Screen Acting As Taught Early

Mae Marsh Shows How To ... For Silent Picture Players

I didn’t know until recently that Mae Marsh wrote a book called Screen Acting back in 1921. Now having read it, I’m put to wondering if any other silent era player took serious account of the profession they chose; I mean other than whatever they said to interviewers or wrote in memoirs. Marsh would seem to be an only one who gave vent to whole of a volume (129 pages, illustrated), her emphasis on screen performing, though she draws distinction between skill as practiced for a stage and that necessitated by movies. Some of prose dates, what of those times doesn’t?, but Marsh throughout Screen Acting tells what she learned before cameras up to veteran (for her) year of 1921. By then, she had been in films a decade (age 15 the start). Seems less remarkable to modern eyes until we realize that acting for cameras was then a recent application, ten years hardly enough to graduate past infancy, and here’s Mae Marsh filling a tall order of explaining it all to us.

The book is in the Public Domain and is everywhere, online and even audio-read on You Tube. Mae Marsh is known for work with D.W. Griffith, but did plentiful star parts afterward. DWG was a cult director, as in players following his lead like terriers let in/out of a kennel daily. Marsh credits his unerring eye for falsity in performance. He liked her to pull drama from past personal experience to shade work done in a present, like The Birth Of A Nation’s cabin siege where Marsh unexpectedly laughs rather than cries as doors are being kicked in toward she and a helpless Cameron clan. This was acting way ahead of teens curve, which to that add low-key work Marsh and Henry B. Walthall self-devised where he returns home to find her in a shabby dress festooned by scraps of cotton, a sister’s pathetic attempt to keep style stripped away by war and desolation. A great moment still, and Griffith let Marsh/Walthall develop and play it their way. Based on this book, maybe it’s time we recognize DWG as truest progenitor of the Method.

Screen Acting may be an earliest detailing of Griffith technique as told by one of his stock company in a book. Marsh addresses too the use, and sometimes overuse, of close-ups, and how some players abuse the privilege. She admits all actors crave them, but often neglect to tone down for cameras drawn near. To value of story, Marsh is clear: “Motion picture actresses prosper almost in exact ratio to the inherent worth of their scenarios.” Narrative matters, folks, then, now, always. Griffith sent Mae and others on “observation tours” to taste real life before trying to recreate it on screens. That included slums and “baby hospitals” (Marsh’s stop for prepping her Intolerance part). Acting must show, she said, “a thing as it is, not as we think it ought to be.” Modern technique? Sure looks that way to me, and bear in mind Griffith was applying it early as Biograph days, his followers like Mae Marsh doing so thereafter. She had a nice stay on top, did character work for talkies, was a small-part mascot at Twentieth-Fox for decades, same for John Ford as valued member of his thesping group. Mae Marsh lived till 1968, knowing well her worth, even if others were slow (still are) in recognizing pioneer strides her generation made in the art of film performance.