Film has been dramatically spread around the world since the development of cinematograph by the Lumiere brothers in 1895. The movie industry has been rapidly growing despite its short history, compared to the drama. Especially Korea’s movie and TV ...
Film has been dramatically spread around the world since the development of cinematograph by the Lumiere brothers in 1895. The movie industry has been rapidly growing despite its short history, compared to the drama. Especially Korea’s movie and TV broadcasting industry have already stepped up their statues and are well recognized. Also some movie stars have gained an international reputation called Hallyu star, and won many awards in some of the international film festivals, which has proved themselves as great actors and actresses.
Despite these achievements, academic studies and training methods of acting in Korea have not been explored systematically and remained unanswered. In Korea, acting education has been usually developed focusing on theatrical acting under its traditional way. In addition, 'Film Acting' has been under-estimated as a merely part of various aesthetic devices in a traditional film theory.
However, film acting has its own unique value which has been developed since the beginning of film history, unlike the previous art of drama. The history of film acting since the silent picture days has been the process of making itself more suitable to related media and developing itself to unique acting style art. The fundamental principles of film acting and theatrical acting are similar in terms of the fact that they are both the art of performing an imaginary character sincerely, however, there are huge differences in the way of accepting the media and conveying the message. Moreover, the acting style in film and theatre should be different due to the different work environment.
In the United States of America, a study of 'Film Acting' and 'Screen Acting' have been established for a long time as an independent study, being completely separated from theatrical acting. Apart from this, the country has been developed its own education system for film acting since the ‘Hollywood studio system’. On the other hand, in Korea studies on film acting have been unexplored; there are very limited acting-related books previously written and few practical film acting courses or workshops. As film and drama have different acting techniques, the unique characteristics of each medium should be understood in order to play good acting.
Since Konstantin Stanislavski established the scientific method of acting, his acting methodology has become a renowned acting training program among many actors and actresses around the world. Particularly in the USA his emergence in the early 30’s has made significant contribution to the improvement of America’s modern drama and film.
Lee Strasberg, the American creator of acting style 'Method' developed Stanislavski’s 'system' to his own style, which is called 'method'. The original meaning of the term ‘Method’ refers to the specific acting style created by Lee Strasberg which has been the basis of film acting in Hollywood. However, the meaning of 'Method Acting' not only refers to the style of method acting but also refers to the most suitable acting style to the trait of film. In other words, Method Acting can include the concept of realistic and natural(non-artificial) acting, which is the most appropriate form of acting to the nature of film.
The representative American acting teachers, such as Lee Strasberg, Stella Addler and Sanford Meisner adapted ‘Stanislavski’s system’ to the nation in order to suit a different cultural climate and managed to develop its own acting techniques which leaded to an advanced acting ‘methodology’ for the nation. From now on, this acting methodology would be called “American Acting Method” in this study.
Among those who developed the American acting methodology, Sanford Meisner’s method is based on 'The Reality of Doing' and is now being used as the most general acting training method in USA. His acting method focuses on an 'interaction' among actors and considers their 'reaction' important, which is appropriate to camera acting. It also includes many different techniques such as ‘The Repetition Exercise’, ‘The Mechanical Repetition Exercise’, ‘The Repetition from your own point of view’, ‘The Knock on the door’, ‘Working with text’, ‘Preparation’, ‘As If: Particularization’, ‘Making the part your Own'
In Korea, Stanislavski's system has been the basis of Korean acting in film and drama since it was introduced by Hong Hea Sung in 1950s. Since then, Korean method acting has been developed particularly by actor Kim Seung Ho. In addition, some Korean drama directors such as Lee Yoon Taek and Park Gn Hyoung have been forging their own unique acting methods. Although there were many limitations to develop Korea’s own unique method of acting, the efforts to study Stanislavski's system and turn it into Korea’s acting style have contributed greatly to the nations’s art of acting as a whole.
As seen from the example of Sanford Meisner who was influenced by Stanislavski's system, but rather than just accepting the system as it is he added his own method on the existing system and actually recreated. Korea is in need of creating its own unique acting method, which would suit the nation’s unique circumstances. In this study a practical guideline for Korean film acting method is proposed with a consideration of distinct characteristics of film itself and it suggests the way of reorganizing the techniques of American acting method so that it can be applied to the field of Korean film directly.