4Contemporary Treatments of Race in Popular Cinema — Very few actors play leading roles in feature films, and minority actors achieve that level of success even more rarely. Only a handful of minority actors have ever won an Oscar. Sidney Poitier (b. 1927) and Denzel Washington (b. 1954) belong to both select groups, however, and are likely the two most famous and successful African American actors in Hollywood history.

4Naturalistic and Nonnaturalistic Performances* — Actors generally employ naturalistic acting to convey recognizable parts of life and human behavior, and they reserve nonnaturalistic acting for depictions of "outsider" existence—the offbeat, the oddball, the weird, the monstrous. To convey such deviations from the norm, actors exaggerate and even invent facial expressions, gestures, and vocal mannerisms and tones that exceed what is considered "natural" or conventional.

4The Star System and "Star Vehicles"* — The star system consists of Hollywood's mechanisms for developing and promoting film stars, a system that began during the silent era and continues in greatly altered form today. To fully appreciate the role of stars in narrative films, we need to have a general sense of how the star system works and a general sense of the various ways spectators respond to stars.

4Vocal Performances in Film: Recording Technology and Techniques* —To capture and combine the various kinds of sound within a film, including dialogue, music, and sound effects, filmmakers employ multitrack recording. This system enables them to record each sound on a separate track, which can then be manipulated on its own and mixed together with other sounds, of the same type or different types, for coherence and dramatic effect.

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