Non-Professional Film Acting

Catherine Russell is Distinguished University Professor of Film Studies at Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of seven books, most recently The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck: Twenty-Six Short Essays on a Working Star (2023). She has also written extensively on documentary cinema, archive theory, Japanese cinema, and experimental film.

"Distant from the galaxy of glittering stars, the non-actor brings us down to earth and redraws the global cartography of cinema in fascinating ways. This anthology boldly traverses this new map, assembling essays that probe how non-professional performers raise questions of style, authenticity, labour, and the (extra)ordinary across an eclectic and essential array of films."– Erika Balsom, Reader in Film and Media Studies, King’s College London"Non-Professional Film Acting recovers the disavowed labour and precarious conditions of the non-professional performer. It reveals the fashioning of realist aesthetics through the exploitation of performers’ experiential knowledge, but it also highlights collaborative practices that challenge industry hierarchies. This important collection for scholars of cinema and cultural labour reframes non-professional performance as a site of negotiation where artifice and authenticity, ethics and experience converge."- Alan O’Leary, Associate Professor of Film and Media, Aarhus University

• 1. Introduction: Performance, Precarity, and the Weight of the World Part I: Neorealism Revisited 2. Gestures Without Meaning: Non-professional Acting and “The Coffee Grinder Scene” in Umberto D. 3. Neorealist Labour Extraction and the Casualisation of the Non-Professional Actor Part II: Ontologies of Film Performance 4. The Dramatics of Process: Acting Within Not Acting in Eduardo Coutinho's Documentaries 5. Dry Ground Burning and Fortress Europa: The Stakes of Non-Actor Subjectivity Part III: Committed Cinema 6. Salt of the Earth, Non-Professional Actors, and 1950s American Independent Cinema 7. Return to Haifa: Non-Professional Performance as Revolutionary Mobilization Part IV: Community Filmmaking 8. Extra Time: The Performance and Labour of the Background Actor 9. The Authenticity of Relational Cinema: The Working Method of Valeska Grisebach 10. Decolonizing the Screen through Performance: Non-Professional Indigenous Actors and Community Filmmaking in Before Tomorrow 11. “Natural Actors”: Non-Professional Performance and the More-than-Human World in Spanish Film Part V: Beyond Independent Cinema 12. Movie-Making Mother: Judith Crawley and Her Cast of Kids 13. Performers in Reality Television: The Work of Creating Characters 14. Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916): Ballet-Pantomime in the Production of Film Melodrama