when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.
it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.
the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.
there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening. right around the fifties, I think. the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” – he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.
i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.
or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.
i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.
this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.
now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.
as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:
here, also, is a comedy punch:
the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.
i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!
I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)
Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That
Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.
Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special – just people talking.
AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.
It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,
“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”
“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”
“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”
“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”
All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.
I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.
the nazis succeeded so well in erasing trans history that the iconic image of book burnings is specifically the burning of the institut für sexualwissenschaft
library and it goes generally uncaptioned to this day
“On May 6, 1933, students at the Berlin School of Physical Education [Hochschule für Leibesübungen] raided the Institute for Sexual Research [Institut für Sexualwissenschaft] in Berlin and plundered its library. The institute had been founded in 1919 by the gay Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), who had devoted the better part of his career to enlightening the public about homosexuality and fighting for greater rights for homosexuals. The Institute for Sexual Research was dedicated to the exploration of a variety of sexual topics, including sexually transmitted diseases, marital problems, abortion, and homosexuality. Thus, it is hardly surprising that the National Socialists were quick to target it. The photograph below shows the Institute after the May 6th raid. On May 10, 1933, the Institute’s books were burned on Berlin’s Opera Square [Opernplatz]. The National Socialist students who participated in this book burning also threw a bust of Hirschfeld into the flames.”
The whole Pepsi commercial thing reminded me that people always mis-remember the famous flower in the gun barrel photo as being a young woman. It wasn’t. The photo, taken by Bernie Boston, is of George Edgerly Harris III better known by his stage name Hibiscus. He was a member of the San Francisco based radical gay liberation theater troupe the Cockettes. He died of AIDS in 1982 at the time AIDS was still referred to by the name GRID which stood for Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency. The photo was taken at a protest at the Pentagon.
I had no idea who he was, thank you.
This is one example of the Mandela Effect phenomena, where an iconic moment is reenacted with a hippy woman so many times that people think that’s the story and thus another gay man is written out of history. Thanks for the photo.
I had no idea. Wow.
This photo was taken by Bernie Boston, a black/native man who willingly stood up to a chapter of the KKK and earned their respect among other things
I get the subject is important, but please dont erase Bernie. I knew him personally and he deserves to be remembered and by only remembering the subject, a white man, you erase a black man.
@vaspider could you reblog this version too, please? I am deeply upset by Bernie’s erasure from his own work.
Reblogging for credit to the photographer, and so I can look up his work on desktop later.
The Adventures of Prince Achmen. 1926. German. The oldest surviving animated film in history.
I am sorry BUT THIS IS NOT JUST “GERMAN” PLEASE DO NOT FORGET THE NAME OF THE ARTIST.
THIS WONDERFUL MOVIE WAS MADE BY LOTTE REINIGER! SHE WAS ONE OF THE PIONEERS OF ANIMATION!!!! SHE MADE OVER 40 FILMS IN HER CAREER USING A TECHNIQUE SHE INVENTED WITH HER HUSBAND! WALT DISNEY ENDED USING HER MULTI PLANE TECHNIQUE IN HIS OWN MOVIES! AND SHE FUCKING MADE THE FIRST FEATURE LENGTH ANIMATED MOVIE!! (she ended up fleeing Nazi germany eventually work in north america, both us and canada, on other movies.)
This woman is one of the most important figures in animation HISTORY!
i was a little apprehensive to watch this because it’s four minutes long and i have a short attention span, but within the first 30 seconds i was hooked.
Sylvester – American singer and songwriter, known for the hits “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” “Dance (Disco Heat),” and “Do Ya Wanna Funk”
Patrick Cowley – American composer and musician, a pioneer of electronic dance music known for his collaborations with Sylvester and solo works like “Menergy” and “Megatron Man”
Rock Hudson – American actor who rose to fame in the 1950s with films such as Magnificent Obsession (1954) and Giant (1956), known for his work with Doris Day in romantic comedies such as Pillow Talk (1959) and Lover Come Back (1961)
Anthony Perkins – American actor, best known for his role as Norman Bates in the Hitchcock classic Psycho (1960)
Rudolf Nureyev – Russian dancer and choreographer who was the director of the Paris Opera Ballet for six years, widely regarded as the greatest male ballet dancer of his generation
Freddie Mercury – Parsi-British singer and songwriter, best known as the lead singer of the rock group Queen and writer of songs such as “Killer Queen,” “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and “We Are The Champions”
Vito Russo – American film historian, writer, and activist known for co-founding the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and writing The Celluloid Closet
Keith Haring – American artist, known for his pop art and street art which focused on themes such as LGBT and AIDS activism
Howard Ashman – American playwright and lyricist known for his work with Alan Menken on shows like Little Shop of Horrors, and for being one of the most important figures of the Disney Renaissance, having worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin
I just thought about this today and dug through my pictures to find it: a letter from a black soldier in the Civil War to the person who owns his daughter. “The longer you keep my child from me the longer you will have to burn in Hell and the quicker you will get there.“
photo text (with corrected spelling and broken into sentences, paragraphs):
Letter from a Black Soldier to the Owner of His Daughter
Spotswood Ric, a former slave, writes to Kittey Diggs, 1864:
I received a letter from Cariline telling me that you say I tried to steal, to plunder, my child away from you. Not I want you to understand that Mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own.
And you may hold on to her as long as you can. But I want you to remember this one thing, that the longer you keep my Child from me the longer you will have to burn in hell and the quicker you’ll get there.
For we are now making up about one thousand black troops to come up thorough, and want to come through, Glasgow. And when we come woe be to Copperhood rebels and to the Slaveholding rebels. For we don’t expect to leave them there. Root nor branch. But we think however that we (that have children in the hands of you devils), we will try your the day that we enter Glasgow.
I want you to understand Kittey Diggs that where ever you and I meet we are enemies to each other. I offered once to pay you forty dollars for my own Child but I am glad now that you did not accept it. Just hold on now as long as you can and the worse it will be for you.
You never in you life before I came down hear did you give children anything, not anything whatever, not even a dollars worth of expenses. Now you call my children your property. Not so with me.
My children is my own and I expect to get them. And when I get ready to come after Mary I will have both a power and authority to bring her away and to exact vengeances on them that holds my Child.
You will then know how to talk to me. I will assure that. And you will know how to talk right too. I want you now to just hold on; to hear if you want to. If your conscience tells that’s the road, go that road and what it will bring you to Kittey Diggs.
I have no fears about getting Mary out of your hands. This whole Government gives cheer to me and you cannot help yourself.
Source: Ira Berlin, ed. Freedom, A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982, 690.
I wanted to find out what happened (DID HE GET HIS DAUGHTER BACK?) and the answer is that not only was he reunited with his family, but went on to be a successful minister and his daughter was interviewed in the 30s for the Slave Narratives Project.
willowfoot 
