The Great Acting Blog: "There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind"

This week, I journeyed to Cork City, to attend a screening of HE  (the new feature film by Rouzbeh Rashidi in which I play the lead role), which was wonderfully hosted by The Guesthouse. Rouzbeh and I participated in a Q & A session after the screening, and I very much enjoyed answering the few questions about acting which came my way, especially in light of the unusual, highly collborative methods Rouzbeh and I employ. I found it enriching to engage with the audience in this direct way, and it was pleasing to see that the film was very well recieved.

 Also while in Cork, production was set in motion for There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind, the fourth feature film collaboration between myself and Rouzbeh - it's a fragmented, experimental, horror film, with a melancholic inflection, and will be shot over the next year in various countries. The film also features Maximillian Le Cain in a leading role. Visually, the film will again be driven by Rouzbeh's high visual artistry, and I will again create scenes in response to brief notes given to me by the director. There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind marks a slight change of approach for us however, in the sense that long monologues have been prominent in our previous films, whereas in this new film, dialogue will be extremely limited, although a voiceover will be added upon completion of filming. So the scenes we shot in Cork then, were largely physical, which is to say I was expressing myself through movement and actions, which is a form of acting I particularly love, because I love to find ways of expressing the internal life of the character through physical movements and the handling of objects: using these tools to show states of being like; distraction, pre-occuption, or an important thought suddenly entering my mind. There was one scene in particular, where my character is waiting to play an important game of chess, and the key challenge was moving between being mildly aggitated and nervous, to trying to alleviate this state by finding ways of distracting myself, to sudden bursts of intense clarity of thought, where my character has come up with some moves to defeat his opponent. Agitation and nervousness can be done physically through the body, using a certain amount of physical tension and intensity of concentration. In order to alleviate this state, I scanned books on the shelf, but with no particular object in mind other than distraction. And finally, in order to show an important thought coming into my mind, I grabbed my pen and scribbled notes into my notebook. It's important to stress that each of these beats was given to me by Rouzbeh just before we were to shoot the scene, and my job was to express the meaning of the scene using these beats - and the meaning of the scene is: waiting for important events. We continued in this fashion for several more scenes, employing the notions of distraction  and agitation and thought, sometimes using different objects to express the moment (a Super 8 camera in one scene, for example), but the notebook was always present. Whether we are creating dialogue, or physical actions, the idea which unifies our approach in all the scenes (here, and in the other films where I have worked with Rouzbeh) is; improvising in response to the immediate situation, and so create "moments of cinema".

Work on There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind continues early next year.

Persistencies Of Sadness & Still Days (Feature Film), Is Now Complete

"Persistencies of Sadness & Still Days", a four hour feature film by Maximilian Le Cain and Rouzbeh Rashidi. Structured in two sections or "takes" of two hours each, this dream-like, experimental project offers two complementary explorations of cinematic form that skirt around possible narratives, ducking through a series of fluctuating audio-visual categories and intensities.

 

 

For more information about the film, please visit: 

 

lecain.blogspot.com

rouzbehrashidi.com

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Performance Without Rehearsal"

 

As I noted in the previous blog, there were no speeches or dialogues to motor my performance because all of that work had been completed in Dublin. In Cork, I only had my face and body and pure physical actions to express myself with. As always when working with Rashidi, I am only briefed about the specific actions of a scene shortly before we come to shoot it, Cork was no different. However, and unusually for me, when given my instructions for each scene this time, I didn't need to convert those instructions into an doable action , as I still felt “full” from my work in Dublin, and I simply thought that that energy would fuel me. Essentially then, I was working almost completely intuitively, however, my tasks for each scene were more concrete than my tasks in Dublin; for example: unwrapping the packaging around a bottle, or making a cup of coffee. So, I had concrete points  in the scenes to give structure to my performance, which is different from only having improvised dialogue where you have to magic something from nothing. Still, without putting my instructions through my usual process, I wasn't sure what I would be capable of delivering.

As soon as the scenes started, I felt an inner emotional intensity, which rarely manifested itself physically, but it gave me energy, which lead to an intensity of thought. I began to feel as though the stakes were high (which for the fiction of the film, they were), everything I did seemed to take on the utmost importance. There is a scene where I buy some liquid from a sort of apothecary, played by Maximilian Le Cain, and my concentration became furious – it was almost overwhelming, but at the same time I had to focus it and give it direction, which resulted in a tension coupled with control and reserve – a combination just right for the character.

So how can this performance come about without rehearsals or conscious application?

Well, it's possible that rehearsals are overrated (certainly lengthy rehearsals are) – an heretical statement in our age of the goody-two-shoes, middle-class, industrial-earnest-pseudo-art, where we're supposed to have an “idea” for every line of dialogue,  where we pretend that “drama games” are anything other than waste of time, where the actor is  told if he's not willing “to make a fool of himself” then he is not a real actor (how dare the actor even think he can own his own work) and where we are supposed to pretend that “research” is interesting and useful, and that use of the imagination is a mere self-indulgence – the truth is, acting belongs to the brash, arrogant individualist with a hyperactive fantasy life, and all the attendant gak which has built up around the actor's ambition  should be shoved to one side, and ignored. The other important point however, is that the actions I had chosen for myself four months previously in Dublin, were now working  for me in Cork. During that four month break, the work I had done in Dublin would have been churning around in my sub-conscious (especially as I knew I would be coming back to do more scenes, and my mind would not have jettisoned the material completely, but put it in storage somewhere), which then expressed itself during the scenes in Cork – hence, I didn't feel the need to find new actions for myself. It's a similar situation to the screenwriter, who reaches a dead end with one of his scripts, so he takes a break from it for a few months, but when he returns to it, he is easily able to find solutions to problems which had previously seemed insurmountable. And that is the whole point of using actions : it works for the actor, organizing and directing his performance, which then leaves the actor free to play.

(An)Other Irish Cinema: Maximilian Le Cain

The third and final filmmaker of (An)Other Irish Cinema, and the most prolific, is Maximilian Le Cain....

Maximilian Le Cain (born 1978) has made more than forty short and medium-length films and videos over the past decade. He is also a film critic whose writings have appeared in a broad range of international film journals, most notably Senses of Cinema, and in several books. He is editor of Cork Film Centre’s online experimental film magazine Experimental Conversations.

He has written of his always formally experimental work:

My culture is cinema, including experimental film. There is cinema and what is called ‘reality’. There is the body, mine in this instance, and then there is the night. There are limits, failures and overwhelming sensations. Sound, image, silence: oblivion. It is at the obscure intersection of all these that I jot down my audio-visual sketches. Perhaps a bid to reconcile these elements? More likely, simply a place to exist with accuracy. Movement on the cusp of exhaustion and decay, creation in a time when every film has been made. But the energy persists and the images keep moving, moving in darkness, ceaselessly linking the body and the night in a multitude of shifting rhythms.

For more information, please visit

 

www.lecain.blogspot.com
http://www.expcinema.com/wikien/Maximilian_Le_Cain

For a full filmography, see: