Nuts4R2 Reviews Rouzbeh Rashidi's Bipedality

BI FI Bipedality Ireland 2010 Directed by Rouzbeh Rashidi Experimental Film Group Bipedality is yet another of director Rouzbeh Rashidi’s “slow burn” movies. And by slow burn I mean it starts working on you right away but the power of it crawls slowly up your brainstem without you at first noticing it. Although, having said that... it has to be noted that the first couple of really strong shots in this film don’t so much crawl as, well... rather they sit you up and shake you and make you pay attention. The film starts, you see, with two quite achingly beautiful tracking shots of an industrial landscape by a river and I just wish I’d at some point have gotten to see this on a bigger venue than just the screen of my Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, these kinds of films just don’t get cinema releases. The two shots pan up and down in their constant pursuit of travelling the length of the river and allowing viewers to take in certain details of the landscape... and these are accompanied by the sound of rain and thunder. These are pretty much the only moving camera shots in this whole piece. In anybody else’s movie, this might be considered a typical opening play at an establishing shot... but this is Rashidi we’re talking about here. If you’ve seen any of his movies before (or even read my reviews) then you’ll know he’s just not going to be that interested in leaving it at that and, sure enough, he soon cuts to a shot of another landscape but the effect is jarring because it’s a) static and b) got a completely different soundtrack to the previous two shots... basically an audio representation of bird song and tranquility. Thus both the audio and the visual form, from moving to static, has a jarring effect on the viewer. After a while we cut to the two main and, but for a few shots near the end, only characters in the movie. A man and a woman at, presumably, the start of a relationship (although they don’t know it yet) talking at length on a bench (and I suspect a lot of this was done without any script) about a five year old child who has gone missing since an incident involving a fire and their perceptions of a mother who has become desperate to find this child (naturally). This conversation, like all of the rest of the sequences in this film, is punctuated by intercut shots of different landscapes using different filters and treatments while the sound of the conversation continues on. It seems to me that, from this first conversation onwards, the film then follows pretty much a pattern of a reflection of itself in terms of structure... the only thing really missing is two tracking shots to close out the picture. I’ll explain this a little more in a while but it’s interesting that the syntax I’ve used to describe the echoing scene structure is “reflection” because, it seems to me, Rouzbeh Rashidi’s film-making is all about inhabiting a “cinema of reflection”. I’ve noticed this before in his films but the words that are coming out of the characters mouths... even the way they interact with each other (with or without verbal stimuli), always confounds a conclusive comprehension of the scene because, like in real life perhaps, you are constantly aware that what is not being said by the characters is much more important than what’s actually coming out of their mouths. Everyone always seems to be looking internally for some kind of universal truth which will help to get them through their day... or at least make them clearly understood. It’s like the characters are constantly exploring their inner dialogue trying to nail something which can’t quite be nailed. Now, you could say thay this is an expected outcome of the process of the acting if, as I believe, a lot of Rashidi’s films are improvised in terms of the craft. However, I personally believe the auteur is at work from the director in this matter because, this quality may well be exactly what Rashidi is looking for and why he so favours the form of improvisation over standard scripting techniques. I suspect he gives limitations and topics as opposed to handing out pages and pages of dialogue to his actors. It always feels like his characters are looking for some sense of closure from the situation they’re in and Rashidi rarely shows these situations or catalysts in his work, just the “reflection” on these incidents. Frankly though, if these two particular characters are looking for some kind of relevance and closure from each other or by looking within themselves... well, they’re pretty much buggered if they’re in a Rashidi movie. Although, to be fair, in this movie there may well be a certain closure of a kind (if you don’t think about it too much)... but there’s not a whole lot of closure for the audience on this directors films, or at least that’s how it seems to me. There’s a sense of trying out different visual techniques in this movie too. One brave shot has the two characters carrying out their conversation as a reflection of themselves in a moving body of water which is in front of them, even though there's been no visual indication in any of the previous shots that they are in front of said water. After 25 minutes, the scene changes to an interior shot of a kitchen where the same guy and gal have obviously moved on in their relationship with each other. They are obviously living together but are having a bad time as their relationship has ground to a halt by the attitude of the woman to the object of her self reflection and inner life. It's uncomfortable to watch the couple bat around the death of their relationship, even as the discussion is both beautifully framed and again, like the earlier conversation, is punctuated by insert shots of beautiful scenery. And a lot of this scene is juxtaposed with the sounds of rain and thunder to enhance the tension beneath the words. I wonder if Rashidi chooses the moments in a scene to cut away to an insert shot with a specific design or whether the positioning within the flow of the film is based on masking certain parts of the scenes “out” which Rashidi is less happy with. Again, there are some really great contrasts of texture and in one notable cut away, density is created with a shot of a forest which brings the simplicity of the textures and composition of the actual kitchen setting back into sharp relief on the return to the master shot. After 15 minutes or so of this we cut to the guy having a shower... the woman watches him, although he is unaware of this. She seems underwhelmed. The two regroup on a sofa for another round of non-communication... this time, silent non-communication. This goes into a minute or so of black before we cut back to the characters again as they have moved in a little more in time and are once again sitting on a bench and talking... athough it's not the same location as the earlier sequence. The woman seems less interested in being distant... but she's making no sense and a lot of this stuff reminds me of a past relationship I once had. Sometimes it's hard to unravel the truth of a matter if one of you is becoming slightly unhinged. It's actually a little frightening how the non-sequitur of the woman's dialogue, with her talk of knowing where the child mentioned in that first conversation disappeared to, can be used to indicate the fragility of us all... and reveal the truth that we are all, deep down, strangers to each other. The missing child is, of course, a standard Rashidi set up to non-disclosure... although there is, surprisingly, a certain small sense of tension-release to this film at a non-verbal level... as the couple kiss passionately at the end. All this serves to increase awareness that the words of the characters are mostly irrelevant... as if Rashidi uses dialogue as mere window dressing to the more important aspects of dramatic tone and visual contrast in his work. I said earlier that there was a certain reflecting quality to the scene structure and now I’ve got this far in the review I can reveal that it seems to go something like this... TYPE A: Conversation in external location. TYPE B: Conversation in internal location. TYPE C: Shower scene (bodies of water and the sound of them seem to be a running theme for this movie). TYPE B: Conversation in internal location. TYPE A: Conversation in external location. Now I don’t, for certain, know if the director planned this structure to push the “dual” element implied by a title like Bipedality (or just made this visually implicit by limiting the majority of the shots to a cast of two) but I’d like to think that there was a certain plan to structuring this movie like this. Perhaps to just pull the rug out and disorient the audience a little more by confounding the predictability of ending on a set of tracking shots (as I was expecting the film to end with while I was figuring out the scene sequence while watching). But this is what Rashidi does. He doesn’t make films to pander to the narrative expectancy of an audience. He makes films which will challenge (to a certain degree) and certainly inspire an audience to look beyond their expected world view as it applies to watching movies. No answers are given and no answers are necessarily conceived... just a set of cinematic rocks to rub together to produce a certain friction of thought. The film Kill List, which had a mainstream cinema release earlier this year, does much the same thing but in a slightly more commercially acceptable manner. I think what I’m trying to say here is that, as usual with a Rashidi movie, you get back what you put into it. Your place as a member of the audience is not to question why or fathom the problems and concerns of the character... it is to look at the characters and see them in both the simplicity and complexity of life and to draw your own sense of meaning (or lack thereof) from the visual and aural collisions on screen. And if you are willing to allow yourself to experience these kinds of films in these kinds of ways... then your rewards from viewing these kinds of movies will come to you and bring the kind of mental enrichment you require, without the necessity for clarification or meaning or, in this case, a sense of a mystery solved. Lay down your tools and receive. Read more by Nuts4R2 at www.nuts4r2.blogspot.com

