Film Technique And Film Acting Pdf

[Charo Lemucchi]

Forexample, I was utterly convinced I did not like Gwyneth Paltrow. I still am. But what is the basis of my dislike? I could point to some films in which she starred that I do not enjoy, but was my lack of enjoyment definitively due to her performance, or was it due to other aspects of the film I did not like? And what to do with the films she was in that I liked very much, such as Hard Eight (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (dir. Anthony Minghella, 1999)? Her performance was central to those films, and I could not deny that it added considerably to the films in question. Maybe, in fact, I liked Paltrow just fine as an actor, but found other things about her annoying?

In 1940, the Motion Picture Production Code of 1934 had effectively banned any frank discussion of most adult themes, including of course sex. Here Walter and Hildy have a frank and frankly ribald discussion of sex and marital discord without ever speaking any of it by name. And they do it at about 70 miles per hour. The arrival of stage actors like Grant and Russell and the writers capable of generating believable dialogue (no easy feat, as anyone who has tried to write it knows well) changed movie acting in fundamental ways. For the first time, the worlds of stage and film acting did converge in meaningful ways, even if profound differences (of the kind Benjamin describes above) continued to exist.

This is a scene written for film actors. It would, in truth, be hard to perform on stage. Without lavalier microphones attached to the actors, which did not exist in the 1940s, it would be impossible to deliver these lines as we hear them here for a live audience in a large theater. The dialog would simply be inaudible. Similarly, if the actors were to deliver the lines with the projection they might bring to a large theater, with the boom microphone right overhead, they would swamp the microphone and produce an utterly unusable recording. Thus, many of the skills actors brought with them from the stage were now useful in screen acting, but there were major adjustments actors had to make as they moved back and forth between them (which, in truth, few actors did during this period because they were placed under rigid contracts by their studios).

Before we turn to the next stage in the development of film acting, it is worth pausing over something many of you might notice when watching classic Hollywood films of the first generation of sound in film (1927-1949). People seem to talk strangely in those films, so much so that as I kid in the 1970s I often wondered how accents and speech patterns could have changed so much in just a few decades.

In both of these scenes, we hear none of the transatlantic accents familiar to the 1930s and 40s, no artificially articulated lines. Speech is natural: it sounds like we are listening in on incredibly private and painful conversations: in one, Terry (Marlon Brando) and Edie (Eva Marie Saint) have an awkward conversation in a playground by the promenade. In the other, Jim (James Dean) has just told his family about the death of a classmate during a game of chicken at a ravine, begging them to let him do the right thing.

And of course not all actors are hired for their acting. Sometimes it is a look, a visual feel that they bring to the film that is desired. Film is a visual medium, after all, and as we saw in our discussion of mise-en-scene, the movement of actors around the screen is as much a part of the visual look of a film as sets or costume design.

Close-Ups: An Introduction to Film Copyright 2023 by Jared Gardner & The Ohio State University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. When you think of the acting technique known as the Method, you may think of "Raging Bull" and how Robert De Niro gained 60 pounds to play boxer Jake LaMotta in his retirement. You may think of actors who stay in character even while they're not performing. Or, as my guest Isaac Butler puts it, we tend to think of the Method as some goofy hocus pocus that actors, particularly the more self-important ones, get up to in order to do their job. Or as someone he met once put it, it's remembering the most traumatic thing that ever happened to you in order to make yourself cry. But the Method is much, much more, Butler says.In his new book "The Method: How The 20th Century Learned To Act," he describes the history of the Method, from the series of techniques created in the early 1900s by the Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski, through the American adaptation created by the Group Theatre and the Actors Studio, and the actors who brought those techniques to their work on stage and screen. It's also the story of how acting was influenced by war, social change and personal and aesthetic battles. Isaac Butler also co-wrote the book "The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent Of Angels In America." He's also a theater director, teaches theater history and performance at The New School, co-hosts the Slate podcast "Working" about the creative process and is a cultural critic whose writing frequently appears in Slate.Isaac Butler, welcome to FRESH AIR. As someone who frequently interviews actors, I really enjoyed and appreciated reading your book. Let's start with an example that you think - an example of a performance that you think embodies the Method.ISAAC BUTLER: Thank you so much for having me, Terry. You know, when I think about the Method, I think of a performance like Al Pacino's in the first "Godfather" film in that, you know, a lot of that role is communicated non-verbally through you watching the character think. The character's often feeling emotions in a very intense way but not letting them out, but also allowing you to see that they are feeling them. You know, there's a certain amount of mystery to the