Method Acting

The Actors studio: a look at the Stainslavski's Method

Although most filmgoers readily form opinions about acting, the subject of performance is one of the least analyzed aspects of film aesthetics. What exactly do actors contribute to film artistry, and how do they do it? Lee Strasberg (1899-1982), a teacher and theorist of acting and a leader of the Actors Studio, suggested that the most effective film performers were those who did not act. “They try not to act but to be themselves, to respond or react,” he said. This may be a debatable proposition in the sense that performers' images and roles are invariably constructed by such factors as studio publicity and genre codes, but it does relate to a central tenet of the Stanislavski Method: actors were not to emote in the traditional manner of stage conventions, but to speak and gesture in a manner one would use in private life. Konstantin Stanislavski, who was, director at the Moscow Art Theater, wrote a number of books on acting, the first of which, An Actor Prepares, was published in English translation in 1936. Before then, however, one of his students, Richard Boleslawsky (1889-1937), opened an acting school in New York and began teaching Stanislavskian principles (Boleslavsky went on to Hollywood and directed a number of films in the 1930s)”

The first significant performance work drawing on Stanislavski's ideas was carried Out by the Group Theater, formed in New York in 1931. The Group's most famous Production was a play expressing the militant radical spirit of the 1930s, “Waiting for Lefty” (1935), by Clifford Odets (1903-1963), who became a Hollywood scriptwriter and occasional director. The Group did not last beyond the 1930s, but its influence continued in Hollywood and through the formation of the Actors Studio.

After World War II, in the context of the Actors Studio, the Stanislavski Method was shorn of its radical Political connotations (the Group Theater became a particular target of anticommunist investigators) and emphasized an individualized, psychological approach to acting- The “Method” required a performer to draw on his or her own self, on experiences, memories, and emotions that could inform a characterization and shape how a character might speak or move. Characters were thus shown to have an interior life; rather than being stereotyped figures representing a single concept (the villain, the heroine), they could become complex human beings with multiple and contradictory feelings and desires. it was the ability to convey the complexity-indeed the confusion of inner feelings that made the Actors Studio-trained Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, and James Dean such emblematic figures for the Postwar era.

The most celebrated two character exchange in the history of American movies, a historian of Method acting, Steve Wineberg, has called the taxicab scene in “On the Waterfront”, with two Actors Studio alumni, Marlon Brando as Terry Malloy and Rod Steiger as Charley, his older brother. Terry discovers his brother's past betrayal, “I coulda been a contender” and Charley faces his own imminent death, lets listen in.