intense psychological preparation required the
actors’ conscious efforts to tap their unconscious
selves. On one hand, they had to portray living char-
acters onstage; on the other, they could not allow
their portrayals to detract from the acting ensemble
and the play as a whole and as written text.
Stanislavsky’s ideas influenced the Soviet silent-
film directors of the 1920s—Sergei Eisenstein,
Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Lev Kuleshov, and Vsevolod
I. Pudovkin—all of whom had learned much from
D. W. Griffith’s work. But they often disagreed
about acting, especially about how it was influ-
enced by actors’ appearances, and by editing, which
could work so expressively both for and against
actors’ interpretations.
Among this group, Pudovkin, whose Film Acting
(1935) was one of the first serious books on the sub-
ject, has the most relevance to mainstream movie
acting today. Although he advocates an explicitly
Stanislavskian technique based on his observations
of the Moscow Art Theater, he writes from the
standpoint of film directors and actors working
together. Because film consists of individual shots,
he reasons, both directors and actors work at the
mercy of the shot and must strive to make acting
(out of sequence) seem natural, smooth, and flowing
while maintaining expressive coherence across the
shots. He recommends close collaboration between
actors and directors, with long periods devoted to
preparation and rehearsal. He also advises film
actors to ignore voice training because the micro-
phone makes it unnecessary, notes that the close-
up can communicate more to the audience than
overt gestures can, and finds that the handling of
“expressive objects” (e.g., Charlie Chaplin’s cane)
can convey emotions and ideas even more effec-
tively than close-ups can.
Outside the Soviet Union, Stanislavsky’s books
My Life in Art(1924) and An Actor Prepares(1936)
had a lasting impact. In the mid-1930s, Stella Adler
studied privately with him in Moscow—perhaps
the first American actor to do so. Soon after, she
returned to New York and taught principles of
Method acting to members of the experimental
Group Theatre, including Elia Kazan. In 1947,
Kazan, now a director, helped found the Actors Stu-
dio in New York City. In 1951, Kazan was replaced by
Lee Strasberg, who alienated many theater people,
including Kazan, Adler, Arthur Miller, and Marlon
Brando. Today, the studio is guided by three alumni:
Ellen Burstyn, Harvey Keitel, and Al Pacino. In 1949,
Adler went her own way, founding the Stella Adler
Studio of Acting, where Marlon Brando was her
most famous and successful student.
These teachers loosely adapted Stanislavky’s
ideas—not only his principle that actors should
draw on their own emotional experiences to create
characters but also his emphasis on the impor-
tance of creating an ensemble and expressing the
subtext, the nuances that lay beneath the lines of
the script. The naturalistic style that they popular-
ized (and called Method acting, more popularly12Elia Kazan and Method actingElia Kazan is notable,
among many other things, for directing two of the iconic
Method-acting achievements: [1] Marlon Brando’s as Terry
Malloy in On the Waterfront(1954)—here we see Kazan
(center) and Brando (right) on location during the filming—
and [2] James Dean’s as Cal Trask, a troubled teenager, in
East of Eden(1955).THE EVOLUTION OF SCREEN ACTING 303