Chapter 375 Introduction to Acting
Acting is an art with a long history, which can be traced back hundreds or even thousands of years. After a long period of precipitation, it has developed to today.
Generally speaking, people’s understanding of acting is to present a state and a role through movements, expressions, language and other means. This has also been people’s common understanding of acting for a long time, and then formed the traditional academy School performance method——
Also known as expressionism.
The so-called expressionism is actually very intuitive. "Expression" refers to body language, facial expressions, line skills, etc. Actors need to accurately understand emotions, characters, and plots, and then through precise control and Present the status in an accurate way.
There are no shortcuts to this type of performance, and it completely tests solid basic skills. This is a true portrayal of "one minute on stage and ten years off stage". Every actor must go through systematic study, lengthy training and professional training. From body posture to grooming, everything must be carved.
Each actor has a different level of performance and a different degree of practice in basic skills. The performance and the charm left by the performance are completely different, and the real material is clear at a glance.
It is precisely because of this that in classic plays in London's West End and Broadway, the audience needs to know the actors and casts in advance before going to watch the work. The viewing effect presented by different lineups may be hugely different. Really experienced professionals Audiences tend to pick specific casts to enjoy.
Even the same lineup may have different effects on different dates based on different performance conditions.
So, some people may be curious why professional audiences continue to watch the same play, even though they have seen it countless times, they still come into the theater again and again. This is the reason.
In addition to expressionism, in the past half century, another performance method has risen strongly and has even gradually become the mainstream of the industry, which is experiential acting.
The so-called experiential style, in short, means that the actor completely brings into the current situation of the character, lives in the character's state, brings his own understanding according to the character's situation, and then expresses the character's emotional state.
There are many reasons for the rise of this form of acting. Part of it is the comprehensive popularity of the film and television industry. There are more and more grassroots actors from non-traditional colleges. They have not received professional training or polished their basic skills. It is difficult to express emotions and states with techniques or methods, so experiential acting was born.
The most famous example in film history is Robert De Niro's performance in "Taxi Driver". In order to feel the real life of a taxi driver and to feel the background of the era when the script was originally written, he went to New York in After actually working as a taxi driver for three months, I truly felt the confusion and madness of the male protagonist.
This is a typical experience acting.
The highest state of this kind of performance is "You can't live without going crazy", completely ignoring the boundary between reality and illusion, and reaching a state of selflessness.
Below the experience-based acting, there is a new branch, method-based acting.
From an overall perspective, the essence of the experiential school and the method school are the same. They require actors to bring into the role and experience the character's experience and emotions to complete the performance; but the difference is that the experiential school requires the actor to follow the character 100%. Emotion, whereas Methodism allows actors to replace emotional objects.
A simple example: an actor plays a role that requires him to fall in love with a man in a movie.
For the experiential type, the actor is required to truly find a shining point in the character and then fall in love with him.
The method school allows the actor to use alternative methods to imagine the character as a woman and fall in love with him.
For the audience, the difference may not be visible, but for the actors and the opposite actors, the temperature of true feelings is different.
Slowly, method acting became more and more popular around the world, so much so that experiential acting took a back seat.
The reason is simple and intuitive. Experiential acting requires a real approach to reality. If an actor plays a serial killer, he can't really commit a crime, right?
Naturally, method acting, which allows the replacement of emotional objects, has come to the fore, especially in Hollywood, where it is becoming more and more widely respected.
In general, advocates of the experiential school/method school believe that the characters’ lives are full of strange things, and no one can truly feel their emotions. Unless they have experienced it themselves, everything is just talk on paper. Imaginations are all suspended in the air, and carry their own imagination.
Of course, the most important thing is to make the entire entertainment industry more people-friendly and popular.
With the overall rise of social network platforms, there are more and more grassroots artists, and after the strong rise of short videos, the pace of traffic is getting faster and faster. Artists no longer have time to go to the academy to calm down and slowly polish their basic skills. Popular artists with no acting skills to speak of fully occupy the screen. In this context, actors who are willing to study the experiential/method school are already considered rare.
In the contemporary film industry, Europe advocates expressionism, and they firmly believe that actors need a threshold, even twenty years later. This will still be the case; the United States advocates method, and the film industry represented by Hollywood has achieved countless grassroots successes. The dream of stardom is open to everyone without a professional background or historical background.
Anson belongs to the latter.
Actually, Anson has been wandering at the doorstep of Method acting until now.
The three characters of "Friends", "Princess Diaries" and "Spider-Man" are different from each other, but the same thing is that Anson extracted some characteristics from himself, and amplified, concrete, and imaged them, and finally Evolved into three characters; from modeling to knowledge, cut into the characters and truly feel the characters.
However, it is just a small joke. After all, the three works themselves are not that serious.
The same goes for the "cat and mouse game".
Although it is not that serious and is still mainly light-hearted, the role of Frank Abagnale Jr. gave Anson a platform to explore.
To some extent, Little Frank’s experience overlaps with Anson’s. Anson can understand Little Frank’s feelings, so he now needs to mobilize his own memory and project his emotions and images on Little Frank. Frank finally created a new image.
Whether it is an experience person or a method person, for Anson, it seems that it is the first time that he has truly touched the door of the acting world -
It has not been pushed away for the time being, but he can really feel it in the palm of his hand. To the solid texture of that door.
This made Anson a little excited.
Once, he hoped that he would never think of those dark and painful memories again and just bury them in the past.
But now, he found that it didn't matter even if his memory was awakened, because he was already strong enough to face it calmly.
It is precisely because of this that after joining the crew of "Cat and Mouse Game", the first truly difficult scene was not facing Tom Hanks, but facing Christopher Walken. Walken)——
The actor who plays old Frank Abagnale.
(End of this chapter)