* GODOT.06: Doing Beckett => main stage Theatre UAF Spring 2006 * Oedipus05
Acting One
PreAct-Title
Fundamentals : BioMethod
Required *
Links

Featured Pages: Film-North on directing!

How to Give Notes to Actors: eShakespeare-Hamlet Theatre is live - tenuous, transitory, momentary.

Theatre Theory Pages

Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques by Viola Spolin; Northwestern University Press, 1963 - Theory and Foundation - I. Creative Experience - Ii. Workshop Procedures - Exercises: The Workshop Sessions in This Section Can Be Used in Progressive Sequence. - Iii. Orientation - Iv. Where - V. Acting with the Whole Body - Vi. Non-Directional Blocking - Vii. Refining Awareness - Viii. Speech, Broadcasting, And Technical Effects - Ix. Developing Material for Situations - X. Rounding-Out Exercises - Xi. Emotion - Xii. Character - Children and the Theater - Xiii. Understanding the Child - Xiv. Fundamentals for the Child Actor - Xv. Workshop for Six-To-Eight-Year-Olds - Formal Theater And Improvisational Theater - Xvi. Preparation - Xvii. Rehearsal and Performance - Xviii. Post-Mortem and Special Problems


Correlations: Aristotle
Concept & Idea
Character & Actor
Plot/Action &
Film Acting:

6. Remarks on the Actor
THE FILM ACTOR occupies a unique position at the junction of staged and unstaged life. That he differs considerably from the stage actor was already recognized in the primitive days when Réjane and Sarah Bernhardt played theater before the camera; the camera let them down pitilessly. What was wrong with their acting, the very acting which all theatergoers raved about?

Stage actor and screen actor differ from each other in two ways. The first difference concerns the qualities they must possess to meet the demands of their media. The second difference bears on the functions they must assume in theatrical plays and film narratives respectively.

QUALITIES
How can the stage actor's contribution to his role be defined in terms of the cinema? To be sure, like the film actor, he must draw on his nature in the widest sense of the word to render the character he is supposed to represent; and since his projective powers are rarely unlimited, a measure of type-casting is indispensable for the stage also. But here the similarities end. Due to the conditions of the theater, the stage actor is not in a position directly to convey to the audience the many, often imperceptible details that make up the physical side of his impersonation; these details cannot cross the unbridgeable distance between stage and spectator. The physical existence of the stage performer is incommunicable. Hence the necessity for the stage actor to evoke in the audience a mental image of his character. This he achieves by means of the theatrical devices at his disposal -- a fitting make-up, appropriate gestures and voice inflections, etc.

Significantly, when film critics compare the screen actor with the stage actor they usually speak of the latter's exaggerations, overstatements, amplifications. 1 In fact, his mask is as "unnatural" as his behavior, for otherwise he would not be able to create the illusion of naturalness. Instead of drawing a true-to-life portrait which would be ineffective on the stage, he works with suggestions calculated to make the spectators believe that they are in the presence of his character. Under the impact of these suggestions they visualize what is actually not given them. Of course, the play itself supports the actor's conjurer efforts. The situations in which he appears and the verbal references to his motives and fears and desires help the audience to complement his own definitions so that the image he projects gains in scope and depth. Thus he may attain a magic semblance of life. Yet life itself, this flow of subtle modes of being, eludes the stage. Is it even aspired to in genuine theater?

Emphasis on being
Leonard Lyons reports the following studio incident in his newspaper column: Fredric March, the well-known screen and stage actor, was making a movie scene and the director interrupted him. "Sorry, I did it again," the star apologized. "I keep forgetting -- this is a movie and I mustn't act." [ ... ]

Casualness
This implies something infinitely subtle. Any genuinely photographic portrait tends to sustain the impression of unstaged reality; and much as it concentrates on the typical features of a face, these features still affect us as being elicited from spontaneous self-revelations. There is, and should be, something fragmentary and fortuitous about photographic portraits. Accordingly, the film actor must seem to be his character in such a way that all his expressions, gestures, and poses point beyond themselves to the diffuse contexts out of which they arise. They must breathe a certain casualness marking them as fragments of an inexhaustible texture.

