Trailer For Masaki Kobayashi's Harakiri

Masterful samurai tragedy from Kobayashi's, centering on the notion; "the honour in death, the death of honour".

The Great Acting Blog: "A Tragic View"

 

 

“I like the futility of effort – the uphill road to failure is a very human thing” - Jean-Pierre Melville

My penchant for Samurai films has lead me to Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece, Harakiri. The film is set in the world of the 17th century samurai, and centres on the notion: “the honour in death – and the death of honour”. Tatsuya Nakadai plays an impoverished samurai, who  visits the House of the Iyi Clan, and requests he be given somewhere to perform harakiri  (the samurai ritual suicide by disembowelment). Just before Nakadai  is to kill himself however, he begins to recount his fate to the surrounding clan, and here the film cuts to the past. It transpires that Nakadai has fallen into abject poverty, ironically because Japan is at peace, a peace Nakadai helped to forge by fighting in the civil war,  but because of that peace, demand for the samurais' services has slumped, and many are forced to wander as ronin (masterless samurai), looking for work (unfortunately, the samurai cannot take normal jobs, because it may cause trouble). Despite his poverty however, Nikadai refuses to give up his beautiful daughter to a clan because she will be turned into a concubine, instead, he encourages her to marry the honorable but equally impoverished and unemployed samurai, Motome Chijiiwa, played by Akira Ishihama. They have a child, but the mother falls ill, and soon the child does to, catching a fever. In general, the film is about the individual who stands alone, who refuses institutional comfort, preferring a true and singular life, even if it means additional toil. Crucially, Harakiri is a film which acknowledges that life is tragic, that we humans are flawed, and no matter how hard we try, more often than not we are doomed to fail. There is one heartbreaking scene in Harakiri which reveals this, where Nakadai, at his wits end, is explaining to his grandson who lays in coma, that they have run out of options, that they have sold everything they own in order to keep the boy alive, but now they have nothing left (the boy's father, Motome, has even sold his two samurai swords, replacing them with bamboo facsimiles – the swords are deemed to be the samurai's very soul).  The tragedy is the fact that this situation could have been avoided, the choices Nakadai made to safeguard his family, have infact lead to it's destruction: he decided his daughter should marry the samurai Motome, a pauper,  who now cannot afford a physician to keep his child alive. Watching this scene, I dropped my head as I felt shame, then looking up again, I felt sorrow – seeing this good and noble warrior beg his unconscious grandson for a forgiveness which can never be forthcoming, was hard to bear. Luckily though, it is only a film, and so Nikidai experiences these trials and tribulations in the land of make believe. The point is, tragedy enables us (the audience)  to see that we are not perfect, that we can come up short, and damningly so at times. Tragedy strips us of our intellectual arrogance (if only for a moment), and offers us  a chance to acknowledge our helplessness. We are not perfect. That's why I have never been interested in disaster movies or superhero movies – they're a comforting lie – we don't have the power to re-direct meteors heading toward Earth, and we can't put on a pair of underpants and fly to Mars. It's also why I've always loved film noir, the protagonist is an ordinary person with an accomplishable goal, but he often fails, or at least, if he succeeds, it is at a far greater cost than he could ever have imagined.

Since writing “Create Precisely The Body Of Work You Want”, I have started to think a tragic view of the world can help us do just that. A tragic view enables us to be braver, to stand alone, to identify those things we want to fight for, and go out and fight for them. It is a concern with perfectionism which holds us back . Someone responded last week that “success” differed from person to person – well yes, but I would go even further and say that success and failure are highly ambiguous, whatever your definition of them. The perfectionist view implies that there is a perfect result, and any outcome other than that perfect result is a disaster. So, with the perfectionist burden too heavy to bear, we trundle along on the prescribed path, regardless of how meaninglessness and fruitless it may be – it's numbing, but at least we'll feel no pain. Perhaps you have an idea about precisely the kind of work you want to do, but you're not being offered anything like it, so you may need to step out and create it yourself – and creating it yourself is difficult because you will be criticised for not being attached to an established institution, and in any case, your precious creation could fall apart, and you could be left with nothing other than the ridicule of your peers. Absolutely. And so what? Nakadai could have made  his life considerably easier by sending his daughter away to become a concubine, but he refused on a point of principle. That your decision to employ your principles (and an aesthetic is a principle) may lead to disaster, is not an excuse to not employ them. How serious are you about doing precisely the kind of work you want? The tragic view encourages us to go for it because it accepts that we may fail miserably, and so the perfectionist burden is removed. If we do infact fail in our task, fine, but that failure will not destroy us - we'll live to fight another day.

