Non-Professional Film Acting Performance and Experience

1. Introduction: Performance, Precarity, and the Weight of the World
Catherine Russell

Part I
Neorealism Revisited

2. Gestures Without Meaning: Non-professional Acting and “The Coffee Grinder Scene” in Umberto D.
Miguel Gaggiotti

3. Neorealist Labour Extraction and the Casualisation of the Non-Professional Actor
Karl Schoonover

Part II
Ontologies of Film Performance

4. The Dramatics of Process: Acting Within Not Acting in Eduardo Coutinho's Documentaries
Fabio Andrade

5. Dry Ground Burning and Fortress Europa: The Stakes of Non-actor Subjectivity
Ivone Margulies

Part III
Committed Cinema

6. Salt of the Earth, Non-professional Actors, and 1950s American Independent Cinema
Cynthia Baron and Yannis Tzioumakis

7. Return to Haifa: Non-Professional Performance as Revolutionary Mobilization
Kay Dickinson

Part IV
Community Filmmaking

8. Extra Time: The Performance and Labour of the Background Actor
Catherine O’Rawe

9. The Authenticity of Relational Cinema: The Working Method of Valeska Grisebach
Anette Guse

10. Decolonizing the Screen through Performance: Non-Professional Indigenous Actors and Community Filmmaking in Before Tomorrow
Karine Bertrand

11. 'Natural Actors': Non-Professional Performance and the More-than-Human World in Spanish Film
Tom Whittaker

Part V
Beyond Independent Cinema

12. Movie-Making Mother: Judith Crawley and Her Cast of Kids
Liz Czach

13. Performers in Reality Television: The Work of Creating Characters
Samantha Morris Mastai

14. Anna Pavlova in The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916): Ballet-Pantomime in the Production of Film Melodrama
Roxanne Hearn

Biography

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