Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Film of Value
- Part I Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
- Interlude
- 5 Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting
- 6 On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas
- 7 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni
- Part II Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment
- Bibliography of Related Criticism
- Index
- Plate section
5 - Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting
from Interlude
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Film of Value
- Part I Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
- Interlude
- 5 Switching Genres, or Playing to the Camera, Playing to the House: Stage vs. Screen Acting
- 6 On the Road Again: The Road Film and the Two Coppolas
- 7 The Coming-of-Age Film à la Fellini: The Case of I vitelloni
- Part II Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment
- Bibliography of Related Criticism
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Everybody in the world is an actor. Conversation is acting. Man as a social animal is an actor; everything we do is some sort of a performance. But the actor whose profession it is to act is then something else again. … I don't understand what a picture is if there is bad acting. I don't understand how movies exist independently of the actor – I truly don't.
— Orson WellesWhen viewers had their first exposure to film one hundred years ago, it is unlikely that they interpreted silence as loss. Then, motion pictures represented a striking novelty: the ability to convey photographic detail in motion-produced images that on initial viewing must have seemed quite dramatic in themselves. Oddly enough, it was filmmakers' earliest efforts to convey a story that may have called attention to the unremitting silence of actors on the screen. Almost immediately, dramatic episodes adapted or drawn directly from the legitimate stage began to contend with more strictly documentary forms such as travelogues and newsreels. And the simple sight of people's mouths moving – an alien one, given the stiffness of nineteenth-century photography – must have prompted audiences to wish for the same range of expression on the screen that they had grown accustomed to in live performances.
When stage actors first came to film, they moved and spoke as they had been used to doing before live audiences.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Screen WritingsGenres, Classics, and Aesthetics, pp. 73 - 86Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010