Creating precisely the work you want to do, is, on the one hand, liberating, because you seize control of each action step, you're not relying on somebody else to come through for you (which happens almost all the time if you are an actor), but on the other hand, it is more frightening, precisely because you are controlling the steps – if it should all fall apart, you've got nobody to blame but yourself, and that can be a very lonely place. However, if we accept the tragic view of the world, that, despite our very best efforts, we may still fall short, then we may make braver choices, and seize that thing we want from the fire.

The Great Acting Blog: "Create Precisely The Body Of Work You Want"

I've always been fascinated by Hollywood mythology, so it's surprising that it took me until this week to watch Sophia Coppola's 2010 film, Somewhere. The film charts the empty, lonely life of Steven Dorff's movie star, Johnny Marco, who lives at the Chateau Marmont, moving from encounters of meaningless casual sex, to meaningless promotional work for his latest blockbusting action flick. The paradigm of Dorff's life shifts when his daughter from a previous relationship comes to stay with him (not as icky as it might sound, as it turns out). Somewhere is a film made up of delightful moments, as when Dorff, who almost exclusively eats take-away, picks up an apple from a fruit bowl, and looks at it as though it had just landed from Mars. One of the things that struck me about Dorff's character though, was how useless he is, how impractical, and how he lacks drive, lacks passion, he just goes with the flow, he doesn't seem to care about anything, although this manifests itself as amiability rather than anything demonstratively destructive. In some respects, Coppola romanticizes Dorff's empty existence, fuelling my suspicion that she has disdain for us little people. There is however, a neat little scene, where Dorff, at a party, is engaged by a nervous young actor who asks him what “school” of acting he subscribes to, to wit Dorff shrugs, and responds that he doesn't subscribe to any school, adding that when he started out, he got an agent and “just went on auditions”. 

I was also taken by surprise this week, by people who came out and not only defended ass kissing, but passionately advocated it after I had criticized it in last week's blog. If you haven't read it, I said that you shouldn't use your work to kiss ass, but simply let it speak for itself. One person came out and said that actors should kiss as much ass as possible, another said that ass kissing was an actor's only means of “getting work”, and another, a theatre producer, said that the actor who has the attitude that they will not kiss ass, goes straight in the “trash”. Why this advocacy for the loathsome toadyism? Well, ass kissing is a form of schmoozing, which is to say that you want someone to give you something but you have nothing to give in return. The ass kisser believes that one can become an enormous success without engaging in the nasty unpleasantness of actually learning a demonstrable skill, ie - without hard graft. This is not merely a point of view for the ass kissers, it's actually crucial to their psychic well being. Why? Because progress without effort enables the ass kisser to maintain their delusion that they are simply “special”, that they're not like us little people. For what else can success without effort mean? When, as happens with the vast majority of those who go into acting, they learn that the life of the actor is mostly about toil, we see them freak out, unable to cope with the shattering realization that they may need to put in a shift at some point, they flee the business altogether – hence the preposterous drop-out rate (in many respects, it's these wannabees who give acting a bad name – for sure, actors spend a lot of time working on themselves, but that's not because we think we're special little creatures, but because we use ourselves in our work - do we criticize professional sports people for being “obsessed” with their bodies?). In the end, that's what the ass kisser desires: the Stephen Dorff/Johnny Marco lifestyle, an unconstrained life, effortless and useless, where every whim and urge is catered for, the entire world their playground – not only is it success without effort then, but it's success without responsibility – and the ass kisser is rewarded with all this for the mere fact of their existence.

