Do Film Actors Act?

...In films retake may follow retake for considerations unrelated to the acting: The lighting may improve, the background may look better in (or out of) focus, the director wants dresses to swirl with more abandon, the colors fall into harmony (or discords), more striking cloud formations give a richer texture to the sky...

...Olivier has understood as well as most artists how big acting can exploit the cinema...

...If too much self-consciousness leaks into a performance, the actor' s personality obtrudes and distracts us from the characterization, or else makes it look irritatingly complacent, mannered and isolated...

...Well, yes, it does if the performances could have been even finer...

...the objective and subjective lens versus the responsive, or sometimes heedless, audience...

...In practice, as Pudovkin notes, the actors may be unwilling or unversed in the technicalities...

...garlic" performance...

...They scorned the chilliness of the lens...

...On such vacant lots lofty reputations have risen...

...that everybody is, potentially at least, an actor...

...By way of contrast, the late Jack MacGowran felt that 40 takes for one little segment of Dance of the Vampires and60takes for another were "only a part of [Roman Polan-ski's] overall perpetual seeking for perfection...

...Actors, in turn, often profess an appreciation for demanding directors: "He really taught me what screen acting is all about...

...Professional critics' assessments of actors in public, as well as amateurs' depreciations of them in private, owe more than is generally acknowledged to subjective factors...

...They are "pros,' as Hitchcock once said of Cary Grant and James Stewart...

...Half a century later, when many hopes are unfulfilled, one cannot help asking this: If film acting deliberately took on some of the ex-pansiveness of its theatrical counterpart, would it turn stagy...

...But in all three cases the face was exactly the same...

...All the same, a specific uneasiness over the future of acting in films pervades his stimulating and openhearted discussion of the subject...

...To hell with the transition—let the soundtrack make it for us...

...The most compelling acting does not conceal traces of self-consciousness...

...If they attempted anything bolder, they would sink into deeper lu-dicrousness...

...Natural (sometimes miscalled naturalistic) or realistic acting of the sort Nicoll advocated for the screen has hampered film-making since the introduction of sound...

...But fragmentation is merely one token of film actors' lack of control over their portrayals...

...In our daily routines we play roles, enact scenes...

...It might...

...Authorities on cinema have repeatedly confronted us with these and other distinctions to promote a conceptual autonomy for film...

...The most satisfying pert'ormances, in theater or on film, come from actors who have burrowed all the way into their roles, and then emerged from them—but only just...

...They give themselves, not of themselves, as do screenwriters, directors, designers, and other film artisans...

...They contrive mannerisms, deliveries of their lines and themselves which change little from film to film, and they cast their emotions in more or less the same facial mold during the silences...

...It also keeps it, as an imitation, from being slavishly natural by holding it at a slight esthetic distance...

...We generally distinguish film from theater acting by citing the cutting up of film performances into tiny units...

...Thesheer technicality of film-making comes between them and their art: The delays lessen their chances to approach what they conceive to be the definitiv e interpretation...

...2. Retakes...

...It should be noted, too, that retakes do not always occur in quick succession...

...Done for reasons of money, convenience or caprice, this jeopardizes the actor's chances of "building character" and an "orAlbert Bermel, playwright, translator andprofessor of theater at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, won the George Jean Nathan Award during his tenure as the NL's drama critic...

...Still, as with many performers before and since, this young woman could not hold herself responsible for a performance in a 90-min-ute movie assembled out of roughly 15,000 pieces of film...

...any move in that direction would be "reactionary...

...They are infatuated with its pictorial stand-bys: chop-and-splice, flying stunts and special effects, telescopic shots across shimmering terrain at noon, sunrise or dusk, models and miniature catastrophes, torn bodies and fountains of blood —cruelty and motion...

...But the production had not been adapted for the screen, merely bundled onto it...

...Here are several others: • Framing...

...but the most effective acting looks and sounds like life because it artfully transcends the ordinariness, the fleetingness of "being" and ceases its "becoming...

...Yet even allowing for what amounts to discrepancies in taste, a consensus has come to pass: Certain performances on film stand out...

...A longer version of this article will appear in The Play and Its Critic: Essays for Eric Bentley, scheduled to be published in October...

...Nonetheless, both out ofhabitandas a directorial power-grab, the retake tic will persist as long as movies remain wastefully expensive and complicated...

...This is the artificial positioning or composition of actors, or bits of actors...

...Meanwhile the acting doesn't change, or gets worse, or turns mechanical...

...Consequently, acting is tantamount to natural behavior...

...Perhaps the director was fastidious, indecisive or spendthrift...