character and idiosyncrasy. It feels like a real person in all of their complexity, not, like, a type or a stock role or anything like that. And, you know, Al Pacino just seems really alive in the moment and really present in that role at all times. So, to me, that's an example of the kind of performances that the Method helped usher to the fore over the course of the 20th century.GROSS: I forget who it was, but one of the, you know, Method directors or a teacher said, you know, let someone else take the part with a lot of dialogue. You take the part where you're just, like, thinking and reacting.BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. That was Kazan. You know, when he was - when Elia Kazan briefly was trying to be a film actor, you know, he really learned from the other actors on set that part of what you do is you let everyone else say all the lines, that the camera is - can really read your mind, and it can really see your thoughts on your face. So part of the thing that you do is you just think, and the camera will see what you're thinking.GROSS: There's different approaches to the Method, but one of them really emphasizes digging into your own emotional history, your emotional memories, to use those to get into your character. And you were practicing that when you were in college and you had a role, and you had been a professional child actor. And you write in the introduction to your book that through this process of mining your own emotional memories, you retreated too far into your personal darkness. Can you describe how that happened, because I'd really like to understand how, like, psychologically upsetting it can be to take this approach to plumbing your own emotional depths?BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's funny. It was over two decades ago, but I still remember it really vividly. The play was "Talk Radio," which is by Eric Bogosian, and he wrote it for himself to play the lead character who's this kind of, like, shock jock, right? And over the course of the 90-minute play, the actor playing that part - you are chain-smoking and you're talking to people who are calling in to the radio. And then at the end of 90 minutes on stage, you have a nervous breakdown, you know, live on the air. That's the arc of the play. And this was a college production. It was student directors who, you know, of course, didn't really know what they were doing, and neither did any of the rest of us. And we probably had two or three weeks of rehearsal.And, you know, the character I was playing was older than me, had a lot more life experience, and they're having their nervous breakdown based on whatever is the matter with them. And I - the only way I knew how to find a connection to them was to go deep into the things that I thought were wrong with me and - you know, my own depression at being, you know, newly in college, my own loneliness and my own feelings of inadequacy and guilt and all sorts of other things. And so I really spent a lot of time thinking through those things and finding them and finding images or sensory ideas associated with them so I could kind of trigger them. And so I was doing that on stage and, at the same time, chain-smoking real cigarettes for 90 minutes. And so, you know, I would end every performance feeling completely wrung out emotionally and physically ill, simultaneously.And so what I would have to do at the end of the show is I would go back to my dorm room and I would just stare at a blank wall until I kind of - like, my stomach settled down and I felt my humanity return. And, you know, that show only performed three or four times. And I just remember at the end of it saying to myself, I am not tough enough to keep doing this again and again and again, for part after part. I can't do this. And that was the last moment in my life that I really considered pursuing a career as an actor. I very quickly switched to focusing on directing and then eventually to writing, which led to the book that we're talking about today.GROSS: So is this one of the fundamental aesthetic battles in acting, whether you have to kind of damage yourself in order to play a role?BUTLER: Certainly one of the fundamental aesthetic battles in acting is whether the actors should be, on some level, really experiencing what the character is experiencing while they're on stage or on screen. And, you know, for hundreds of years, the consensus was, no, they absolutely shouldn't do - should not do that. That is in poor taste. You know, they can't really play the part if they're doing that. They can't control themselves, et cetera and so forth. But, you know, starting with Konstantin Stanislavski and then with the people who followed in his footsteps, we, as a culture, changed our mind about that, and we began to prize things like vulnerability and risk and - on the actor's part and the sense that they are really, on some level, really doing what the character is doing, not to such an extent that they lose all sense of themselves, because that truly would be madness, but that something real is at stake in those performances.GROSS: So let's talk about the roots of the Method. The Method is an American version of the acting techniques that were codified by Konstantin Stanislavski, the Russian director who co-founded the Moscow Art Theatre in the 1890s. He started codifying his approach in 1906. He called it the system. Can you describe some of the basic tenets of the system?BUTLER: Sure. The system flows from a couple of really simple core ideas. One of them has to do with the necessity of the actor - experiencing is the word that they use. Experiencing is a rough translation of a Russian word, perezhivanie. And it means just that moment where the actor is so into the imagined reality of the character that, to some extent, they're really feeling and experiencing what the character is