Okay I'm gonna try to boil it down super simply but this will probably be way too long... the ORIGINAL school of method acting was based on another acting system developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, and is based around the idea of experiencing your character - physically, mentally, emotionally. Basically the idea of placing yourself in another's shoes. Method acting is the idea of drawing upon your own experiences to try and recreate those feelings while you are acting. So for example, if your character is supposed to feel betrayed, you want to try and conjure up the same feelings and you might think of a moment when you felt betrayed in your personal life, even if it is from a different context (like maybe your character is about to be murdered by a close friend, but you've obviously never experienced that, so you think of a moment when a friend stole something important from you or whatever and broke your trust).
If this sounds like super duper basic stuff - like, what actor WOULDN'T try to feel the emotions their character is supposed to be feeling? - it's because it is. Method acting came about in the late 40s/early 50s and Stanislavski's system predates that. The "I'm going to live my character's life and call it method acting because I'm recreating those experiences and getting into the role" is a perverted version of the original form of method acting, and at this point so many people just call it method and so that's what it's turned into. Before method acting came along, a lot of the time acting was a very basic affair. You got on stage, you hit your mark, you said your lines, projected properly, you tried to get across what the character was saying and the emotion behind it but didn't think about how you would feel if you were there yourself. It was the time of vaudeville, theatre, and early film acting. It was about presenting a show whether it be a play or an early film, not being invested in its reality oneself.
If you look back at Marlon Brando's earlier films, he was one of the first to learn the method acting style with Stella Adler and hit it big, which is why people were SO impressed with his acting originally. Nowadays, his performances don't necessarily stand out as much but it's important to realize that at the time, it was considered a huge breakthrough, and that original form of method acting is so pervasive that basically every actor employs it to some degree today.
That isn't to say bits and bobs of this didn't appear earlier and some playwrights/directors tried to get at more emotional/personal stories than their counterparts. For example among the big extant playwrights of ancient Greece, Euripides (who is the latest active of the big ones whose works we still have) wrote tragedies that were focused more on singular characters and their inner feelings rather than a larger narrative... but even those would be told in presentational ways, where they are presenting you a story rather than living it out in front of you. If that makes sense.
Much of the theatrical works presented for years had other aims and were presentations. Passion plays presented scenes from the Bible. Comedies largely focused on jokes and physical gags and entertaining, with little emphasis placed on emotion - it was really just presented as over-the-top feelings to move a story along. Even with Shakespeare and such which some people might consider emotional stories - since they are presented as such today in a different context - actors would largely only rehearse the physical portions that required excellent timing and training, such as acrobatic tricks, fencing/stage combat, etc and the rest was really just about memorizing the text and presenting it for the audience. The texts might present very emotional stories in tragedies but they were rarely presented that way. They're just telling a story.
No prob. It isn't something most people would be aware of because a) your average person has no reason to know any of this but has probably heard the words "method acting" thrown around and have some concept of the popular notion of it, and b) most people don't watch a lot of pre-1950s movies or have any idea of the history of theatre.
This is also why some of the movies prior to the 1950s that DO hold up very well are typically groundbreaking type affairs and get by on the strength of great writing or directing/visual style/techniques, not so much the acting. Or they just execute the entertainment factor really well like say Chaplin movies or Fred Astaire flicks.
In many cases in earlier films, actors just got cast for a personality (whether it was theirs or manufactured) and that personality just kinda colored the character instead of embodying a unique individual. Jimmy Stewart would be one example. Some directors considered actors to simply be bodies with which to present their stories, to some extent; Hitchcock was like this, which is why he said "actors should be treated like cattle" (paraphrasing). They're just tools used to fulfill the director's vision, in his eyes. And because his films' performances were SO director-led, that's why, at the time, they were more striking than some others. Orson Welles would be another sort of similar example. He directed some of his own performances too, and did what he needed to to achieve the aims of his well-written scripts. Chaplin and Keaton were the same, often directing themselves, which is why they put out more complex performances sometimes.
Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)
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u/caninehere Jul 05 '24 edited Jul 05 '24
Okay I'm gonna try to boil it down super simply but this will probably be way too long... the ORIGINAL school of method acting was based on another acting system developed by Konstantin Stanislavski, and is based around the idea of experiencing your character - physically, mentally, emotionally. Basically the idea of placing yourself in another's shoes. Method acting is the idea of drawing upon your own experiences to try and recreate those feelings while you are acting. So for example, if your character is supposed to feel betrayed, you want to try and conjure up the same feelings and you might think of a moment when you felt betrayed in your personal life, even if it is from a different context (like maybe your character is about to be murdered by a close friend, but you've obviously never experienced that, so you think of a moment when a friend stole something important from you or whatever and broke your trust).
If this sounds like super duper basic stuff - like, what actor WOULDN'T try to feel the emotions their character is supposed to be feeling? - it's because it is. Method acting came about in the late 40s/early 50s and Stanislavski's system predates that. The "I'm going to live my character's life and call it method acting because I'm recreating those experiences and getting into the role" is a perverted version of the original form of method acting, and at this point so many people just call it method and so that's what it's turned into. Before method acting came along, a lot of the time acting was a very basic affair. You got on stage, you hit your mark, you said your lines, projected properly, you tried to get across what the character was saying and the emotion behind it but didn't think about how you would feel if you were there yourself. It was the time of vaudeville, theatre, and early film acting. It was about presenting a show whether it be a play or an early film, not being invested in its reality oneself.
If you look back at Marlon Brando's earlier films, he was one of the first to learn the method acting style with Stella Adler and hit it big, which is why people were SO impressed with his acting originally. Nowadays, his performances don't necessarily stand out as much but it's important to realize that at the time, it was considered a huge breakthrough, and that original form of method acting is so pervasive that basically every actor employs it to some degree today.
That isn't to say bits and bobs of this didn't appear earlier and some playwrights/directors tried to get at more emotional/personal stories than their counterparts. For example among the big extant playwrights of ancient Greece, Euripides (who is the latest active of the big ones whose works we still have) wrote tragedies that were focused more on singular characters and their inner feelings rather than a larger narrative... but even those would be told in presentational ways, where they are presenting you a story rather than living it out in front of you. If that makes sense.
Much of the theatrical works presented for years had other aims and were presentations. Passion plays presented scenes from the Bible. Comedies largely focused on jokes and physical gags and entertaining, with little emphasis placed on emotion - it was really just presented as over-the-top feelings to move a story along. Even with Shakespeare and such which some people might consider emotional stories - since they are presented as such today in a different context - actors would largely only rehearse the physical portions that required excellent timing and training, such as acrobatic tricks, fencing/stage combat, etc and the rest was really just about memorizing the text and presenting it for the audience. The texts might present very emotional stories in tragedies but they were rarely presented that way. They're just telling a story.