...Just as, in life, I take instantly to some people and am repelled (or repulsed) by others, so, in the playhouse or moviehouse, my determination of whether acting is good or bad draws upon personal reactions I may not be aware of...

...Sound synchronization: This includes dubbed dialogue, songs rendered by invisible mouths, voiceover narration between and during scenes, and—a gimmick that has become faddish, if not a fetish, of late—voices floated in from the scene to come before a fade, a dissolve or a retreating long shot...

...We'll take the first and last scenes in Death Valley, the battle in Yugoslavia, the banquet in Vienna, and fill in the rest between times on the back lot...

...I never suspect the sincerity of these devout expressions of gratitude...

...I am not about to start picking holes in The Blue Angel alibis late date...

...What I like about the films of the' 20s and early '30s is that the long takes, often considered uncinematic, benefited actors who could spot an opportunity...

...Otherwise admirable biographies and books that analyze the artistry of such men as Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, Pier Paolo Pasolini, John Ford, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, D.W...

...Technical sophistication has drawn these arts closer together, rather than separating them further, and occasionally allowed overlap...

...The director alone makes many inroads into their initiative during the shooting by various means, each defended in the sacred name of results...

...Apocryphal or not, the story is wholly plausible...

...Pudovkin describes how he coaxed a desired smile out of the small boy in The Story of a Simple Case...

...I am not referring to actors who get by exclusively on their good looks or, now and then, succeed mightily becauseof them...

...Takes are getting shorter all the time...

...Or they may be outvoted...

...Among its many virtues, Film Acting recommends that directors enlist actors as partners at every point in filmmaking, instead of exploiting them as adjuncts or implements...

...enjoys Wallace Beery: "He acts like life: very good...

...Griffith, and Josef vonStern-berg allude to directors and actors as colleagues and sometimes as adversaries, but the sole sustained discussion I know of is 50 years old—V.I...

...cutting versus scenic changes...

...Because the director, editor, composer, possibly the producer, and sundry technicians make their living at the actor's esthetic expense, film performers are no longer whole artists...

...The audience ascribes a state of feeling to empty features...

...During new or modified set-ups, the stars may retire to their tents or trailers and the supporting players to their poker games—and grow "cold...

...they are memorable, and would survive without the aid of VCRs...

...They give us the pleasure of watching enviably winsome humanity...

...A judicious salting of self-consciousness, though, keeps acting from seeming needlessly naive...

...Laurence Olivier trades on self-conscious tricks more openly (I'm tempted to say: more bravely) than anyone else, especially in the theater...

...pudovkin warned that film should not revert to stage practices...

...As they weary, they can become defiant, indifferent or compliant — like Gilda Radner in the Saturday Sight Live sketch where John Belushi, caricaturingSamPeckinpah, kept slapping Iter to the ground as he murmured, "1 still don't quite see it...

...And despite his advocating this deeper participation, Pudovkin himself did not grant it: His vision of actors in the editing room is an ideal, not a normal culmination of their efforts...

...The movies of Eric Rohmer, such isolated films as A fter the Rehearsal, The Return of Martin Guerre, The Draughtsman's Contract, and, up toa point, the home-grown Lost in America, remind us that the arts of film, as they evolve, can thrive on the eloquent, all-out acting and the extensive scenes that sustain the best in theater...

...Still, I wonder how many of the engrossing performances Sternberg captured from the likes of Dietrich, Jannings, Cooper, Arnold, Lorre, McLaglen came about in spite of the actors...

...and that everybody is thus capable of acting before an audience or camera...

...Here we run into the longstanding confusion over the word "natural" (not to mention the even worse confusion over the word "is...

...Admittedly, the content of run-of-the-mill pictures, the ones that used to have a "general release" and now enjoy "saturation distribution," dictates the underacting or nonacting that is conspicuous in most of them...

...When the Othello he starred in—staged by John Dexter and mixing Olivier's tempestuous Moor with Frank Finlay's small, guarded Iago—was transferred to film stock, the reviews and the public found Olivier hammy and Finlay quietly appropriate...

...What of those occasions when the natural or lifelike ideal is a misplaced one...

...Applied to acting, does natural mean an imitation of nature, as observed, or ordinary, that is, commonplace...

...If I had to find a single adjective to sum up these actors, it would be either Andrew Undershaft's "unashamed" or, better, theatrical...

...In the BBC-PBS version of King Lear on television, for example, Robert Lindsay's recitation of Edmund's soliloquy—"Thou, Nature, art my goddess" (please notice the juxtaposition here of nature and art) through "Now, gods, stand up for bastards !"—although dedicated to Nature, cried out to be cried out, not savagely muttered...

