Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition

by Stephen Prince

  Out of Africa (1985), Ironweed (1987), and A Cry in

  She has also won numerous Golden Globe Awards,

  the Dark (1988). She won an Oscar for Best Actress

  Emmy Awards, and Screen Actors Guild Awards.

  for her role in Sophie’s Choice as a Polish mother

  As these honors suggest, many professionals in the

  forced by a Nazi officer to choose which of her chil-

  film and television industries view her as one of the

  dren will be executed.

  finest—perhaps the finest— actors currently work-

  Most of her roles in the 1980s were in serious and

  ing in motion pictures. The film industry today does

  very literate dramas, and beginning in the 1990s she

  not produce many films with a female lead at their

  expanded her range of characters by playing flam-

  center, and yet Streep has sustained a long and dis-

  boyant villains and comic characters in movies that

  tinguished career in the face of this obstacle. She has

  had a more popular orientation. Her comic villains in

  worked regularly and often, and has supplemented

  She-Devil (1989) and Death Becomes Her (1992) were

  her film roles with performances on television and

  startling changes of pace, as was her rugged, white-

  the stage.

  water-rapids-shooting character in the action film,

  Her first film roles in the 1970s, as supporting

  The River Wild (1994). But she kept returning to seri-

  characters, were in very prominent films by major di-

  ous drama for her best work, as in Clint Eastwood’s

  rectors. These included Fred Zinnemann’s Julia (1977),

  The Bridges of Madison County (1995), as an Iowa

  Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1979), Woody

  housewife vaguely unhappy in her marriage who falls

  Allen’s Manhattan (1979), and Robert Benton’s

  in love with a visiting photographer. In The Hours

  Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). She had an Oscar nomina-

  (2002), she costarred with two other outstanding

  tion as Best Supporting Actress for The Deer Hunter

  contemporary actors—Nicole Kidman and Julianne

  and won in that category for Kramer vs. Kramer .

  Moore—in a finely directed and performed story of

  In the next decade, she became a major star,

  three generations of women coping with despair.

  playing lead roles in a variety of highly prestigious

  Streep formed a very productive relationship with

  films, many of which were historical dramas that

  director Mike Nichols on the films Silkwood (1983),

  showcased her exceptional command of language,

  Heartburn (1986), Postcards from the Edge (1990),

  132

  Acting

  THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA (20TH CENTURY FOX, 2007)

  Streep’s performance as fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly added another powerful character to her portfolio. While Miranda is not a villain, she is an unsympathetic character, one of many that Streep has bravely played. Many stars are reluctant to play characters they know the audience will not like. Other films in which she does not try to elicit the audience’s favor include Rendition (2007) and The Manchurian Candidate (2004). Frame enlargement.

  and Angels in America (2003), a television mini-series

  Off-screen Streep has lent her name and prestige

  in which she played four different characters and

  to various environmental, health, family, and arts

  won an Emmy Award. Nichols also directed her on

  charities and benefits, remaining extremely active in

  the stage in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull .

  social and community causes.

  She has lent her voice to cartoon characters in the

  At a time when major roles for women in

  television series The Simpsons and King of the Hill and

  Hollywood film are in short supply, Streep has not

  in film, The Ant Bully (2007). She also has a splendid

  only endured; she has prospered and has accumu-

  singing voice, which can be heard in Postcards from

  lated a significant body of work, enduring films that

  the Edge and A Prairie Home Companion (2006).

  define her as one of the screen’s great performers. ■

  ANGELS IN AMERICA

  (HBO, 2003)

  As a performer, Meryl

  Streep has few limits. She

  is equally adept at comedy

  and drama, and there

  seems to be no role she

  cannot play. She plays

  four roles in this film, in-

  cluding the elderly rabbi

  pictured here. Frame

  enlargement.

  133

  Acting

  METHOD AND TECHNICAL APPROACHES

  TO PERFORMING

  In creating a character, film actors today tend to use a blend of method and technical approaches. For the sake of clarity, these approaches will be discussed in distinction to one another, although in practice most actors use some elements of both. Method acting grew out of acting teacher Lee Strasberg’s workshops and exerted a powerful influence over a generation of actors in U.S. motion pictures beginning in the 1950s.

  This generation included Marlon Brando ( A Streetcar Named Desire , 1951; On the Waterfront , 1954); James Dean ( Rebel without a Cause , 1955); Paul Newman ( The Left-Handed Gun , 1958; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , 1958), and others. They brought to their roles a more reflective psychological dimension than had existed in preceding decades of screen acting. In a performance by Brando or Newman, one senses a res-ervoir of thought and feeling within the character, a rich inner life, that is only partly disclosed through dialogue and gesture. Their playing style was emotionally rich and projected volatile and at times contradictory psychological dynamics.

  The method involved using emotional recall to play a role. Called on to portray fear, anxiety, sadness, or other emotions, the method actor searches his or her personal experience for moments when these emotions were experienced and tries to reimagine the situations that led to those feelings and internally recreate them. Re-experiencing the emotion, or one similar, becomes the basis for its performance. The method actor searches for the relevant personal experiences that will enable him or her to feel the character.

