Realistic films favor restraint, as one can see in Heath Ledger’s performance in Brokeback Mountain (2005), in which the character’s tumultuous emotions are as tightly controlled as a closed fist; but comedies, musicals, and costume pictures often encourage a “stagy” style, as in the case of Steve Martin’s wild abandon in The Jerk (1979). In fact, most movies contain a heterogeneous mix of performing styles and skills. Hollywood in the studio period usually required that supporting players, ethnic minorities, and women act in more vividly expressive fashion than white male leads, and the range of expressive behavior can be quite broad even in Method-influenced pictures: in On the Waterfront (1954), Marlon Brando is recessive but Lee J. Cobb chews the scenery. Notice also that certain directors impose differing styles on ensembles. By most accounts Fritz Lang was a sadistic personality who moved actors like puppets and Robert Altman was a sweetheart who gave them a great deal of freedom; this may explain the geometric rigidity of the blocking in a Lang film versus the roaming, freewheeling movements in an Altman film. Orson Welles wanted his players to execute actions quickly and overlap dialogue in a carefully planned fashion; Stanley Kubrick, who resembles Welles in some respects, favored an unusually slow, measured pace and actors who displayed over-the-top mugging (George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove [1963]) or deadpan minimalism (Keir Dullea in 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]).
These qualifications and variations aside, the history of both stage and film acting since the late nineteenth century can be said to involve a movement from a semiotic to a psychological conception of performance, or from what Roberta Pearson terms a “histrionic code” to a “verisimilar code”—a phenomenon determined by changes in dramatic literature and the culture as a whole. The shift appears to have begun in the theater of the 1850s, with the rise of the “well-made” drawing-room drama, but it became most apparent in the period between 1880 and 1920 in the work of Stanislavsky and his followers. For at least two thousand years previously, acting was closely related to dance and oratorical rhetoric (the very word actor originally suggested the actions of oratory), and the major form of actor training was instruction in elocution and pantomime, in which the actor learned “proper” diction and a vocabulary of bodily and facial expressions. One of the most important representatives of this pantomime school in the nineteenth century was François Delsarte, a Parisian elocutionist who made one of the earliest attempts to codify expressive gestures and who exerted an indirect influence on the whole of silent cinema. The Delsarte system was adapted to American theater by Steele MacKaye, the immediate predecessor of David Belasco, and it resulted in numerous “cook-book” manuals of acting, such as Edmund Shaftesbury’s Lessons in the Art of Acting (1889) and Charles Aubert’s The Art of Pantomime (translated into English in 1921). The system often reinforced social stereotypes or genteel mannerisms, but it was well suited to silent cinema and at its best produced remarkable performances: Lillian Gish’s eloquently expressive close-ups, Charlie Chaplin’s balletic comedy, Lon Chaney’s grotesque movement in horror films, and so forth. Its last flowering was in German expressionism, which arrived at an approximately Delsarte-like technique via a different, modernist aesthetic; examples include The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which Conrad Veidt moves with the languorous rhythms of a trained dancer, and Metropolis (1927), in which the entire cast gestures in the boldest, most elemental fashion.
Relatively few actors in talking films worked along such lines (Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich are qualified examples), but the pantomimic or histrionic style was sometimes adopted for ironic or thematic purposes, as in Gloria Swanson’s flamboyant behavior in Sunset Blvd. (1950) or Robert Mitchum’s frightening performance in Night of the Hunter (1955), which is a particularly clever fusion of old-fashioned melodrama and Germanic expressionism. These, however, are distinct exceptions to the rule. In general, a certain tendency toward verisimilar or naturalistic acting—a movement from “presentational” to “representational” performance—was at work from the origins of the classic narrative cinema. Like Stanislavsky, D. W. Griffith was interested in making blocking less artificial and acting more intimate and emotionally charged, and at each stage of cinema’s technical history these general aims were increasingly facilitated. The earliest, so-called “primitive,” films were devoted to straightforward action sequences, paying little or no attention to psychological motivation; the camera was usually situated at least twelve feet from the players, who moved parallel to the camera, stood in three-quarter profile when they addressed one another, and gesticulated broadly. After 1909, the camera began to move closer; the subsequent development of continuity editing, and especially of shot/reverse shot, enabled directors to reduce the amount of visibly rhetorical blocking and track the psychological nuances on the actor’s faces in a pattern of action and reaction. When sound was introduced, an elocutionary style of speech was favored, but the invention of sensitive directional microphones eventually transformed the “grain” of the voice and the subtler levels of timbre into important expressive instruments. A wide range of rural or working-class accents became acceptable, and multitrack sound editing, looping, and sound mixing were used to record ordinary, low-key behavior in ways that would have dazzled Stanislavsky.
Films continued to use wide shots, and directors such as Howard Hawks and John Ford were especially good at bringing the actors’ bodies into play. In a Hawks film, as has often been observed, characterizations usually arise from the way characters walk, sit, or perform small actions such as tossing a coin or striking a match; and in Ford there are many family rituals and communal dance scenes in which sharply individuated characters interact in the same shot. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the conjunction of digital editing systems with television-style shooting techniques, in which scenes are photographed with multiple cameras and long lenses, led to what David Bordwell calls “intensified” continuity editing, especially in large-budget Hollywood features. “Continuity cutting,” Bordwell observes, “has been rescaled and amped up, and the drama has been squeezed down to faces—particularly eyes and mouths” (Figures Traced in Light, 27). Big-budget movie directors usually strive for close-up “coverage” of each line of dialogue and facial reaction, using multiple cameras and small wireless microphones attached to the bodies of the actors. As a result close-ups dominate, space is flattened, backgrounds are blurred, and the average shot length is shortened (most images are held on the screen for somewhere between two and eight seconds). In this environment movie stars such as Tom Cruise are valued for the intensity they bring to the smallest twitch of an eyebrow.
The apotheosis of what might be called the inner-directed, Stanislavskian approach to acting, which can be a useful training for the kind of movies that center on microscopic facial expression, was the American “Method,” particularly as taught by Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. Much was written in the popular press in those years about the “mumbling” and “shambling” of Actors Studio–trained actors, but such behavior was more advertised than practiced. Brando’s clever performances as an inarticulate, sexy proletarian in On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), and The Wild One (1953) inspired the popular conception of the Method, but his greater importance was as a rebel celebrity who indicated a seismic shift in U.S. popular culture; he represented a new personality that was related not only to the emerging postwar bohemia and the fashion for existential Angst, but also to the rise of rock-and-roll figures such as Elvis Presley. Where Brando’s acting style is concerned, Richard Dyer is correct to say that “the formal differences between the Method and, say, the repertory/Broadway style are less clear than the known differences between how the performances were arrived at” (Stars, 154). Shelley Winters, for example, was much more closely connected to Strasberg and the Actors Studio than Brando ever was, and yet Winters is seldom described as a Method actor.
Method training undoubtedly contributed to “lifelike” performances and enabled actors to fine-tune their delicate psychological instruments.