...Movies with far humbler texts equally give the impression of shame and shrinking in the presence of some fervor...

...The actress went on to speak of other takes that were shot 12, 20, 34 times...

...And so we have Ullman, Mifune, Shimura, Brando, Sternhagen, Durning, Welles, Papas, Olivier, Tognazzi, Finney, Ashcroft, Magnani, Hoffman, and others who appear to experience emotions so complex that they are irresoluble...

...If, as I am saying, bland means blank when it comes to acting, it is legitimate to wonder how certain " natural" actors come across strikingly...

...These days the average performance on film is no more acting as an integral art form than ground round is steak...

...moving and angular perception versus still viewpoints...

...During the filming of Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman supposedly won that heart-piercing look of wonder from Victor SjOstrom—in truth, a look of desperation, verging on disappointment— by requesting him to postpone his ritual five o'clock glass of scotch...

...Since the force of any performance depends to an extent on the individual spectator, its gauging is colored by irrational likes and dislikes...

...The close-up, Griffith's momentous discovery, must often stand for expressions of high emotion, when the face will be contorted to denote fear (circular mouth and eyes) or love (droopy lids, pursed lips) or hate (taut nostrils, mouth pulled into an extended hyphen...

...Pudov-kin's Film Acting...

...When she saw the take selected by the director and editor, she did not remember whether it was number one, number 16, orwhat...

...The actors in question have enlarged their roles in ways that identify those roles, perhaps forever, with their names...

...but we watch them, fascinated by the swirl of new stories around their unvarying personalities...

...In the theater a performer keeps rehearsing to fix—not rigidify—an interpretation, to pack high-quality soil around its roots so that it can seem to grow spontaneously...

...Every director has done something comparable...

...In any case, actors seldom take part in the editing—"the most important stage of work on the film," says Pudovkin—and then usually where they were marquee names who financed or directed their own films...

...More likely he was simply hewing to the tradition laid down by that maj or studio once known as Retake Valley...

...She speaks for uncounted spectators when she pronounces that good acting is like life...

...Arkin, Bogart, Hepburn, Falk, Greenstreet, George C. Scott, Ronald Colman, Sa-valas, George Sanders, Mastroianni, Rosay, Matthau, Gabin, Nicholson, Belmondo, Loren—they each exert a power accumulated in part from previous films as their intricately carved masks, like those of Noh actors, catch unexpected gleams of light...

...In such documentaries as James Blue's The Olive Trees of Justice, some individuals do possess, without preliminary training, whatever it takes to act convincingly...

...They brought themselves clean through it, out beyond the screen's flatness and rectangular edges, and they relayed to us a mysterious intensification of what their characters were supposed to feel...

...Today's directors, particularly American ones, seem embarrassed if they dwell on one subject for a full minute...

...As an additional complication, psychologists and sociologists tell us that we are all actors...

...The casual beliefs persist that natural acting means being oneself...

...Bessie Berger in A wake and Sing...

...I may enjoy watching some performers because they remind me, unconsciously perhaps, of my parents or siblings or myself...

...Three in particular deserve elaboration...

...Again !" Of Sternberg, John Baxter writes: "In common with many directors who depend on believable expressions in close-ups to make a point, he pressured actors, forcing them to repeat scenes until exhaustion and frustration gave the desired reaction...

...Dietrich' s scene on the spiral staircase in The Blue Angel took a day to shoot, Sternberg demanding continual retakes until she lost her temper, whereupon he expressed himself satisfied...

...Chaney, Baranovskaya, Garbo, Barry-more, Laughton, Michel Simon, Rai-mu, Jannings, Baur, and (supremely) Chaplin and Keaton made possible against all the odds, all the handicaps inherent in film-making, the money pressures and other prejudices, a continuation of their breed...

...From Pudovkin, I would guess, Allardyce Nicoll deduced that films demand realism in the acting no less than in the story and settings...

...The disdain or offhandedness they must sometimes affect in public for protection notwithstanding, actors are the most generous people on earth...

...The classic example, related by Pudovkin in his On Film Technique, has him and director Lev Kuleshov in the palmy days of Russian montage experiments matching photographs of the actor Ivan Mos-jukhin—"close-ups which were static and did not express any feeling at all, quiet close-ups"—with shots of a plate of soup, a dead woman and a little girl to demonstrate simulations of hunger, grief and affection...

...But much of the time the face in close-up expresses nothing at all...

...A photograph in Luis Bunuel's autobiography, taken during the filming of Belle de Jour, shows the director lovingly using both hands to arrange an actor's mouth against Catherine De-neuve's bare shoulder—to kiss or bite it...

