Realism: The Contrast between Acting on Movies versus Acting on Stage

On sober reflection, people readily admit that films are like buildings, books, and symphonies or artifacts made by humans for human purposes. Yet, as part of an audience watching an enthralling movie, people may find it difficult to remember that what they are seeing is not a natural object, like a flower or an asteroid. Unlike theater, cinema is so captivating that people tend to forget that movies are make believe.

An understanding of the differences between acting on movies versus acting on stage or theater depends initially on the recognition that film is produced by both machines and human labor, while theater is more of a reflection of real life.

Understand the Differences between Movies and Stage

In order to understand the differences between portraying a role in a movie and a theater, it is important that you know the difference between a movie and a play.

Watching a film differs from viewing a stage performance. A film presents its audience with images in an illusory motion. For cinema to exist, a series of images must be displayed to a viewer by means of a mechanism, which presents each image for a very short period and inserts between successive images an interval of blackness.

If a series of slightly different images of the same object are displayed under these conditions, physiological and psychological processes in the viewer will create the illusion of seeing a moving image. Like most human artifacts, a film depends on particular technological factors.

This goes to show that the quality of acting in movies may not be as intense as those delivered the theater. In theaters, naturalism and realism take the stage. That is why some critics say that most people often go to the theater to use their brains, not just to be entertained.

Acting in movies depends so much on the script, hence the term scripted whenever somebody wants to refer to things that are too good to be true.

In theaters, acting sometimes depends on the wits of the actors. They also have scripts but there are times that the lines of the actors on stage should be sharp and witty so that the audience will be entertained.

Boiled down, the main discrepancy between acting in movies versus acting on stage is realism. Acting in theater faces life as it really is. With movies, you can have as many takes as you need to come up with the emotion the director wants to convey.