Many a great film maker has been aware that this texture reaches into the deep layers of the mind. René Clair observes that with screen actors spontaneity counts all the more, since they have to atomize their role in the process of acting; 6 and Pudovkin says that, when working with them, he "looked for those small details and shades of expression which . . . reflect the inner psychology of man." 7 Both value projections of the unconscious. What they want to get at, Hanns Sachs, a film-minded disciple of Freud's, spells out in psychoanalytical terms: he requests the film actor to advance the narrative by embodying "such psychic events as are before or beyond speech. . . above all those. . . unnoticed ineptitudes of behavior described by Freud as symptomatic actions."

Physique
For this reason the film actor is less independent of his physique than the stage actor, whose face never fills the whole field of vision. The camera not only bares theatrical make-up but reveals the delicate interplay between physical and psychological traits, outer movements and inner changes. Since most of these correspondences materialize unconsciously, it is very difficult for the actor to stage them to the satisfaction of an audience which, being in a position to check all pertinent visual data, is wary of anything that interferes with a character's naturalness. Eisenstein's 1939 claim that film actors should exert "self-control. . . to the millimeter of movement" 9 sounds chimerical; it testifies to his ever-increasing and rather uncinematic concern for art in the traditional sense, art which completely consumes the given raw material. Possessed with formative aspirations, he forgot that even the most arduous "self-control" cannot produce the effect of involuntary reflex actions. Hence the common recourse to actors whose physical appearance, as it presents itself on the screen, fits into the plot -- whereby it is understood that their appearance is in a measure symptomatic of their nature, their whole way of being. "I choose actors exclusively for their physique," declares Rossellini. 10 His dictum makes it quite clear that, because of their indebtedness to photography, film productions depend much more than theatrical productions on casting according to physical aspects.

FUNCTIONS
From the viewpoint of cinema the functions of the stage actor are determined by the fact that the theater exhausts itself in representing interhuman relations. The action of the stage play flows through its characters; what they are saying and doing makes up the content of the play -- in fact, it is the play itself. Stage characters are the carriers of all the meanings a theatrical plot involves. This is confirmed by the world about them: even realistic settings must be adjusted to stage conditions and, hence, are limited in their illusionary power. It may be doubted whether they are intended at all to evoke reality as something imbued with meanings of its own. As a rule, the theater acknowledges the need for stylization. * Realistic or not, stage settings are primarily designed to bear out the characters and their interplay; the idea behind them is not to achieve full authenticity -unattainable anyway on the stage -- but to echo and enhance the human entanglements conveyed to us by acting and dialogue. Stage imagery serves as a foil for stage acting. Man is indeed the absolute measure of this universe, which hinges on him. And he is its smallest unit. Each character represents an insoluble entity on the stage; you cannot watch his face or his hands without relating them to his whole appearance, physically and psychologically.

Object among objects
The cinema in this sense is not exclusively human. * Its subject matter is the infinite flux of visible phenomena -- those ever-changing patterns of physical existence whose flow may include human manifestations but need not climax in them.

In consequence, the film actor is not necesarily the hub of the narrative, the carrier of all its meanings. Cinematic action is always likely to pass through regions which, should they contain human beings at all, yet involve them only in an accessory, unspecified way. Many a film summons the weird presence of furniture in an abandoned apartment; when you then see or bear someone enter, it is for a transient moment the sensation of human interference in general that strikes you most. In such cases the actor represents the species rather than a well-defined individual. Nor is the whole of his being any longer sacrosanct. Parts of his body may fuse with parts of his environment into a significant configuration which suddenly stands out among the passing images of physical life. Who would not remember shots picturing an ensemble of neon lights, lingering shadows, and some human face?

This decomposition of the actor's wholeness corresponds to the piecemeal manner in which he supplies the elements from which eventually his role is built. "The film actor," says Pudovkin, "is deprived of a consciousness of the uninterrupted development of the action in his work. The organic connection between the consecutive parts of his work, as a result of which the distinct whole image is created, is not for him. The whole image of the actor is only to be conceived as a future appearance on the screen, subsequent to the editing of the director."

