Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  The acting styles of many famous motion picture stars would be totally inappropriate and ineffective on stage. The quavering, tremulous undertone in Judy Garland’s voice is a subtlety of performance that precisely and powerfully conveys the vulnerability of her characters in movies like The Wizard of Oz (1939) and A Star Is Born (1954).

  It is a characteristic captured by the motion picture medium in its ability to amplify 125

  Acting

  voice and gesture. Humphrey Bogart’s nervous facial tics and James Cagney’s trademark shrug of the shoulders, repeated from film to film, helped establish the star presence of these performers. These tiny gestures would be lost if played in a theater auditorium.

  Lighting, Lenses, and Effects Work

  The film actor has to know not just the emotional arc of the character in the story and how to play this arc but also how to play for the camera’s view of the scene. In other words, the actor has to know how the camera is viewing the area within its frame. What is the depth of field? Where is the focal plane of the shot—the area in focus—and where are its borders? Where does the light fall off into shadow as the camera reads it , not as it appears to the eye? These considerations complicate how an actor must move on screen.

  Performing with these considerations in mind is called hitting the mark . Actors hit their mark when they move in precise accord with the constraints imposed by lighting and depth of field. In a complex and highly specific lighting setup, if an actor misses his or her mark by taking one extra step crossing the set, he or she may deliver his or her line from an unexposed or out-of-focus area of the frame. Hitting the mark without letting the audience see this dimension of performance requires tremendous skill from a performer.

  How the camera frames a shot will influence the way an actor plays the scene.

  In a master shot, where the camera is some distance away, actors often will put more energy into their scene and then recalibrate their energy level for closer shots. Some directors, like Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, like shooting with multiple cameras running simultaneously so that actors won’t feel the need to play to a specific camera and will therefore give a more natural performance.

  Director Paul Greengrass used multiple cameras when he made United 93

  (2006), about the aircraft hijacked on 9/11 which crashed in Pennsylvania after a THE GENERAL (BUSTER

  KEATON PRODUCTIONS,

  1926)

  Minimalist acting styles can be

  highly effective in cinema because

  the camera is so sensitive it sees

  everything a performer does, no

  matter how tiny. Buster Keaton

  was, with Chaplin, one of the great

  masters of silent comedy. Unlike

  Chaplin, though, Keaton avoided

  expressing emotion. He was called

  the “Great Stoneface.” In situations

  of chaos and danger, his characters

  are calm and stoic, their faces un-

  responsive to crises. This contrast

  is part of what makes his films so

  funny. Keaton’s extraordinary abil-

  ity to underplay his characters offers

  the purest example of the general

  rule in art that “less is more.” Frame

  enlargement.

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  Acting

  THE HOURS (MIRAMAX,

  2002)

  Makeup effects can be an

  essential tool of the ac-

  tor’s craft. Many actors, for

  example, have worn false

  noses. Orson Welles often

  did so, and Kevin Spacey

  in Beyond the Sea wore

  one to better resemble his

  character, singer Bobby

  Darin. Playing writer Virginia

  Woolf, Nicole Kidman wore

  a prosthetic nose to enhance

  her resemblance to Woolf.

  Changing one’s appearance

  in this manner can help the

  actor to get “in character.”

  Frame enlargement.

  struggle onboard between the hijackers and the passengers. By shooting scenes with several cameras and starting each camera at a different time, Greengrass could film an entire, lengthy scene without interruption. He did this for the benefit of the actors, enabling them to stay in character for a much longer time than is the norm in movies shot with only one camera and therefore to give more naturalistic, extended performances.

  Visual effects scenes in film impose an additional set of demands on performers.

  Actors play these scenes in nonexistent sets and often to nonexistent characters, if those characters are effects creations like Godzilla or the bugs in Starship Troopers .

  The actor performs in front of a greenscreen, a blank-colored wall that will be digitally subtracted from the shot, leaving the performer as an element that can be composited with other digital elements in a special effects shot. Much of Keanu Reeves’s performance in The Matrix (1999) and Liam Neeson’s in The Phantom Menace (1999) were greenscreened.

  Lack of a Live Audience

  On stage, performers play to a live audience, and they typically modify their performance based on the immediate feedback they get from the audience. The film performer does not have this luxury. To shape a performance, the actor has to depend on the guidance of the director, and those who have the reputation of handling actors well—Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Sydney Pollack, Oliver Stone—have consistently attracted the industry’s finest performers to their films.

  Some film actors periodically do stage work precisely because they value the immediate feedback of a live audience and consider this to be essential to developing their skills as an actor. By contrast, other performers have found film acting more congenial precisely because the audience is absent. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Charlie Chaplin, who had a fear of playing to live audiences and felt more comfortable perfecting his performances in the relative seclusion of the motion picture studio.

