Long H.

Do

Professor Williams

October 31st, 2019

Film 20: Film History I – From Silent to Sound

Final Paper Proposal

In my paper, I want to examine the changes and negotiations in screen acting style during

the period between 1909 and 1915, focusing on Florence Lawrence and her performances during

this time as a case study. Writing about the acting styles of this era, scholars mostly agreed that

there was a shift from an "externalizing" to a more restrained and "internalizing" method of

performing on screen. That being said, these scholars offer diverse explanations regarding such

changes in film acting, not only in terms of style but also in terms of aesthetic judgement and

origin of influence. 

Roberta Pearson, for example, offers a detailed account of the changes from what she

calls the "histrionic code" to the "verisimilar code" in D.W. Griffith's movies during this era.

Ever since, other scholars have also offered alternative arguments and slightly pushed back on

some of Pearson's claims. Ben Brewster, for example, problematizes Pearson's binary division

and her association of the "histrionic code" with the stage. Brewster argues instead that

throughout this era, performers were always already making adjustment to accommodate the

innovations of the medium. In this sense, Brewster believes that changes in acting styles must be

explained by the transformations in filmmaking practices at the time, rather than merely by the

legacy of the theatre. Hilary Hart, in an article about Delsarte's impact on silent cinema, also

implicitly pushes back on Pearson's claim that the theatre influence ended by 1913. Hart instead
argues that even after the popularity of the close-up and other filmmaking techniques, actresses

such as Lillian Gish continues to follow Delsarte's and other theatre guidelines in their screen

performances. 

While I find their arguments absolutely valuable and insightful, I also wonder if, by

organizing their research around films from the same company or directed by a single person

(usually Griffith), these scholars have attributed these transformations more to other factors and

people than to the performers themselves. It should be noted that performers such as Florence

Lawrence, as evidenced by her answers in later interviews, was particularly conscious of acting

styles, and even, at times, vehemently disagreed with her colleagues as to the appropriate acting

method. Thus, building on this previous scholarship and primary sources, I look into the archive

of films starring Lawrence and identify, through close analyses, some key acting choices that the

actress makes in these film. Through these examples from films that were made by different

directors and different companies, I hope to suggest that Lawrence proactively adjusted her

performances over time, rather than passively applying different codes or following the director's

direction. Towards the end of the essay, I will also briefly touch upon the possibility of verifying

the speculative claims that I have made in the essay by using more quantitative methodologies

from the emerging field of digital humanities. 

 Annotated Bibliography

Pearson, Roberta. Eloquent gestures: The transformation of performance style in the Griffith

Biograph films. Univ of California Press, 1992.

Pearson’s book serves as valuable starting point for thinking about the changes – across

multiple levels – in performance styles at this era, especially when it comes to Biograph

performers such as Florence Lawrence. Inspired by semiotics criticism, Pearson defines two

types of codes in the acting style of this era – the “histrionic” and the “verisimilar.” Pearson

states that the former follows from the theatre legacy and conforms to a highly standardized set

of rules and meaning-making conventions, while the latter remains harder to pin down precisely

because it has a greater relationship to the outside reality and features less exaggerated gestures.

Pearson offers a lot of explanations and arguments throughout her text, and thus there are

definitely questions that one could ask in response to these claims. For example, one might

wonder Pearson’s association of the histrionic/verisimilar binary with the stage/screen one, as

well as her tendency to imply a linear transformation from old, histrionic, exaggerated and

theatrical gestures to newer, verisimilar, restrained and internalized ones. Moreover, Pearson

certainly argues that Griffith had much say in shaping the performances of his performers, citing

his background in stage. This, in turn, might encourage readers to ask the extent to which the

performers negotiated his direction with their own judgements in refining/updating their acting

styles.

Hart, Hilary. "Do You See What I See? The Impact of Delsarte on Silent Film Acting." Mime

Journal 23.1 (2005): 184-199.

 In her essay on the impact of Delsarte on silent cinema, Hilary Hart uses analyzes the

acting styles of Lilian Gish in some D.W. Griffith's films in the 1910s. Hart's methodology

primarily entails connecting what Gish does on screen with the descriptions in various sources

that claim to be about Delsarte's philosophy about gestures and movements. At the end of her

essay, Hart speculates that Delsarte continues to have an impact on silent screen acting up to

1928, which basically means that up until the end of the silent era. Overall, although Hart does

not focus on any films starring Florence Lawrence or any that were released around the same

time this actress worked for the Biograph company, her methodology remains interesting and can

serve as an example for future research into Florence Lawrence's performances.

Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to cinema: stage pictorialism and the early feature film.

Oxford University Press, USA, 1997.

In their book chapter titled “Pictorial Style and Film Acting,” Ben Brewster and Lea

Jacobs agree with Pearson and changes in performance styles indeed occurred from 1908 to

around 1915. However, the two authors push back on certain arguments that Pearson makes in

her book. For instance, Brewster and Jacobs do not agree that the performers at Biograph

employs a strictly theatrical set of gestures. The two argue that what Pearson calls the histrionic

code was not strictly something borrowed from theatre, but rather a series of modifications that

these performers consciously made in order to fit in with the filmmaking practices of the time.

Indeed, throughout their essay, the two argue that it was the changing nature of the film medium

and industrial conventions, such as the framing or the rise of editing, that shifts the highly

gestural and fast-paced style to a more restrained and less complicated one.
Lawrence, Florence & Monte M. Katterjohn. “Growing up with the Movies,” Photoplay, 7, no.

2. (Jan 1915). 95 – 107.

This interview contains some revealing answers by Florence Lawrence about her

disagreement with Griffith as well as other colleagues when it comes to the appropriate acting

style. Cited by both Pearson and Brewster and Jacobs, the interview suggests that Florence

Lawrence was highly aware and in favor of a more restrained method of gesturing.

Dyer, Richard. "Stars and Performance," na, 2006.

In his chapter on "Stars and Performance," Dyer gives an overview of trends in

performance studies as well as important features of performance signs. Dyer classifies these

scholarships on screen performance into two categories, one he describes as more focused on the

performer while the other on the audience. In the next part of his chapter, Dyer delves into what

he calls "the signs of performance," which range from facial expression, voice, gestures, body

postures to body movement. In discussing these signs, Dyer highlights the importance of "the

determining codes" in facilitating our understanding of acting. In particular, Dyer speculates that

"we read movement and speech in films according to specifically filmic, culture-bound but

general codes of movement and speech" (136). Overall, even though Dyer does not make any

explicit connection between Griffith and Delsarte, as can be seen from the way he writes this

section, Dyer seems to imply that both Delsarte and Griffith are the pioneers of acting styles in

early silent cinema, with the former providing a theoretical base while the latter popularizing

such a theory through his own various filmic productions.