{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "when i watch old movies i\u2019m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad,...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/189033373708/", "html": "
when i watch old movies i\u2019m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it\u2019s just often kind of artificial? it\u2019s acting-y. it\u2019s like stage acting.
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it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40\u2032s, or even the 70\u2032s.
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the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would\u2019ve blown the critics\u2019 socks off in the days of \u2018casablanca\u2019.
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there\u2019s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening.\u00a0 right around the fifties, I think.\u00a0 the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in\u00a0\u201ca streetcar named desire\u201d - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.
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i even noticed it in \u2018the sting\u2019, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie\u2019s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you\u2019re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set\u2019s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.
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or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.
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i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it\u2019s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn\u2019t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you\u2019ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they\u2019re framed in an unmoving center-stage.
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this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it\u2019s a tableau. it lives in a box.
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now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn\u2019t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren\u2019t stuck inside the box. but i couldn\u2019t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they\u2019re not traveling, they\u2019re moving around, and they treat things outside the \u2018stage\u2019 as real and interact with them, even if it\u2019s only to stare in delighted horror.
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as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here\u2019s a comedy punch:
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here, also, is a comedy punch:
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the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn\u2019t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone\u2019s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.
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i\u2019m not saying this to dis old movies, i\u2019m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!
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I\u2019m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there\u2019s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old \u201cstage acting\u201d comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you\u2019d probably call it bad composition)
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Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That
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Y\u2019all, THAT\u2019S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.
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Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.
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AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.
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It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,
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\u201cWELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?\u201d
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\u201cOH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND\u2019S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.\u201d
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\u201cWELL IT\u2019S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU\u2019LL GET THROUGH IT.\u201d
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\u201cWELL I SUPPOSE I\u2019VE GOT TO, HAVEN\u2019T I JOE?\u201d
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All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you\u2019ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.
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I don\u2019t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it\u2019s the other way around.
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Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to\u00a0a 2011\u00a0TV audience as if he was doing a parody.\u00a0When you watch Brief Encounter they\u2019re not speaking like that because they can\u2019t act, they\u2019re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it\u2019s not the norm any more.
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Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn\u2019t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn\u2019t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)
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Even the Queen\u2019s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become \u201cmore common"\u00a0- check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).
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There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or\u00a0\u201coverplayed\u201d acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando\u2019s character and Eva Marie Saint\u2019s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove\u2013turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn\u2019t call\u00a0\u201ccut.\u201d\u00a0
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Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene\u2013because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I
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t\u2019s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando\u2019s character doesn\u2019t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.
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Okay, but here\u2019s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.
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And that\u2019s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) \u2013 as the later movies would bear out. It\u2019s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.
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Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.
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Here\u2019s another example of that.
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Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.
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The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.
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Fast forward to the new series, and you\u2019ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.
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Three things have changed:
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1. Cameras have become much smaller.
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2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.
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3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.
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The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn\u2019t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.
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It\u2019s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form\u2026this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn\u2019t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.
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Going back to speech patterns for a moment \u2013 I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of \u2013 whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue.\u00a0
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I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone\u2019s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.
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Anyway, so I think it\u2019s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you\u2019re living through the shift, you don\u2019t really notice it as it happens.
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In the 1980s the American TV series Miami Vice and 21 Jump Street were famous for scoring scenes with contemporary pop music.
Even as late as the 90s WB teen soaps like Dawson’s Creek were distinct for that, scoring meaningful montages to current songs (that were totally chosen thru lobbying if not payola) and repping the songs in an end-of-episode card
This was a break from the tradition carried from the popular stage into the 3-network era that dramas would be accompanied by diegetic sound purpose-composed and -performed by in-house orchestra
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