...Inspired more by commercials and videos than by Sergei Eisenstein's and Dziga Vertov's editing feats and the New Wave's jump cuts, they grind up their movies into a larger number of particles than ever and correspondingly blunt the actors' initiatives and resources...

...As it happens, Chekhov anticipated something like that in his later plays by intercutting separate conversations...

...Each one's "presence" or "magic" or "magnetism" or whatever inadequate word we use to convey their amalgam of art and temperament compensates us in some measure for the cinema's habit of splintering performances...

...Loyalty of this caliber can proceed only from a shared vision of perfection or from blind trust...

...Film remains one of theater's legitimate offspring...

...natural versus exaggerated behavior...

...Bold acting in place of the bland stuff would surely prove less numbing than successions of zooms, swoops, vertical and swish pans, irising in and out, slow motion (generally of murder sequences, car smashes, and athletic prowess), pix-ilation, blinking from one tight close-up to the next, computerized animation, and the rest of the showing-off which, for the spectator, resembles sharing a cell with a five-year-old who is taking a course in vocabulary enrichment...

...This was not a critical scene in the film, "but we retook it 23 times, she said, "and in the final cut it lasted for about three seconds...

...I may find them unsympathetic for the same reasons, or for some other reason that has at least as much to do with my background as with their skills...

...In films, as in plays, acting does often seem like life, and the resemblance constitutes one of its delights...

...Shooting out of sequence...

...Which may, like almost everything else, turn out to be a function of biochemistry...

...Most popular film directors evidently do not have much more than a grudging respect for acting, and in some cases evince an open contempt for it...

...Yet there remains at least one divide between them when they unravel a dramatic narrative: in the acting...

...The dangers of staginess lie elsewhere than in the acting...

...The public raved about the acting of the artist...

...but it was certainly not 24, and, moreannoyingly, not number 19, which she recalled as the most convincing she had done, with the least forced smile, and most apt for that place in the film...

...These cause some of the most serious depredations of the screen actor's initiative...

...We describe this effect as being too "knowing," because the actor negates any dramatic irony there may be in the play by seeming aware of dangers and subsequent triumphs that the writer has purposely kept hidden from the character...

...I n the same filmhercasual pose on stage with one leg upraised was arrived at only after much experiment, with more than a dozen possible attitudes tried and discarded...

...These talented novices merely prove, however, that they have not matched their abilities with their vocations—or that they have overflowing abilities, more than their professions can encompass...

...3. Bland acting...

...It hangs in space, a frozen asteroid, relying for its efficacy on music or silence, lighting and the darkened auditorium, the preceding moments, and some inevitable expectations...

...When Pudovkin (who pays tribute to Stanislavsky's System for training actors) writes of "typage" as a desirable form of acting, though, he comes near to asking for stylized performances not unlike the ones required by Brecht, in which the gestus helps performers reveal not only individual characters but also character as a function of social class...

...By no accident, these are all actors who came from the stage...

...Occasionally with, usually without, a single twitch...

...It needed to issue, as do Lear's counter-rumblings at the heavens, from a vast theatrical void, a heath that is a hole in the world...

...1. Suggestions and manipulation...

...To her the synthesis amounted to an arbitrary and unrecognizable mishmash...

...I wonder whether Pudovkin would still maintain that "the concept of the edited image is by no means an affirmation of the doctrine that the film actor is merely a type actor providing piecemeal material for mechanical composition into a pseudo-whole in the process of editing...

...Perhaps Hazlitt had something akin to self-consciousness in mind when he remarked that "the height of [actors'] ambitions is to be beside themselves...

...Design-directors," as opposed to "acting-directors," often prefer performers who are (to use that favorite actors' word) vulnerable, and therefore pliable...

...The differences between playing in films and in the theater have come in for frequent comment by actors, directors, screenwriters, and other interested parties—much of it sharp-witted, some of it indignant, almost all of it cursory...

...Does it matter...

...A single performance may be evanescent, yet it has been fixed for a while by selective art—relatively fixed in the theater by deficient memory and defective rehearsals...

...Does it mean understudied or unstudied...

...The beliefs are mischievous because they derive from a partial truth...

...absolutely fixed in the cinema by chemistry and moved into the museum of photography...

...At the Academy Awards festivities, when the winners for acting pay excessive tribute to their collaborators, they arc actually proclaiming the truth, not faking modesty...

...A gifted stage actress who had j ust completed her first Hollywood assignment told me she was asked to run along a beach toward the camera...

...Films that pursue it while they tackle declamatory texts tend to tone down not only the grimaces but also the voices and, thence, the passions...

...Yet to coin an anti-Bauhaus and antiminimalist slogan, less is less...