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  Acting

  Case Study THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST

  Jim Caviezel gives a very intense performance as Jesus,

  prosthesis that contained the wounds, but these were

  one that helps to create the film’s emotional power and

  covered digitally in postproduction with fake skin. To

  appeal. Caviezel’s enactment of Christ’s agonies during

  simulate the whip strikes, the digital skin was removed,

  his torture and crucifixion struck many viewers as emo-

  revealing a prosthetic wound.

  tionally true and deeply moving. It is a very physical per-

  The climax shows the flagrum tearing out a large

  formance, as Caviezel graphically depicts the anguish of

  chunk of flesh from Jesus’ side. Caviezel was not in-

  a man whose body is being systematically broken.

  volved in this action. Another actor wore a chest pros-

  But the most powerful moments in the film were

  thesis with a flagrum attached to it, and the camera

  digital effects, requiring that Caviezel pretend that

  filmed the action of it being torn loose. This imagery

  some action was occurring when, in fact, it was not.

  was then digitally pasted onto Caviezel’s body. Caviezel

  The scourging scene, for example, shows a Roman

  pretended to react to something that was not there.

  guard whipping Jesus with a flagrum, a torture device

  This provides one measure of the quality of his

  with sheep bones and iron balls attached to the ends

  acting—he convinces us that what we are seeing is

  of leather thongs. The flagrum tears out large chunks

  actually occurring. Viewed in a naive way, the scene

  of Jesus’ flesh, which the viewer sees on
camera as

  seems to put the actor’s performance at the center of

  Caviezel pretends to react in pain.

  the action. In fact, however, the detailed performance

  While the action may seem convincing, in fact, it

  provided by Caviezel occurred in very artificial condi-

  was assembled from many different elements combined

  tions—without a key prop (the flagrum), with the scene’s

  digitally, which included the actors’ performances.

  action conveyed in pantomime, and with no on-camera

  The flagrum was a digital effect. The actor playing the

  depiction of the climax (the tearing of Jesus’ side).

  Roman guard did not hold any such device. Instead,

  This is the kind of artificiality that is commonly

  he merely pantomimed the action of whipping. The

  encountered by actors today. They must share the

  wounds that seem to open on Jesus’ back when the

  screen with missing elements that are added in post-

  flagrum hits also were effects. Caviezel wore a body

  production, long after the actor has gone home. ■

  THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (DIMENSION FILMS, 2004)

  Jim Caviezel’s performance helps lend credibility to this special-effects scene in which none of the pictured action happened on camera. The whip and the wounding were digital effects added in postproduction. Film actors today increasingly must do their work in relation to nonexistent (digital) props, sets, and even other characters. Frame enlargement.

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  Acting

  CATEGORIES OF FILM PERFORMERS

  Motion picture actors tend to fall into three categories. There are stars, supporting players , and extras. The star is an indelible feature of motion pictures. Audiences go to the movies in large part because of the stars who appear in them, and this has been the case for decades. This is true not just for the U.S. film industry but for virtually every film industry in the world.

  Stars are distinct from supporting players in that the star commands the largest salary, usually gets top billing, and is foremost in the minds of viewers. Supporting players, as their name implies, have secondary and supporting, rather than starring, roles in a production. By contrast, extras occupy the smallest amount of screen time.

  Extras are performers who appear incidentally and briefly—pedestrians crossing a street, the crowd watching a baseball game.

  Although stars typically get the most attention from viewers, many supporting players have established careers with considerable distinction and have created recognizable screen personalities. Supporting players such as Walter Brennan, for example, developed very distinct screen personalities in such films as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Red River (1948), and Rio Bravo (1959). Brennan frequently portrayed cantan-kerous old coots who came close to stealing the film from the established stars. Other supporting players, such as Danny Aiello and Robert Duvall in more recent years, have approximated star status. Duvall began his career with memorable supporting work in pictures such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Godfather (1972) and, by virtue of his star turn in Lonesome Dove (1989), graduated to leading-player status. The Apostle (1997), which he wrote, directed, and starred in, showcases his charismatic personality and subtle, nuanced playing style. It is very much an actor-centered film, emphasizing the human emotional drama for which performance, not effects, is essential.

  The Star Persona

  The star persona is the collective screen personality that emerges over the course of a star’s career from the motion pictures in which he or she appears. The star persona or on-screen personality is a collective creation generated by many films and is greater than any single performance in an individual film. One of the easiest ways of gauging whether a performer has become a star is to evaluate whether a star persona exists.

  Names such as John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Bette Davis, and Katharine Hepburn instantly call to mind a very fixed, distinct screen personality that exists beyond their individual film appearances and that unifies these.

