Hollywood Stardom Manuals: Conceptions and Pedagogies of Silent Film Acting
The research project I am proposing is the first book-length critical history of the conceptions and pedagogies of film acting in American silent cinema. The study takes as its principle primary material a large selection of previously unstudied popular film acting manuals, guidebooks, and advice columns in magazines, which proliferated in the United States during the late 1910s and the 1920s. Outside of their significance for the study of historical styles of film acting, I argue that these manuals offer us unique historiographic resources since they may be read as some of the earliest self-reflexive articulations of conceptions regarding performance, mediation, and spectatorship in film history. My study thus considers these texts as documenting a "vernacular theory" of film acting - an informal set of general propositions about the nature and social role of cinematic performance of the time. As I will demonstrate, this vernacular theory deals with ideas about the craft of the newly emerging profession of film acting in a manner that mirrors the concerns that later classical film theorists have grappled with. The writers of the early acting manuals were seeking to come to terms with the new aesthetic properties and possibilities of cinema, to define what would be "good" or "proper" filmic practices, to address the novel challenges of performing not in front of audiences but to an apparatus, and to make a case for cinema's potential to qualify as a new art form.
Final report
P15-0697:1
Hollywoodstjärna: Idéer och pedagogiker kring stumfilmskådespeleri / Hollywood Stardom Manuals: Conceptions and Pedagogies of Silent Film Acting
I am writing to report on the results of the research project “Hollywood Stardom Manuals: Conceptions and Pedagogies of Silent Film Acting,” carried out between 2016 and 2021. The project concerned the rhetoric and techniques of training actors in silent film, focusing on Hollywood of the late 1910s to late 1920s, a period that saw the establishment of methods that came to dominate filmmaking for the rest of the century. The project took as its main source material early film-acting manual and guidebooks from the silent era. The initial idea that guided the project was that these texts, which were published as Hollywood star-system paratexts, could be addressed as exemplars of ‘vernacular theories” of cinema. In other words, written parallel to the articulation of the canonical ideals of film theory, these manuals and guidebooks index ideas that were common in the emerging Hollywood industry regarding cinema’s preferred aesthetic traits, the unique qualities of screen stardom, medium specificity (especially in the sense of demarcating distinctions from the theatre), and the relations between the expression of emotions and the cinematic apparatus.
The research grant allowed me to go on several research trips and excavate historical publications on film acting. I have visited the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Wisconsin; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, and the library of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition, I have also done research locally, at the Swedish Film Institute’s bibliotek, and digitally, using databases of historical journals and magazines. Having collected the primary materials, which consisted of dozens of items, I could also address relevant secondary sources from the fields of film history, film theory, and theatre and performance studies. Consequently, I was able to get a clearer idea about recurring themes and historical transformations among the various guidebooks and manuals – namely with respect to questions of beauty, nature, and adherence to aesthetic traditions.
These finds informed what became the first major theme of this research: the relations between conceptions of American silent film acting and aesthetic ideals of neoclassicism. While I was not trying to make a case for explicit stylistic continuity between the eighteenth-century neoclassical stage and silent feature films, highlighting notions of neoclassical aesthetics allowed me to discuss the early discourses on acting in light of foundational theoretical and historiographical debates in cinema studies. Ever since the 1980s, the idea of “classical cinema” that drew upon neoclassical ideals of harmony, decorum, symmetry, etc. has been central in scholarship on the particular stylistic approaches of Hollywood filmmaking. In recent years, the concept of classical cinema has come under criticism by scholars whose studies of Hollywood rather foregrounded the quintessentially modern nature of the American film industry and its indebtedness to melodrama – two elements that the notion of neoclassicism typically occludes. In all these cases, however, the crucial focus remained on Hollywood’s dominant narrative strategies, editing techniques, and pictorial styles, whereas questions of screen acting styles remained overlooked. In light of such debates, my study integrated considerations of acting style into the disciplinary debates about the historicity of Hollywood film style. By looking at the previously underexplored instructional writings on acting, my study shows how classical notions of beauty and adherence to nature persisted throughout the 1910s and 20s and continued to offer ideal images of screen performance, although filmmakers were also open to influences from newer realistic and modern traditions. In my article about this persistency of neoclassical ideals in discussions of silent film acting I go on to speculate on what allows for these erstwhile aesthetic traits to have such a long stronghold on ideas of acting, and suggest that frequent references to neoclassical styles not only allowed Hollywood to associate itself with established art forms, but also to make a case for its own stylistic historical evolvement and, most importantly, to make a case for how the cinematic apparatus – which appears to be alien to traditional concepts of art – is in fact most appropriate for registering qualities of harmony and decorum in performance.