TYPES
The non-actor
Considering the significance of the screen character's unstaged nature and his function as raw material, it is understandable that many film makers have felt tempted to rely on non-actors for their narrative. Flaherty calls children and animals the finest of all film material because of their spontaneous actions. 14 And Epstein says: "No set, no costume can have the aspect, the cast of truth. No professional faking can produce the admirable technical gestures of a topman or a fisherman. A smile of kindness, a cry of rage are as difficult to imitate as a rainbow in the sky or the turbulent ocean." 15 Eager for genuine smiles and cries, G. W. Pabst created them artificially when shooting a carousal of anti-Bolshevist soldiery for his silent film, THE LOVE OF JEANNE NEY: he herded together a hundred-odd Russian ex-officers, provided them with vodka and women, and then photographed the ensuing orgy. 16

There are periods in which non-actors seem to be the last word of a national cinema. The Russians cultivated them in their revolutionary era, and so did the Italians after their escape from Fascist domination. Tracing the origins of Italian neorealism to the immediate postwar period, Chiaromonte observes: "Movie directors lived in the streets and on the roads then, like everybody else. They saw what everybody else saw. They had no studios and big installations with which to fake what they had seen, and they had little money. Hence they had to improvise, using real streets for their exteriors, and real people in the way of stars." 17 When history is made in the streets, the streets tend to move onto the screen. * For all their differences in ideology and technique, POTEMKIN and PAISAN have this "street" quality in common; they feature environmental situations rather than private affairs, episodes involving society at large rather than stories centering upon an individual conflict. In other words, they show a tendency toward documentary.

Practically all story films availing themselves of non-actors follow this pattern. Without exception they have a documentary touch. Think of such story films as THE QUIET ONE, LOS OLVIDADOS, or the De Sica films, THE BICYCLE THIEF and UMBERTO D.: in all of them the emphasis is on the world about us; their protagonists are not so much particular individuals as types representative of whole groups of people. These narratives serve to dramatize social conditions in general. The preference for real people on the screen and the documentary approach seem to be closely interrelated.

The reason is this: it is precisely the task of portraying wide areas of actual reality, social or otherwise, which calls for "typage" -- the recourse to people who are part and parcel of that reality and can be considered typical of it. As Rotha puts it: " 'Typage' . . . represents the least artificial organisation of reality." 18 It is not accidental that film directors devoted to the rendering of larger segments of actual life are inclined to condemn the professional actor for "faking." Like Epstein, who turns against "professional faking," Rossellini is said to believe that actors "fake emotions." 19 This predilection for non-actors goes hand in hand with a vital interest in social patterns rather than individual destinies. Buñuel's Los OLVIDADOS highlights the incredible callousness of despondent juveniles; the great De Sica films focus on the plight of the unemployed and the misery of old age insufficiently provided for. [ Illus. 25 and 54 ] Non-actors are chosen because of their authentic looks and behavior. Their major virtue is to figure in a narrative which explores the reality they help constitute but does not culminate in their lives themselves.

The Hollywood star
In institutionalizing stars, Hollywood has found a way of tapping natural attractiveness as if it were oil. Aside from economic expediency, though, the star system may well cater to inner needs common to many people in this country. This system provides variegated models of conduct, thus helping, however obliquely, pattern human relationships in a culture not yet old enough to have peopled its firmament with stars that offer comfort or threaten the trespasser -- stars not to be mistaken for Holly. wood's.

The typical Hollywood star resembles the non-actor in that he acts out a standing character identical with his own or at least developed from it, frequently with the aid of make-up and publicity experts. As with any real-life figure on the screen, his presence in a film points beyond the film. He affects the audience not just because of his fitness for this or that role but for being, or seeming to be, a particular kind of person -- a person who exists independently of any part he enacts in a universe outside the cinema which the audience believes to be reality or wishfully substitutes for it. The Hollywood star imposes the screen image of his physique, the real or a stylized one, and all that this physique implies and connotes on every role he creates. And he uses his acting talent, if any, exclusively to feature the individual he is or appears to be, no matter for the rest whether his self-portrayal exhausts itself in a few stereotyped characteristics or brings out various potentialities of his underlying nature. The late Humphrey Bogart invariably drew on Humphrey Bogart whether he impersonated a sailor, a private "eye," or a night club owner.

