1900s, filmmakers started to tell stories with their
films and thus needed professional actors. Most
stage actors at the time scorned film acting, however,
and refused to take work in the fledgling industry.
Therefore, the first screen actors were usually
rejects from the stage or fresh-faced amateurs
eager to break into the emerging film industry.
Lack of experience (or talent) wasn’t the only hur-
dle facing them. Because no standard language of
cinematic expression or any accepted tradition of
film direction existed at the time, these first actors
had little option but to adopt the acting style
favored in the nineteenth-century theater and try to
adapt it to their screen roles. The resulting quaint,
unintentionally comical style consists of exagger-
ated gestures, overly emphatic facial expressions,
and a bombastic mouthing of words (which could
not yet be recorded on film) that characterized the
stage melodramas popular at the turn of the twen-
tieth century.
In 1908, the Société Film d’Art (Art Film Soci-
ety), a French film company, was founded with
the purpose of creating a serious artistic cinema
that would attract equally serious people who ordi-
narily preferred the theater. Commercially, this
was a risky step, not only because cinema was in
its infancy but also because, since the sixteenth
century, the French had seen theater as a temple
of expression. Its glory was (and remains) the
Comédie-Française, the French national theater,
and to begin its work at the highest possible level,
the Société Film d’Art joined creative forces with
this revered organization, which agreed to lend its
actors to the society’s films. In addition, the society
commissioned leading theater playwrights, direc-
tors, and designers, as well as prominent com-
posers, to create its film productions.
Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), revered by her
public as la divine Sarah, was the first great theatri-
cal actor to appear in a movie, Clément Maurice’s
Le Duel d’Hamlet(Hamlet, 1900, 2 mins.), a short
account of Hamlet’s duel with Laertes. She appeared
in at least seven features, the most important of
which is Les Amours d’Elisabeth, Reine d’Angleterre
(Queen Elizabeth, 1912, 44 mins.), directed by Henri
Desfontaines and Louis Mercanton and produced
by the Société Film d’Art.
As interesting as it is to see one of the early
twentieth century’s greatest actors as Elizabeth I,
it is even more interesting to observe how closely
this “canned theater” resembled an actual stage
production. The space we see is that of the theater,
limited to having actors enter and exit from stage
left or right, not that of the cinema, where charac-
ters are not confined to the physical boundaries
imposed by theater architecture. For all her
reputed skill, Bernhardt’s acting could only echo
what she did on the stage. Thus we see the exag-
gerated facial expressions, strained gestures, and
clenched fists of late-nineteenth- century melo-
drama. Although such artificiality was conven-
tional and thus accepted by the audience, it was all
wrong for the comparative intimacy between the
spectator and the screen that existed even in the
earliest movie theaters.
Despite its heavy-handed technique, Queen Eliz-
abethsucceeded in attracting an audience inter-
ested in serious drama on the screen, made the
cinema socially and intellectually respectable,
and therefore encouraged further respect for the
industry and its development. What remained to
be done was not to teach Sarah Bernhardt how to
act for the camera, but to develop cinematic tech-
niques uniquely suitable for the emerging narra-
tive cinema, as well as a style of acting that could
help actors realize their potential in this new
medium.D. W. Griffith and Lillian Gish
American film pioneer D. W. Griffith needed actors
who could be trained to work in front of the cam-
era, and by 1913 he had recruited a group that
included some of the most important actors of the
time: Mary Pickford, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Mae
Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Lionel Barrymore, Harry
Carey, Henry B. Walthall, and Donald Crisp. Some
had stage experience, some did not. All of them
earned much more from acting in the movies than
they would have on the stage, and all enjoyed long,
fruitful careers (many lasting well into the era of
sound films).
Because the cinema was silent during this
period, Griffith worked out more-naturalisticTHE EVOLUTION OF SCREEN ACTING 295