What a Performance! Exploring Audiences' Responses to Film Acting
. Volume 12, Issue 1 May 2015 What a performance! Exploring audiences’ responses to film acting Sarah Ralph, University of East Anglia, UK Martin Barker, Aberystwyth University, UK Abstract: The part played by acting in audiences’ responses to films is largely unexplored – but often assumed to be considerable. In this essay, we report on the results of a small research project into this, using the 1995 film The Usual Suspects as a focus and stimulus. Deliberately recruiting a mix of audiences, the project resulted in twelve discussion groups. Out of the responses of these groups, we explore the variety of ways in which acting plays a part within people’s responses, and outline a tentative model for theorising this relationship. Keywords: film acting, performance, The Usual Suspects, audience responses. In the 2012 film Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close plays a middle-aged woman in late 19th century Dublin, who for most of her life has ‘passed’ as a man, working in service in hotels. The story unfolds around the discovery of her sex when she is forced to share her room with Hubert, a visiting painter and decorator – who in ‘his’ turn discloses that she too is secretly a woman – and married to a third, Cathleen. There is a particularly striking scene where, following Albert’s thinking about the implications of this (s/he had always thought herself completely alone), s/he visits the couple. Albert is persuaded to try going out (perhaps for the first time in thirty years) dressed as a woman. At first unable even to cross the doorstep, she does go, and we see the two ‘men’ in long skirts walking along a windy beach.
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