Film Acting Theory

Seeing Film: Mise-en-Scène

• The American New Critics' concept of the 'heresy of paraphrase' is valuable in understanding film's distinctiveness as a medium.
• The 'heresy of paraphrase' refers to literary criticism that focuses on summarizing the narrative rather than analyzing the work's formal elements.
• Film discourse often summarizes narrative or discusses characters but neglects cinematography, editing, and sound.
• Analyzing cinematic form is essential for students of film and critical to understanding the cultural or ideological questions.
• Visual and auditory elements should be explored as devices that generate meaning.
• Film's 'material body' is the subject of this book's first three chapters, beginning with an account of film's visual properties, grouped together under the French term mise-en-scène.

Defining Mise-en-Scène

• Jacques Rivette emphasized the importance of engaging with particularities of visual style in film studies.
• Spectators interpret a film's visual elements, giving them significance.
• Considering elements like setting, props, costume, and lighting is important.
• Analyzing the camera's framing and the quality of the footage allows one to embrace visual regimes distinctive to film.
• Mise-en-scène translates from French as 'staging' or 'putting into the scene', indicating origins in theatre.
• The Oxford English Dictionary primarily defines it as 'staging of a play', but it's also used in cinematic analysis.
• David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson define filmic mise-en-scène by what it shares with theatrical staging (setting, props, costume, lighting, and acting).
• Considering aspects of cinematography expands the definition of filmic mise-en-scène.

Pro-Filmic Elements of Mise-en-Scène

• Etienne Souriau coined the term pro-filmic to refer to components of a film's visual field existing independently of the camera.
• Pro-filmic elements include setting, props, costume, lighting, and acting, which cinema shares with theatre, opera, and dance.
• While separating these is artificial, it's useful to consider film's pro-filmic strands separately.

Setting

• Cinematic settings vary in scale, ranging from interplanetary spaces to confined spaces.
• Settings can advertise artificiality or evoke a 'reality effect'.
• Film settings compel attention and are charged with significance, serving to reinforce the plausibility of particular kinds of stories.
• Settings function as an index of a film's generic status.

Props

• Props substantiate narratives, signal genre, and reveal character through objects that appear on screen.
• Like settings, props perform an informational role, confirming socio-economic or occupational status.
• Props can also take on expressionistic power
• Props have been a part of an ongoing debate over realism in film as well as its value to reveal with heightened vividness the world we inhabit.
• Cinema can free objects from their material circumstantiality and instead endows them with other, non-realist potentialities

Costume

• Costume, including make-up and hairstyle, has a wide range of functions and significance within film.
• Garments index historical period, national origin, class status, sub-group affiliation, gender identity, etc.
• Costumes can also encourage the spectator to make assumptions about a film's genre.
• Costume functions as a structured set of signs replete with connotations.
• Assessing costume in film requires co-ordination with sensitivity to matters of history and geography.

Lighting

• Film practitioners sometimes express concern about the over-promotion of lighting.
• Skilled lighting is self-effacing, as it is more subtle in its treatment, it seems more natural or obvious"
• Ideal film lighting is inconspicuous, contributing to the fashioning of cinematic illusions that absorb the spectator, without recognising the artifice.
• It's important to note the distinction between two basic lighting schemas in film: high-key (or low-ratio) and low-key (or high-ratio), aka chiaroscuro.
• High-key means an even diffusion of lighting across a shot, resulting in low contrast.
• Low-key means much higher contrast between bright and dark with less penetrable areas of shadow.
• Broad hypotheses need to be tested in analyses of how exactly lighting functions in specific cases, for example high-key lighting can disperse such brightness it becomes monotonous and oppressive (like in The Truman Show).

Acting

• Lighting is crucially articulated with the final pro-filmic component: acting or performance (the repertoire of on-screen facial expression, body positioning, gesture, movement and speech)
• Many position film performance against theatre acting and judge it to be impoverished by comparison.
• Assessment of film acting also requires sensitivity to historically and geographically variant performance styles.
• Acting in later periods are more equally codified, even it its relative economy inn the deployment of both body and voice may make it more difficult to perceive its convections.
• Most recent performance in English-speaking cinema is broadly naturalistic, aiming to align itself more with observed human behaviour.
• Acting in a non-naturalistic mode has not entirely disappeared even from Anglo-American cinema (Jim Carrey, Jack Nicholson).

Cinematography

• Spectators vary on the degree which they register the numerous cinematographic processes that endow props, costumes
• 'Cinematography' describes the host of decisions taken during the recording and processing of the film image (whether that image is imprinted on celluloid or encrypted in digital videotape)
• Filmmakers can choose between different types of film stock that generate images of strikingly contrasting kinds.

Distance

• Film tends to be human-centered and camera distances are generally tabulated according to the relative smallness or largeness of the human figure as it appears on screen.
• From most distant perspective: extreme long shot, in which the figure is barely visible in an overpowering setting.
• Background is still significant in the long shot (or full shot)
• Next, the shots do not disclose the entire human body: medium long shot, medium shot, medium close-up, close-up, extreme close up.
• Terminology has been adjusted historically
• Shot significance depends on the particular context in which they are utilized.

Height, Angle and Level

• First of these categories refers to the degree of elevation in the camera's positioning
• With respect to camera angle, three basic options are available: high angle, straight-on angle and low angle.
• While the frame is generally balanced in mainstream cinema, filmmakers can alter it from the horizontal so as to produce a canted shot
• Other cinematographic practices offer alternatives to the image's rectangular format itself: Masked shots.

Movement

• None of the many cinematographic options discussed above implies or requires that the camera is moving.

Focus

• All of those camera movements so far described potentially affect one further property of the film image: its quality of focus:
• Options include shallow foocus, deep focus, and racking or pulling focus
• Each of these are more than merely technical matters.

Colour and Its Meanings

• One of film's most disquieting lack is colour.
• Colour may serve as device for historical and geographical authentification.
• Exemplary here is the Chinese martial arts film Hero (2002), which has a tripartite colour scheme: red and gold, white and green, and blue.
• A prime factor to consider is the sensibility and multiple interpretative possibilities.

Case Study: 12 Years a Slave (2013)

• Steve McQueen fashioned his film's visual dimension charged with ethical and political seriousness.
• Slavery depended upon racialized notions of visibility and objective observation making visual culture the location for racism's faulty logics.
• The episode begins with Chapin exiting after saving Northup from vengeful tibeats
• Valuable consideration must be made to point to a great ethical moment, is a very vital consideration in McQueen's short selection.
• There may be risks in sheer vividmess with which Nor thup's indivual suffering is realized in this sequence.