The Audition - Short Film - Teaser 1

 

The more I work on The Audition, the more I see that it is a gentle little film, very slight, I would like to say in the Chekhovian mould....Emotions are transfered as are fears. I still have much work to do on it, and thought I'd post this fun little teaser.

The Great Acting Blog: "Why James Stewart Quit"

They do not make them like this anymore.

“I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, “aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?” Tracy replied, “What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?” You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks”. - James Stewart.

I once read somewhere that James Stewart quit acting because he no longer liked himself on screen. This makes a lot of sense to me, I need to like my work. It'll never be perfect, but it's important I'm on the right trajectory, in terms of becoming the ideal actor I'd like to be. If I was not on this trajectory, then I would either quit, or fix it.

Now, it's always a shock when I first see myself on screen, because my performance rarely conforms to the idea of the performance I had in my head, nor does it resemble how I felt while I was giving it. If we're dealing with the moment honestly, then our performances never will be how we expected them to be, all sorts of bits and pieces emerge which we had not intended, infact - it couldn't be how we expected it, unless we impose our ideal on the moment rather than dealing with it as it unfolds, and the truth gets lost. However, once the first shock wears off, we can begin to appreciate our performance for what it is, and calmly debrief from there. Acceptance then, is the first step to improving our work – accept that what we see infront of us is the actual performance we gave. If we get all neurotic about our work, then it will be very hard to progress, because it means we cannot truthfully reflect upon what we've done – we will either repress it and pretend that our performance was ideal, or freak out because our performance was not the ideal we saw in our head. I say forget the ideal we saw in our head, it is a red herring, we should compare what we have done to the needs of the scene instead, to do that is useful and rational.

