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While several critical works on Spanish cinema have centred on the cultural, social and industrial significance of stars, there has been relatively little critical scholarship on what stars are paid to do: act. Bringing together a range of scholars that attend carefully to the performances, acting styles, and historical influences of Spanish film, Performance and Spanish Film is the first book to place the process of Spanish acting centre stage. Comprising fifteen original essays, the book casts light on the manifold meanings, methods and influences of Spanish screen performance, from the silent era to the present day. It situates the development of Spanish screen acting in both its national and global contexts, tracing acting techniques that are largely indigenous to Spain, as well as unpicking the ways in which Spanish performance has frequently been shaped by international influences and forces. As the volume ultimately demonstrates, acting can serve as a powerful site of meaning through which broader questions around Spanish film practices, culture and society can be explored.
extraordinarily hybrid film. It blends performance techniques lifted from the café-théâtre with a presentation of issues such as the function of language, power and ethics, that suggests an intertext with the thought of modern critical thinkers, Butler, Foucault and Lacan. Moreover, Ridicule constitutes a brave choice for a director of comedies. In this film, the social functions of humour, wit and laughter are stripped
embraced and internalised as England’s own form of musical virtuosity, distinct from those of neighbouring traditions, so too has the specific practice of fiddle-singing become regarded as a technical demonstration of a specifically English kind, even though the activity is also commonplace in various musical traditions across America. It might be argued that here the Englishness is inherent in the contradistinction of this performance technique with perceived common practice in Celtic musical traditions. Beyond this distinctiveness of the activity, the nature of fiddle
contemporary ‘archive’. Modern scholars situate the Pucelle actors infrequently within religious contexts as well, despite extensive study of Joan’s own 208 Performing women sanctity and connections to visionary and prophetic culture.63 Just as the spiritual elements of the performances of other Pucelle actors have been eliminated by the fifteenth-century ‘archive’, the historiography of the fausse Pucelle can be charged with the elision of this facet of Claude’s practice. Nonetheless, the Chronique du curé credits Claude with employing ‘prophetic’ performance techniques
of topical referencing of industrial unrest within plays and pantomimes but that the strike and the protest march borrowed a series of performance techniques. Richard Gaunt’s and Marcus Morris’s essays both constitute revisionist biographical analyses. Gaunt is concerned to deconstruct Robert Peel’s self-promotion as an actor-dramatist and the development of the idea of Parliament as a theatrical space. Morris’s investigation of early leaders of the labour movement argues that scrutiny of clothing and other forms of non-verbal communication is required in order to
usually follows a cinematic narrative structure and employs the standard naturalist/realist performance techniques of screen drama’ (Paget, 1998 : 82). The television medium is especially appropriate for these two divergent components of docudrama because television has always offered both of them to its audiences, though usually in institutionally separated factual and fictional genres. British docudrama’s sobriety is based on a
, mobilised the performance technique of blackface, which had long been used all across Europe. From medieval drama including French mystères , Spanish autos and English cycle plays where the devil was performed with soot, to the elaborate cosmetics used in most seventeenth-century European commercial theatres to represent sub-Saharan Africans, via the black veils and visors
Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain explores the relationship between classic American films about juvenile delinquency and British popular youth culture in the mid-twentieth century. The book examines the censorship, publicity and fandom surrounding such Hollywood films as The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock alongside such British films as The Blue Lamp, Spare the Rod and Serious Charge. Intersecting with star studies and social and cultural history, this is the first book to re-vision the stardom surrounding three extraordinarily influential Hollywood stars: Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis Presley. By looking specifically at the meanings of these American stars to British fans, this analysis provides a logical and sustained narrative that explains how and why these Hollywood images fed into, and disrupted, British cultural life. Screening the Hollywood Rebels in 1950s Britain is based upon a wide range of sources including censorship records, both mainstream and trade newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts and memoirs, as well as the films themselves. The book is a timely intervention of film culture and focuses on key questions about screen violence and censorship, masculinity and transnational stardom, method acting and performance, Americanisation and popular post-war British culture. The book is essential reading for researchers, academics and students of film and social and cultural history, alongside general readers interested in the links between the media and popular youth culture in the 1950s.
this chapter to attempt detailed micro-analyses of performance within the entirety of even three of Khan’s films. Instead, key generic and performance techniques from across the films will be selected and offered as examples of Khan’s acting choices in relation to coherency and the nuance of his performance style. To begin, a mutated version of John O. Thompson’s commutation test will be used to compare Khan’s performances in
power is derived from ‘secret, and conventionally rejected knowledge’ (1991: 35) and although being associated with the dark arts he is often on the side of good. Within the diversity of these characters we can see a ‘spectrum’ of persona and performance technique based upon the practitioner’s intention to produce hard or soft, monstrous or fabulous bizarre