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
