The Actor
NATURAL & PROFESSIONAL:
The problem of film-acting and the place of the professionally trained ‘Actor’ in ‘The Cinema’ is not peculiar to story film. What we mean by acting is, in fact, closely bound up with the whole principle of creative method and is providing a most difficult problem. The relationship of man to the society in which he moves is one of the fundamental perplexities for the filmmaker. It is more. It is one of the most vital problems of modern civilization and is occupying the attention of every thinking person today.
Opinions differ so widely on the issue of whether ‘acting’ is an inherent part of film creation and, if so, in what lies the difference between stage & screen acting; that we should do well to try to analyze their essential distinctions. We should realize, however, that the immaturity of ‘The Cinema’ renders any but its fundamental constituents & elementary principles open to contradiction, whereas the traditions and conventions of the Theatre lie deep rooted in long years of precedent. There is, you can safely say, some fixed opinion as to what does, and what does not, constitute ‘good’ acting on the stage today, that is, within the orthodox limits of the stage as generally accepted by its critics. And since most western story films still rely on the transference, or rather the adaptation of theatre style to film technique, we may assume that the majority of so called actors of the cinema are judged according to standards derived originally from the stage. That is to say, they set out to achieve the same end of characterization although the methods employed are slightly different. The one must make allowance for the mechanical reproduction of the cinema apparatus; the other must rely upon the illusion that is the basis of the theatre medium. [Verisimilitude vs. Suspension of disbelief].
Now, in the theatre, the stage upon which an actor performs has a real existence and definite spatial dimensions. In order to pass from one side to the other your actor must walk that distance in so many steps, in a given period of time. On separate eye-levels, there sits the audience. Thus it is clear that any speech or gesture on the part of ‘the actor on stage’ must be capable of traveling across the intervening gap, or space if you like, so as to be comprehensible both aurally & visually to the audience. This can only be achieved by a deliberate emphasis on the part of the actor. So much is obvious.
Such limitations, naturally lead to a peculiar technique being adopted by the stage actor. He can not behave as in real life. If he whispers, he must whisper loudly! The ‘stage whisper’ as it is called, so that the audience at the dress circle may also hear clearly! Unless he employs certain forms of word enunciation, the greater part of the audience will be unable to hear what he says. Unless he exaggerates his facial expressions and uses grease paint to heighten his features, the audience will not notice the changes in his facial movements, let alone understand the meaning that he is trying to infuse into so many cubic meters volume of the auditorium, whether filled to capacity, half full or empty.
The stage actor, then, quite apart from the other factors of ‘theatre craft’, has to learn special methods of speaking and possess a special knowledge of exaggerated gestures before he can undertake to represent a fictitious character to his audience.
Further, the aim of theatre is to perform a play as many times and to as large an audience as wishes to see the piece. In other words, not one but many performances are necessary, of a successful play in order to satisfy the potential audience. So the actor has not only to learn the tricks of his technique for one demonstration of a particular character, but he must be able to adopt this un-natural & artificial behavior on many occasions. He must repeat his tricks over & over again and still appear fresh until the public is tired. He must be able to cut himself off abruptly from his normal, every day existence and to assume the mind, behavior, feelings and often the physical appearance of an imaginary person. To do this demands great skill, for in each of these manifestations he must rely almost entirely upon himself. Artificial lighting and stage effects are there to help him, but at the base the success of the portrayal lies in his own ability.
When we come to examine the Screen, however, we find a wholly different state of affairs. Firstly, because the nature of motion picture is an illusion, moving image, exploiting a weakness of the human eye, called ‘persistence of vision’; it is clear that the actor’s movements are not governed by actual time or confined within a real space. We may see him begin to walk across a room and then pick him up on the other side, thereby deliberately eliminating a piece of ‘space & time’. Secondly, the capability of the Camera for isolating comprehensive views, near views, close-ups etc, at once destroys the significance of the distance between the screen and the audience. That distance still exists, but the illusion of the constantly changing view points un-consciously draws the audience first near to, and then perhaps far from, the object shown on the screen within the span of a second or two. The movie-cameras possess the god-like vision of the remote and the minute. Should the actor desire a special movement of his hand to be observed by the audience, he has no need to emphasize it himself as in the theatre, because the camera can isolate that single gesture and show it alone in a magnified size so that the audience can not fail to grasp its meaning. But, & this is the important point, the emphasis no longer rests with the actor but with the Camera.
