HSP 134 Is Complete

 

HSP (134) / 10min Colour Stereo DSLR Ireland 2012

 With Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi

 

homosapiensproject.tumblr.com

The Great Acting Blog: "A New Body For A Lost Soul"

 

“Homo Sapiens Project is an ongoing series of personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi.... The films produced range from cryptic, often darkly surreal film diaries to impressionistic portraits of places and people, from found footage séances to semi-documentary monologues. Formally, they encompass everything from highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images. They are also frequently often suffused with an eerie sense of mystery reminiscent of Horror and Classic Sci-Fi cinema. “

 

The Call had been my one-play from 2008, which I wrote and produced myself aswell as performed. The plays is about Mickey, a near-psychotic entrepeneur who rings up a rival in order to boast about his recent successes, but finds himself locked into an ever more extreme battle of one-upmanship, over girls, cars and money. It's structured around a telephone call in such a way that the audience only hears Mickey's side of the conversation, and had proved to be a very challenging piece of work, and constituted an important artistic breakthrough for me. However, my only record of the performance had been a scratchy DVD of one of the rehearsals, which had been lost until I stumbled upon it year or so ago, copying it to my hardrive, and there it languished for months.

I decided recently to send the recording to Rashidi, because I knew he liked to re-work old footage for Homo Sapiens Project. And I was not disapointed. Using digital post-production techniques, Rashidi transformed the material into a stunning new film: HSP 131 (ie – the 131^st film in Homo Sapiens Project so far). The file I sent him was a 100MB MPEG, which he then converted and blew-up into a 40 GIG Apple Pro-Res 422 (HQ), it is a half hour multiple exposure of one continuous take. Rashidi eloborates on the aesthetic aspects of HSP 131: -

“The nature of HSP usually are rooted in horror and science fiction cinema with heavily presecence of eerie mood and mysteriousness. In this particular episode elements such as visual multi-layer activities, positive/negative imagery, sepia-tone, dark/drone ambient soundscape, and use of very light flickering effect are together in order to serve the enigmatic experience,and expose the situation of the uncanny character of the film”.

And further, on the new life given to my performance of The Call in HSP 131: -

“If we assume that the performance of James Devereaux is the heart and soul of the film, then it needed a brain/bodyi n order for it to come back to cinematic life...when the performance is good, the soul is there. The image and sound can be heavily changed and altered later on, thanks to digital cinema. Like we did in HSP 131”.

I think this is an important and fundamental point, which I am still coming to terms with. I thought that my work in The Call was essentially “dead” - the performances on stage can only live on in the memory of the audience, and the recording of the rehearsal was never really going to see the light of day, but Rashidi has given the performance a new life, or, to put it another way, a new body for a lost soul. I've written before on this blog, that it is the actor's job to be truthful, while the filmmaker supplies the fantasy (the actor is Alice in the filmmaker's Wonderland, as it were). Digital technology in the right hands then, possesses the power to take the same, truthful performance, and create a new, fantastical context for it.

Homo Sapiens 131, Is Now Complete

HSP (131) / 30min Sepia-Tone Stereo DV UK Ireland 2012

The Homo Sapiens Project is a series of personal and highly experimental works by Rouzbeh Rashidi. 131 has been made/salvaged from a 100MB MPEG, which had been a very rough recording of a rehearsal for my 2008 one-man play, The Call. Rashidi has converted/blown it up into a 40 GIG Apple ProRes 422 (HQ), to create a new film that is a half an hour continuous  multiple exposure of one continuous take.

The films which make-up the Homo Sapiens Project, are usually rooted in horror and classic science fiction cinema, and possess an eerie mood and a mysteriousness atmosphere. In 131, elements such as visual multi-layer activities, positive/negative imagery, sepia-tone, dark/drone ambient soundscape and use of a light, flickering effect are combined together in order to serve the enigmatic experience and expose the situation of the uncanny character at the centre of the film.

Personally, I am delighted this performance has been given a new life within this impressive context.

 

 

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Reality & Illusion"

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All stills by Rouzbeh Rashidi

 

The Homo Sapiens Project is an ongoing series of personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi, who asked me to contribute to the project by talking about myself on camera for 40 minutes (few actors need to be asked twice to do this). We shot the interview in Dublin while filming HE, along with additional footage in various parts of the city. After seeing the finished film, Rashidi remarked : -

“it is very interesting because there are no lines in this film between documentary or fiction. The film goes beyond all of this and your performance (the interview) seems completely fictional and staged.”

This is strange because in the film I simply talk about what I've been doing as an actor, there was no preparation – the camera was turned on me, I was asked a question and just spoke. So, how can it seem “fictional and staged”. I believe what is being referred to here is the precision of movement and speech, that everything which is not germane to answering the question is censored out, and this censoring creates a “deliberateness”, a control, which could also be viewed as staged.

But how does this situation come about? Well, the tools of the actor are his body, his voice, his personality. A profound understanding of these tools and how they function is crucial if he is to develop into an effective performer (you cannot improve something you don't understand). Much of the actor's time then, is spent observing himself, making improvements where necessary and discarding bad habits. This requires enormous will and self-control, which can be built up and strengthened over time, after facing up to real challenges. Ultimately, this self-monitoring becomes habitual: I've always loved the story about actor-impresario and co-founder of Dublin's Gate Theatre, Michael Mac Liammoir, who, upon learning of the death of his partner Hilton Edwards, walked downstairs grief stricken, when he caught himself in the mirror and thought: “ah, so that's what I look like when I have just learned about the death of a loved one”. Now THAT'S an actor (incidentally, the report of Edwards' death proved to be false). The point is, the actor is continually working for “the moment where you have to deliver”.

 

An actor's performance should not be pretended to, regardless of the fiction of a script, the performance should be an actuality – in short, it should be true. The actor renders his performance truthful by giving himself something concrete to accomplish in the scene, by giving himself an action .* Further, this aesthetic can also be applied when the actor is not performing, in his everyday life, strengthening the aesthetic, and making it habitual so that it will kick in and help the actor when he is under pressure – every moment of the actor's life then, is effectively contributing to his growth as an artist. The net effect is that the actor's work becomes indistinguishable from his personality.

The combination of the actor's intense self-awareness and the habitual employment of actions, can make the illusory seem real, and the real seem illusory, and sometimes it can make something seem both real and illusory simultaneously. Perhaps then, the distinction is false?

 

 

*For example, if character A is trying to get character B to leave her husband and dead end marriage, and,run away with him to start a new life, then an action could be “to sell a great idea” - point is, selling a great idea is something you can actually do, and it doesn't need “preparation”.