The Art of Theater a Concise Introduction Review Synonym

Theater and Film

Kin-Yan Szeto

• LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2017
• LAST MODIFIED: 29 September 2014
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199791286-0112

Introduction

Historically, theater and moving picture accept been closely intertwined in many respects. Indeed, theatrical genres and aesthetics accept had a pregnant influence on flick. Nineteenth-century theatrical genres such as melodrama and vaudeville had an impact on many popular American moving picture genres, for example. Since the early years of movie theater, collaborations between filmmakers and theater personnel bear witness not merely how two art forms have influenced each other, but also that the flows between theater and film are bidirectional. Directors, writers, actors, and personnel working across these ii media demonstrate that much interconnection of stage and screen exists. D. W. Griffith was a stage histrion and playwright before he became a movie managing director, and Sergei Eisenstein directed plays and designed scenery before he started making films. Many film stars, as early as Buster Keaton and as contemporary equally Jackie Chan, were trained in popular theater forms and traditions and have incorporated such techniques into their screen functioning. From early modern drama to the musical theater of the 20th century, stage plays have often been realized on moving picture. Less often, films have been adapted to create pieces of theater. Meanwhile, film had a profound effect on 20th-century theater. Early in the 20th century, theater directors and playwrights integrated pic and visual images in theater. For about of the 20th century, theater practitioners and theorists felt pressured by the growing popularity of moving-picture show amongst the general public. As a result, amidst the feet regarding film, the human relationship between theater and picture show is largely viewed equally combative. Scholars and critics argue that film's close affinity with theater impedes film from becoming a unique art form. Therefore, advocating film's autonomy from theater can become a passionate concern. Today, in a technology-driven world, cinema and media greatly influence directors, writers, actors, artists, practitioners, audiences, and critics alike. In addition, the perpetuation of the theater and picture show dichotomy obstructs the reciprocal exchange and mobility between cinematic and dramatic means of expressions. Indeed, many discussions have focused on interdisciplinarity, because artistic practices can exist intermedial, intercultural, and international. Finally, the topics of acting, movie adaptation of Shakespeare, and musicals are excluded from notation here, as they take already received a off-white amount of scholarly attention past other contributors to Oxford Bibliographies. These topics are listed nether the Bibliographies department in this article, for readers' reference.

Full general Overviews

The overview presented here provides an outline of the theoretical discussions of the historical, cultural, and artful relationships between theater and pic. For some, the alliance between theater and film is seen as an impediment to the development of whatsoever unique cinematic art. Waller 1983 traces the historical debates regarding stage and screen, which are dominated by the argument that cinematic fine art and theater should remain separate, a position maintained by Münsterberg 1916 and Nicoll 1936. Both Münsterberg and Nicoll enquire for the basic elements in theater and in movie theater to be defined as dissever and independent paths of evolution. Vardac 1949 gives an account of some of the important issues that define the transition from theater to film in the 19th century, arguing that the need for realistic aesthetics in melodrama and spectacle in theater prepared audiences for the invention of moving picture. Brewster and Jacobs 1997 problematizes Vardac and his proposition that pic is the natural descendant of the theatrical tradition of realism. Exploring the connections between theater and early pic history, Brewster and Jacobs evaluate the history of early cinema as beingness deeply influenced by melodrama, and by a striving to be theatrical by assimilating pictorialism, a unique theatrical tradition. Dissimilar Brewster and Jacobs, Bazin 1967 emphasizes picture palace'southward close relation to reality and the differences between cinematic and theatrical mise-en-scène. Notwithstanding, Bazin is open to the possibilities of décor to offer dramatic ambivalence and natural realism at the same time. While Bazin focuses on movie theater's power to represent reality, Sontag 1966 problematizes the privilege of realism in motion picture and questions how such privilege is subject to social, economic, political, and aesthetic complications. Sontag interrogates the essence of theater and film past rejecting whatever unmarried model for either fine art form. In comparison and contrasting film and theater, she points out that films "age (being objects) as no theatre-event does (existence always new)." Highlighting theater's currency as a performative event, she anticipates the later discussions in Ghosh 2010 (cited under Theater on Screen) and Folio 2011 (cited under Theater in Picture show), which question the general assumptions about how film as a new medium revitalizes theater when the opposite happens to be the case. In a different vein, from a perspective of semiotics, Esslin 1987 focuses on two central themes: dramatic fine art should include both live and mediated performance, and the critical written report of dramatic sign systems provides conceptual tools for understanding film and theater.

