Title: Good bad acting
Clemens: When you look at old films, like 20's mute films, the way of acting has significantly changed today. During the days of Fritz Lang, acting was stylish, in a experessionist way. Today we laugh about these styles, or at least look at it with a strange eye, in mind all the time that has passed until today. In the 80s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder told his actors not to act: In "Katzelmacher", the guys hang around, nearly frozen, and just speak. Only the women sometimes move "normally", and the men only move to beat someone up or to order the next beer.
It seems that acting styles change like fashion every 5 years…
When i speak to people looking at my short films, i get strange reactions. I made different kind of films, and so people can choose: One kind of people like acting called "cinematic naturalism", others like the way,an actor trained in theater would play. Earlier I chose the persons I filmed in front of the camera in a conceptual way, for example an immigrant would play an immigrant, or visitors are suddenly extras, or prisoners remake laurel and hardy.
As for now, more and more i get bored of this conceptualist way, and i also get bored of acting and directing actors in general. I am not trained in theatre, but each time i have to work with actors, i get sad. For the project "The Fourth Wall", i wanted some actors and non-actors to be on a stage, rehearsing a play about a neolithic, peaceful tribe. The difference in acting capability is obvious, as also children and non actors, but also theatre trained actors and so on mix on the stage, forming a heterogenous group. We also just had not enough time and money to rehearse, but i like the outcome, which shocks some cinema-goers. For me it is a situation, which does not need to be "perfect", because it needs to transport an idea and an atmosphere, not the entertainment of perfect acting. But what is perfect acting to you? Not acting at all? In which way helps or destroys it the film or video we look at?
Köken: At the end of your text you are approaching something that also interests me: Accidental Acting. You are elaborating this very well in your work, but maybe without realizing in full. The excuses you are making here: about not having enough time, money, are maybe consciously created. Your heart is not in creating a good acting in the Stanislavksy sense of the word…
I will come back to that. But first I want to show you the origin of my personal problem with all these ‘acting things’… My problem is not in these recent acting theories, styles, like the Stankislavki method, cinematic naturalism, or Brechtian etc. but more with mimesis itself, in general. I am more interested in understanding Plato’s objection to mimesis, hence theatre itself. And we are talking about the Ancient Greek theatre here, which obviously had very different styles that what we are used to today when we talk about or see acting. If todays audience was transformed to the Epidarus Theatre of 485 BC to a performance of Aiskhylos’ Euminides, they would have been very surprised about the acting. Maybe it would not even count as acting to them.
Plato’s refusal of this theatre (not only acting) was an objection to many things within the Greek society; its polytheist religion, its obsession with creating images, stories. To him all these were leading the society to a world of fantasies, which in the end prevented them to see his ‘real world’. A world that he was trying constantly to discover and describe: The world of the one creator; the world of “idea”s. Against our world of copies, or of copies of copies…
But before diving into “The Republic” and discussing the problem of mimesis, I would like to make use of my background as an acting student and director’s apprentice and talk about acting in very practical terms:
What do I understand of the word “acting”? Well, basically two things:
1. 2.
Acting out (being) someone else Re-enacting (re-living)
with someone else’s words something that happened
(I am acting somebody else: to me in different time and
Antigone, Hamlet, Passenger #1) conditions
(They expect me to be that other (I am acting myself)
person) (Nobody expects me to be someone else, I am still myself)
Most people will not even accept number 2 as acting but it is very well acting, and I will try to demonstrate that it is essential to our discussion of bad acting as well as Plato’s objection to mimesis.
First of all, our topic “bad acting” does not apply to number 2. It only applies to number 1. If your wife is telling you what happened to her that day when she fell of the bike, she is re-enacting something that happened to her in the past. You were not there, and she wants you to picture in your mind the setting, the time, and what happened to her etc. She might use some gestures and recite some words that came out her mouth at that exact moment. She is acting because she is re-enacting a moment. It is an act of remembering. But you cannot say she is acting bad or good. Then she tells you about the meeting at the kindergarten of your child, which involves other parents. This time she might need to “act out” Mr. Smith for example. Mr. Smith said this and this. While doing so she is trying to become someone else, by using mimesis. This time you could say she is acting Mr. Smith good or bad, cause you are able to judge her mimicry. You can say to your self “well, this is not like Mr. Smith” or “that’s exactly how Mr. Smith would act like!” You can judge her ability to create the reality effect, an essential feature of theatre and cinema arts.
