Emotions on screen vs emotions behind the camera
After today's lecture when I was watching Santa Diabla, I realized how much of a contrast there is in actors' and actresses'' emotions on screen and behind the camera. When on screen and acting they are fully devoted and seem like they actually care, but the second the camera is cut all that love, hate, joy, sadness, or whatever that seems so real vanishes in the blink of an eye. Obviously this is just the mark of good acting but it is weird to think about how emotionally invested the viewers are versus the people actually putting in the work probably only care about where they fit into the story and don't care about that emotionally, they just want their pay check. Still at that, the actors and actresses make their emotions seem so real and genuine. In Santa Diabla, you feel compelled, you feel like you also want to exact your revenge on the antagonistic family just as the main character does. While most shows might make you interested or slightly invested, Santa Diabla has drawn me in completely and consumed my life. I did not believe that telenovelas were this addicting and easy to get hooked on and additionally the dialogue helps me a lot with my spanish skills. The spanish aspect of this class was my initial and only reason for choosing this fyos but now I feel as if now I will forever continue to watch telenovelas, and not just Santa Diabla, unlike all of my friends who all tell me they do not care about their fyos topic or are just not super interested. Also I think telenovelas are quite interesting because they are so cheesy but still so addicting and it is a very unique combination but still very effective in gaining viewers across all age and gender ranges.
It is very interesting how they are able to shut it off so quickly. Some actors go the route of method acting where they will try and stay in character after the director calls cut to sort of live through their character I guess to help them connect with their character more. An example of this, and I'm sure you've heard of this, is when Heath Ledger played The Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight. He locked himself in a room for about a month practicing the laugh and basically driving himself crazy. What resulted was an incredible performance, but sadly it also resulted in his death after getting addicted to pills. It's unclear whether the method acting was directly responsible for his death, but it certainly did not help.
ReplyDeleteYeah it is very interesting to see such a stark contrast between what we the audience see in a character and what the actor or actress actually acts like in real life. I have a bit of an inside joke to myself about the main character in my own novela that I'm studying, Pasión, where Susana González just completely goes full drama queen with her character Camila to a point where is extremely funny out of context, but the audience really feels all of the anguish that she constantly goes through in the show. It's extremely bizarre to see how different and calm she is when the cameras aren't rolling, and snaps you back into the mindset of, "Oh yeah, this is just a character." I think that its a real testament to the talent that they have, including an interesting point Mac brought up about method actors. Some that come to mind are Christian Bale and Al Pacino and the incredible amount of talent that they possess when on camera. I agree with your point on the cheeziness aspect, seeing how far the characters go to portray different emotions in novelas is so interesting and amusing compared to American shows.
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