However, we should also compare our performance to our definition of what great acting is, we should compare it to the actor we are striving to become. Again, this will lead to effective improvement – if, for example, you think you need superb diction in order to be a great actor but you mumble, then you know what you need to do. I thought it strange that James Stewart quit for the reason he did – surely a man who enjoyed one the most glittering careers there ever was, possessed the capacity to fix something he didn't like about his work? Afterall, he probably didn't get to where he did by being sloppy and lazy. Then it occurred to me that Stewart must have seen something in his work which not only compared unfavourably with his notion of great acting, but that that something must have been beyond his power to put right. He gave his last onscreen performance at the age of 78, so we might conclude that whatever it was, it might have something to do with age, either way, it convinced him he was no longer capable of attaining his great acting ideal.

As Stewart says, you've got to develop you're own style and pursue it – I take this to mean developing your own aesthetic. It's about being an individual creative artist rather than an employee. It also happens to be more pleasurable, meaningful, and fulfilling to work for your own satisfaction rather than trying to please other people, which rarely works anyway, and usually ends up with a loss of self-respect. Define the ideal actor you want to become, and pursue that ideal, and discard anyone or anything which seeks to block that pursuit, and if it's you yourself blocking it, well, then, you know what to do.

The Great Acting Blog: "When James Stewart Quit"

 

They do not make them like this anymore.

“I've always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, “aren't you tired of always playing Tracy?” Tracy replied, “What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?” You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks”. - James Stewart.

 

I once read somewhere that James Stewart quit acting because he no longer liked himself on screen. This makes a lot of sense to me, I need to like my work. It'll never be perfect, but it's important I'm on the right trajectory, in terms of becoming the ideal actor I'd like to be. If I was not on this trajectory, then I would either quit, or fix it.

Now, it's always a shock when I first see myself on screen, because my performance rarely conforms to the idea of the performance I had in my head, nor does it resemble how I felt while I was giving it. If we're dealing with the moment honestly, then our performances never will be how we expected them to be, all sorts of bits and pieces emerge which we had not intended, infact - it couldn't be how we expected it, unless we impose our ideal on the moment rather than dealing with it as it unfolds, and the truth gets lost. However, once the first shock wears off, we can begin to appreciate our performance for what it is, and calmly debrief from there. Acceptance then, is the first step to improving our work – accept that what we see infront of us is the actual performance we gave. If we get all neurotic about our work, then it will be very hard to progress, because it means we cannot truthfully reflect upon what we've done – we will either repress it and pretend that our performance was ideal, or freak out because our performance was not the ideal we saw in our head. I say forget the ideal we saw in our head, it is a red herring, we should compare what we have done to the needs of the scene instead, to do that is useful and rational.

However, we should also compare our performance to our definition of what great acting is, we should compare it to the actor we are striving to become. Again, this will lead to effective improvement – if, for example, you think you need superb diction in order to be a great actor but you mumble, then you know what you need to do. I thought it strange that James Stewart quit for the reason he did – surely a man who enjoyed one the most glittering careers there ever was, possessed the capacity to fix something he didn't like about his work? Afterall, he probably didn't get to where he did by being sloppy and lazy. Then it occurred to me that Stewart must have seen something in his work which not only compared unfavourably with his notion of great acting, but that that something must have been beyond his power to put right. He gave his last onscreen performance at the age of 78, so we might conclude that whatever Stewart saw in his work that he didn't like, it might have had something to do with age, either way, it convinced him he was no longer capable of attaining his great acting ideal.

As Stewart says, you've got to develop you're own style and pursue it – I take this to mean developing your own aesthetic. It's about being an individual creative artist rather than an employee. It also happens to be more pleasurable, meaningful, and fulfilling to work for your own satisfaction rather than trying to please other people, which rarely works anyway, and usually ends up with a loss of self-respect. Define the ideal actor you want to become, and pursue that ideal, and discard anyone or anything which seeks to block that pursuit, and if it's you yourself blocking it, well, then, you know what you need to do.