Following this, I went on to explore the historical origins of instructional texts on film acting. My initial focus was specifically on silent-era Hollywood, that is circa 1917-1928, but while working with the primary sources, I came to realize that the very idea of teaching acting in books and manuals (and in fact also in acting schools separate from theatres) was a novelty in the early twentieth century. I became interested, therefore, in revealing the history of how these methods of training became popularized in the cinema, and so I turned to some earlier American publications from 1913-1915 as well as histories of theatre acting pedagogies. The results of studying these aspects illuminated for me some of the central concerns that filmmakers, performers and critics had with respect to screen acting in the early 1910s, a period during which, as I found, a particular focus was given to the natural expression of emotions. This notion, in turn, informed what was seen as the most important techniques and skills film actors needed to master. At the same time, training programs in theatrical acting started emerging for the first time outside the institutional frameworks of theatres or touring theatrical stock companies. As I have shown in my study, it was the model of training actors off the stage, not for particular roles but for the cultivation of a range of techniques, that inspired the first film acting schools as well as acting manuals and guidebooks.
Another part of my project followed a peculiar group of texts on acting and actors that I have located and that lead me to explore areas beyond the initial scope of the study. These were articles titled “Have All Actors an Inferiority Complex?” “What Does Acting Do to the Actor?” and “Have you Acting Talent?” that were published in 1927 and 1928 in the prominent American fan magazine Photoplay. As I found, the articles appeared as part of a series of 13 articles about film and psychoanalysis, which were written for the fan magazine by American neuropsychiatrist Louis E. Bisch and remained relatively unknown until today. The article series addressed a range of topics – from acting and stardom to genres, spectatorship, censorship, and the cinematic apparatus – all explored from Freudian perspectives. In so doing, Bisch laid out a remarkably early popular account that associated cinema and psychoanalysis decades before theorists in the established discipline of film studies did so. In my study, I analyzed Bisch’s particular pro-Hollywood approach to the cinema and placed his ideas in the context of the vexed reception of psychoanalysis in 1920s American popular discourses. As I shown, paradoxically, Photoplay used Bisch’s contribution to make a case for the moral healthiness of cinema by affiliating it with a theory that at the time was regarded as scandalous for its preoccupation with sexuality and the irrational.
The studies described above have been written as two articles and a book chapter. Two of them are accepted publication and the third is currently under peer-review for the journal Necsus.
In addition, I also served as coeditor of a volume on corporeality and early cinema, which consisted of sections on “performing bodies” and “bodily features” – both pertaining to themes in the study of screen acting. The volume was published as Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form, edited by Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, and Valentine Robert (Indiana University Press, 2018).
In May 2018 I initiated and organized a two-day workshop on silent film acting at Stockholm University, which hosted eight speakers from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the UK and consisted of a special film screening in collaboration with Cinemateket. In the workshop I presented a paper titled “Screen Acting Manuals, Vernacular Film Theory, and the Medium Specific Body.” I also presented my work on the project in four other international conferences and in the Cinema Studies seminar at Stockholm University in February 2019.
In addition to the above-mentioned publications and events I have also planned to create a video essay that will apply some of the ideas formulated in my research to the case study of William S. Hart, an American film star who arrived at the screen after a career on the stage and became one of the prominent early Hollywood stars, especially in the western genre. Hart’s film acting career spans the entire silent-feature film era, from 1914-1928 and as such is of particular interest for a number of reasons. First, because it spans a period that saw important changes in acting styles; secondly, because he was simultaneously one of the most popular actors of his time and a figure who inspired some of the early avantgarde accounts of film aesthetics, thus becoming something of a modernist icon. I started planning the creating of the video essay with two colleagues – one in the U.S. the other in Denmark – but unfortunately, due to the restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic we were unable to make progress with it. My hope is to continue with this plan when possible.
