animal. When I finished, there was a hush in the stu-
dio. Mr. Griffith finally whispered: “My God, why
didn’t you warn me that you were going to do that?”^8Gish gives a similar, powerful performance—her
character shoots the man who raped her—in Victor
Sjöström’s The Wind(1928), and her work in con-
fined spaces influenced such later climactic scenes
as Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh) murder in the
shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho(1960) and
Jack Torrance’s (Jack Nicholson) attempt to get
out of a bathroom in which he is trapped in Stanley
Kubrick’s The Shining(1980).
With the discovery and implementation of the
principles of screen acting, Gish (and her mentor,
Griffith) also influenced excellent performances
by her contemporaries, including Emil Jannings in
F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh(1924) and Janet
Gaynor and George O’Brien in Murnau’s Sunrise:
A Song of Two Humans(1927), Gibson Gowland in
Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), and Louise
Brooks in G. W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box(1929).
The Influence of Sound
It was not long after Griffith and Gish established a
viable and successful style of screen acting that
movie actors were faced with the greatest chal-
lenge yet: the conversion from silent to sound pro-
duction. Instead of instantly revolutionizing film
style, the coming of sound in 1927 began a period of
several years in which the industry gradually
converted to this new form of production (see
Chapter 9). Filmmakers made dialogue more com-
prehensible by developing better microphones;
finding the best placements for the camera, micro-
phones, and other sound equipment; and encourag-
ing changes in actors’ vocal performances. Initially,
they encased the camera, whose overall size has
changed relatively little since the 1920s, in either a
bulky soundproof booth or the later development
known as a blimp—a soundproofed enclosure,
somewhat larger than a camera, in which the cam-
era may be mounted so that its sounds do not reach
the microphone.
Such measures prevented the sounds of the
camera’s mechanism from being recorded, but also
restricted the freedom with which the camera—
and the actors—could move. Actors accustomed to
moving around the set without worrying about
speaking now had to curtail their movements
inside the circumscribed sphere where recording
took place. Furthermore, technicians required time(^8) Gish, Lillian Gish,p. 200. For another version of how this
scene was prepared and shot, see Charles Affron, Lillian Gish:
Her Legend, Her Life(New York: Scribner, 2001), pp. 125–131.
Early sound-film actingSound technicians on the
earliest sound films were challenged with recording the
actors’ voices with stationary microphones, which restricted
their movements. This problem was solved later with
microphones suspended on booms outside the camera’s
range and capable of moving to follow a character’s
movements. Looking backward, the classic movie musical
Singin’ in the Rain(1952; Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly,
directors) found nothing but humor in the process of
converting movie production to sound. In the background
of this image, we see a reluctant and uncooperative actor—
Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, right), next to Don Lockwood
(Gene Kelly, left)—who has had a microphone concealed
in the bodice of her gown. This device is connected by wire
to the loudspeaker in the glass booth in the foreground,
where the exasperated director and sound recordist discover
that it has recorded only Miss Lamont’s heartbeat. Obviously,
they’ll have to find a different microphone placement if they
want to hear her voice. And if you’ve seen the movie, you
know that her voice is so bad that she could not in any case
make the transition to sound movies.
THE EVOLUTION OF SCREEN ACTING 297