Film Performance: From Achievement to Appreciation

by Andrew Klevan

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.

144 pages, Paperback

Published May 11, 2005

Reviews

[Vahid Mortazavi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A superb study on how film performance works along with the narrational and stylistic choices of a specific film.

[Arta · Rating 4 out of 5]

An elegantly written and brilliantly observant account of performance in its complex web of interrelations with other elements that make up a film, including space, plot, and position. The section on There's Always Tomorrow (which happens to be my favorite film from Sirk) was the highlight for me.