Conference presentations of the research:
“Screen Decorum: Silent Hollywood and Neoclassical Concepts of Acting.” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, March 2021. [online presentation due to Covid-19]
“The Craft of Silent Film Acting: Classical Traditions and Modern Innovations.” Domitor Early Cinema Studies Conference, November 2020. [online presentation due to Covid-19]
“Screen Acting Manuals, Vernacular Film Theory, and the Medium Specific Body.” Silent film acting workshop, Stockholm University, May 2018.
“Early Hollywood, Cultural Legitimacy, and Photoplay Magazine’s Resident Psychoanalytic Theorist.” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Seattle, March 2019.
“Early Hollywood Theorizes Itself.” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Chicago, March 2017.
Hollywoodstjärna: Idéer och pedagogiker kring stumfilmskådespeleri / Hollywood Stardom Manuals: Conceptions and Pedagogies of Silent Film Acting
I am writing to report on the results of the research project “Hollywood Stardom Manuals: Conceptions and Pedagogies of Silent Film Acting,” carried out between 2016 and 2021. The project concerned the rhetoric and techniques of training actors in silent film, focusing on Hollywood of the late 1910s to late 1920s, a period that saw the establishment of methods that came to dominate filmmaking for the rest of the century. The project took as its main source material early film-acting manual and guidebooks from the silent era. The initial idea that guided the project was that these texts, which were published as Hollywood star-system paratexts, could be addressed as exemplars of ‘vernacular theories” of cinema. In other words, written parallel to the articulation of the canonical ideals of film theory, these manuals and guidebooks index ideas that were common in the emerging Hollywood industry regarding cinema’s preferred aesthetic traits, the unique qualities of screen stardom, medium specificity (especially in the sense of demarcating distinctions from the theatre), and the relations between the expression of emotions and the cinematic apparatus.
The research grant allowed me to go on several research trips and excavate historical publications on film acting. I have visited the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Wisconsin; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, and the library of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In addition, I have also done research locally, at the Swedish Film Institute’s bibliotek, and digitally, using databases of historical journals and magazines. Having collected the primary materials, which consisted of dozens of items, I could also address relevant secondary sources from the fields of film history, film theory, and theatre and performance studies. Consequently, I was able to get a clearer idea about recurring themes and historical transformations among the various guidebooks and manuals – namely with respect to questions of beauty, nature, and adherence to aesthetic traditions.
These finds informed what became the first major theme of this research: the relations between conceptions of American silent film acting and aesthetic ideals of neoclassicism. While I was not trying to make a case for explicit stylistic continuity between the eighteenth-century neoclassical stage and silent feature films, highlighting notions of neoclassical aesthetics allowed me to discuss the early discourses on acting in light of foundational theoretical and historiographical debates in cinema studies. Ever since the 1980s, the idea of “classical cinema” that drew upon neoclassical ideals of harmony, decorum, symmetry, etc. has been central in scholarship on the particular stylistic approaches of Hollywood filmmaking. In recent years, the concept of classical cinema has come under criticism by scholars whose studies of Hollywood rather foregrounded the quintessentially modern nature of the American film industry and its indebtedness to melodrama – two elements that the notion of neoclassicism typically occludes. In all these cases, however, the crucial focus remained on Hollywood’s dominant narrative strategies, editing techniques, and pictorial styles, whereas questions of screen acting styles remained overlooked. In light of such debates, my study integrated considerations of acting style into the disciplinary debates about the historicity of Hollywood film style. By looking at the previously underexplored instructional writings on acting, my study shows how classical notions of beauty and adherence to nature persisted throughout the 1910s and 20s and continued to offer ideal images of screen performance, although filmmakers were also open to influences from newer realistic and modern traditions. In my article about this persistency of neoclassical ideals in discussions of silent film acting I go on to speculate on what allows for these erstwhile aesthetic traits to have such a long stronghold on ideas of acting, and suggest that frequent references to neoclassical styles not only allowed Hollywood to associate itself with established art forms, but also to make a case for its own stylistic historical evolvement and, most importantly, to make a case for how the cinematic apparatus – which appears to be alien to traditional concepts of art – is in fact most appropriate for registering qualities of harmony and decorum in performance.
