In this week’s studies, we discussed about the actor’s performance in front of the camera. This is a quite interesting topic for me, I have took part in many shooting projects before, the acting was always a difficult obstacle for me. Facing the camera will make me feel uncomfortable. I will magnify some of my psychological changes and it is difficult to express naturally. However, getting into the role you play is crucial to the quality of a film. From Forgacs and David’s(2011) article, they illustrate some concept of acting and filmming form the director Antonioni. In his films, he stayed away from performance and actors, but focused on other aspects, such as his destruction of traditional narrative structures, their treatment of time, architecture, space, and inanimate objects implied by nature. In Antonini’s post-60s film narrative adopts a kind of visual minimalism, strongly focusing on the appearance of things, the surfave of the world as he see it, and a minimisation of explanatory dialogue. ‘Acting is one of the means the director can use to express idea, whether figurative or strictly conceptual’, ‘The film actor must work on the plane of psychology but on that of imagination’(Forgas, David. 2011), however, the imagination is opened by themselves. There are many forms of film acting, but the limitations of technical issues make every details in front of the camera significant. Antonioni’s film is full of metaphors, it has elusive plots, striking visual composition and a preoccupation with modern landscapes. He is a careful and dedicated director. His narrative style is not based on characters, which does not mean that characters are replaced by the inanimate environments. On the contrary, in such an indifferent, anti-social world, the characters in his lens showed another kind of vitality and tension. 

Forgacs, David, 2011, ‘Face, body, voice, movement: Antonioni and Actors [Excerpt]’ in Rhodes, John David (ed.) & Rascaroli, Laura (ed.), Antonioni : Centenary essays, Palgrave Macmillan, New York/Basingstoke, pp. 167-181.