  Marlon Brando is one of the supreme exemplars of this approach. One of his greatest performances is in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). During a lengthy scene in the middle of the film, shot largely in a single take to accentuate the continuity of Brando’s performance, his character reminisces about his youth and his parents. Brando improvised the scene on camera and largely drew on his own life to flesh out the memories of the character he was playing, as he did in other scenes of the picture. The result is a performance of authentic emotion that shocks and disturbs the viewer with its candor.

  An alternative to the method is a more technical approach. Here, instead of bas-ing a character on personal emotional memories, the actor plays the script and creates the character by performing the behavior and dialogue called for in the scene. The classic Hollywood actors of the 1930s and 1940s represent this approach, perhaps none better than James Cagney. Cagney was one of the industry’s finest actors and possessed an impressive range, excelling in gangster movies ( The Public Enemy , 1931; The Roaring Twenties , 1939), light comedy ( The Strawberry Blonde , 1941), and the musical ( Yankee Doodle Dandy , 1942).

  In his autobiography, he discussed one of his most famous scenes in White Heat (1948), where, as gangster Cody Jarrett, he goes berserk in a prison cafeteria on learning of his mother’s dea
th. Cagney wrote his autobiography after the method performers had arrived in the 1950s, and his discussion contains an implied criticism of that approach. He recalled being asked by reporters whether he prepared himself in some special way for the extraordinary emotional and physical outburst he displays in the scene. He said that he didn’t psych himself up in any special way and (here was the implied criticism) that he didn’t understand actors who felt the need to emotionally pump themselves up in order to do a scene. Cagney said that he remembered seeing some lunatics in an asylum when he was a boy and tried in the scene to imitate the way they looked and sounded. While Cagney admitted drawing on personal experi-134

  Acting

  LAST TANGO IN PARIS

  (UNITED ARTISTS,

  1972)

  In this single, lengthy shot,

  Marlon Brando used details

  from his own childhood

  to create his character in

  Last Tango in Paris . The

  raw emotional candor of

  this performance remains

  unsurpassed in his career.

  Frame enlargement.

  ence to play the scene, it is significant that he did not phrase it in emotional terms. He did not try to recall the emotions he felt as a boy viewing people in the asylum or to imagine what those so confined must have felt. He merely tried to imitate some of the inmates’ gestures and behavior patterns. He created the role from the outside in rather than from the inside out. Cagney took pride in maintaining that the pro knows how to do a scene without extensive “psyching up” and just goes and does it.

  Prior to the arrival of the method performers, most Hollywood acting tended to be of this sort, extremely accomplished but without excessive psychologizing about a character’s motivations and personality. It was in this context that the more introspective approach of Brando, Newman, and their generation of actors seemed so revolutionary.

  While today it may seem less so, that is because the playing styles of so many contemporary actors—Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt, Sean Penn—owe much to the 1950s method actors.

  WHITE HEAT (WARNER

  BROS., 1948)

  Exemplifying a technical

  approach to acting, James

  Cagney, as gangster Cody

  Jarrett, goes beserk on learn ing

  of his mother’s death. The scene

  is a classic in the history of

  American screen performance.

  Frame enlargement.

  135

  Acting

  THE PERFORMER AS AN ELEMENT OF VISUAL DESIGN

  Now that the fundamentals of motion picture acting are clear, it is time to examine how performance style becomes an element of mise-en-scène. Filmmakers can treat actors as design elements in several ways: by emphasizing a performer’s unique body language, by choreographing performance and regulating its intensity, by transforming the performer into a visual “type,” and finally, by relating the performer to additional structural elements of design.

  Unique Body Language

  Many stars have distinctive, highly identifiable ways of moving. Denzel Washington, for example, has a centered, rolling gait that projects calmness and power.

  Filmmakers often capitalize on the body language of an established star so that it becomes part of the visual design of a film. John Wayne had a peculiar manner of walking that, in time, became famous. A large and very graceful man, his feet were quite small in relation to his bulk, and he developed an easy, fluid gait that riveted attention—such a large man moving so easily on small feet. Actress Katharine Hepburn (with whom he worked in Rooster Cogburn , 1975) was very impressed by his light movements.Wayne’s graceful, catlike movements became a justly famous part of his screen persona, evident in scores of films over many decades. In Red River , Wayne walks through a herd of cattle, and they scatter to get out of his way. It’s an impressive thing to see.

  In 1976, at the end of his career, Wayne appeared in The Shootist , a film with strong biographical elements in which he played an aging gunfighter dying of cancer, much as Wayne, the actor, would soon do. At the climax of the film, Wayne’s character, J. B. Books, agrees to meet three gunfighters for a shoot-out in the town saloon.

  Wayne enters the saloon, and the film’s director, Don Siegel, privileges his walk by letting Wayne traverse the length of the saloon from the front door in the background to the bar in the foreground. Siegel lets the moment play without cutting, enabling the viewer to observe and enjoy the walk one final time in what was to be his last film.

