Хрестоматия для самостоятельного чтения по специальности

“Актерское искусство”

The actor

The actor must be able to stand and move with ease and grace. His voice must have range, beauty, and strength. He must know his own psychological and emotional make-up, for he must draw on his own understanding of life to recreate the lives of others.

One school of acting is based wholly on technique. The actor learns to express characterization through body and voice alone. Unfortunately, human behavior cannot always be shown by physical demonstration. As a result, this kind of acting often seems cold, mechanical, and stagy. However, it is consistent, and it can be heard and seen by the audience.

Another school is based on the Stanislavski approach. Often called simply “the method”, it is taught at Actors Studio in New York and other schools. In it the actor identifies himself with the emotional life of the character and “makes-believe with conviction”. This emphasis on creative imagination arouses great sincerity and gives the stage character a sense of real life. But sometimes it is undisciplined, loses awareness of the play, or cannot be seen or heard. If each actor is allowed to move and talk just as he “feels”, the unity of production may be lost.

The best approach to acting has the good points of each school. The best performance is given by the actor who comes to the role both from outside and inside and has a trained body and voice combined with a real response to the inner life of the character.

In working up a part the actor must understand the play, his character, and the artistic ideas behind the production. He must know how to read lines clearly - with meaning and emotion. He must be devoted to his task, responsive to his director, and conscientious about rehearsals. He knows he must memorize lines before he can build character.

The theater still belongs essentially to the actor. All other theater artists think in terms of him. The actor is a keen observer of life. He draws on what he has experienced and what he has seen. He knows that a characterization based on another actor's performance is a shallow and inadequate copy.

Acting in cinema

Although following the stage tradition, film acting gradually has worked out a style all its own. The performers in the earliest films of Lumiere and Edison were ordinary people playing themselves; but then, with the development of the story film, the need for professional actors appeared.

Stage actors in the 1900s ignored the new medium, so most of the performers taken for early film dramas were either amateurs or theater dropouts. They adopted a style of acting prevalent on the stage at the time - a declamatory technique characterized by bombastic speech and exaggerated gestures.

In 1908, Film d'Art, the French film company, convinced the Comedie-Fransaise to allow the filming of some of its productions with the entire original casts, including such stage greats as Sarah Bernhardt, Max Dearly and others.

The success of these productions helped make films more popular but did little for the development of motion picture art. Gestures and movements that were perfectly valid on the stage were exaggerated on film, and the result was often grotesque. However, the financial returns on these films encouraged stage actors especially in Italy and in the US, where Adolph Zukor soon launched his Famous Players in Famous Plays productions.

D.W. Griffith is credited with being the first director to recognize the need for a new style of acting for the screen. He sensed that the size of the screen image and the camera's tendency to emphasize the slightest nuance required acting that was subtler and less stylized. As early as 1909, Griffith gathered a group of young actors and rehearsed them continually until he was able to achieve a new, restrained style of acting, which had a lasting influence on the development of the cinema.

There are basic differences in conditions under which actors perform on stage and on screen. Although the stage actor is able to show the life of the character throughout one performance, the screen actor has both the advantage and disadvantage of film technique - short takes, out-of-continuity shooting, angle variance, and endless repetition of scenes until they are just right.

A stage actor must make certain adjustments when appearing in films. Although he does not have to memorize many lines or sustain a performance, he must be able to respond with a display of a given emotion at the time it is needed and without the chance of coming to it step by step. Since scenes in a film are shot out of continuity, he must have a firm grasp of the character he is portraying.

Most important, it is much more difficult to play a false emotion on screen than on stage because of the closeness of the camera. The camera’s ability to capture and magnify the smallest detail of personality that flashes across an actor’s face has led some theoreticians to say that what was needed in film was not acting but being. Certain directors feel that if this is the case they would rather use real people whose appearance and personality match those of the characters to be portrayed, thus hoping to achieve a stronger sense of reality.

The nonprofessional actor has been used extensively in European cinema, particularly in the Russian silent films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The latter called this use of nonprofessionals “typage”. Though the practice has never been widely used, it reappears from time to time, notably in the Italian neo-realistic films of Vittorio De Sica and in the later films of Robert Bresson.

The introduction of sound removed the last traces of stylization from film acting. The pantomimic exaggeration of gesture and movement was gone forever. Many of the silent era stars were unable to hold their own because their diction and voice quality were not perfect. Stage actors, whom producers began to import in large numbers, were successful to some degree, but many of them failed to make the transition because the screen demanded a more natural way of speaking than did the theater.

The contribution of acting to the total quality of a film varies from production to production. Certain directors, such as Clarence Brown, Sidney Franklin, and George Cukor, are known as "actors' directors" because they tend to rely heavily on the talent and personality of their performers. Others, such as Josef von Sternberg and Alfred Hitchcock, tend to treat actors as just another element of their mise-en-scene.

In recent years, there has been a definite swing in public as well as critical thinking toward the acceptance of the director as the primary force in the creation of a film, with a resulting minimisation of the role of the actor. However, some directors, such as John Cassavetes with SHADOWS (1960) and HUSBANDS (1970), are inclined to rely to the improvisational skill of their performers.