going through.And some of its other sort of core ideas are that the actor is their own material - they're kind of both the painter and the paint - that a role should be divided up into its component parts, which he called bits, that - he was very into physical relaxation and the actor using the powers of concentration and attention to forget the audience was there, and to try to kind of live again within the imagined reality of the play and of the character. One of the things that he was also very interested in, which would become particularly notorious in the United States, was this idea of affective memory. And affective memory is essentially triggering a strong emotional state that you might need to play the character through using your own memories of when you have experienced that emotion.GROSS: He also had a principle that acting should be guided by actions, by things that you wanted or needed, demands that you had. You give the example of if you're thirsty, then you want a glass of water.BUTLER: Yes. Yeah, hopefully in most plays, it's more high-stakes than just being thirsty, right? But yes, actually one of his ideas that goes on to be really the cornerstone of a lot of American acting and directing and script analysis is that characters are always wanting something, and they're always doing something in pursuit of the thing that they want. And those wants and the things they're doing - there's a whole lot of different names for them - the task, the problem, the objective, the action. But whatever you call it, the core idea is that I as a character have something that I need, something that I want and that I'm going to do things - which is often language is the thing that I'm doing - but I'm going to do something to accomplish that end.GROSS: Stanislavsky also emphasized the importance of rehearsals, and he was really, really strict about them, and he'd have people rehearse, like, over and over and over and over again until they'd get angry with him.BUTLER: Yeah, absolutely. That predates the system, really. That comes from the very start of his career. You know, he was rebelling against a status quo in Russia, where plays weren't really rehearsed that much. They were rehearsed, like, nine times, maybe. The dress rehearsal was a relatively new idea. And so he was rebelling against that by saying, no, the whole point of rehearsal is that we're going to do this over and over again. The actors and the director are going to have a unified vision of what the play is trying to do, and they're all going to kind of sublimate themselves to that unified vision. And we're going to do it over and over and over again until we get it right. That becomes particularly extreme once he starts using his rehearsal periods to experiment with developing the system. And probably the - you know, his production of "Hamlet" rehearses for something like three years, you know, so eventually it gets really, really out of control. And there are times where he rehearses things for 14 months, and the play is no better off than it was at the beginning. So those two ideas, one that predates the system and one that comes from the system, kind of intersect in ways that eventually cause him a huge number of problems.GROSS: Well, let's take a break, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method." We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method" about the history of that acting technique, the people who created and fought over it, the actors who practiced it and how it fell out of favor. So in the early 1920s, Stanislavsky brings his Moscow Art Theatre to the States, and it really is an amazing experience for some up-and-coming actors and directors. Can you talk a little bit about the impact of the Moscow Art Theatre on acting in New York - acting and directing in New York?BUTLER: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of difficult to oversell how important their Broadway run on their U.S. tour was. People had really never seen acting like what they saw from the Moscow Art Theatre. You know, John Barrymore wrote a letter to the producer that was published in The New York Times, saying it was the best acting ensemble he'd ever seen. You know, people would come back night after night, wrapped with attention to what they were seeing. And these plays, it should be said, were performed in Russian, and most of the audience members did not speak Russian. So it's even coming across this language barrier.And what they were particularly swept away by was that every actor in the Moscow Art Theatre would sort of fully dedicate themselves to their characters, even if those characters were supernumeraries. Even if those characters were, you know, a spear carrier, that spear carrier would feel like a real human being. And that had always been the Moscow Art Theatre's approach. Stanislavsky is the guy who came up with the phrase, there are no small parts, only small actors, and he really lived it in his company. And so you would just see this ensemble who were all on the same page, working towards the same ends and giving it their all. And people were completely blown away by it. And, you know, many of those people - Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurman, among them - would go on to become some of the foremost thinkers about acting and theater in the United States for the rest of the 20th century.GROSS: And some of the people who you just mentioned studied with Maria Ouspenskaya, who was from the Moscow Art Theatre but stayed in America and started teaching.BUTLER: Yes. Yes, Ouspenskaya and this guy Richard Boleslavsky were two members of the Moscow Art Theatre who wound up staying in New York. Boleslavsky was actually already there because of his political beliefs, and Ouspenskaya also was informed while on tour that she couldn't return to Moscow. And so she remained in New York, and Boleslavsky