The great silent-era director F. W. Murnau
emphasized intellect and counseled actors to restrain
their feelings, to thinkrather than act. He believed
actors to be capable of conveying the intensity of
their thoughts so that audiences would understand.
Director Rouben Mamoulian gave Greta Garbo much
the same advice when she played the leading role
in his Queen Christina(1933). The film ends with the
powerful and passionate Swedish queen sailing to
Spain with the body of her lover, a Spanish nobleman
killed in a duel. In preparing for the final close-up,
in which the queen stares out to sea, Garbo asked
Mamoulian, “What should I be thinking of? What
should I be doing?” His reply: “Have you heard of tab-
ula rasa? I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper.
I want the writing to be done by every member of the
audience. I’d like it if you could avoid even blinking
your eyes, so that you’re nothing but a beautiful
mask.”^38 Is she remembering the past? Imagining the
future? With the camera serving as an apparently
neutral mediator between actress and audience,
Garbo’s blank face asks us to transform it into what
we hope or want to see.
Naturalistic and Nonnaturalistic Styles
We have all seen at least one movie in which a char-
acter, perhaps a whole cast of characters, is like no
one we have ever met nor like anyone we couldever
meet. Either because the world they inhabit func-
tions according to rules that don’t apply in our
world or because their behaviors are extreme, such
characters aren’t realistic in any colloquial sense of
the word. But if the actors perform skillfully, we are
likely to accept the characters as believable within
the context of the story. We might be tempted to
call such portrayals realistic, but we’d do better to
use the term naturalistic.
Actors who strive for appropriate, expressive,
coherent, and unified characterizations can render
their performances naturalistically and/or nonnat-
uralistically. Screen acting appears naturalistic
when actors re-create recognizable or plausible
human behavior for the camera. The actors not
only look like the characters should (in their cos-
tume, makeup, and hairstyle) but also think, speak,
and move the way people would offscreen. By
contrast, nonnaturalistic performances seem
excessive, exaggerated, even overacted; they may
employ strange or outlandish costumes, makeup,
or hairstyles; they might aim for effects beyond
the normal range of human experience; and they
often intend to distance or estrange audiences
from characters. Frequently, they are found in hor-
ror, fantasy, and action films.
What Konstantin Stanislavsky was to naturalis-
tic acting, German playwright Bertolt Brecht was to
nonnaturalistic performance. Brecht allied his the-
atrical ideas with Marxist political principles to cre-
ate a nonnaturalistic theater. Whereas Stanislavsky
strove for realism, Brecht believed that audience
members should not think they’re watching some-
thing actually happening before them. Instead, he
wanted every aspect of a theatrical production to
limit the audience’s identification with characters
and events, thereby creating a psychological dis-
tance (called the alienation effector distancing
effect) between them and the stage. The intent of
this approach is to remind the audience of the arti-
ficiality of the theatrical performance.
Overall, this theory has not had much influence
on mainstream filmmaking; after all, unlike theater,
cinema can change—as often as it wants—the rela-
tionship between spectators and the screen, alter-
nately alienating them from or plunging them into
the action. However, we do see this approach when
actors step out of character, face the camera, and
directly address the audience (a maneuver, more
common in theater than cinema, that is called
breaking the fourth wall—the imaginary, invisible
wall that separates the audience from the stage).
Although it is a device that can destroy a movie if
used inappropriately, breaking the fourth wall
works effectively when audience members are
experiencing things as the character does andthe
character has the self-confidence to exploit that
empathy.
In the late 1920s in Berlin, Brecht discovered
Peter Lorre, who later became one of the most dis-318 CHAPTER 7ACTING
(^38) Rouben Mamoulian, qtd. in Tom Milne, Rouben Mamoulian
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 74.