But why is any one chosen for stardom while others are not? Evidently, something about the gait of the star, the form of his face, his manner of reacting and speaking, ingratiates itself so deeply with the masses of moviegoers that they want to see him again and again, often for a considerable stretch of time. It is logical that the roles of a star should be made to order. The spell he casts over the audience cannot be explained unless one assumes that his screen appearance satisfies widespread desires of the moment -- desires connected, somehow, with the patterns of living he represents or suggests. *

The professional actor
Discussing the uses of professional actors and non-actors, Mr. Bernard Miles, himself an English actor, declares that the latter prove satisfactory only in documentary films. In them, says he, "non-actors achieve all, or at any rate most, that the very best professional actors could achieve in the same circumstances. But this is only because most of these pictures avoid the implications of human action, or, where they do present it, present it in such a fragmentary way as never to put to the test the training and natural qualities which differentiate an actor from a non-actor." Documentary, he concludes, "has never faced up to the problem of sustained characterization." 20

Be this as it may, the majority of feature films does raise this problem. And challenged to help solve it, the non-actor is likely to forfeit his naturalness. He becomes paralyzed before the camera, as Rossellini observes; 21 and the task of restoring him to his true nature is often impossible to fulfill. There are exceptions, of course. In both his BICYCLE THIEF and UMBERTO D., Vittorio De Sica -- of whom they say in Italy that he "could lure even a sack of potatoes into acting" 22 -- succeeds in making people who never acted before portray coherent human beings. Old Umberto D., a rounded-out character with a wide range of emotions and reactions, is all the more memorable since his whole past seems to come alive in his intensely touching presence. But one should keep in mind that the Italians are blessed with mimetic gifts and have a knack of expressive gestures. Incidentally, while producing THE MEN, a film about paraplegic veterans, director Fred Zinnemann found that people who have undergone a powerful emotional experience are particularly fit to re-enact themselves. 23

As a rule, however, sustained characterization calls for professional actors. Indeed many stars are. Paradoxically enough, the over-strained non-actor tends to behave like a bad actor, whereas an actor who capitalizes on his given being may manage to appear as a candid non-actor, thus achieving a second state of innocence. He is both the player and the instrument; and the quality of this instrument -- his natural self as it has grown in real life -- counts as much as his talent in playing it. Think of Raimu. Aware that the screen actor depends upon the non-actor in him, a discerning film critic once said of James Cagney that he "can coax or shove a director until a scene from a dreamy script becomes a scene from life as Cagney remembered it." 24

Only few actors are able to metamorphose their own nature, including those incidental fluctuations which are the essence of cinematic life. Here Paul Muni comes to mind -- not to forget Lon Chaney and Walter Huston. When watching Charles Laughton or Werner Krauss in different roles, one gets the feeling that they even change their height along with their parts. Instead of appearing as they are on the screen, such protean actors actually disappear in screen characters who seem to have no common denominator.
[ pp. 93-101 ]
[ Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Siegfried Kracauer; Oxford University Press, 1960 ]

[ Total Acting ]

Notes

2005: "Actions are all the relationships, all the interactions between the characters, or between the characters and the lights, the sounds, the space. Actions are what work directly on the audience’s attention, on their understanding, their emotiveness …." Eugenio Barba
Of course, I am consumed with the directing Oedipus, but even more -- directing actors in tragedy! (Spring 2005)

We lost the sense of the tragic...

We know only "drama"...

Oedipus
TRAGEDY hero (Aristotle: above average). "Dramatic" acting base.

Actors-Move
In Part I (Plays) I wanted to write about my admiration for great scripts (this is what I do -- staging dramatic masterpieces), in Part II my situation is opposite. I work with "young" actors... What do they know about Sophocles, about life, theatre or themselves? I write to bridge the gap...

[ ... ] google.com/group/acting2 Chekhov: Farces & Love Letters -- Fall 2005

"Directing is a scam. Those who want to go into the professional theater but have no ability, become directors. And they get away with it. Most pro directors can't direct and don't bother, for, if you don't get in the way of your actors, they'll do your work for you." (Radio Theatre = good website). "You're only as good as your actors!"

True.

"It's essential that a director know as much about playwrighting as a playwright and about acting as an actor."

True too. Friendly Enemies: Maximizing the Director-Actor Relationship 0823079449

The best-kept secret in the entertainment industry is how much actors, including award-winning major stars, distrust directors and how directors, in turn, fear actors. UCLA professor, acting coach, and actress Delia Salvi addresses this problem in her book Friendly Enemies: Maximizing the Director-Actor Relationship.

