Theatre

This guide for actors and directors develops a valid method for training performers to act from their core--whether they are cold reading, auditioning, or performing for film or television. This book teaches actors how to achieve and respond to believable and honest emotions before the camera, and it maintains that the key to a successful performance lies in how the actors relate to one another and to the circumstances. Exercises, including script examples, throughout the book give readers an easy resource for practicing the principles outlined.

Performers make a crucial contribution to the achievement of narrative films. By moving through exemplary sequences, this book closely follows the movement and behaviour of screen performers - Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Widmark - and by emphasising their relationship to other aspects of film style - camera, location and plot - it develops accounts that are specific and involved. This study concentrates on films from the 'Golden Age' of Hollywood and moment-by-moment descriptions enable fresh interpretations to emerge and evolve. These reveal the significance and intensity of a performer's engagement with the world of a film.

Screen performances entertain and delight us but we rarely stop to consider actors' reliance on their craft to create memorable characters. Although film acting may appear effortless, a host of techniques, artistic conventions, and social factors shape the construction of each role. The chapters in Acting provide a fascinating, in-depth look at the history of film acting, from its inception in 1895 when spectators thrilled at the sight of vaudeville performers, Wild West stars, and athletes captured in motion, to the present when audiences marvel at the seamless blend of human actors with CGI.

Combining life-coaching and screen-acting tools and techniques in one accessible handbook, this guide empowers actors to overcome personal inhibitions and approach their work, characters and careers with the assuredness to produce powerful, real and believable acting on screen. Structured to build confidence and understanding of yourself before you take on the role of someone else, this book offers the tools and techniques to give you the necessary conviction and self-assurance to perform uninhibited. Dresner then examines essential elements of a screen actor's craft, such as emotions, imagination, nerves, focus, listening, improvisation and line-learning.

Why is it that so many good actors don't perform well at castings? Secrets from the Casting Couch gives practical advice for actors, written from a casting director's point of view, teaching the craft of film casting in front of camera. It shows how actors can work with today's internet technologies to get cast and features advice and actual exercises that achieve results in the casting studio.

This spirited volume explores the history and diversity of improvisation in the cinema, including works by Jean Renoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and Nobuhiro Suwa. Gilles Mouëllic examines improvisational practices that can be specifically attributed to the cinema and argues in favors of their powers as instigators of unprecedented forms of expression. Improvising Cinema reflects both on the permanence of attempting improvisation and the relationship between technology and aesthetics.