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
