As we wrote in the introduction to this small handbook for cinema, the items of the alphabet that we report are necessarily essential, sufficient to provide food for thought, elements of knowledge useful for better understanding cinema in its infinite components. Each of them has had and still receives considerable study attention. We limit ourselves only to making small suggestions and defer the necessary insights to the work of the experts.
Let's still stay in the first entry of the alphabet and talk about actor. We are referring to the one who acts, to the subject who, in the cinema as in the theatre, gives life to the action, interprets it, physically summarizes its features and expresses them in the times and in the ways foreseen by the script. In some circumstances, the actor is the subject himself as the focal point of the performance. In ancient Greek theater the actor, strictly a male figure even if he plays female roles, is the expression of the word and the power of the Gods. Initially it was only on stage and hence the definition of "protagonist". In the Latin theater the actor summed up and played various roles in speaking, singing, dancing and acting. The figure of the modern actor begins to take complete shape starting from 1500, in Italy with the Commedia dell'arte and in England with the Shakespearean theatre. It deserves the quotation from Hamlet addressed to the actors: “Say the speech, please, as I recited it to you, as if it were dancing on your tongue; because if you voice it, as many of our actors do, it would be all one to me that the public announcer should say my verses. And don't cut your hand too far, like this; but treat everything with discretion; because in the torrent itself, in the storm, and, as I might say, in the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and generate a temperance that gives it softness".
The first complete theorization of the role, dimension and profession of the actor occurs with the writings of Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky, first with “The actor's work on himself” of 1938 and then, posthumously in 1957, “The actor's work on the character”. These writings become a real "method" still in use in acting schools in both theater and cinema. From these texts, subsequently, we come to another school of great success: the method strasberg applied in the Actor's Studio. It is a question of multiple ways of being on the scene that presuppose different preparation, sensitivity, styles and languages. Stage presence on stage, in a unique and unrepeatable moment, is a completely different profession from acting in front of a camera where it is possible to rehearse the scene countless times until the desired result is achieved.
The same human and cultural dimension together with professional skills delimit the "weight" of the actor. While in the theater it is alone with itself in front of the audience and is the only tangible expression of the mediation between the direction and the text, in the cinema instead it often becomes the representation of the will of the director who entrusts to him, and realizes through him, the his personal vision of the story he intends to express. In this key we can read the definition of Umerto Eco, where the actor is "a multi-channel transmitter of messages with a poetic function".
Another parallel way of defining the subject who acts on the scene other than the human figure is the actant, that is, how he defines it Treccani, "In the structural analysis of the story, each of the protagonists who, specifically in myths and fables, perform different functions, which schematically can be reduced to six: subject, object, addressor, recipient, helper, opponent". The actant represents a role, an immaterial, metaphysical figure, which in some way, direct or indirect, determines the narrative foundation. Shakespeare offers an excellent example of this in Julius Caesar: the actant is the "conspiracy" that is the set of characters, circumstances, events that take place around the character who is no longer him as such at the center of the story. The actors, in this case, become "actantial characters".
On the figure of the actor, on his history, on his role in the cinema we propose some texts - in addition to the two fundamental ones already mentioned by Stanislavsky: "Actor's minimum manual" by Dario Fo, unmissable collection of lessons on the theater; speaking of "methods" of acting that should not be underestimated “For a poor theatre” by Jerzy Grotowski; to summarize the evolution of the actor over time “A Brief History of Theater” by Luigi Lunari and, finally, in the opinion of the writer, to combine cinema and theater, signed by David Mamet “The three uses of the knife”:
