Posts Tagged ‘acting’
“There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.”*…
As we unwind into the weekend, sci-fi art curator Adam Rowe, with a collection of photos of famed sci-fi characters (and monsters) taking a break…
More at: “Break Time,” from @AdamRRowe.
* Alan Cohen
###
As we give it a rest, we might recall that it was on this date in 1984 that The Terminator was released. Directed by James Cameron and produced by Gale Anne Hurd, it starred Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, a cybernetic assassin sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose unborn son will one day save mankind from extinction by Skynet, a hostile artificial intelligence in a post-apocalyptic future. Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) played a soldier sent back in time to protect Sarah. The screenplay was credited to Cameron and Hurd, while co-writer William Wisher Jr. received an “additional dialogue” credit.
Defying low pre-release expectations, The Terminator topped the United States box office for two weeks, eventually grossing $78.3 million against a modest $6.4 million budget. It is credited with launching Cameron’s film career and solidifying Schwarzenegger’s status as a leading man. The film’s success led to a franchise consisting of several sequels, a television series, comic books, novels and video games. In 2008, The Terminator was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
“So much of performing is a mind game”*…
As John Seamon explains, in describing how they remember their lines, actors are telling us an important truth about memory…
… Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know. Actors study the script, trying to understand their character and seeing how their lines relate to that character. In describing these elaborative processes, the actors assembled that evening offered sound advice for effective remembering.
Similarly, when psychologists Helga and Tony Noice surveyed actors on how they learn their lines, they found that actors search for meaning in the script, rather than memorizing lines. The actors imagine the character in each scene, adopt the character’s perspective, relate new material to the character’s background, and try to match the character’s mood. Script lines are carefully analyzed to understand the character’s motivation. This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?” Later, during a performance, this deep understanding provides the context for the lines to be recalled naturally, rather than recited from a memorized text. In his book “Acting in Film,” actor Michael Caine described this process well:
You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously…
…
Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use this strategy to enhance everyday retention. In picking up an apple at the grocers, for example, you can look at its color and size, you can say its name, and you can think of its nutritional value and use in a favorite recipe. Focusing on these visual, acoustic, and conceptual aspects of the apple correspond to shallow, moderate, and deep levels of processing, and the depth of processing that is devoted to an item or event affects its memorability. Memory is typically enhanced when we engage in deep processing that provides meaning for an item or event, rather than shallow processing. Given a list of common nouns to read, people recall more words on a surprise memory test if they previously attended to the meaning of each word than if they focused on each word’s font or sound.
Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known. Retention is enhanced because elaboration produces more meaningful associations than does shallow processing — links that can serve as potential cues for later remembering. For example, your ease of recalling the name of a specific dwarf in Walt Disney’s animated film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” depends on the cue and its associated meaning:
Try to recall the name of the dwarf that begins with the letter B.
People often have a hard time coming up with the correct name with this cue because many common names begin with the letter B and all of them are wrong. Try it again with a more meaningful cue:
Recall the name of the dwarf whose name is synonymous with shyness.
If you know the Disney film, this time the answer is easy. Meaningful associations help us remember, and elaborative processing produces more semantic associations than does shallow processing. This is why the meaningful cue produces the name Bashful…
On the art of recall: “How Actors Remember Their Lines,” an excerpt from Seamon’s book, Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us About Memory, from @mitpress.
* Joshua Bell
###
As we recollect, we might recall that it was on this date in 1952 that Guiding Light (AKA The Guiding Light) transferred from CBS Radio to CBS Television… and, as while radio actors could read from scripts, tv performers couldn’t, an enormous new occasion for the memorization of lines was created.
And indeed, there were lots and lots of lines to remember: with 72 years of radio and television runs (18,262 episodes), Guiding Light remains the longest-running soap opera, ahead of General Hospital, and is the fifth-longest-running program in all of global broadcast history.
“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature”*…
In 1982, the BBC ran a glorious nine-part series developed and hosted by John Barton, co-founder and director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A master class in playing Shakespeare, it features RSC members and alumni including Judi Dench, Ben Kingsley, Peggy Ashcroft, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack, Susan Fleetwood, Sheila Hancock, Alan Howard, Donald Sinden, Michael Williams, and more…
Indispensable for thespians, the series is every bit as rich a resource for those of us who want simply to enrich our appreciation of the Bard. All nine episodes can be streamed on Acorn or You Tube.
* Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, Scene 2
###
As we declaim, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at London’s Old Vic Theatre. A glorious piece of metatheater, the play expands on the exploits of two minor characters from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
The action of Stoppard’s play takes place mainly “in the wings” of Shakespeare’s, with brief appearances of major characters from Hamlet who enact fragments of the original’s scenes. Between these episodes, the two protagonists voice their confusion at the progress of events occurring onstage without them in Hamlet.
The title is taken directly from the final scene of Hamlet. In an earlier scene, Prince Hamlet has been exiled to England by the treacherous King of Denmark (his uncle Claudius, who of course has murdered Hamlet’s father to obtain the throne). En route to England, Hamlet discovers a letter from King Claudius which is being carried to England by Hamlet’s old but now untrusted friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The letter commands that Hamlet be put to death upon his arrival in England. Hamlet rewrites the letter to command that instead, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be put to death. He then escapes back to Denmark. By the end of Shakespeare’s play, Prince Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude all lie dead.
“Comedy too can sometimes discern what is right”*…
What’s old is new again…
When Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion released ‘WAP’ in August 2020, ‘conservative’ commentators such as Tucker Carlson expressed outrage that the song might corrupt ‘your granddaughters’; Alyssa Rosenberg in the Washington Post celebrated it as an ‘ode to female sexual pleasure’. The video featured the two long-lashed goddesses twerking their way through a gilded McMansion in fabulous candy-coloured outfits, like bethonged Disney princesses. The lyrics create a cluster of ambiguities: are the speakers supposed to be sex workers struggling to pay their college tuition and running in fear from ‘the cops’, or wealthy A-list celebrities? Or are they, as Black women in a white man’s world, both? Do they really want anyone but each other? Do they own the house through which they strut? The song mocks its listeners and viewers for yearning for these superior beings in their state of limitless desire. At the same time, its sly laughter invites us to feel, for a couple of minutes, part of their glittering, multicoloured world.
The song’s genius lies in its inventiveness: its mastery of rhythm, and its innovative abundance of metaphors for the ‘wet-ass pussy’ of its title. You come for the nasty, but you stay for the poetry. The two artists celebrate the power of their bodies to express desire and joy, but more fundamentally, they celebrate their gushing waterfalls of linguistic ‘flow’. The joke of the title hinges on the fact that language is both literal and metaphorical: one body part is used as a linguistic modifier for another. The most memorable lines contain no words that would be unsuitable for a nursery school sing-along, but provide brilliantly funny images: ‘Swipe your nose like a credit card’, ‘Get a bucket and a mop’, or – climactically – ‘Macaroni in a pot’. It’s wild and down to earth at the same time, and for ever changes the way you think about cooking spaghetti.
Ancient Athenian comedy of the fifth century BCE – mostly known to us through the work of Aristophanes – can be usefully compared to a number of different modern genres. Like traditional TV sitcoms, it featured typical or stereotypical characters, and showcased their ridiculous lust, avarice, stupidity and ambition. Like modern stand-up comedians or late-night TV hosts, comic poets included speeches in their plays in which they railed at the audience about the state of society and their personal grievances. Like Saturday Night Live, comedy in fifth-century Athens included caricatures of people who might well have been in the audience – such as Socrates, Euripides or the politician Cleon. Like The Simpsons or 30 Rock, the dialogue had a high rate of jokes per minute, and catered to multiple different audience sensibilities, including a taste for lavatory humour. As in Broadway musicals or on the Disney Channel, characters in lavish costumes were liable to burst into song and dance at any moment – although, unlike on Hannah Montana, the male characters wore large strap-on phalluses. Old Comedy anticipated modern sci-fi, and shows like The Good Place, in its willingness to carry out fantastical thought experiments (talking frogs, a city of birds, a singing chorus of metaphysically inclined clouds, or, weirdest of all, women with real political power), and considered their social and political repercussions. Like pantomime or Punch and Judy, it included formulaic riffs on falling over, violence and cross-dressing.
But the lush comic hip-hop of Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B is one of the most useful modern analogues, because it illustrates the core element of Old Comedy that is most often obscured in contemporary Anglophone translations – the flow. Aristophanes, like the creators of ‘WAP’, was a musician, songwriter, choreographer and poet, and his linguistic effects depend, like theirs, on the artful manipulation of rhythm and sound in words and imagery. The poetic affinity between rap and Old Comedy is explored in Spike Lee’s film Chi-Raq, a hip-hop adaptation of Lysistrata set on the South Side of Chicago…
Aristophanes and rap: “Punishment By Radish,” from Emily Wilson (@EmilyRCWilson), the translator of a wonderful edition of The Odyssey.
* Aristophanes
###
As we LOL, we might we might send dramatic birthday greetings to Nathan Field; he was born on this date in 1587. A contemporary and colleague of Shakespeare, Field was– like the Bard– both a dramatist and an actor.
As an author, Field wrote alone (e.g., the comedy A Woman Is a Weathercock), and in collaboration with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger (e.g., the tragicomedy The Knight of Malta). As an actor he ended his career in the Kings Men, working alongside Shakespeare, where he appeared in Shakespeare’s plays and in Ben Jonson‘s Volpone and The Alchemist, among other productions.
“Something can always go wrong”*…
When what’s old is new again…
When Dennis Lehane joked in 2011 that the only real difference between Greek tragedy and noir was that in the former characters fall from great heights and in the latter they drop from the curb, he was pinpointing something simultaneously mythic and fatalistic about the American crime fiction tradition: the idea of cautionary tales being told at street level. “Whichever way you turn,” broods the antihero of Edgar G. Ulmer’s axiomatic Detour (1945), “fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” The same anxious malaise inflecting detective stories of Depression-era novelists like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler—whose twisty plots doubled as picaresque guided tours through a newfangled urban wilderness—would manifest in the flow of postwar thrillers that either literally adapted their contents or else reconfigured their themes for a visual medium. Stories set in moral grey zones and gritty environments were transformed into cinematic shadow plays by filmmakers who recognized and exploited the material’s expressionist potential. A movie like Fritz Lang’s wonderfully wicked The Woman in the Window (1944) sutures the seams between the elegant, sinister poeticism of Weimar-era horror and the hard-driving, irrepressible energy of pre-Code American crime pictures, an unholy matrimony yielding plenty of significant offspring. In 1946, writing about a group of American movies previously banned in France during the Nazi occupation—mostly signed by European émigrés like Lang who’d fled for the Hollywood Hills—critic Nino Frank evocatively referred to them as “dark films,” a coinage whose actual originality has been debated but proved lingeringly evocative. The description was taken as a workable industrial template for decades by Hollywood studios and insurgent independents alike.
Though noir was and remains an amorphous concept, it does have a few instantly identifiable features: like any genuinely red-blooded and pleasurable entertainment, you know it when you see it. The commercial appeal of noir lay primarily in its natural conduciveness to sex and violence, both always lurking and often intertwined in defiance of everyday moralism and official censorship, while its critical viability owed to its existential dimension, a spectrum broad enough to accommodate a muckraker like James M. Cain alongside Albert Camus. The latter famously said that Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice was a deep influence on his own 1942 L’étranger; in both books, outwardly mild-mannered protagonists momentarily get away with murder, imagining themselves privy in the act’s aftermath to some secret knowledge about what Camus’s narrator calls “benign indifference of the world.” Or, as a pair of noir addicts put it in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), a movie branded with the mark of Cain: “it’s hard to explain, but seeing it whole gives you some peace.”…
“The Same Old Song: A Guide to Neonoir” Adam Nayman (@brofromanother) leads us from Point Blank and Chinatown through Blood Simple and Night Moves to The Last Seduction and Momento.
* “Visser” (M. Emmet Walsh), Blood Simple
###
As we get dark, we might send thrilling birthday greetings to Arthur Zwerling; he was born on this date in 1914. Better known by his professional name, Jeff Corey, he was a stage and screen actor and director (whose work included noirs like The Man Who Wouldn’t Die and the radio series The Adventures of Philip Marlowe).
Corey’s career was interrupted when he was blackilisted in the early 1950s, so he turned to teaching– and became one of the most influential acting coaches in Hollywood. His students, at various times, included Robert Blake, James Coburn, Richard Chamberlain, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Michael Forest, James Hong, Luana Anders, Sally Kellerman, Shirley Knight, Bruce Lee, Penny Marshall, Jack Nicholson, Roger Corman, Darrell M. Smith, Diane Varsi, Sharon Tate, Rita Moreno, Leonard Nimoy, Sally Forrest, Anthony Perkins, Rob Reiner, Robert Towne, Barbra Streisand, and Robin Williams. He resumed his acting career in the the 60s.
You must be logged in to post a comment.