See film and write an essay according to questions that my teacher gave
P720TT
Lecture8.pptFirst Performances on Film
- Novelty films of Edison (1895-1905)
- The Great Train Robbery (1903)
- 1st narrative film
Clip: The Kiss
Early Influences
- Theater
- legitimate art form
- Dominant Acting styles: Classical, Melodrama, Vaudeville
- broad, histrionic gesture, not suited for the intimacy of the camera
- Early Moving Pictures- (1900-1915)
- base entertainment for the masses
- As a result
- 2nd class actors employed in Moving Pictures
- Performances appear ‘affected’
Early Milestones
- Societe Film d’Arte-France (1908)
- full length plays
- Famous Players In Famous Plays (1912)
- Feature length, ‘canned’ theater
- Biograph Studios (1908-14)
- Griffith, Gish
- ‘Naturalism’
- Chaplin (1914-25)
- Slapstick
- Screen Persona
Broken Blossoms
- Broken Blossoms (1919)
- ‘Natural’ performance, subtleness of gesture, character development
- Griffith
- first director to minimize actions
- play to the camera
- Directs Gish to observe everyday people, types, movements, behavior, and to emulate through deliberate practice
Clip: Broken Blossom
Hollywood and The Star
- The Matinee Idol (20’s)
- Mary Pickford ‘America’s Sweetheart‘
- Hollywood ‘gossip’ column
- Luella Parsons-Hedda Hopper
- Scandals of the Roaring Twenties
- Golden Era of Hollywood (30’s, 40’s)
- The Star is cultivated
- Image, Screen Persona
- MGM –’more stars than there are in heaven’
- Seven Year Contract
- Clip- Mae West, Gold Diggers, Monroe
The Method
- Stanislavski - the Moscow Art Theater 1895
- A system of acting based on naturalism in performance, both physical and psychological
- The ‘inner life of the character’
- Actor as artist- perfection of craft
- An ‘instrument’ of the theater
- ‘Work on Oneself ‘
- ‘Science’ or method of acting
- Theory/Terminology
- ‘the magic if’, improvisation, emotional memory, objectives, subtext, ‘method of physical actions’
The Method in the US
- 1923 Boleslawski founds The American Laboratory
- Acting The First Six Lessons
- 1930 Group Theater - Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets.
- Political/Social platform
- Communist Party
- 1934 Adler Visits Stanislavski,
- receives direct instruction, causing controversy and the eventual split of the Group Theater
The Actors Studio
- Elia Kazan Founds the Actors Studio (1947)
- devoted to training Film Actors in the Method
- Later run by Lee Strasberg
- Brando, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe
- Inside the Actors Studio
- Pervasiveness of ‘method’ based acting
Links:
https://sites.google.com/site/arttheatrestudio/
www.theactorsstudio.org/studio-history/
http://www.methodactingstrasberg.com/history
http://www.npr.org/series/4510430/the-evolution-of-acting
Brando and Kazan
- Kazan actor’s director. Accomplished in both stage and screen
- Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller. Brando, James Dean
- Brando’s Relationship with Kazan.
- Street Car Named Desire, On The Waterfront
- Brando personifies the ‘complex’ character.
- Inner vulnerability/Tough exterior
- Rebuked for never repeating lines same way, mumbled or threw away lines
- Exuded ‘charisma’/ inner life (subtext)
- Both Screen Persona and Character Development strongly represented in his work
- The HUAC. The Black List
- Clips: Street Car, Last Tango
