The Present Situation Research On Contemporary Chinese Film Performance Education

Film performance education is aimed at instructing the actors to master the skills of playing a role in front of a movie camera with the approach of "a person portraying another person". It is a way of talent cultivation that is different from the general education. As a subject with very strong practicality, film performance teaching has always emphasized on the teaching method of "oral teaching that inspires true understanding" and the "elite education" philosophy. After decades of development, it has cultivated a large number of excellent film actors for China’s movie industry. Although the teaching is practice-oriented, China’s film performance education often neglects to improve the research on theories and to summarize the teaching principles. In the meanwhile, conflicts have emerged between the increasing popularity of the movie performance education and ever-changing demand of our time. With the progress of the society and continuous improvement of the quality of students, the external environment is constantly changing, so the teaching methods adopted in universities must be constantly adapted to these changes and make timely adjustments accordingly. Thus, the study on the theory of contemporary Chinese film performance education has the urgent need to be reviewed comprehensively from the historical, contemporary, integrative and comparative aspects.Chinese contemporary film performance education was reflected on in the thesis based on the author’s practice and experience in the film performance education and teaching. It was presented in the thesis not only a comprehensive summary of teaching experience and patterns of education for Chinese film performance, but also the measures to be taken for dealing with the various issues that film performance teaching is currently facing. Therefore, it is of great significance for the completeness of China’s film education theory; more importantly, it’s expected to change the situation that China’s film performance education, which lacks theoretical research and a systematic structure, neglects its own academic tradition.The thesis is divided into five chapters and the introduction part of discusses the basis of the topics, the object of study, the literature review and the research methods. The first chapter analysis comprehensively and professional disciplines positioning characteristics of the film acting education.In the second chapter, China’s experience in film performance education in the past sixty years and the formation of the theory about film performance in China were reviewed and summarized, in an attempt to find the way of carrying out the reform and innovation of China’s film performance education. The history of Beijing Film Academy since its foundation was traced, and the way in which China’s film performance education introduced, addressed questions about, inheriting, promoting and innovating in Stanislavsky’s System was analyzed. It was also analyzed in the chapter the continuous efforts that people dedicated to the theoretical system of China’s film performance education have made in combining the tradition of Chinese art education and western teaching mode/method, and in exploring a new approach of film performance education. The third chapter focuses on other educational institutions in which performance was taught for cultivating talents for the film industry except Beijing Film Academy which specializes in training film specialists. In this chapter, the teaching methods employed by drama academies, of which the Central Academy of Drama is a representative, were studied. Taking Shanghai Normal University, Xie Jin Film School, as an example, the current multi-level school-running patterns for performance majors were analyzed in a comprehensive way. It was illustrated explicitly in the four chapter the great ecological changes of movie performance education under the background of economic and social transformation in today’s China. Many problems and challenges that China’s film performance education must face up to were also pointed out, such as the upgrading of the film industry, the transformation of film actors’living environment,"the Craze for Studying in an Art School" and "Employment Difficulty" caused by the increased enrolment increase. On the basis of the above discussion and analysis, an innovative exploration of contemporary Chinese film performance education was carried out in the fifth chapter and a new concept of film performance education was defined. The orientation of China’s film performance education and the philosophy of the education was explained in a comprehensively from film technology, market demand, movie reviews, graduates’career planning; the possibility of changing the concept of performance teaching and creating new teaching method was also discussed. It was also put forward in the chapter some creative ideas about "the training of type actors","raising the level of appreciation and creation with the help of review","the professional way of cultivating actors", for the purpose of inspire the innovative development of China’s film performance.