And despite the creation in 1993 of the Michael Powell Award for the festival's best new British Film, it didn't get around to introducing a similar actors' prize until last year - the gong going to Robert Carlyle for Summer. This is a festival which started way back in 1947 (no film-festival can boast a longer unbroken continuity) as a showcase of documentaries. There's a mild irony in emphasising the contribution of actors with regard to Edinburgh. Looking back at the 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival - which ran from the 17th to the 28th of June (and which has already been excellently covered in these pages via my colleague David Cairns' near-daily dispatches) - what sticks in my mind (along with the death of Michael Jackson, news which broke as I drove back to Edinburgh after an evening in Glasgow) isn't so much the movies themselves, as the performances within them. This, however, isn't going to be one of those articles. And, as I've said, there will be instances where I will write 500 or even 1,000 words on a movie and the only time I mention any of the actors is within parentheses, matching them with the name of their characters in the time-honoured film-criticism tradition. Call me perverse, but there will be numerous occasions when I'll go out of my way not to talk about the stars - especially when, as is so often the case, there's much more interesting work being done by the supporting players or even among the bit-part performers. We live in a celebrity-driven age, and so it's understandable that many reviewers will write about the new Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie picture, for example, and bang on and on about the star's choice of role, appearance, relationship with the director, and go into the minutiae of what he or she does with the part. If actor X or actress Y is competent in what they do, why say so - unless one is also going to name-check the composer, costume-designer, cinematographer, and so on? My theory being that reviewers should only cite contributions which either exceed or fall below the expected basic professional level to a significant degree. I have nothing against actors or acting, but quite often I will write a review without passing comment on the thespian skills on show. This seems such an eminently reasonable, meritocratic, level-playing-field idea that I'm dismayed that I can't remember Labute's idea being repeated in the intervening six years. Rather than the credits simply stating the performers' names - as has been the custom in cinema all over the world for decades - Labute identified each of the four individuals concerned by their job-title ("Actor - Paul Rudd"), thus treating them the same as every other artistic contributor to the movie ("Editor - Joel Plotch.") Neil Labute has made some rather disastrous creative mis-steps in his time ( Lakeview Terrace) but he'll always have a special place in my heart for the way he opened the (wildly underrated) 2003 movie version of his play The Shape of Things. "It's never too soon // To tread the boards Above: Laetitia Guerard and Leora Barbara in Sylvie Verheyde's Stella (Verheyde, France).
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