 

 

 

 

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Character Work: Letting The Character Lead" By Emmanuelle Chaulet

She studied acting and the Michael Chekhov technique with Robert Cordier in Paris, France and with Mala Powers of the International Chekhov Institute USA. A Fulbright Scholar at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York, she is a theatre director, teacher and actress with over 20 years of experience in theatre and film both in France and the U.S. Lead film roles include “Boyfriend and Girlfriends” by French New Wave master Eric Rohmer, and “All the Vermeers in New York” by Jon Jost.

Character Work: Letting The Character Lead

 

When I recently responded to a blog post on character preparation, I brought up the idea, central to my method, the Energize technique, of “Letting the Character Lead.” James asked me to share with you an excerpt of my book A BALANCING ACT on that subject.

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Here it is, found in Chapter VII:

 

Try to “hear” the character speak.

Begin to cooperate with your character,

asking questions and getting its “visible” answers.

Michael Chekhov

 

A character, sir, can always ask a man who he is.

Because a character truly has a life of his own,

 marked by his own characteristics, because of which he is always “someone.”

 On the other hand, a man – I’m not saying you at this moment –

 a man in general, can be “nobody.”

Luigi Pirandello

 

 

The outside-in approach

The theatre world has been divided on this issue for centuries. Some say it is better to create a character from personal knowledge and past experiences (Lee Strasberg, for example). Others say that imagination must be the primary foundation for the actor’s work, that form precedes content and that by working on the form of the expression, the body language and the gesture, the emotion will follow (Michael Chekhov, for example). I have been trained both ways and I see truth in each. I am a strong believer in using both in some ways. The order and sequence in which the actor needs to approach the role doesn’t really matter. However, I truly feel that an actor must get inspiration from outside his personality or he will forever play himself in various situations. Yet, he also needs to root his performance within his own subconscious, in order to be truthful and to exploit the various facets of his personality. After all, actors are chameleons. They love changing personas, and they naturally have an ability to do so, or they would not have become actors.

The first phase of the Energize technique is based on the outside-in approach. In the next chapter we will see how to integrate the inside-out approach via the use of sub-personalities. Ultimately, an actor should use both simultaneously. I conceptualize it this way: starting from inside to open the aspect of oneself that is most appropriate for this particular role, then later reaching outside to wear the new “skin” of the character.

But first, one needs to get to know and befriend the character. Stanislavski called that “falling in love” with the character. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello[i] puts the following words in the mouth of the Father, one of the six “immaterial” characters who tries to convince a director and his acting troupe to perform their story:

 

Father: One is born to life in many ways and in many forms: as a tree, or as a stone, as water, as a butterfly…or as a human. And one can also be born as a character … “He who has the luck to be born as a live character can even laugh at death. He will never die. The one who will die is the man, the writer, the instrument of the creation. The creation never dies …  They live eternally, because, being live germs, they had the good fortune to find a fertile matrix, a fantasy that knew how to raise and nourish them, to make them live for eternity! …

DIRECTOR: All of this is fine. But what is it that you want here?

Father: We want to live, sir!

DIRECTOR: For eternity?

Father [referring to the actors]: No sir, only for a moment…in them.

 

Listening to the character, befriending it

One of the first exercises I do with my actors is a relaxation/visualization focused on the character. After a good lying down relaxation on the mat, during which time I take them through all the chakras, aura, and different elements of the energetic system while doing a self-clearing, I ask performers to visualize the character they are going to play. Using their five senses, I ask them to observe, feel, listen to, smell, touch in their minds eye, and (why not?), taste the character they are going to play. This exercise is a “getting to know each other” time, as if the character and the actor were going to become dance partners, and even live together for a while in a marriage. I ask the actor to explore the persona they are going to embody. Using their subconscious and not censoring any information their imagination and intuition are going to give, they create, or more accurately, discover, the character’s personality. A composite of voice, movements, posture, mannerism, thoughts, inner monologue, and personality traits, the character then starts having a life of its own and becomes a real person. I ask actors to listen to what the character wants to tell them. I ask them to take notes at the end of the relaxation/visualization. The character will tell its story, its challenges, and share what its objective, deepest wants and yearnings are. He or she will talk about their struggles and about the obstacles in their way. They will talk from their point of view about the other characters, about events in the play or in their life before the play. He or she will share their childhood, their stories of love and lust, abuse and revenge. From these confidences, the images and feelings about who the character really is will be more vivid, more tangible. The objectives and actions will be clearer and more obvious. This inner dialogue is like having an imaginary date with your character, befriending him or her, finding its qualities, its humanness, and listening to its point of view and its story. Stanislavski talked about “flirting” with your character. It is indeed a seduction dance, a tender approach. Shirley MacLaine writes in Going Within about her performance of Madame Sousatzka:

