Delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles and a variety of films, Murray Pomerance traces the common dynamics that work to structure the complex relationship between the act of cinematic performance and its eventual perception.

Acknowledgments

Preamble: Saw the Air

            Thinking about actors and their allure; Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause; viewers’ love of acting; momentary performance; acting, action, and activity; acting, evidence, and biography; Linda Darnell; casting and gatekeeping.

1                Fantastic Performance

Thinking about acting style and culture; innocent and scientific watching, and “falling in”; The Edge of Tomorrow; The Last Laugh; With Blood on My Hands: Pusher II; predictive performance and John Wayne; transcendent performance and Katharine Hepburn; Bringing Up Baby; Now, Voyager; El Dorado.

2                Beaux Gestes

            Thinking about language and gesture; The Disorderly Orderly; Anthony Perkins in Psycho; Jeff Goldblum in Le Weekend; Touch of Evil; the flower of the gest; Ralph Richardson and Christophe Lambert in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes; effects gesture; Life of Pi and keyframing; animated performance and puppetry; Blithe Spirit; Robert Walker in My Son John; The Stepford Wives; The Musée Grévin; Jacques de Vaucanson’s duck; The Thief of Bagdad; Charlton Heston and Gary Cooper in The Wreck of the Mary Deare; cinematic gesture and The King of Comedy; The Thin Man; Cool Hand Luke; The Red Shoes; hands and handfulness; actors under direction; John Frankenheimer, Burt Lancaster, and The Train; Antony and Cleopatra; Hitchcock, gesture, and “cattle”; Kim Novak, Vertigo, and vertiginous gesture.

3                Curtains

            Thinking about the actor’s multiple selves; Vivian Sobchack and the actor’s four bodies; performance amplification; Alec Guinness and preparation; rehearsal and “downkeying”; curtain calls; Whose Life Is It Anyway?; Murder on the Orient Express; Citizen Kane; The Magnificent Ambersons; The Bad Seed; “behind-the-scenes” musicals; theatrical exhibition spaces; credit-roll “goofing”; Peter O’Toole and Winona Ryder offscreen; Birdman; fans and fan logic; actor-in-the-street stories; acting audiences; the Academy Awards.

4                “It’s Not a Man, It’s a Place!”

            Thinking about setting and the actor’s labor; workplaces under capitalism and factory design; the sound stage environment; Rope; acting and make-up; Technicolor; My Dinner with André; Ian Carmichael; Ingrid Bergman and Under Capricorn; The Wizard of Oz; Grey Gardens; Simon Callow and A Room with a View; Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; Boris Karloff; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Haruo Nakajima, Godzilla, and body division; Billion Dollar Brain; The French Lieutenant’s Woman; Chinatown; Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers; the sound boom; the “caffeination schedule”; acting, editing, and lighting; predetermined focus; Suddenly, Last Summer; The Hands of Orlac; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; “Instructions for John Howell”; panoptical setting; Laurence Olivier in Sleuth; setting and characters; Bette Davis in The Letter; the character “at home” in Marnie; “hypothetical” performance, Sandra Bullock, and Gravity; Andy Serkis; the actor’s mirror; animation vocalizing; The Member of the Wedding.

5                Acting Intimate

            Thinking about actors’ trade secrecy; Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights; Anthony Hopkins and Hannibal Lecter; Colin Farrell and truth-telling; Joaquin Phoenix in The Master; zombie performance; George Herbert Mead; Hud; Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice; onscreen urination and bleeding; Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained; the actor’s voice; acting and musculature; the actor’s touch; interpersonal contact and audience exclusion; The Bourne Identity; anxious interiors; Peter Lorre in Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, and Hotel Berlin; Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold; the “Doctrine of Natural Expression”; anti-intellectualism, the portrayal of genius, and Jesse Eisenberg; acting the “amnesiac”; forgotten moralities and cathartic awakening.

Notes

Works Cited and Consulted

Index

MURRAY POMERANCE is an independent film scholar in Toronto, Canada. He is the author, editor, or co-editor of many books, including The Eyes Have It, Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s, A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film, and The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory (all published by Rutgers University Press).