Enacted emotionality: a missing concept for directing affective screen acting?

Abstract

Creating emotionally truthful screen performances is often thought the performance elixir for screen actors and directors, but how this process is approached is subject to significant, and often idiosyncratic, variation from both actors and directors alike. During my own experience as a professional director working in filmed drama, I recognised the struggle rationalising a response to each performed take. In this article, I attempt to identify a conceptual frame implicit in many approaches to directing screen acting but not explicitly referenced or conceptualised as a directorial skill or intrinsic directorial process. This analysis aims to identify enacted emotionality as a missing concept from the directing screen acting literature. This analysis rooted in the theories of distributed cognition, a constructed theory of emotion, and affect theory attempts to explain how the process of directing screen acting can be more explicitly defined as characterising the range of cognitive activities involved in, and experienced by, screen directors and actors while making Film/TV drama. This inter-disciplinary approach offers a conceptual contribution towards the application of an enacted emotionality as a missing concept in the directing screen acting literature that can benefit future media education and practice for screen directors, actors, and media scholars.