Core Post #2 - Erin Cooney

It was interesting to read about the argument made by King in Stardom: Industry of Desire around the difference between acting for the stage and for the screen. The other readings also touched on this question in different ways, but I was interested especially in the discussion of authorship that King raises. The argument presented in this reading is that actors are much less the author of their character or of the narrative their character appears in when they're acting in film as opposed to on the stage. The examples presented of how the director/editor controls the performance for the screen stuck out to me, suggesting that in some cases, what the actor is doing is largely irrelevant to what emotion or story is expressed on screen, with the example of the shot from Queen Christina or the example of people being unable to distinguish between the two different scenes from the prison when the actor's performance was recut, even when the actor was doing something completely distinct in their performance in each scene.

The discussion of control--over a performance, over a character, over a narrative, etc.--is really interesting, especially as the article continues and thinks about casting. What an actor brings in automatically to their role, based on what they signify cultural just in their appearance/"natural" personality or style was discussed, in type casting and in how the article suggests so much of casting has started from the physical and from the persona of the star, outside of their general acting ability. This is certainly interesting to consider in a context of increased public scrutiny around casting decisions, when we're thinking about things like whitewashing in film--both in adaptations from other mediums or in assuming whiteness as a default--and in issues like casting able-bodied actors to play disabled characters or cisgender actors to play trans characters. There is a lot happening here around what actors signify and bring in based on who they are and what they represent culturally and so on that is pretty complicated. This is true in what they signify physically, certainly, but also meaningfully in what they bring into their performance in terms of their own experience and how we consider people playing roles outside of their experience--a cis person playing a trans character, for example, ends up drawing on stereotypes and assumptions of that role from a really basic level and the same is true or potentially true of abled actors playing disabled characters, of white actors playing characters who are or should have been characters of color, straight people playing queer people, whatever. There's a lot happening around what actors put into their roles based on who they are and what does to the character and the performance generally.