I'm advocating that the actor take responsibility for his work, and put in some graft so that his work is actually worth the attention of an audience. I'm advocating that rather than try to preserve our well being by ingratiating ourselves, the actor should cultivate a rational self-esteem through hard won accomplishments which require no outside validation. Don't “just go on auditions”, but define your ideal work, and apply yourself to the things within your control in order to construct precisely the body of work you want*. All this is an immense task of course, which will be spread out over many decades, and requires constant self-improvement such that we can work ever more productively, and for longer, necessary in order to get everything done. Understanding how and why you are making progress, boosts confidence and self-respect, which in turn becomes a self-perpetuating process of ever greater accomplishment. That doesn't seem to me, to be a bad place to be.

 

*I'm reiterating this point, because although people responded to my ass kissing comment, nobody responded to this comment – actors are constantly being told they should be grateful for whatever scraps come their way, but why not aim for something more?

 

 

Some Interesting Thoughts By Mike Figgis On Cinema

...#IsConventionalNarrative passe? Speaking for myself I find it way past its shelf life.Observational cinema and interractive dialogue work. ...why I am finding inspiration in #theAmericanMusical and #IngmarBergman. Both have strong 'theatrical' elements,no fake realism. ..therefore less time wasted on Phony relationship with the audience, convincing them of 'reality'. #InvasionOfTheBodySnatchers good example. * Figgis originally posted these words on Twitter.

Andre Wilms Talks About Acting In Aki Kaurismaki's Le Havre

The trick to great acting? Do nothing BY T'CHA DUNLEVY, GAZETTE FILM CRITIC DECEMBER 1, 2011 MONTREAL - Film is notable for its ability to feel real – to take us into a situation and give us the impression we’re living it – or to sweep us away into Hollywood-style fantasy. But there is a less-celebrated strain of cinema that goes in the opposite direction, toward surrealism. The work of Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki falls into this last category. His latest film Le Havre is an oddly endearing, shrewdly comic drama about illegal immigration set in the French port town. Where most any other director would milk the tale’s torment for everything it’s worth, Kaurismaki has his cast play it straight, delivering life-important lines as if they were reading the phone book. It’s classic Kaurismaki, and it works like a charm, injecting offbeat humour into the most serious situations and bringing the narrative to another place by consistently defying our expectations. “He hates emotion,” said André Wilms, the French actor and Kaurismaki regular, in a sit-down interview during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “He wants it to be very reduced, (like) Buster Keaton. He says, ‘Play it like an old gentleman. Don’t make me crazy with your actor tricks.’ ” Le Havre posits Wilms as Marcel Marx, a solemn shoeshine man who hides a young African refugee (Blondin Miguel) from the authorities, while his wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) lies sick in the hospital. Wilms could almost be said to be non-acting for most of the film, as he shuffles from scene to scene with a grim look on his face – not seeming to want any part of his own heroism, but unable to avoid it and, most importantly, unable to not do the right thing. Some actors might be frustrated by such constraints on their expression, but Wilms couldn’t be happier. “I have to say, he’s the only great director I’ve worked with,” he said. “He’s a real genius. And I totally agree with him. I see (actors) playing really intense, real suffering and everything, and I am bored. Okay, suffer – I don’t give a sh-- about your suffering on the screen. Less is more. It’s very difficult to do nothing; to cry is easy. “I try to make my job as humble as possible.” If Wilms is deadpan in the film, he is outdone only by fellow Kaurismaki veteran Outinen, who takes her monotonous delivery to outrageous extremes. She won best actress at Cannes in 2002, for her role in Kaurismaki’s The Man Without A Past, which also took the festival’s coveted Grand Prix as well as the Ecumenical Jury Prize “She understands Aki,” Wilms said. “She’s very grave … She doesn’t speak a word of French. She learned (her part) all by heart, phonetically. I worked with her for hours and hours.” Wilms’s own history with the director goes back 20 years, when he was cast in Kaurismaki’s only other French film, La vie bohème, after being sent to a rather unusual audition. “It was two in the morning in Paris in a bar,” Wilms said. “He was sitting behind two bottles of white wine, three beers and a bottle of vodka. He sees me coming in – he’s very big, like a bear. He said to me, ‘Oh, you have a big nose, you can smoke under the shower. You have sad eyes; you are hired. Okay, let’s talk about something else.’ “He never saw me act. He didn’t know anything about me. We became friends. I don’t know, he’s a bit like (a character) in a Western – ‘Let’s do it, and don’t talk about it. And don’t ask me questions, please.’ ” Kaurismaki approached Wilms for his latest project wanting to make a film about a serious subject, immigration, but also wanting to do something with a lighter tone. “He said, ‘I only make depressed, dark films; nobody wants to see them. Society is so dark and apocalyptic, we have to make a comedy. And I will make two happy endings.’ It’s his kind of comedy. And a fairy tale, but the red cap (Little Red Riding Hood) has to eat the wolf,” Wilms said. Shooting in France was an obvious choice, given the country’s immigration issues. It also brought Kaurismaki closer to some of his greatest influences – classic French directors Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir and Jean-Pierre Melville. North American film fans may be reminded of Jim Jarmusch and Hal Hartley, directors whose works are marked by minimalism, humour and a playful affection for the absurd. But while comparisons provide orientation, Kaurismaki has made his own distinct mark on the world of cinema – a unique vision, at once insightful and ironic, that changes our ideas of what a film can be. “Aki is a bit apart,” Wilms said. “He’s an outsider who makes his own world … He doesn’t like the whole (mainstream movie thing) – wow, fast, camera always moving, explosions – he hates this. He calls these popcorn movies, and says, ‘I don’t want to be a popcorn director.’ But he is okay. He’s much more a poet than a filmmaker.” Article via http://www.montrealgazette.com/touch/story.html?id=5798107