• Bazin, Andre. "Theatre and Picture palace." In What is Cinema? Vol. 1. Past Andre Bazin, 76–124. Translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

  NNNBazin questions the aesthetic theory and problems in approaching the commonalities and differences between stage and screen. He notes the extent of the audience's identification with characters in picture show, whereas in theater such identification is kept to a minimum because of the presence of the actor. Therefore, cinema, even fictional cinema, is documentary, and the language of movie theatre correlates to reality.

• Brewster, Ben, and Lea Jacobs. Theatre to Picture palace: Stage Pictorialism and the Early on Feature Film. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

  NNNThe volume investigates the influence of the pictorial tradition in staged and cinematic visuals as part of the narrative construction, and explicates the relationships amongst theatrical acting, gestural acting, and early picture palace. The authors trace the influence of the pictorial tradition in staged and cinematic scenes.

• Esslin, Martin. The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Significant on Phase and Screen. London: Methuen, 1987.

  NNNBy applying the bones concepts of semiotics, Esslin discusses each chemical element of dramatic sign systems—actor, setting, text, music—and makes cross-references to stage and screen. He points out the essential and fundamental aspects that film and theater have in common, and proclaims that the ii arts forms are much more closely related than most critics take suggested.

• Münsterberg, Hugo. The Photoplay: A Psychological Study. New York: D. Appleton, 1916.

  NNNMünsterberg notes that film'south historical development is defined past the emancipation of the photoplay away from theater and toward the purely cinematic. He asserts that moving picture creates a harmony that reflects the psychological movement of the mind through cross-cuts and flashback. Such perception of the mind has furnished film with a means that transcends power of whatsoever theater stage.

• Nicoll, Allardyce. Film and Theatre. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1936.

  NNNNicoll compares and contrasts cinema and the staged drama of Elizabethan times, as well equally the modern stage and moving moving-picture show. Past using examples from screen and stage, he presents their differences, including the audition's association with characters, sympathy, illusion of reality, and time and infinite. He proposes that the two media take to progress separately by distinctly different paths.

• Sontag, Susan. "Picture show and Theatre." Tulane Drama Review 11.ane (Fall 1966): 24–37.

  DOI: 10.2307/1125262

  NNNSontag interrogates the general arguments that consider picture show and theater as either separate or interconnected. She questions the assumptions nearly the cinematic and the theatrical maintained by dominant disquisitional practice and suggests that new ideas are needed to consider the theory and history of the two media.

• Vardac, A. Nicholas. Stage to Screen: Theatrical Method from Garrick to Griffith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949.

  NNNVardac looks at how moving-picture show fits into the historical evolution of theater and the need for pictorial realism, and focuses on the transition from melodrama and romanticism of the 19th century to the emergence of picture. He describes melodrama as proto-cinematic, striving for spectacular effects without film'south technological ways, and discusses the similarities and differences between the two media. Reprinted as Phase to Screen: Theatrical Origin of Early Film: David Garrick to D. W. Griffith (New York and London: Benjamin Blom, 1968; New York: Da Capo, 1987).

• Waller, Gregory Albert. The Stage/Screen Argue: A Study in Popular Aesthetics. New York and London: Garland, 1983.

  NNNWaller summarizes the historical debates between stage and screen. He notes that the clearly defined and mutually exclusive approaches to the debates had been fatigued out every bit early as the invention of cinema. Theater and film are subjected to a separate but equal theory, provided that each knows its limits and remains true to itself.

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