hired her to teach at this new acting school he founded called the American Lab Theatre, the goal of which was really to teach Stanislavsky's ideas in the United States and to create a kind of mini Moscow Art Theatre in the U.S. And Ouspenskaya was the person who really taught the system to her American pupils. And she was, like Stanislavsky before her, famous for how harsh her critique could be. In her case, it had a really explicit pedagogical purpose, which was that acting is very frightening. You have to do a lot of scary things. And so if you could kind of survive her - you know, you had a bulletproof vest for the rest of your career, if you could really survive her, you know, flensing of your ego (laughter) in her class. And she was the one who really taught these techniques that were the core of the system to people like Strasberg, Clurman, Stella Adler.GROSS: And if you could survive her, you could survive the rejections you'd be getting when you audition for a show or the bad reviews you'd be getting.BUTLER: Yes, absolutely. I mean, being an actor is tough. It's never been the case that being an actor is an easy job. You have to deal with a lot of rejection. You have to deal with a lot of bad reviews. You have to deal with people not treating you well. I mean, it's a tough life. And so she thought of herself as toughening up her young charges for this difficult life they were going to have to lead.GROSS: Stanislavski's theater group, The Moscow Art Theatre - when they perform in New York, that leads in various ways to the creation of the Group Theatre, which was, you know, an early laboratory for the American version of Stanislavski, which is what became known as The Method. Among the co-founders were Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg. What was the Group Theatre, and what are some of the ways that it was trying to innovate what theater was in America?BUTLER: So the Group Theatre was an ensemble theater producing new works on Broadway with a fixed acting company. It was co-founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg. And the idea was to create and discover a uniquely American voice, a uniquely American way of doing theater, and whose acting techniques would draw on Stanislavski to create sort of the most sort of present, vital, living, alive-feeling acting possible. The idea was, you know, that we were in the midst of the Great Depression. The theater starts performing in 1931. We're in the midst of the Great Depression. We're still recovering from the wreckage of World War I - that America was filled with a new people and that out of this wreckage could grow a kind of utopia. And the group was - in some ways, they were utopian dreamers, and their theater company was a utopian dream. And, of course, didn't work out that way.The company lasted 10 years before going bankrupt. But along the way, it launched the careers of, you know, Harold Clurman, prominent critic and director, Lee Strasberg, who became the most important and famous acting teacher in America of the 20th century, Stella Adler, his rival, Sanford Meisner, who's also an incredibly important acting teacher, Clifford Odets, the most important playwright of the 1930s and, of course, Elia Kazan, who for a while was the most important theater director and the most important film director simultaneously. And several of those people then went on after the group died to found The Actors Studio, which became the kind of high temple of The Method from then on.GROSS: The Group Theatre also launched the battle - the aesthetic battle - between Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler about how to interpret Stanislavski. So what was that battle about?BUTLER: Well, part of what that battle was about was that they despised each other on a personal level and had for years. So, you know, part of it had to do with their own personal animus. I think it could have been a respectable difference of opinion otherwise (laughter). But Stella Adler was an actor in the group, and Lee was the director and the kind of acting guru. And from the get-go, Adler really disliked Lee Strasburg's emphasis on psychology and on emotion and on the actors' personal experiences and using their personal experiences to realize the part. She had trouble doing it. She also didn't like doing it. She thought that it was - sick was the word that she would use many times. And she was also often the lead in these plays. So she's fighting with Lee Strasberg all the time about acting technique.And then finally, on a trip to Europe, she goes to Moscow and then to Paris with Harold Clurman, who was her on-again, off-again lover and eventually her husband. In Paris she actually meets Stanislavski. And she is trying to be kind of polite. But finally, she can't hold it back any longer. And she says, you know, Mr. Stanislavski, I loved acting before I studied your system. And it's ruined me, and I hate it now. And Stanislavski says to her, well, perhaps you're not doing it right. But either way, why don't you come to my apartment tomorrow, and we'll start working together, and maybe I can help you? And so they worked together in French. And she translates a scene she was having trouble with in French. And they work really hard at it and - for a few weeks.And then she comes back to the United States, and she tells the Group Theatre, Lee has gotten Stanislavski all wrong. Stanislavski is not about personal experience. And he's not about these affective memories. And he's not about using your emotions. The core of the system is actually imagination. The core of the system is action - all those other things you and I were talking about earlier, Terry - action, the problem, the objective, what the character wants. The system is about behavior. And the system is about the circumstances in which the characters find themselves and the context in which they live. And so from then on, there's really this battle about, you know, who is really representing the truth of what Stanislavski taught. Is it about psychology and emotion? Is it about imagination and behavior? And I think the truth of the matter is it's kind of about both. And it depends on what the specific actor needs. But that fight is really fascinating. And it lasts for the rest of their lives. And even posthumously, people are still arguing about it.GROSS: Let's take another break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method." We'll talk more after a break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.