Based on a course the author designed in the mid-1970s, and still teaches at UCLA, the book guides young directors in film and television in how to work with actors, as well as how to analyze scripts. Friendly Enemies is divided into seven chapters focusing on key topics such as understanding the actor, the director's self-knowledge, the language of the actor, the director's preparation, casting, rehearsal, and working on the set. An additional chapter includes directors' notes for the script, character analysis, and a scene breakdown from a section of the classic movie On the Waterfront.

The book also includes author interviews with entertainment professionals Burt Brinckerhoff, well-known producer and director of the successful television series 7th Heaven, and director of over 46 TV shows, including episodes of Touched by an Angel, Beverly Hills 90210, Magnum P.I., Moonlighting, and The Bob Newhart Show; Todd Holland, Emmy-winning director of the comedy series Malcolm in the Middle as well as The Larry Sanders Show, Felicity, My So-Called Life, and Twin Peaks; Alexander Payne, director of the award-winning film Election as well as Citizen Ruth; Mark Rydell, director of such films as On Golden Pond and The Rose; Brad Silberling, film director of the box-office smash City of Angels, with Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage, as well as television director of such shows as Judging Amy and NYPD Blue; Audrey Wells, director of the films Under the Tuscan Sun and Guinevere, and screenwriter for such films as The Kid, starring Bruce Willis, The Truth About Cats and Dogs, and George of the Jungle; Geena Davis, star of The Accidental Tourist, Thelma and Louise, and A League of Their Own, as well as three television series; Anthony Franciosa, star of stage, screen, and television; and Barry Primus, who's recently appeared in such films as Life as a House and 15 Minutes as well as on such television shows as The Practice, X-Files, and Law and Order.

Summary

In the long quotation from Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Book by Siegfried Kracauer, right), the old conflict between the Film Acting concept by Eisenstein and by Pudovkin (model vs. professional). It shouls be on the Actors page in Film Directing 101, but since I plan to use THR331 as Stage and Film directing intro, I write about it here.

Method Acting could be seen as a compromise between the two schools (theories) of acting (later 1920s-30s) in Russia. "Professional Model" = contemporary film industry practice (USA). [ more on Kracauer (right table) ]

Grotowski

An Acrobat of the Heart : A Physical Approach to Acting Inspired by the Work of Jerzy Grotowski (Vintage Original)
In An Acrobat of the Heart, teacher-director-playwright Stephen Wangh reveals how Jerzy Grotowski's physical exercises can open a pathway to the actor's inner creativity. Drawing on Grotowski's insights and on the work of Stanislavski, Uta Hagen, and others, Wangh bridges the gap between rigorous physical training and practical scene and character technique. Wangh's students give candid descriptions of their struggles and breakthroughs, demonstrating how to transform these remarkable lessons into a personal journey of artistic growth. Grotowski amazon

Questions

What is the difference between Method and Biomechanics?

Directors should see rehearsals from two different perspectives: "process" and "composition" -- always both!

Homework

Working with actors: line-by-line analysis.

12night

Next: Directing 3
Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television
Author: Judith Weston Format: Book (Illustrated), 314 pages (amazon, right table)

YY (Yeremin): First, the director is someone who interprets the text. The director brings the concept. Why are we doing this play? The production must correspond to some thought but the director cannot do it on his own. A director works with people - smart and talented people. You can't just press and push them, you have to make them believe in what you do. The most important gift a director needs is the talent to inspire actors to use their imaginations. I use one of Stanislavsky's last discoveries - the action analysis of the character. To work on any part, the actor has to know everything about his character. Whatever you know about yourself, that's what you need to know about this character. Second, there has to be some action on the stage. It's not simply words; anyone can say lines. You can pick people off the street and ask them to memorize a line, then block them on stage, and it will do. But the dialogue of theatre starts with an actor who can perform the action inside himself in such a way that it affects his partner. Yeremin at AmRep (Chekhov on Ice)

-- What do you like most about directing?

YY: Rehearsals. Rehearsals. My favorite thing ever.

DangerousLiaisons
STAGEWORK.ORG.UK Latrec-Chekhov05
polka2.mid www.joshuasmith.com/articles/DirectingActors.doc