

A similar reversion to uncanny forms of pantomime can be seen in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers (2002), for which Andy Serkis invented both a voice and a set of body movements to structure the computer animation for his character, Gollum. (New Line Cinema aggressively but unsuccessfully campaigned to have Serkis nominated for an Academy Award.) Ultimately, Gollum was created from a mixture of sculpture, puppetry, and digital effects, with Serkis donning a motion-capture suit and interacting with the other players on the set. Serkis also provided the “psychological” expressions that signify his character’s split personality. To further elaborate these expressions, the animators consulted Gary Faigin’s The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression and Paul Ekman’s Darwin and Facial Expression, two modern books that attempt to codify the semiotics of the face in much the same fashion as François Delsarte attempted to codify actors’ gestures for the nineteenth-century stage. In other words, the digital era, coupled with the rise of fantasy and comic-strip films of various kinds, seems to involve a qualified return to a style that predates Stanislavsky. In some cases it causes human actors to behave like clockwork instruments, but it also expands the range of performance styles. Comic-book spectaculars, for instance, can give players an opportunity to show off their skills in dual roles or to behave expressionistically. (In RoboCop [1987] Peter Weller imitates Nikolai Cherkasov in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible [1943].)

Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) uses mini–digital cameras to record a series of actors speaking improvised monologues or dialogues, which it then transforms through digital rotoscoping techniques into colorful, animated imagery; this film contains a monologue about André Bazin, and everywhere it demonstrates how advanced technology can reveal the sign-making activity behind realist acting. Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001) is a costume drama set during the French Revolution, and, like most of Rohmer’s work, it involves actors seated in rooms holding long, realistic conversations; but it also uses digital video and computerized imaging to create a visibly artificial, painterly mise-en-scène around the actors. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005) is even more radical in its transformation of actors into cartoon-like characters who inhabit a world of boldly graphic designs. Where more avant-garde experiments are concerned, Michael Snow’s *Corpus Callosum (2002) serves as a compendium of things that can be done with computer technology to bend, reshape, and manipulate human bodies. If these four examples are an indication, acting is crucial to the digital age. It would of course be possible to make digital films without actors, but that was true of motion picture photography. In any case, at the historical moment when analog human players seem about to be replaced by digital images, the players are with us as much as ever.