(SOUNDBITE OF LEONARD BERNSTEIN'S "ON THE WATERFRONT MAIN TITLE")GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Method," about the history of that acting technique, the people who created and fought over it, the actors who practiced it and how it fell out of favor. Butler also co-wrote the book "The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent Of Angels In America." He's a theater director, teaches theater history and performance at The New School, co-hosts The Slate podcast "Working" about the creative process and is a cultural critic whose writing frequently appears in Slate.We were talking about the Group Theatre and the directors and actors that came out of it. It started as a theater group in the 1930s and as, you know, film expanded and, you know, sound on film became really popular, some of the actors from there and the directors, too, migrated to Hollywood. So give us an example of an actor who learned the Method through the Group Theatre and went on to Hollywood afterwards and how they had to tune up what they learned for the screen, which reveals really different things than the stage does because the audience is seated at such a far distance in the theater whereas close-ups enable you to see details you'd miss on stage.BUTLER: That's a great question, and it's really important because film and television actually becomes, in many ways, sort of the largest vehicle for the Method throughout the rest of the century. And, you know, in some ways, the most important actor to come out of the group, who I maintain is actually the first Method film star, is a man named John Garfield. And John Garfield quits the group over a dispute over a role in a play. And he goes out west to - because his wife is pregnant and they need money. And, you know, this is what he knows how to do, and he's going to make money. And he lands a role in 1938 in this film called "Four Daughters," which is directed by Michael Curtiz and stars Claude Rains and is written by the guys who go on to write "Casablanca." And he gives this unbelievable performance in this kind of nothing movie. It's a very silly, slight film. But the performance he gives - you know, as soon as he walks on camera, you can just tell that something is happening, that acting is changing, that the norms around what a character is, that they're never going to be the same on some level because he's so vital and in the moment and he feels much more like a real person than everyone else.But it wasn't easy for him to learn how to do that. He couldn't just do a stage performance on camera. If you've ever seen someone just give sort of a stage-size performance on camera, it's really too much because the camera picks up so much that an audience in the theater will not see. It can really see you think or people talk about it reading your mind. Or I think John Garfield calls the camera, like, the great monstrous eye, you know? And so he really had to learn how to do much less and much less and much less and to strip away and to learn how to perform with a new kind of ease and spontaneity that the camera would kind of pick up and enjoy. That was really what he had to learn to do to be a great film actor, which he really was.GROSS: So what would you say was different about him and about other people who came out of the Method compared to their predecessors in - on screen?BUTLER: Yeah, on screen, absolutely. So part of what's going on is in the '30s and '40s is, you know, the height of the Hollywood studio system. So the Hollywood studios own the movie theaters their work is going to be presented in. They have the actors on these incredibly detailed contracts. So the actors are full-time employees of the studios, but the studios also kind of own them and control their lives in all these ways. And the movies that they're making at this time revolve, in terms of acting, around type. So what they would do with a new actor and new star is they would create this persona for that actor - with that actor's cooperation often but not always. And then on camera, they are playing some variation of that type in every part. So when you go to see - to pick a brilliant actor from that time period, when you go to see Cary Grant in a movie from the '40s, you are not going to be convinced that Cary Grant is playing a real person. The joy of it is watching Cary Grant play this kind of variation on what a Cary Grant part is. So, you know - I mean, you've seen "Bringing Up Baby," right?GROSS: Yes.BUTLER: You know, an amazing film. You're not saying, oh, Cary Grant's really an archaeologist, right? You're like, isn't it hilarious to watch...GROSS: Absolutely, yes.BUTLER: ...Cary Grant hike up his pants and go, oh, oh, I'm so flustered all the time, you know? And so that's - I mean, that stuff is amazing. It just has different values, starting with John Garfield and then especially once people like Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando come along. Instead, what we start to value is versatility, the actor's ability to disappear into a role, the actor's ability to seem like they are really in the moment and that they are giving a truthful performance, that the actor is letting us in to some private, vulnerable part of them that we wouldn't