The Material Poetry of Acting: "Objects of Attention," Performance Style, and Gender in the Shining and Eyes Wide Shut
2006; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 58; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
Autores Tópico(s)Visual Culture and Art Theory
ResumoCINEMA SCHOLARS ARE NOW INTERROGATING ways a film actor's use of body and voice within frame can contribute to aesthetics of a film. In 1988, lames Naremore laid groundwork for such inquiry with Acting in Cinema. More recently, in anthologies such as Screen Acting and More Than a Method, film scholars have continued project of disentangling actors' work from their a priori status as stars. By turning attention away from star personae and toward acting as a discrete art form collaborates with other cinematic arts in production of a film, such studies promise a productive reassessment of power of actors within mediated forms of performance. The analysis of acting on screen as an observable series of physical and vocal gestures challenges Lev Kuleshov's influential 1935 stance apart from montage, nothing exists in cinema, the work of actors is absolutely irrelevant (McDonald 24). As Paul McDonald demonstrates in his canny comparison of Gus Van Sant's 1998 remake of Psycho with Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 original, actors' physical and vocal choices matter in audience's reception of a film and legibility of characters' emotions. It is only in details of actor's voice and body, McDonald concludes, that meaning and significance of acting's contribution to film can be found (39-40). Close analyses of how screen actors gesture, move, control tempo and rhythm, use language and sound, and inflect and articulate their lines complement more traditional studies on power of montage. Detailed and often tedious observation of acting can best be compared to close readings of poetry, in which smallest details of usage culled from an otherwise quotidian language become key to a poet's unique artistry. However, McDonald rightly cautions if film acting is to become an established aspect of film analysis, it must be because reading uses of voice and body can inform a larger understanding of any film and of film in general (26). I would add another caution as well, reading actors' work only becomes widely persuasive when it avoids all too predominant tendency toward subjective, impressionistic description. Those scholars, like McDonald himself, who succeed in their critical stance on acting do so because they utilize concrete aspects of acting to develop objective readings. This objectivity has largely relied upon a common-sense observation of material elements in an actor's work. But long history of acting and many acting theories have formed basis for training can also offer objective modes of description and a professional terminology for analysis. Like established modes for scansion of verse, theatrical terminology for acting stands at ready to be mined in our efforts to understand how actors become agents in a (Naremore 23), to describe physics of movement and gesture (Naremore 34), and to evaluate acting within frame. By examining work of Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall in The Shining (1980) and Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut (1999), I contribute to growing body of studies use acting to illuminate films. Close readings of two scenes in these films demonstrate Stanley Kubrick's directorial strategy of refracting conflicts between husbands and wives, and between genders more generally, as clashes of acting styles. Discussing The Shining in his 1994 study of Kubrick's films, Mario Falsetto first commented on Kubrick's propensity to seta nonrealistic male performance against a realistic female one. While the film's narrative is played out at such a level of abstraction and unreality notion of character empathy is virtually impossible, Falset to observes, the film contains not only an interesting mix of moods but also a real contrast in acting styles (171). Nicholson's exaggerated performance is set against Duvall's very convincing and naturalistic one. …
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