Theoretically, the Actor need employ no tricks or peculiar techniques. He must remain neutral, as in normal life, and the probing selectivity of the Camera, under the Director’s control, will translate the ‘meaning’ of his ‘acting’ to the audience. Keeping ‘him’, the object in the center, the Camera actually looks at action iconic-ally from all directions and distances. One could plot camera position/s (fluid/static) by referring to ‘two clocks’ one in the horizontal plane and the other in vertical plane in an expanding and/or contracting balloon like spherical space, the centrality of which is the ‘Actor’ or action/object. If necessary, the action/movement may be slowed down or made faster than normal in order to draw attention on certain intangibles in normal motion. Pudovkin will often use slow motion to show the beginnings of a smile! And then there are these endless points of view based upon the ‘two clocks & a balloon’ system to absolve our ‘actor’!
To continue, as in the theatre, so in the Cinema is it essential that the performance should be repeated many times. But the nature of Cinema is such that this multiplication is made by machinery. Theoretically, the actor’s emotions need to be expressed only once for proper registration on the negative, after which all else is purely a matter of mechanical processing. Thus his ‘acting’ if such it can still be called, may be both spontaneous & natural and even his most transient moments may be fixed on celluloid for all practical time.
So much, then, for some of the elementary differences between stage and film performances.
But we must go further. By now it is familiar to most people that the underlying principles of Film-craft are based upon manipulation of celluloid lengths which bear upon them ‘fragments’ of ‘acting’; performed by the actor. No matter how he has ‘acted’ in the studio, his representation on the screen is conditioned by the manner in which his fragments of acting are pieced together. Other actors or intimate objects, which may have no real relation to him and were not even within eyesight or earshot at the time of shooting his studio performance may be brought into relation to or contrasted with him, thereby giving, possibly an entirely new meaning to his gestures & expressions. In fact his acting really plays a very small part in the composition of the web of meaning of the film when compared with the very important part it would play in a stage performance. Whether he likes it or not, your actor is just so much ‘Raw Material’. His very personality, so impressive, perhaps on the stage, may be entirely altered by the process of editing.
As it happens, of course, such distortion of acting does not occur in most story-films today because, as has been pointed out earlier, the popular method of film production is a compromise between theatre & cinema. The fact that the camera is supposed to photograph what we really see - that it acts as a recorder – still conditions most film technique. Actors still ‘act’ in the theatrical manner before a turning camera and a sensitive microphone and their performance is transferred to the screen. Not until we reach “Cinema” – which deals with ‘real people in their natural environment’ – do we come up against the difficult problem of ‘Cinematographic Creation’, a process that makes use of the specific ‘potentials & limitations’ of this novel medium for characterization, and the place of the individual in the Theme. This simply implies that the film made with theatre acting, and with actors playing ‘characters’ with which they have no connection in real life, is an extension of the Stage, where film is being used as a ‘packaging & carting’ device; it is not a development from within Cinema itself.
On the other hand we have observed that one of the most serious shortcomings of Cinema as a medium has been its continued evasion of the human being; and that the most difficult problems facing the filmmakers today is the need for characterization of individuals. This same problem, quite naturally, in view of its political & sociological implications, fully occupies the imagination and experiments of film technicians. From Eisenstein’s 1923 experiment of transfer from Commedia dell`Arte to the ‘types’ in his film ‘Strike’ the story of Cinematic expression has been the story of Cinematic representation of the Human Being. Pudovkin, on the other hand, was trying to express his themes through definite individuals; types drawn from & typical of the mass, attempting a synthesis between professional and natural actors; that is just ordinary people with a correct look about them, who never aspire to be actors one day; people who were not nervous and camera shy, who could communicate and understand the director in a common language and who were not being asked to do things far removed from their actual day to day life experiences. They didn’t even have to remember long dialogues as these were mostly silent films based upon montage, action and imagery with a grunt or a groan here and a word or sentence there to complement its web like syntax.
“Watching other regisseurs at work in those early days”, writes Pudovkin, “I studied the difference between the actor’s movements and gestures while he was consciously acting for the camera, and his natural movements as a result of, or in response to various normal stimuli. I was attracted to analyzing these natural movements, but even when I started work on “Mother” I wasn’t clear why I found more dynamic material in the natural behavior of the actor than in his pre-conceived & rehearsed performance. Both Baranovskaia and Batalov, the mother & son in the film, were theatre artists with almost no experience of the Cinema. With them I came face to face with the problems which were occupying my mind, but, being uncertain, I at first left them to themselves. The result was that effects which moved me in the theatre appeared to me in the studio as false and schematic.”