On the other hand, she is still re-enacting a moment she has witnessed herself. What she is saying, she heard. What she is acting out, she witnessed. But things change when the text and Mr. Smith’s character are written by someone else and given to her as a text and ordered: “Now play this guy called Mr. Smith.” This is what happens in most of theatre and cinema, in different degrees. Mimesis is no longer a mere device but becomes a technique and order on its own. This is the mimesis that Plato objects to in The Republic.
It is in this level of mimesis where bad acting is applicable. In other words, the idea of bad acting exists in the realm of this type of developed mimesis. It is in this aesthetic form of play that one must act good in order to make things look real – and this is even the case with non-realistic, expressionist acting you mention in the beginning. The action of acting out becomes an artistic expression and the performers become actors, in the professional sense of the word. In return we expect them to act good –whatever style of acting they have, and we expect the work to be good as well. We expect and expect… We judge. Even the actor judges himself.
Judgement is the key element here I think. It spoils a lot of things. If an actor fails in his attempt to be that someone else (Mr. Smith, Hamlet, Passenger #1) the acting becomes unconvincing to the audience, because the reality effect is not achieved. I know how terrible this feeling is for the actor, cause I have always been a bad actor myself. It is tormenting for a young actor who is instructed in the Stanislasvky method not to be able to achieve this reality effect. Now Stanislavksy always says that he doesn’t expect the actor to be someone else completely, he says the actor must use his own devices just to ‘act out’ that person within the time and space frame of the play in question. An actor must be like water, who takes the shape of any cup it enters. But I was never convinced of this. for example, how could someone like me, born and raised in Istanbul into warm climate, community atmosphere, to an Eastern and Muslim culture embody a highly individual character of Anton Chekhov of a much colder climate, Christian and Slavic culture. It is possible but not easy. Most important of all it is not in earnest. It is a simulation.
So when I realized this my acting studies became hell for me, and I gradually moved away from theatre and to video art, where I started to document ceremonies (I, Soldier), rituals (WEDDING) and other performative acts that are not made for art, to be a work of art, or judged in the same sense that an art work is judged. The acting you see in this kind of ritualistic phenomenon is closer to the # 2 acting I tried to explain above. We can very well preserve this acting within theatre and cinema, but first we will have to redefine these arts, or perhaps deconstruct them.
I think when you have casted immigrants to play immigrants (Otjesd), careworkers for careworkers taking care of homeless people in the train station in Munster (Von der Gegenüber) you were in earnest, but as soon as you cast any actor for a specific role, you are involved more in simulation and this clearly disturbs you. Maybe you can tell me why then you want to keep on doing this.
Maybe bad acting is an unconscious resistance against being forced to be someone else. Some actors might be comfortable to simulate someone else, this might be part of their character, but some actors and mostly non-actors are not happy with this world of simulations. They prefer to be more in earnest. Maybe we can even divide people into those who live mimetic and those who don’t. Actually Plato is clearly doing this. He simply does not want mimetic acts in his state. For him it is not about acting, or theatre; he is trying to explain a bigger world picture.
And I completely agree when you say “in bad acting at least some part of the actors own personality is preserved” (I cant find these words now but I remember u wrote it somewhere, can u add them back to your question?). This fits my explanation above about the degrees of acting. I want to see real people, not people who are acting out someone else’s reality. Instead of trying to be someone else, it is more fun for me to demonstrate the failure of being someone else. At least it is more honest… I can see this in your works prior to “Die Probe” and “the Fourth Wall”. This is also for all of Guy (Ben Ner)’s works so far. Imagine “Moby Dick” or “Stealing Beauty” for example.
After all, given the right supporting ingredients/features, the audience will understand or feel what the actor is trying to do, even though he/she acts bad. Imagine “Stealing Beauty” here. They are such bad actors, it is so good! Or the woman outside the train station in “Von Der Gegenuber” who is angry at protestors throwing fliers around.