Following this, I went on to explore the historical origins of instructional texts on film acting. My initial focus was specifically on silent-era Hollywood, that is circa 1917-1928, but while working with the primary sources, I came to realize that the very idea of teaching acting in books and manuals (and in fact also in acting schools separate from theatres) was a novelty in the early twentieth century. I became interested, therefore, in revealing the history of how these methods of training became popularized in the cinema, and so I turned to some earlier American publications from 1913-1915 as well as histories of theatre acting pedagogies. The results of studying these aspects illuminated for me some of the central concerns that filmmakers, performers and critics had with respect to screen acting in the early 1910s, a period during which, as I found, a particular focus was given to the natural expression of emotions. This notion, in turn, informed what was seen as the most important techniques and skills film actors needed to master. At the same time, training programs in theatrical acting started emerging for the first time outside the institutional frameworks of theatres or touring theatrical stock companies. As I have shown in my study, it was the model of training actors off the stage, not for particular roles but for the cultivation of a range of techniques, that inspired the first film acting schools as well as acting manuals and guidebooks.
Another part of my project followed a peculiar group of texts on acting and actors that I have located and that lead me to explore areas beyond the initial scope of the study. These were articles titled “Have All Actors an Inferiority Complex?” “What Does Acting Do to the Actor?” and “Have you Acting Talent?” that were published in 1927 and 1928 in the prominent American fan magazine Photoplay. As I found, the articles appeared as part of a series of 13 articles about film and psychoanalysis, which were written for the fan magazine by American neuropsychiatrist Louis E. Bisch and remained relatively unknown until today. The article series addressed a range of topics – from acting and stardom to genres, spectatorship, censorship, and the cinematic apparatus – all explored from Freudian perspectives. In so doing, Bisch laid out a remarkably early popular account that associated cinema and psychoanalysis decades before theorists in the established discipline of film studies did so. In my study, I analyzed Bisch’s particular pro-Hollywood approach to the cinema and placed his ideas in the context of the vexed reception of psychoanalysis in 1920s American popular discourses. As I shown, paradoxically, Photoplay used Bisch’s contribution to make a case for the moral healthiness of cinema by affiliating it with a theory that at the time was regarded as scandalous for its preoccupation with sexuality and the irrational.
The studies described above have been written as two articles and a book chapter. Two of them are accepted publication and the third is currently under peer-review for the journal Necsus.
In addition, I also served as coeditor of a volume on corporeality and early cinema, which consisted of sections on “performing bodies” and “bodily features” – both pertaining to themes in the study of screen acting. The volume was published as Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form, edited by Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, and Valentine Robert (Indiana University Press, 2018).
In May 2018 I initiated and organized a two-day workshop on silent film acting at Stockholm University, which hosted eight speakers from Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and the UK and consisted of a special film screening in collaboration with Cinemateket. In the workshop I presented a paper titled “Screen Acting Manuals, Vernacular Film Theory, and the Medium Specific Body.” I also presented my work on the project in four other international conferences and in the Cinema Studies seminar at Stockholm University in February 2019.
In addition to the above-mentioned publications and events I have also planned to create a video essay that will apply some of the ideas formulated in my research to the case study of William S. Hart, an American film star who arrived at the screen after a career on the stage and became one of the prominent early Hollywood stars, especially in the western genre. Hart’s film acting career spans the entire silent-feature film era, from 1914-1928 and as such is of particular interest for a number of reasons. First, because it spans a period that saw important changes in acting styles; secondly, because he was simultaneously one of the most popular actors of his time and a figure who inspired some of the early avantgarde accounts of film aesthetics, thus becoming something of a modernist icon. I started planning the creating of the video essay with two colleagues – one in the U.S. the other in Denmark – but unfortunately, due to the restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic we were unable to make progress with it. My hope is to continue with this plan when possible.
Conference presentations of the research:
“Screen Decorum: Silent Hollywood and Neoclassical Concepts of Acting.” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, March 2021. [online presentation due to Covid-19]
“The Craft of Silent Film Acting: Classical Traditions and Modern Innovations.” Domitor Early Cinema Studies Conference, November 2020. [online presentation due to Covid-19]
“Screen Acting Manuals, Vernacular Film Theory, and the Medium Specific Body.” Silent film acting workshop, Stockholm University, May 2018.
“Early Hollywood, Cultural Legitimacy, and Photoplay Magazine’s Resident Psychoanalytic Theorist.” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Seattle, March 2019.
“Early Hollywood Theorizes Itself.” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, Chicago, March 2017.