“I began then, to remove, from the actor all that seemed to me to be exaggerated. I rooted out every attempt of the actor to show off his ability. I began to collaborate with him in finding the ‘actual, emotional state’ and, in addition, eliminating all un-necessary movement. I looked for those small details and shades of expression which are difficult to find, but which reflect the inner psychology of man. I took these subtle characteristics and fixed them on the film until I had a collection of human portraits. For the most part, these shots were motionless, or reproduced hardly noticeable movement. [Once, my Master said to me, “You filmmakers! Your medium is built up on movement; you look for ‘stasis’. Let painters look for movement.”]
I gave these isolated portraits, ‘Form’ & a dynamic continuity by the process of ‘Montage’. I found the way to build up a dialogue in which the transition of the actor from one emotional state to another (a change from glumness to smile in response to a joke) had never taken place in actuality before the camera. I shot the actor at different times, glum and then smiling, and only on my cutting table did these two separate moods co-ordinate with the third – the man who made the joke.
Eisenstein, however, continued with the theory of completely impersonal approach in “October”. It is a supreme example of a film “without hero or plot”, which, in the opinion of Dinamov was a very dangerous; “it was a number of events without definite characters. Such material needs great talent to express, but those pictures are not pictures of the mass. The mass must have its leaders. In “Potemkin” & “October” there was only a crowd.” Obviously, it was this absence of emotion and lack of characterization that made Eisenstein choose a central figure as heroine in the “General Line”. But being apparently unable to grasp the social & economic issues of his subject, he sidetracked the whole thing with artificial trickeries of symbolism – his worst enemy. Eight years later we find him saying, “The intellectual Cinema – the vulgar definition of an ‘intellectual film’ – is a film without emotional feelings – is too vulgar to consider. The “General Line” was an intellectual film.”
“Characters”, says Dinamov, “disappeared from our cinema because the ‘directors’ did not know the ‘people’. They thought the film must be based upon the mass but the film without a hero was only an experiment. We need actors with great passions. Without actors we can do nothing. We can not base our cinema on typage.” Consequently the workers in the cinema had to grasp fully this relationship before they could attempt characterization.
Pudovkin, during all this time, still pursued the ‘typage’ theory and after making his first sound film, “Deserter”, over which he took two years, wrote, “After much experimental and theoretical work I am convinced that it is possible to get excellent material for a picture from the ‘ordinary man’ taken straight off the street, who never having acted before, is yet sensitive to the meaning of the experienced regissur. In my last two pictures, “A Simple Case” & “Deserter” it is with just such people that I have worked. My problem is always, ‘by what means am I going to get these people, who are real human material, to express the right emotions at the right moment?’ There are thousands of means but their successful application depends upon how exact the study of the people has been. The fundamental principle is always the same: the man (or the actor) must be placed in such a position that his reactions to the external stimulus (the question, order or an unexpected sound signal) which I have calculated and determined, shall be, more or less the expected one. To be able to create the right psychological atmosphere, it is essential for me to get into the closest contact with people I am working with. I try to meet them outside of working hours, on common grounds; try to observe their natural ways, knowing that these observations will give me material for further work.
All this is, I think, important today. It has allowed its emotions to arise from the excitement of the event, or the drama of its theme rather than from the emotions of the human beings within the picture. We have made this point earlier and I make it again, without apology, because the actor, the natural type and the element of acting are going to be important problems in the immediate future.
At the same time, there is no reason why we should follow in the footsteps of story-film. If we have individuals, let them be typical and let them be real. ‘Cinema’ can have no use for the synthetic and fabulous caricatures that populate ordinary story-film. There are hundreds of people in our everyday life that have never appeared on the screen. But before we can bring them into cinema, we must be prepared to go out and understand them. Our need is for characters who would be simply understood. They must be of the audience. We must go into the streets & homes & factories to meet them. The whole evil of the American Star System, which in its own way is a kin of ‘typage’, is that it deals with types of a false economic & social superiority. The ‘star’, for political & social reasons already explained, is nearly always an in-accessible creature, living on a scale un-obtainable by members of the audience. The ‘typage’ of the star system is an unusual typage – a gallery of Smart Alecs, whores, crooks & idealized young men and women. It is in the power of Cinema to put real men & women on the screen. The problem lies in how it can be done?
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