IN ISOLATION:
WHAT IS
HAPPENING
TO ACTING?
WHAT HAS
ACTING DONE
TO HAPPENING?
As viewers grew more sophisticated in the 1950s and cottoned on to the artifice at the heart of all
movies, they started to wise up to self-important attempts by actors to reflect emotional truth. But as
acting evolved and performances grew more enigmatic, a numbness crept into them – the origins of
a seductive culture that feels lifelike but now threatens to displace life itself, writes David Thomson
HIDDEN AGENDA
In The Assistant, about a
woman working for a movie
company led by a routine
sexual predator, Julia Garner
plays the role with such
restraint she has almost
gone into hiding
he first time I wrote anything more substantial
than a book review in Sight & Sound was winter
1976-77, I think. I believe Liza Minnelli was on
the pink cover in New York, New York, which is still one
of my favorite Scorsese pictures. The essay I had written
was about Red River and its gravitational pull since first
seeing it in South London in 1948. In an adolescent way,
I was trying to admit the child’s passion I had felt for
Matthew Garth/Montgomery Clift in that fantasy about
coming to terms with a fierce father.
In those late 70s, I followed a resolutely auteurist ap-
proach: I talked about Howard Hawks in the indicated
way, as if he and Hitchcock were, in our new Leavisite
great tradition of high culture and critical elitism, fit
for tenure, books and conferences. That was instead of
confessing to those vast childish yearnings, and the way
they catered to immaturity. That was how Sight & Sound
maintained its respectability, riding serenely above the
indecent rapture of dreaming ourselves on the screen.
A large part of what was not yet called cinephilia was a
taming of that longing to be someone else in language
that could pass in academia, and impress the then editor,
the unlikely but estimable Penelope Houston.
Decades later, for a new editor at the magazine, I had
proposed a piece on the ‘numbness’ I felt was arising in
the most intriguing movie acting. What did I mean by
that? James Bell asked. He was an editor I had written
for for years, though we had never actually met. We had
always assumed we were just ‘there’. I wasn’t sure how to
answer James, but let me try now as the chips seem to be
down enough to require candour.
A while ago, I re-examined On the Waterfront (1954).
It was a film I had seen many times over the years, and
I admired it, I thought, even if in Elia Kazan terms I pre-
ferred East of Eden (1955) or Wild River (1960). But this time
around, I felt Waterfront was fabricated and studied, no
matter that it was a product of the Actors Studio fac-
tory of authenticity, sincerity, et cetera. The et ceteraT
42 | Sight&Sound | May 2020