  Stars with long careers evidence interesting changes in their star personas. If one looks at the screen appearances of a performer before they became a star, one often sees a different persona, resulting from atypical roles that the performer, once a star, thereafter avoided. Before he became a star, Humphrey Bogart spent many years as a supporting player in Warner Bros. crime films. In such pictures as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), Bogart portrayed a series of unsympathetic, if interesting, villains. These roles did not showcase the essential feature of his star persona, namely, Bogart’s world-weary romanticism, his cynicism with a heart.

  It was not until High Sierra in 1941 that Bogart, still playing a gangster in a Warner Bros. picture, became a star in a role that allowed him to embody the kind of bruised romantic idealism that he would go on to perfect in such enduring pictures as 129

  Acting

  CASABLANCA (WARNER BROS., 1942); THE AFRICAN QUEEN (UNITED

  ARTISTS, 1951)

  Evolution of a star performer. Two phases of Humphrey Bogart’s career: the romantic leading man (with Ingrid Bergman) in Casablanca and the player of grizzled, quirky, neurotic characters, as with Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen . Frame enlargements.

  The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), To Have and Have Not (1944), and Key Largo (1948). In Bogart’s later career, his star persona underwent another change.

  In the late 1940s and early 1950s, he stopped playing romantic leading men and turned toward interesting character types in such pictures as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), and The Caine Mutiny (1954). Gone from these pictures were his romantic star qualities. In their place was a series of neurotic, quirky, and eccentric characterizations.

  The greatest stars give their pictures an electricity and charisma that ordinary performers can’t provide. Consider Julia Roberts and the excitement of her star-making performance in Pretty Woman (1990). When she is on screen, she dominates the scene.

  ERIN BROCKOVICH

  (COLUMBIA TRISTAR,

  2000)

  As a star vehicle, this

  film provides a showcase

  for Julia Roberts’ screen

  personality and charisma.

  She commands the

  camera’s attention with

  her beauty and force

  of personality. Frame

  enlargement.

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  Acting

  THE SEARCHERS (WARNER BROS.,

  1956)

  After years of struggling in low-budget

  B Westerns, John Wayne achieved

  stardom in Stagecoach (1939) and dur-

  ing the next four decades projected a

  powerful masculine image characterized

  by physical strength, moral dignity,

  fair play, and stubborn independence.

  Directors John Ford and Howard Hawks

  appreciated Wayne’s physical power

  on screen and considered it essential to

  the making of a good Western. Wayne’s

  physical presence easily dominates the

  frame. Frame enlargement.

  Her star performance carries Erin Brockovich (2000), a picture for which she won an acting Oscar. In Ocean’s Eleven (2001), her character doesn’t appear until halfway through the film, and director Steven Soderbergh was counting on her to make a strong impression on the viewer very quickly, and she did. There is an indefinable quality of charisma that stars provide, and each of these pictures is a vehicle for the star.

  Some stars have a greater acting range than others. John Wayne tended to

  play the same type of characters from film to film. His acting range is quite small compared with Robert De Niro’s, but this is not to say that he was a poor actor. His performances in Red River (1948), The
Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956), The Cowboys (1972), and many other films are carefully crafted, and his power and charisma are essential components of those films.

  TRAINING DAY (WARNER BROS., 2002)

  Playing against type can be very effective but also risky. Sometimes audiences don’t want to see their stars in a different kind of role. Denzel Washington has tended to play very courageous and moral characters. Here, though, he plays an evil, corrupt cop and gives the role a savage intensity. Washington’s daring switch of character, and the brilliance of his performance, had a sensational effect on the film’s critical and box-office performance.

  For the role, he earned an Oscar for Best Actor. Frame enlargement.

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  Acting

  Other stars, such as Meryl Streep, have an extraordinary range. She has played an actress and country-western singer in Postcards from the Edge (1990), a distraught Australian mother accused of murdering her baby in A Cry in the Dark (1988), a Polish woman who has survived internment in the Nazi concentration camps in Sophie’s Choice (1982), a Danish author who establishes a life in Nairobi in Out of Africa (1985), a whitewater adventurer in The River Wild (1994), and an Italian-American housewife living in the midwestern farm belt in The Bridges of Madison County (1995).

  Even stars who can play a range of characters often project a relatively consistent personality from role to role. Robert De Niro, for example, is known for his psychopaths in such films as Taxi Driver and GoodFellas , whereas Dustin Hoffman tends to play more introverted, withdrawn characters who have trouble expressing themselves, in films such as The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Hero (1992), and Rain Man (1988).

  What finally counts in cinema is not acting range, but the magnetism of the

  actor’s personality before the camera. John Wayne is a great film actor, as are Streep, De Niro, and Hoffman, despite the differences in their range.

  CLOSE-UP

  Meryl Streep

  Born in 1949, Meryl Streep found rapid success and

  dialect, and diction. These included The French

  acclaim as a film actress and currently holds the

  Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Sophie’s Choice (1982),

  record for the most Academy Award nominations.