Elizabeth Taylor's electrifying performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The milkshake scene in There Will be Blood. Leonardo DiCaprio's turn as Arnie in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? What makes these performances so special?
Eloquently written and engagingly laid out, Murray Pomerance answers the tough question as to what makes an exceptional, or virtuosic performance. Pomerance intensively explores virtuosic performance in film, ranging from classical works through to contemporary production, and gives serious consideration to structural problems of dramatization and production, actorial methods and tricks, and contingencies that befall performers giving stand-out moments.
Looking at more than 40 aspects of the virtuosic act, and using an approach based in careful meditation and discursion, Virtuoso moves through such themes as showing off, effacement, self-consciousness, performative collapse, spontaneity, acting as dream, acting and femininity, virtuosity and torture, secrecy, improvisation, virtuosic silence, and others; giving special attention to the labors of such figures as Fred Astaire, Johnny Depp, Marlene Dietrich, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Plummer, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alice Brady, Ethel Waters, James Mason, and dozens more. Numerous scenic virtuosities are examined in depth, from films as far-ranging as Singin' in the Rain and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and My Man Godfrey. As the first book about virtuosity in film performance, Virtuoso offers exciting new angles from which to view film both classical and contemporary.
Author(s): Murray Pomerance
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2019
Language: English
Commentary: downloaded from Memory of the World Library
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Overture
Chapter 1: A Brief History of the Virtuosic Moment
Chapter 2: Showing Off
Chapter 3: Effacement and Allure
Chapter 4: Follow the Money
Chapter 5: “I Am Acting”
Chapter 6: “I Am On Show”
Chapter 7: Charisma as Commodity
Chapter 8: Outstanding
Chapter 9: Virtuosity Superimposed
Face-off
Hilly Drive
Lunch on the Train
The Cropduster Scene
At the Auction
Climbing to Vandamm’s
Mt. Rushmore
The Townsend Study
Driving Downhill
Lunch on the Train
Cropduster
Auction
Ascending the House
Mt. Rushmore
Chapter 10: Spontaneity
Chapter 11: In Dreams Awake
Chapter 12: A Feminine Mystique
Chapter 13: Tortures
Chapter 14: Secret Virtuosity
Chapter 15: (In)credible Belief
Chapter 16: Touched by the Camera
Chapter 17: Improvise
Chapter 18: Breathe
Chapter 19: Director/Virtuoso
Chapter 20: Heimlichkeit
Chapter 21: Collapse
Chapter 22: Bigger Than Life
Chapter 23: The Spectacle of Things Falling Apart
Chapter 24: Limping On
Chapter 25: The Eternal Return
Chapter 26: Borders
Intelligibility
Intensity
Extension
Parentheses
Chapter 27: Facing
Chapter 28: Magnitude
Chapter 29: Virtuosity Classical
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
Stolen Kisses [Baisers volés] (François Truffaut, 1968)
Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks, 1938)
Chapter 30: Near Misses
The Case of the Residual Diva
The Animal Case
The Case of the Child
Chapter 31: Discounts
Chapter 32: Virtuosic Silence
Chapter 33: Virtuosic Support
Chapter 34: Control
Chapter 35: Virtuosic Play-Within-Play
James Stewart, 1952
Rosamund Pike, 2014
Sean Connery, 1963
Chapter 36: Upstairs Downstairs
Chapter 37: Lost in the Stars
Chapter 38: Virtuosity Pianissimo Virtuosity Forte
Chapter 39: Virtuosity as Event
Chapter 40: Indelibles
Chapter 41: Virtuosity and “the Virtuoso”
Chapter 42: Negative Virtuosity
Chapter 43: Virtuosic Slippage
Chapter 44: The End or “End” of Virtuosic Performance
CODA: A Thought of Conclusion
References
Index
