Although Brecht recognized that some degree of realism was essential to a committed drama and to popular taste, he emphasized that actors should produce signs (the most important of these he termed the gestus), and he wanted his players to feel an emotional estrangement from their roles, an “alienation effect” that made their performances presentational and didactic. Perhaps the best-known exponent of Brechtian acting in cinema is Jean-Luc Godard, especially in films such as Two or Three Things I Know about Her (1966), in which Marina Vlady and the other actors step in and out of their roles and frequently address the camera directly. A different but equally radical style can be seen in some of the films of Robert Bresson, who often worked with amateur players and who advocated a form of “automatism,” in which the actor was instructed to think less about emotion than about gesture. (Alfred Hitchcock, who worked with Hollywood stars, resembled Bresson in the sense that he was impatient with Method-trained performers and was chiefly interested in actors who could produce elemental looks and gestures suitable for carefully edited sequences.)
Nearly all comic actors in film, especially “crazy” comics such as the Marx brothers and Jerry Lewis, employ a style that is entirely different from specialists in Stanislavskian drama. By its very nature comedy tends to be physically exaggerated, presentational, aimed at the head rather than the heart, and deconstructive of realistic conventions. Realistic acting strives for absolute expressive coherence between one shot and the next, or for a type of performance-within-performance in which the character’s “act” for other characters is plausible and convincing: see, for example, the poker-faced calm of Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity (1944), when a man who might identify him as a killer is brought to his office for questioning. By contrast, broadly comic films often depend on exaggerated forms of expressive incoherence, as when Peter Sellers, in the role of Dr. Strangelove, has to keep beating one of his arms down to keep it from springing up into a Nazi salute.
Since the late 1960s, there has been something of a return to movement-based, physical training of actors, a tendency prompted by such diverse figures from theater as Rudolf Laban, Jacques Lecoq, Joan Littlewood, and Julie Taymor. By the same token, several developments in digital technology—in particular CGI (computer-generated imagery), green-screen techniques, and motion-capture devices—have contributed to an increased interest in pantomime. Some writers have reacted to these developments by suggesting that the new technology is a threat to the very profession of acting. In support of their argument they point out that crowd scenes larger than Cecil B. DeMille could achieve are now composed of nothing but computerized figures, and that the face of the dead Oliver Reed has been pasted onto the moving body of a stand-in. Industrial society has entered an increasingly “robotic” stage of development, and digital animators the world over have spoken of their desire to achieve the holy grail of “synthespians” who seamlessly interact with human players. Whether or not CGI is qualitatively new and will lead to such a future, it certainly increases the amount of animation in movies. We should recall, however, that animators have often worked in collaboration with actors: in 1938, for example, the Walt Disney animators copied the photographed movement of dancer Marge Champion in order to create the “lifelike” figure of Snow White. (For an important discussion of acting and animation, see Donald Crafton’s Shadow of a Mouse [2012].) CGI belongs squarely within this tradition, and even though it’s often used to show morphing androids and missing body parts, it probably won’t involve the elimination of human players. Most digital effects are recognizable, and from the time of The Golem (1920) and Metropolis to the time of Blade Runner (1982) and Bicentennial Man (1999), robots and simulacra have been acted by professional thespians. CGI has not so much replaced actors as required them to behave like animated figures or machines.
An obvious case in point is the Terminator series, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger’s visibly “manufactured” physique and stiff acting fit perfectly with the computer-generated effects. An even better example is the Steven Spielberg / Stanley Kubrick production of A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Spielberg, who inherited the project after Kubrick’s death, knew that computer animation has yet to prove that it can create believable human figures in speaking roles. (One of the most elaborate attempts to do so is Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within [2001], a sci-fi adventure based on video games, which uses the voices of several well-known players but looks animated.) As a result, the robot is played by Haley Joel Osment, whose performance is especially interesting for the way it starts with a slightly digitalized, pantomimic style, very similar to what the Russian futurists called “bio-mechanics,” and then shifts, at the moment when the robot’s circuits are imprinted with Oedipal desire, into an analog, Stanislavskian style that supposedly reveals his inner life or soul. (Even in the final stage of his development, he never blinks his eyes.)
A similar reversion to uncanny forms of pantomime can be seen in Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers (2002), for which Andy Serkis invented both a voice and a set of body movements to structure the computer animation for his character, Gollum. (New Line Cinema aggressively but unsuccessfully campaigned to have Serkis nominated for an Academy Award.) Ultimately, Gollum was created from a mixture of sculpture, puppetry, and digital effects, with Serkis donning a motion-capture suit and interacting with the other players on the set. Serkis also provided the “psychological” expressions that signify his character’s split personality. To further elaborate these expressions, the animators consulted Gary Faigin’s The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression and Paul Ekman’s Darwin and Facial Expression, two modern books that attempt to codify the semiotics of the face in much the same fashion as François Delsarte attempted to codify actors’ gestures for the nineteenth-century stage. In other words, the digital era, coupled with the rise of fantasy and comic-strip films of various kinds, seems to involve a qualified return to a style that predates Stanislavsky. In some cases it causes human actors to behave like clockwork instruments, but it also expands the range of performance styles. Comic-book spectaculars, for instance, can give players an opportunity to show off their skills in dual roles or to behave expressionistically. (In RoboCop [1987] Peter Weller imitates Nikolai Cherkasov in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible [1943].)
Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) uses mini–digital cameras to record a series of actors speaking improvised monologues or dialogues, which it then transforms through digital rotoscoping techniques into colorful, animated imagery; this film contains a monologue about André Bazin, and everywhere it demonstrates how advanced technology can reveal the sign-making activity behind realist acting. Eric Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke (2001) is a costume drama set during the French Revolution, and, like most of Rohmer’s work, it involves actors seated in rooms holding long, realistic conversations; but it also uses digital video and computerized imaging to create a visibly artificial, painterly mise-en-scène around the actors. Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005) is even more radical in its transformation of actors into cartoon-like characters who inhabit a world of boldly graphic designs.