The Great Acting Blog: "Independence Of Thought"

This week, I attended a short film event, and was struck by one the films, in the sense that it was technically very flashy, very clever, this filmmaker certainly knew how to use a computer. The problem with the film however, was that it was utterly utterly false, I felt as though I had seen the film hundreds of times before – every idea seemed to be borrowed from somewhere else, nothing seemed to be the filmmaker's own creation. As I reflected upon the film, it occurred to me that such a savvy filmmaker must have known what he was doing – this film was the opposite of artistic intuition. I wondered why such a technically accomplished filmmaker decided to make a film that was such a rip-off. Then the answer hit me: this filmmaker is not interested in making a work of art, is not interested in creating, is not interested in delighting an audience, what they are interested in however, is self-promotion. The film exists merely to showcase the skills of the filmmaker (which were, let me stress, considerable) – the object of the film's existence was to flatter potential financiers and employers.

Now, I have always had a problem with showcases, even having participated in them myself in my younger days. The reason I have a problem with them is because they are a subversion of intent. I have many times been involved in productions where an actor has subverted the truth of the scene at hand by making choices which they thought would help them make a sale. I remember being in a play and one of the actors was playing a homeless person, and was required to look rough and unshaven, but one night he decided to go on clean shaven, because he wanted to appeal to an agent who was in the audience. Admittedly, this is quite a blunt example, and the subversion to make oneself seem more “likable” or “cute” can take many more subtle forms. Further, much of this perversion takes place for economic reasons, as in the case of the filmmaker or the actor above, both are making work choices which they think will improve their financial position, or at least offer the potential to improve their financial position. In the case of actors generally, this is the influence of the audition process, a process which possesses a corrosive flaw: that the people who are doing the casting do not view the actors' work in the same way that the audience does, namely that they are judging the actor, while the audience, in the main, does not judge the actor, but sees him as a bringer of delight. So, actors learn throughout their careers to appeal not to an audience, but to potential employers, and make their decisions accordingly. This can lead to a lack of engagement between actors and audiences, because actors are not trying to communicate something to the audience, but are trying to promote themselves – that's two very different things – in effect, everything becomes a showcase. The spin off of this, are showreels, where past work is jammed together onto one track. Showreels have always seemed unsatisfactory to me, false, even when the work is good, because the scenes are placed into a context they were not intended for. Showreels are tinny. “Networking” is the cousin of all this stuff, whereby the actor turns even his social life into a sales convention, and friends are seen as prospects. When I walk in a room you don't need to shove a business card in my hand – meaningful relationships in life, whether personal or professional, happen naturally, we naturally gravitate to the people we like, and the people we like energize us.

There is a taking-our-pigs-to-market aspect of almost any endevour – if you want an audience for your play then you have to let them know it's on - but the work itself shouldn't in effect become a sales pitch – I've always felt that the best way to promote myself is to put out great work, that's the position I want to be in: if you want to know about me then read this blog, look at my past work, but I'm not going to betray my work to get you to like me: take it or leave it – herein lies self-respect. Further, for our work to carry any meaning, it must be anchored by principles. If you are not interested in your work being meaningful to you, and you want to play the numbers game, then this blog is irrelevant. But if you are out there, and you've got your own ideas, and you think for yourself (or maybe at this stage it's just a feeling you have) then I say: keep working at it, strive to define those ideals, and vow to live by them. Fight to create the body of work you want, never shrug and just go with the flow, even if it would make your life considerably easier to do so. If you understand the true of value of your work then you will never need to pollute it by kissing somebody's ass. Let your work speak for you, always remain true to it - people may come and go in your life, but the work will always remain. Some people will love what you do, others will hate it, be grateful for the former, and decline to concern yourself with the latter. Stick to your guns. There is a lot of talk these days about “independence”, but the most important kind of independence, is independence of thought.

The Great Acting Blog: "Filmmakers' Artifice, Actors' Truth"

I have been editing my short film, The Audition, and have come to realise that, to a certain extent, editing is a brilliant way of learning about acting, because the editor is selecting and arranging the performances depending on the needs of the film, and clearly, a great deal of analyzing the performances takes place in order to get this job done. The Audition is a very gentle film, the drama is slight, and therefore, the performances need to be very precise in terms of expressing the individual beats of the film, otherwise there would be nothing to see – The Audition doesn't have big moments in it to masque generalized acting. Not only do the performances need to be precise, but so too does the editing, each little expression in each shot needs to be weighed up very carefully, the juxtaposing of differing nuances can alter the meaning of the film – again, there is nothing broad about the The Audition; a look, an inflection, a gesture, all of these expressions are crucial in such a minimal work.

So far this process has lead to an affirmation of many of the ideas and principles I have been exploring and trying to articulate here on this blog recently. Upon reviewing the footage, I was shocked by one of the first things I noticed, which was that I almost mumble (but not quite) one of the early lines in the film, my speech is tense, I speak it almost in a staccato – this is the symptom of an underlying tension. However, as the scene progresses, so does my performance, and I begin to relax and speak freely, and my personality begins to shine through. My initial shock wore off, as I reflected upon it, and understood that this is very much the pattern of an audition in life – to begin with we are cautious and reserved, frightened of failure, but as we break the ice and then hit our straps, we loosen up - from this particular moment in the film then, I can infer something general about life – there is a provocative little truth to it, and it is arrived at by allowing the moment to unfold as it will, not applying some outside ideal to the dialogue, a perfect recital would have given a lie to the scene. The performance should be an actuality, not a reference.

It is the actor's job to bring truth to the scene, whereas it is the filmmakers job to supply the fantasy, or, put another way: it is the actor's job to be truthful under imaginary circumstances created by the filmmaker. On The Audition, I am both actor and filmmaker, and so there is a convergence of aesthetics as it were. For me, cinema is not a realistic art form: the script, the camerawork, the editing, are formalized – the dialogue for example, has a deliberately precise rhythmn. The object of this formalism is to draw attention to the fact that the film is an artifice, and it is the actor's responsibility to anchor this artifice with truth. The combination of filmmaker's artifice and actor's truth mean that the film corresponds to our dream life, and our fantasy life, that world which lies below and on the margin of our consciousness, not necessarily articulate, not necessarily understood, but fabulous nonetheless. The actor is the audience's (and the filmmaker's) representative within the film, the actor provides them with access into the film. That the actor give  a truthful performance is crucial, because this enables the audience to participate fully in the film. As with a dream or a fantasy, no matter how weird and wonderful it is, we always recognise the truth of ourselves within it. The same needs to be true of a film.