www.goodreads.com/list/show/25975.Best_Acting_Books
The motto of the Globe Theatre in London was Totus mundus agit histrionem; “The whole world is a playhouse.”
It's true I crept the boards in my youth but I never had it in my blood and that's what so essential isn't it? Theatrical zeal in the veins. Alas, I have little more that vintage wine and memories. It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when he awakes and quite reasonable says to himself: I will never play The Dane. When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases. Don't you agree?
Vanity surely played a part in my preferring acting in films to the theater. But I enjoyed the fact that in a film the role…
www.goodreads.com/list/show/25975.Best_Acting_Books
The motto of the Globe Theatre in London was Totus mundus agit histrionem; “The whole world is a playhouse.”
It's true I crept the boards in my youth but I never had it in my blood and that's what so essential isn't it? Theatrical zeal in the veins. Alas, I have little more that vintage wine and memories. It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when he awakes and quite reasonable says to himself: I will never play The Dane. When that moment comes, one's ambition ceases. Don't you agree?
Vanity surely played a part in my preferring acting in films to the theater. But I enjoyed the fact that in a film the role and my performance were indissoluble, one and the same; while, in the theater, the same role has been and will be performed by many actors. (Are the films in this respect more like life than is the stage?) Also—another incentive to vanity—what one does in a film is recorded and as imperishable as celluloid; while performances in the theater are without record. I also preferred the cinema to the theater because there is no audience present except one’s working colleagues, and no applause. In fact, not only is there no audience, there is really no acting either. Acting in films is not like acting in a play, which is, whatever the interruptions of rehearsal, in performance continuous, cumulative, and replete with consummated movement and emotion. What is called acting in the films is, on the contrary, much closer to stillness, to posing for a sequence of still photographs like those in monthly roman-photos read by shop girls and housewives. In a film every scene is subdivided into dozens of separate shots, each of which entails no more than a line or two of dialogue, a single expression on the actor’s face. The camera creates motion, animates these brief frozen moments—like the eye of the dreamer inhabiting and at the same time being a spectator to his own dreams. • The Benefactor by Susan Sontag