Clemens: Before I can comment on your specific questions and talk about the interesting question of acting and democracy, which we should - I would like to raise the question of truth in acting as well as the boundaries, the blending between your points 1 & 2: Reenacting and Acting-out). You say that you could not, as a young actor, work in the Stanislavski-Method, and you said, because you did not achieve it: “It is a simulation.” This is very interesting, as the tool of acting is always, like art in general, a world of simulation. At least in the beginning. You simulate before things really start. This is the world of the model, the experiment, the rehearsal, the script, the making-of, which to me is the world the more interesting than to achieve a fiction, which looks too perfect, and so is unbelievable. Life is more interesting than heaven, where everything is in order;- Acting is a question of balance, and my perception of it changes with styles, knowledge and cultural differences. (ask this to Clemens in person, don’t understand now)
Concerning the basic elements of acting, which you started to define, let me now speak especially about mimesis in so called “first contact”- scenarios, that is to say when someone from the outside meets a people in a remote area of the world who before had no contact with the outside world. I am very interested in anthropology in this moment, and acting plays a big part here. Acting (and I mean acting here as a system of mimesis, mimicry, re-enacting etc like in your second point, which is probably the older function of “acting”) becomes a very important tool, because if you meet another culture for the first time, there is no interchangeable vocabulary of gestures and language, acting is the first step of learning a sign language, to communicate. Why that? Because you have to test gestures without absolutely taking them for real; you are in a sphere of simulation, of learning. The other wants to find out if you are cheating, etc.
By using mimetic codes, one tries to get a reaction. Some gestures are for example quite easy, like: “I would like to sleep here”, or “I am tired”, or “I am thirsty”. During first contacts between ethnologists and isolated groups, it would seem necessary to begin by using familiar gestures so as to develop a common language. Later it becomes more complicated, and through bad acting you would probably produce some misunderstandings -!
These first encounters are happening still today in the brazilian rainforest, and happened still in the 2030s, when goldseekers travelled in the highlands of Papua-Neuguinea.. Here they filmed during these contacts, which is very interesting. One case happened in 1971 in the Philippines, when a group of 26 people were discovered living in a cave, and using only stone tools, etc.
As NBC, National Geographic and NDR began with filming the following year, one member of the group frequently stood out in front of the camera: Belayem, an unmarried man who was in his mid-twenties at the time. Due to his talent for mimicry and ability to recount experiences with startlingly fine gestures, journalists from NBC dubbed him the ‘Marcel Marceau of the Stone Age.’ Soon he was imitating the photographers and cameramen, who felt they had rediscovered paradise and now presented a human zoo to the world. Belayem mimicked the camera men. On the older video footage he appears ready to clown at any moment. Soon Belayem was so adept at posing for the cameras, that he perhaps knew which gestures were most likely to please and which actions might most impress his viewers. The anthropologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt hoped to avoid the charades by putting a 90 degrees mirror behind his camera lens, and pretending to be testing the camera.
It wasn’t until many years later that cameras from the West returned their attention to these talented mime artists. In 1986, after 12 years of isolation in a guarded reservation under the state of emergency declared during the Marcos’ dictatorship, the Tasaday were re-visited by a Swiss journalist who claimed that they had only acted out their Stone Age existence in the 1970s, and had been pawns of an external power seeking attention and political gain. Indeed an interesting possibility: 26 local farmers strip themselves of their clothes and begin to live in caves, feed themselves from the forest and let their hair grow long, and act as if they had always done so. Their act had so impressed the western media that deforestation had been halted and a reservation erected for their protection. A battle broke out among anthropologists, and in an effort to end the controversy, the government of the Philippines issued an official statement confirming the authenticity of the Tasaday. To confirm the Non-Acting!
Now here is the clue why I am copying this text here: Would an actor, already playing a role in which he builds stone tools, furthermore weave in a second theatrical layer of pantomime into the simple act of natural survival in the jungle? Perhaps. Either way Belayem was an accomplished actor, even more so in the case of a fraudulent play!
But as I mentioned before, you need acting talents when communicating. Charles Darwin, exploring the Tierra del Fuego from the Beagle in 1833, commented on the natives’ talented use of body language: ‘All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry.’ This skill seems much more developed in them than in the so-called civilized. While Darwin attributed this to their more highly developed sensory perception, one could rather cite the evolutionary necessity of oral transmission, also aided by gesticulation during narration.
Perhaps Darwin should have included mime artists along with the painters and writers he took on his journeys to aid in communication. In the case of Belayem, might the high art of pantomime testify not to willful duplicity, but rather give proof of the authenticity of isolated ‘savages’ existing in the 20th century? When viewing the original footage of the Tasaday, I find it hard to believe that a group of peasants might have convincingly imitated a Stone Age people for some time. But it would be possible.
If somebody says they are acting badly, they are maybe authentic, while good acting would make you suspicious. In this case the analyse of acting, beyond the question of good or bad acting, could be a key to the issue if this group was authentic or not.
Furthermore you can also see that only by shifting the perspective on a real subject, by stating a comment like: “He just acted!” you are looking at reality in a very different style. Suddenly the perception of cheating comes into ones perspective, as if bad acting, which is more self-reflective, would remind us of the life of life, of the impossibility of a perfect life.
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