 

“I proceeded to sculpt, with Schlesinger’s help [the director] what Sousatzka looked like, what she wore, how her hair was styled, what jewelry clanked on her wrists, how she walked, talked, ate, breathed, laughed, and cried . . . She became a composite of reality; a real, living, breathing character fashioned from our creativity. After I finished my composition of thought, I let her go. I threw her up to the universe and said “Now you play yourself through me.”[ii] 

 

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© Emmanuelle Chaulet  A BALANCING ACT 2008

 

Emmanuelle Chaulet is a Lecturer of Theatre at the University of Southern Maine, and an artist’s coach. She is the author of A BALANCING ACT, (Starlight Acting Books 2008) and can be contacted at www.starlightacting.org or www.emmanuellechaulet.com

 

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CHAPTER VII

 

[i] Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, trans. Mark Musa, (London: Penguin Books, 1995)

 

[ii] Shirley MacLaine, Going Within (New York: Bantam, 1990), 20-21.

 

Hal Hartley Comments On Reaching Kickstarter Goal For "Meanwhile"

"People! I woke up this morning to discover we had reached -- and surpassed -- our Kickstarter goal of $40,000. THANK YOU to all of you who have pledged! This is great. But we still have 19 days to go, so tell your friends! I might be able to pre-sell enough DVDs to earn back the cost of the film. That would make me what is called in the biz a "profitable filmmaker." Not a very glamorous designation but it helps get professionals to return your calls. Me and the gang here are anxious to start designing and manufacturing the DVD, CD, and lobby card. Also, on the agenda for December is the final audio mix and the mastering of the music. It's a good feeling to make work when you know it has somewhere to go! So far, this has been a fascinating experience. As I've already written to some of you, I have never had such a direct line to my audience. Though I don't try to make work for any specific audience, it is good to know -- generally -- who is watching and -- critically -- that there are people who want to see more." Via Flixist http://www.flixist.com/hal-hartley-successfully-funds-meanwhile-via-kickstart...

The Great Acting Blog: "The Thrilling, Provocative, Beautiful Truth"

I hold an often ridiculed view that the scene the actor is playing can impress upon the his mindset. I don't mean that actor “becomes” the character – this is nonsense – I mean that the scene can influence the actor, for example: if the actor discerns in his analysis that the character he is playing doesn't care about what is happening in the scene, it may become that the actor stops caring about the production he is working on. Please note: the actor cannot know this influencing is taking place, it happens gradually, almost imperceptibly, and the actor will blame his eventual change of mindset on everything except the real cause: the scene itself.

 

However, for the organic actor, this influencing is positive and creative, even if it is unconscious. If for example he is playing a scene where the character is bluffing, all kinds of wonderful, little, provocative moments may reveal themselves in performance, small tells (eg – playing with an earlobe, or handling pieces of paper), which are unplanned, infact, could not have been planned, but there they are, fabulously expressive, complex, intense, and true. The actor doesn't want to consciously re-create these great moments - they're great because they're spontaneous. The actor may try to re-create them because he cherishes them, and further, they represent strong work and so it makes sense to recreate them, but the actor must resist this temptation and create afresh each time. Any re-created version of them will be a dead thing – that moment has passed, move on.

 

The alternative to the organic actor is the presentational actor, who frees himself from the hassle of creation by mapping out his entire performance: every gesture, every turn of the head, every inflection, has been planned in advance (and labelled “characterization”) and the performance is merely a plodding implementation of the plan, even to the extent that changes to his scene partner's performance are ignored. The object of presentational performance is to control everything in order to avoid the terror of facing upto the truth of the moment (which can seem like an abyss). Presentational acting has got nothing whatever to do with creating, and everything to do with limiting criticism, it's rarely provocative or exciting in it's search for bland flawlessness. Furthermore, this actor plays everything in inverted commas as it were, indicating to the audience that he isn't really the character (because of course we couldn't discern that for ourselves – doesn't this actor know that his performance is an illusion which the audience willingly buys into?), and would show that the character is bluffing by using a predetermined general physical nervousness, flicking the eyes, and other cliches, rather than letting the performance manifest itself by confronting the moment. The performance of the organic actor however, appears not to be performance at all, but simply the functioning of his personality, indeed, no differential between his work and his personality can be made.

 

It takes courage and strength to face upto the truth, it is far easier to brush it under the carpet, and trot around in a bland hypocrisy. Acting is not about being perfect all the time, although yes, we need to strive for excellence. The moment may not be perfect, it may not be how we intended it, but it may be true, and this truth is always provocative, always thrilling, always beautiful.