The Books of My Life: Acting in the Cinema

In Acting in the Cinema (Berkley: University of California Press, 1988) and a follow up article entitled "Acting in the Cinema" (in Pam Cook (editor); The Cinema Book (London: BFI, 2007)) that brings the story into the 21st century, Indiana University film scholar James Naremore explores the history and practise of film acting. Naremore delineates the five types of acting that, he argues, influenced Hollywood film acting: the pantomime acting style that goes back some 2000 years, the expressionist acting style with roots in Weimar, the bio-mechanical acting style developed by Vsevolod Meyerhold in post-revolutionary Russia, the naturalistic acting of the late 19th and early 20th associated with Russian and Soviet theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky and which morphed into "the method" in mid-20th century America, the Weimar Brechtian tradition of acting which foregrounds the artificial and constructed nature of theatre and theatre acting, and the neo-pantomime acting style that dominates the contemporary Hollywood of science fiction, fantasy, and comic strip movies.

Naremore's book and article are, in my opinion, the best things I have read on film acting for one simple reason, Naremore really tries to get at the history and sociology of film acting in a systematic and analytical way. Naremore does an excellent job of tracing the history of acting from the theatre of ancient Greece, to the theatre of Shakespeare, to the various patomime acting manuals for theatre actors in the 18th through 21st centuries, to the rise of naturalistic and psychological realist forms of theatre acting of the late 19th and 20th centuries, and finally to 20th and 21st century Hollywood. Naremore, drawing on ethnographer and theorist Erving Goffman, does a nice job of exploring how acting, sociologically and ethnologically speaking, is a caricatured and stereotyped form of the role playing all of us perform in everyday life thanks to socialisation. All of us really are actors o the stage of the world. Naremore does an excellent job of exploring how technologies, such as microphones, editing, camera movements, and cgi, for instance, have impacted film acting over the years. Naremore presents several fascinating and incisive case studies of five Hollywood actors and acting in two Hollywood films. Finally, Naremore does an excellent job of making the exotic and often obscure language of contemporary film scholars understandable for the non-specialist reader.

What Naremore's book and article doesn't do, and which I would like to have seen more of, however, is an exploration of how pantomime and naturalistic forms of acting became dominant in Hollywood. I think a chapter on the Hollywood studio's acting schools would have helped immensely in linking earlier forms of theatre acting styles to Hollywood acting styles. Additionally, given that Naremore speculates about how audiences read Hollywood films and its actors, it would have been nice to see more quantitative and qualitative analysis of how real film audiences "read" Hollywood films and their actors. Without such studies speculation about how audiences "read" Hollywood films in the work of contemporary film scholars seems little more than a form or reader response. Finally, it would have been nice to see Naremore explore in greater detail just how generalisable the acting of the actors he studied and the acting in the films he explored, were and are. Naremore tends to focus his attention on actors and films that are well-known and well-regarded today.

Naremore's book and article are an excellent corrective of the many ahistorical historical and methodologically problematic approaches to film that seem to dominate film studies in the West these days. I wish more film scholars would follow Naremore's lead and ground their analysis in history and sociological studies of socialisation rather than in the ahistorical anti-ethnography of psychoanalysis. Reading Naremore's book, something I have intended to do for some time, reminded this sixty year old plus reader of how much I learned from Professor Naremore when I was a student in his undergraduate and graduate classes at Indiana University.