Discuss characteristic features of casting and/or performance, exploring how far these features contribute to the overall effect of the films you have studied.

Performance? But I’ve revised Man With a Movie Camera and there is no performance!!!!!!

And I want to write about mise-en-scene and context in the Weimar films!

Don’t Panic! No micro feature exists in a vacuum. The Soviets: How is ‘performance’ created/enhanced/supported by editing? Consider typage Consider the restrained Moscow Arts Theatre style of Vera Baranovskaya in Pudovkin’s Mother Though toned down as a style in the films after Strike!, think about how Eisenstein differentiates between the Tsarist and proletarian classes through performance Consider Vertov’s rejection of performance as bourgeois

The Germans Evaluate the appropriateness of the stylised performance style in context of the various films’ subject matter – e.g. Caligari would hardly benefit from method acting Consider performance style as an aspect of mise-en- scene Consider the overall style of the films in context, consistently noting why performance style is important to subject matter, expressionistic style, etc. Compare the context to the Soviets – star performers, commercial cinema, etc.

Writing about performance in Man With a Movie Camera Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera is an example of his ‘Kino Pravda’ philosophy – that cinema can only be ‘true’ when it shows ‘life caught unawares’. Vertov’s ideal was to have no performance in his films, along with no plot or fiction whatsoever, all of which he considered bourgeois. Instead, the film adopts a newsreel style, with Vertov shooting people at work or leisure and structuring the footage through editing. The idea was to be spontaneous and for there to be no performance at all.

However, it is clear when watching the film that people smile, wave or hide from the camera. See, for example, the sequences where the camera follows various families travelling in cars around the city. The woman sleeping on the bench is perhaps ‘unaware’, and she reacts angrily at being filmed as she wakes but the woman dressing in the early part of the film is hardly not performing for the camera.

Overall, though Vertov’s ideal was pure documentary, his films cannot be said to be entirely free of performance. Even ‘casting’ has occurred as Vertov chooses whom he films.

Your go