ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on acting and performance narrows that range to focus on film and media performances, but it retains performance studies' vision that screen performance is prepared in some way, and framed or displayed in some fashion. The equation between real acting and legitimate theatre, and the related idea that screen performances are produced by technology and the decisions of other people also influenced work in cine-semiotics. Performance studies offers additional concepts for analyzing the various registers of screen performance. Prague semiotics is important to studies of screen performance because it frames all aspects of a text as elements that function together as a whole. The intensely social dimension of humor means that attention to performers' individual gesture-expressions facilitates studies of comedic screen performances. Postmodern media texts depend on certain narrative and audiovisual strategies. In postmodern film and media, performances sometimes involve minimalistic modernist portrayals that intermittently feature highly expressive but conventional melodramatic choices.
