An Introduction to Film

warlord (based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth) in

Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood(1957); Marlon

Brando as a Mafia don in Francis Ford Coppola’s

The Godfather(1972); Holly Hunter as a mute Victo-

rian relocated from Scotland to New Zealand in

Jane Campion’s The Piano(1993); Sissy Spacek as

the mother of a murdered son in Todd Field’s In the

Bedroom(2001); Brad Pitt as the leader of a male

aggression movement in David Fincher’s Fight Club

(1999); or Philip Seymour Hoffman as author Tru-

man Capote in Bennett Miller’s Capote(2005)?

Movie acting may be, as legendary actor Lau-

rence Olivier once said, the “art of persuasion.”^46

Yet it is also a formal cinematic element, one as

complex as design or cinematography. To get a

sense of how movie acting works on its own and

ultimately in relation to the other formal elements,

we need to establish a set of criteria more substan-

tial than our subjective feelings and reactions.

Because every actor, character, and perform-

ance in a movie is different, it is impossible to

devise standards that would apply equally well to

all of them. Furthermore, different actors, working

with different directors, often take very different

approaches to the same material, as you can judge

for yourself by comparing the many remakes in

movie history. Within the world of a particular

story, your goal should be to determine the quality

of the actor’s achievement in creating the charac-

ter and how that performance helps tell the story.

Thus, you should discuss an actor’s specific per-

formance in a specific film—discussing, say, Peter

Sellers’s acting in Hal Ashby’s Being There(1979) as

it serves to create the character of Chance and tell

the story of that film without being influenced by

expectations possibly raised by your having seen

Sellers in other movies.

In analyzing any actor’s performance, you might

consider the following:

>Appropriateness.Does the actor look and act

naturally like the character he or she por-

trays, as expressed in physical appearance,

facial expression, speech, movement, and ges-

ture? If the performance is nonnaturalistic,

does the actor look, walk, and talk the way

that character might or should?

Paradoxically, we expect an actor to

behave as if he or she were notacting but

were simply living the illusion of a character

we can accept within the context of the

1

2

Assessing acting performances [1] Toshirô Mifune in

the death scene of Lord Washizu in Akira Kurosawa’s Throne

of Blood(1957) and [2] Holly Hunter in Jane Campion’s The

Piano(1993), a performance for which she won the Academy

Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. To analyze an

actor’s performance, we need to consider its context—the

particular movie in which it appears. Kurosawa’s film draws

on a specific genre—the jidai-geki, or historical drama—that

is traditionally full of action; Campion’s film draws on history

but focuses more on psychology than on action. Thus, Mifune

uses ritualized, nonnaturalistic facial expressions and body

language; and Hunter, who speaks only in voice-over, appears

more naturalistic, inner-directed, muted(subdued).

(^46) Olivier, Confessions of an Actor, p. 51.
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