The primary claim of this book is that post-1950s western realist film acting is a practice that solicits three complementary, simultaneous, and overlapping empathetic relationships: an intrasubjective relationship between the actor and her character; the intersubjective relationships among performing actors and among actors-as-characters; and, a performative relationship between the actor and her audience. While cognitive philosopher Shawn Gallagher and actor Julia Gallagher readily describe an actor’s relationship with her character as empathetic, this study expands the solicitation of this relationship to additional targets such as the other actors and the anticipated audience as part of creating acting’s verisimilar illusion. Even if a complete empathetic connection is as much an ideal as it is a result of acting practices, the mental, corporeal, and emotional processes undertaken in the solicitation of each empathetic connection create the verisimilar illusion upon which realist acting depends. In other words, the actor’s transformation into her character is the result of how she has aspired to connect—and often move herself imaginatively, physically, and emotionally closer—to her character, her fellow actors and their characters, and her anticipated audience.

This analysis of film actors as empathizers aspires to open a critical discussion about the creative agency of screen actors by theorizing from the actor outwards towards the spectator. The goal is no longer to consider screen acting as a mystical generator of semiotically dissectible performances, or an over-determined side effect of film production, nor does it possess a standardized benchmark for aesthetic merit. Instead, acting is a meaning-making practice wherein the actor reorganizes her quotidian self and its bodymind schema to enact the situational character’s lived world, to align herself within the intentional pull of her fellow actors-as-characters, and to collaborate with camera as an access point to her anticipated audience. In short, the goal of this book is to account for the agency of the moving parts of the mise-en-scène, and the ways in which they move themselves and each other in order to move their audiences.

Cognitive Theater Studies and Acting

A major focal point with cognitive theater studies is the deductive—rather than empirical or inductive—application of neuroscience and theories of cognition to analyze the ways actors do creative work, and how audiences engage with that work. This approach necessarily raises questions of self-hood, embodiment, emotion, and meaning-making in theatrical training and storytelling.