  By emphasizing the unique body language of its star, the visual design of The Shootist tailors its mise-en-scène to blend Wayne’s screen persona and the character of J. B. Books into a seamless whole. It does so most explicitly during the opening credit sequence, when Books is introduced through clips from earlier John Wayne Westerns. In each clip, Wayne gracefully performs some physical action—galloping a horse across a river, diving off a wagon under gunfire, snatching a thrown rifle from midair. The clips span 20 years of filmmaking, their images encoding a history of John Wayne’s physical performances, a history that in The Shootist becomes the identity of the character he plays.

  Charlie Chaplin is another performer whose films center on his unique and

  expressive body language. Chaplin’s famous exit at the conclusion of his pictures showed him walking away from the camera with his back to it, waddling in his famous splay-footed fashion and twirling his cane. Chaplin’s camerawork was extremely simple and functional. He avoided extravagant camera movements and fancy angles, preferring, instead, to use the camera as a passive observer of his pantomime performance, believing, correctly, that what he did in front of the camera was more important than how the camera itself might move to comment on the action of a scene. The mise-en-scène of his films centers on his body language and costume.

  136

  Acting

  FUNNY FACE (PARAMOUNT, 1957)

  Born in Belgium and trained as a ballet dancer, Audrey Hepburn became one of Hollywood’s biggest stars in the 1950s. With her lean, dancer’s body and natural beauty, she commanded the screen with exceptional whimsy and charm. She was very adept at physical comedy, and her movements were light, airy, and graceful, even when a scene called on her to play clumsy. Hepburn was a unique personality on screen in the period, and even when playfully costumed as she is here, her star appeal shines through. Frame enlargement.

  Choreographing Expression

  Filmmakers regulate acting style in keeping with their design objectives for a film.

  This often entails a deliberate placement of the performers in relation to the camera.

  Alfred Hitchcock, for example, precisely choreographed his performers, and they had very limited freedom to bring material of their own devising that affected the content and design of Hitchcock’s shots. During a love scene in Notorious (1946), in one extended shot Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman walk from a balcony to the interior of a hotel room, and Grant picks up a telephone and converses with his boss. Hitchcock insisted that Grant and Bergman maintain an embrace, kiss, and nuzzle during the length of the shot as they walked across the set, and they were filmed by a moving camera. The maneuver was extremely difficult to execute. It required that the actors maintain a very unnatural posture, but Hitchcock wanted the visual effect of the sustained embrace and the camera’s intimate involvement with the lovers.

  A filmmaker also can regulate performance by controlling its degree of emotional expression. At one extreme, severe restraint can work to orient the viewer to surface rather than depth. Citizen Kane (1941) revolves around the mystery of how Charles Foster Kane came to be the man he was. In a crucial scene from childhood, where he is taken from his parents to be raised by a rich guardian, director Orson Welles has actress Agnes Moorehead play Kane’s mother in an opaque and impenetrable way.

  Her facial expressions and voice are flat and unmodulated, even when the character appears in close-up framings. As a result, t
he viewer can only attend to the surfaces of this character—her face, her posture—as Moorehead’s performance establishes these. It is very difficult to “read” beyond them, to see into the character, to infer her 137

  Acting

  motives and feelings in abandoning her child and to understand the nature of Kane’s relationship with his parents. This difficulty helps state the film’s overall theme and design, which stress that Charles Foster Kane is, in fundamental ways, unknowable.

  The impenetrability of the mother deepens the mystery of Kane. The acting style expresses the theme that is evoked elsewhere in the film by low-key lighting, camera movement, and editing.

  French director Robert Bresson was a master filmmaker who worked from a

  set of unique ideas about the proper role of actors in cinema. He generally preferred that his performers be empty vessels. He regarded his performers not as actors but as models who should pose in an emotionally flat manner for the camera. He avoided using actors whose facial expressions and gestural styles projected specific emotions.

  He wanted his actors to be recessive, passive, and neutral in their playing style, and he directed them to speak in a monotone. By reducing all stylistic ornamentation, he wanted to illuminate the interior, spiritual lives of the characters. Conventional acting, he felt, turned cinema into theatre and did not get at the interior realities he wanted to explore.

  Bresson explained his creative philosophy in a series of memos published in book form as Notes on Cinematography. His preference for relatively emotionless acting is very different from the norms of U.S. filmmaking, which tend to emphasize acting that communicates a great deal of emotional information. Bresson’s style, however, has influenced U.S. filmmakers. The end of Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) shows the titular thief, now in jail, finally acknowledging the grace a woman’s love has brought into his life. By acknowledging this, he achieves a kind of spiritual redemption. Director Paul Schrader was so impressed with this ending and its emotional restraint that he recreated it as an homage in two of his own films, American Gigolo (1980) and Light Sleeper (1992). (An homage is a reference in a film to another film or filmmaker.) Compare Bresson’s approach with the expression on Chaplin’s face in the