The Great Acting Blog: "My 5 Favourite Performances Of 2012"

Irene Jacob in The Dust Of Time (Theo Angelopoulos)

An epic performance by Jacob, in a film which spans decades. She not only manages the shift in age without fuss, but she also delivers a performance of astonishing sensitivity but which is neither self-pitying nor self-promoting - it's honest and true. An example of the high artistry which acting can be.

I blogged more fully on Irene Jacob in "The Shy Poetry Of Irene Jacob"

Andre Wilms in Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki)

A wonderful example of laid-back-cut-the-crap simplicity, which sits perfectly in the cinematic universe of Aki Kaurismaki. Wilms plays an aging ex-bohemian-turned-shoe-shiner, who hides an immigrant on the run from the police. Every moment of Wilm's performance rings utterly true, and, along with his charm, creates something warming and moving.

Thomas Doret in The Kid With A Bike (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)

An immensely powerful performance from Doret, playing an abandoned and unloved 12 year old. His scenes of rejection are heartbreaking, as is his scene involving a show of self-loathing. Doret resists the temptation to embellish his scenes with exposition and manipulate the audience, instead he is direct, and this directness is the true source of his power in this performance. Doret went a long way in changing my generally negative view of child actors. 

I blogged more fully on Doret's performance here

Denis Lavant in Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

Lavant plays a whole range of characters from an assasin to a beggar to a monster to a family man, and all during one night. It's a great role for any actor, but to which Lavant brings his intense physicality and innate strangeness. It's a unique, bravura performance, which must be seen to be believed.

Teresa Madruga in Tabu (Miguel Gomes)

Madruga's performance is marked by a sadness, and a lonliness, and which is rarely displayed openly, it is more a question of Madruga's prescence, as when she finds out a student who was meant to be staying with her now isn't, we feel her disappointment rather than see it. It is also a performance which is inflected by the film's visuals; director Gomes employs a magnificent black and white, and often the camera is static, which creates an emptiness and emotional flatness.

The Great Acting Blog: "The Shy Poetry Of Irene Jacob"

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I suppose Irene Jacob will always be inextricably linked with Krzysztof Kieslowski, and the two masterpieces she made with him: The Double Life Of Veronique, and Three Colours: Red, which made her name. I am convinced had Kieslowski lived on, he and Jacob would have made many more films together; the aesthetics of Jacob's acting and Kieslowski's cinema are utterly compatible, both marked by an unpretentious poetry and a sensitivity – no other actor is as seemless in Kieslowski's films as Jacob, infact, the BFI's Geoff Andrew wrote that Kieslowski was “making those films around her”. However, it could be said that Jacob has never quite reached the heights of those films with Kieslowski since, although it's true that after winning the best actress award at Cannes in 1994 for Red, the offers poured in, from Europe and Hollywood*, but Jacob instead retreated and took nine months off, spending most of her time “reading Tolstoy, Balzac, Singer and several autobiographies”.She worked with Louis Malle before Kieslowski, and Antonioni after, and latterly delivered a masterpiece of screen acting in Theo Angelopoulos' The Dust Of Time.

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What is unusual about Jacob on screen, is her shyness. She is never aggressive, or flamboyant, and hardly makes any attempt at intensity, even though her performances are vivid. There is a gentleness about Jacob, with a hint of melancholy. However, there is always joy in her performance, it is the energy source for all her work, and it may be re-shaped in all kinds of ways, such as sadness or confusion, depending on the needs of the moment in the scene. Jacob's performances flow from her, which sometimes gives her an ecstatic quality. Her performances are unfettered, and unmolested by vanity. There is a sensitivity and delicacy about her which can at times be heartbreaking. Her acting has the absolute ring of truth to it. As with all great actors, it is her essential goodness we respond to. Further, we also sense that her performances are coming from a deep place, they are important to her. Although she is physically small, she has a magnitude of soul, as though there is so much more to be explored, as though we are only seeing a fraction of what she may express.

 

Jacob, by her own admission, came from a “shy” family, who rarely if ever expressed their feelings. As a result, through much of her childhood, she will have repressed much of what she felt, locking it away somewhere. Then she discovers cinema:

 

“They made me laugh and cry, and that was exactly what I was waiting for in a film: to awaken me to my feelings”.

