Non-Professional Film Acting

This anthology examines non-professional performance in cinema, exploring how "ordinary people" challenge dominant theories of film acting across fiction, documentary, and realist media aesthetics. Readers will gain a comprehensive understanding of non-professional acting through diverse critical approaches ranging from neorealism to reality TV. This book delivers fresh insights by analyzing films from Asia, Palestine, Europe, Brazil, Africa, and North America, examining acting methods, directorial approaches, political commitment, and community representation. Authors unpack the realist aesthetics of "authenticity" to reveal the visual and social effects of casting non-actors, while highlighting the precarity and lived experiences of non-professional performers before, during, and after filming. This multifaceted analysis provides new theoretical frameworks for understanding the aesthetics and politics of non-professional film performance. This book is written for students and practitioners of documentary and independent cinema seeking deeper understanding of performance aesthetics and politics. Scholars of film acting, film criticism, and media studies will find the complex critical questions and theoretical approaches particularly engaging. The collection is also suitable for courses in film theory, documentary studies, and cinema studies programmes.

Catherine Russell is Distinguished University Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of seven books, most recently The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star (2023). She has also written extensively on documentary cinema, archive theory, Japanese cinema, and experimental film.

1. Introduction: Performance, Precarity, and the Weight of the World Part I: Neorealism Revisited 2. Gestures Without Meaning: Non-professional Acting and "The Coffee Grinder Scene" in Umberto D. 3. Neorealist Labour Extraction and the Casualisation of the Non-Professional Actor Part II: Ontologies of Film Performance 4. The Dramatics of Process: Acting Within Not Acting in Eduardo Coutinho's Documentaries 5. Dry Ground Burning and Fortress Europa: The Stakes of Non-Actor Subjectivity Part III: Committed Cinema 6. Salt of the Earth, Non-Professional Actors, and 1950s American Independent Cinema 7. Return to Haifa: Non-Professional Performance as Revolutionary Mobilization Part IV: Community Filmmaking 8. Extra Time: The Performance and Labour of the Background Actor 9. The Authenticity of Relational Cinema: The Working Method of Valeska Grisebach 10. Decolonizing the Screen through Performance: Non-Professional Indigenous Actors and Community Filmmaking in Before Tomorrow 11. "Natural Actors": Non-Professional Performance and the More-than-Human World in Spanish Film Part V: Beyond Independent Cinema 12. Movie-Making Mother: Judith Crawley and Her Cast of Kids 13. Performers in Reality Television: The Work of Creating Characters 14. Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916): Ballet-Pantomime in the Production of Film Melodrama