 

Suddenly those repressed feelings are stirred, and the possibility of being an actor, offers the possibility of an escape from introversion, albeit temporarily and under imaginary circumstances (ie – for the duration of the performance), and the possibility of giving expression to that repressed material. Here's Jacob again: -

 

“...the protection of a character....it's the distance that creates the poetry”.

 

The protection of a character is an interesting point – there is no character, everything the actor expresses is of himself, not of anybody else. In Jacob's case, an introvert, the objectivity of playing a character, creates a vehicle to transport the repressed material out into the world. However, she is such a captivating actor because there is a tension between her inclination for introversion and the demands of the scene (her performance). The poetry is the repressed material touched off by the actor's response to the scene, and reconfigured as truthful fiction by the actor's performance.

 

Jacob (as with all true actors), possesses a surfeit of thought and feeling brought about by shyness, and from this surfeit, Jacob creates her poetry.

 

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness - Part 1""

 

As I arrived in Cork,  the ever prolific and hardworking Rouzbeh Rashidi informed me that in addition to HE, we were to shoot some scenes for another feature film he was putting together (in collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain), and he did so in a tone of voice which suggested that shooting two feature films simultaneously was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the obvious thing to do infact.

He said he wanted to explore on camera some of the ideas I have been developing on this blog over the months, aswell as create fictional, improvised scenes, then finally explore my attitude to cinema generally, in scenes which would be both fiction and documentary. However, as the scenes progressed and as we accrued material, it was decided that the footage would form a feature film of it's own: “Boredom Of The Disgust And Monotony Of The Tediousness”.

5 OF THE BEST

Firstly, Rashidi asked me to write down my five favourite actors and actresses, on a piece of paper, and then discuss what I liked about them, or why I thought they were great. Normally an easy task – I always love a good list, and walking down street lost in my thoughts, I could probably reel off one name after another, but when someone asks you to name names, suddenly the mind goes blank. However, after some thought, I did manage to come up with five actors – (in no particular order) Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Michel Piccoli, Jack Nicholson and Jean Gabin (on my reserve list were Alain Delon and Robert De Niro). For actresses, I decided on: Tilda Swinton, Emmanuelle Beart, Irene Jacob and Delphine Seyrig, and ran out of time before thinking of my fifth (which would have been Monica Vitti). I then offered my reasons for including each. Obviously a lot was said about the excellence of each actor's technique, but, in the end, what we respond to in each actor is their personality, each of them is intrinsically compelling – and I'm not talking about them playing compelling characters, it's something in them, call it energy, call it spirit, there's just something about them that is alight....Of course, as I write this blog, I can think of many, many others I could add to the list (Dirk Bogarde anyone?).

GURU

The next set up had me expounding my theories on acting more broadly (never needing to be asked twice to do so of course) – many of which may be viewed as “controversial”, such as the fact that there is no difference between stage and camera acting, but that a lot of people make a lot of money by inventing a difference: then charging good money to explain what the difference is, then charge again to "teach" the actor how to "adapt" accordingly. The wider point, of course, is that a whole industry has sprouted up around the idealism and the ambition of young people who go into acting – and this industry is made up of “business people” who create a problem for the actor and then offer themselves as the solution (in the same way cigarettes create an aggravation for nicotine in the smoker, which can only be soothed by smoking). A classic example, is the “career guru”, who charges actors £50 an hour to assess the marketing effectiveness of their materials (ie - headshots, CVs, covering letters etc). During this hour, the actor is subjected to a comprehensive criticism of all that he has been doing to “get work”, and at the end, the guru gives him list of things to change (whether it is an improvement is moot of course). What else is the guru to do? Imagine that the desperate actor entered the guru's den, hoping to find out “where he's going wrong”, but, after only 10 minutes, the guru simply turned round and said; “congratulations! I've checked your stuff, and everything seems in order – keep doing what you're doing and success will soon be yours”,  then ushered the actor out the door? Wouldn't the actor feel cheated out of his money? Isn't he paying for the guru to criticise him?....With the £50 spent on the guru, the actor could have gone onto Amazon and bought a Flip HD camera and started making his own films.....I didn't put it this way in Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness, but my point is the actor should remind himself that all he wants to do is offer a presentation to an audience (and hopefully delight them in the process) – this way of thinking will keep him fitted for the task - all else should be kept in perspective. If our work becomes simply a marketing mechanism, it will not be long before the lies breed an all consuming self-loathing, and then what?

The next part of the Boredom Of Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness blogs, which look at the fictional improvised scenes we created.

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