Acting In Experimental Film

Acting In Experimental Film

 

Since I began collaborating with filmmaker, Rouzbeh Rashidi, in 2010, we have made 4 feature films and 8 short films, playing in festivals all over the world.

 

ACTING IN EXPERIMENTAL FILM

Advances in technology are enabling us to see that the making of a feature film need no longer be an industrial process. Indeed, some say cinema is going back to it’s roots, back to a time when large crews were unimaginable, a time when there was just the actor and the cinematographer. Rouzbeh Rashidi was the first filmmaker I came across who not only understood this shift but had acted on the possibilities it offered. When I met him in 2010, he had made three feature films in the preceding three years, each without state or commercial support and had several more in the pipeline. It had always been my ambition to work in auteur cinema, to be a part of something new. However, I had endured years of frustration living in the UK, a country which rarely views cinema as an art form, taking meetings with filmmakers whose sole ambition was to replicate whatever was popular at the time, but to do so without money, skill or glamour. After watching Rashidi’s films and being bowled over by his aesthetic then, signing-up was not a difficult decision to make when he approached me about forming a collaboration. So far, we have made five feature films and seven short films, playing in festivals all over the world.

Rashidi works without a script or any kind of written pre-planning, instead using improvisation to create moments of cinema. He doesn’t offer specific direction to the actor beyond a very basic description of the scene and simple blocking. I believe that actors function best when they are given only the most essential notes from the director, in fact, I think that when they are acting well they cannot be directed at all. Rashidi’s approach then, is geared towards enabling good actors to do their best work in the interests of the film as a whole. I have an enormous appetite for acting and am most creative when I have autonomy, I also like to dig deep and push my boundaries as an actor, giving everything I’ve got. In that sense, I am well suited to the process Rashidi has designed. Crucially however, my acting methods of Actions, Tools and Super-objectives, are ideal for confronting the unique challenges improvising in experimental film poses.
Our very first feature film had been Closure Of Catharsis. I was given no instructions regarding the film until the very morning of the shoot, which was to be a two hour, non-stop, improvised monologue. Despite being kept in the dark, I did not feel unnerved because I had already seen most of Rashidi’s work and was confident that he would handle whatever I gave him with integrity. As we walked to the location, he gave me the following instructions; “you are trying to remember something, something you have repressed because of it’s traumatic impact upon you, but now you are really struggling to bring forth the memory”.  I quickly needed to convert this note into a playable action and reasoned the following – “a memory I cannot remember is a mystery, and I have been asked to remember something I have forgotten, therefore, my task is to solve a mystery”. There is no perfect action to play, the point is not to try and find something perfect, this will only prevent you from acting. What I am looking for in an action is something which is interesting to me (it doesn’t need to be interesting to anyone else) and in line with the author’s intentions (in this case, Rashidi’s note). A well chosen action will get your blood up, get you moving, it’ll organise your performance, anchor you in truth and enable you to create by vanquishing that stultifying self-consciousness. It gives you something more interesting to focus on than yourself. That’s the whole point of it.

I didn’t want to get into a situation where I was pretending to remember something, then pretending I couldn’t remember it. This would be like playing chess with myself. I wanted something to emerge in my imagination which I could explore and decipher throughout the improvisation. However, and this is key to understanding acting in experimental cinema: what the audience sees the character do, is not the same as what the actor playing the character does. Essentially, in Closure Of Catharsis, what the audience sees is a man trying to remember something from his past. What I am doing, as the actor, is trying to work out what the improvisation actually is. For me, the mystery is the improvisation itself. That’s my action. What the character is doing, is trying to remember, this is the fiction of the film. This fiction is what the audience perceives when they watch the film. The character however, is an illusion created in the mind of the viewer by the juxtaposition of the fiction of the scene and the actions of the actor.

HE was the film Rashidi originally approached me about about doing, although production was put back due to a delay in funding. We eventually started work on it in September of 2011. HE is about a man who has decided to commit suicide. He has no definitive reason for doing so, he is not especially depressed, he just knows it is the right thing for him to do. As usual, Rashidi set the general boundary for the scenes but everything within that boundary belonged to me. For the opening monologue, my character was recording a message for his estranged wife, informing her about his impending suicide. We carved-up the filming of the monologue into blocks of 10 minutes and in each block Rashidi asked me to focus on a different aspect of the character’s relationship with his wife. Again, I had very little time to decide on an action for the scene. How could I talk about the character’s relationship with his wife when  I knew nothing about it? After all, no such relationship existed, it was a fiction. Usually, the script would already have created the fictional relationship for me and my job would simply be to discern an action for myself to play. However, in experimental film where there is no script, I need to create the fiction of the scene myself as well as perform an action. For this opening monologue in HE, I had decided that my action would be to explore this relationship using my imagination and the results of this exploration would create the fiction. In response to the original note Rashidi had given me for the monologue, the image of a kitchen formed in my mind. It was a kitchen belonging to a friend from my childhood. Why that came into my mind at that particular moment I do not know. However, I decided that this would be the starting point for the improvisation. On the floor-tiles in the corner of this kitchen were swipe marks, made by the mother of my friend. She would move from the work surface of this kitchen to the sink by taking a step forward with her right foot, then swiping her left foot across. She had done this so many times that it had marked the floor. So I opened the monologue by telling my wife that it was the complacency with which she moved from the work surface to the sink that had made me start to hate her.

A duologue we did later in the production was a lot more straightforward. Essentially, my character meets his best friend in order to inform him about his decision. In the duologue scene there was less pressure on me to self-generate the fiction because I can work off the other actor, his responses spark my creativity and create momentum for the improvisation. This scene was also a very good example of how the character’s Super-objective comes into play. A Super-objective is the action which over archs everything the character does. It is broken down scene by scene, beat by beat, into all the little objectives, all the little things he does to accomplish his Super-objective. Aristotle posited Oedipus Rex as the perfectly designed play. Oedipus’ Super-objective is to find the cause of the plague on Thebes, everything he does is toward that end. In HE, my character’s Super-objective is to commit suicide. In the duologue scene however, my character’s action, what he is literally doing is “informing his friend that he is going to kill himself”. Note that his action in this scene is not to kill himself. During the scene though, the friend tried to talk my character out of his decision. In response, my character defends it and insists on forging ahead. Obviously he does this in order to serve his Super-objective. So we can see how the Super-objective gives meaning and direction to everything the character does, and, therefore, to everything the actor does too.

Boredom Of The Disgust And Monotony Of The Tediousness is our third feature film. The film has no through-action, instead it is made up of a series of scenes, some documentary and some fictional. These include a scene where I spoke about my top five actors and actresses, another where I expounded my theories on acting and another where I played a film critic who had constructed an entire cinema purely for his own use. There was a key scene however, which illustrates perfectly the use of Tools as an acting technique. I was to have an argument with an imaginary, off-screen other person while white noise blasted from a radio and the lights flashed.  I decided quickly that the literal action would be that I was trying to get this other person to come to an important party with me. Of course, this imaginary other person would resist. Tools are different ways of executing the action. The Tools I used in this scene included; to reason with, to persuade, to cajole, to plead, to beg, even to mock – all are in the service of getting what I want. A Tool is not an action in the sense that it needs to carry you through an entire scene, they are only employed for the moment. In a more typical scene where I would be playing off another actor, what I would be doing is selecting which tool to use moment-by-moment, my choice would be determined by the responses of the other actor.

I have only covered a small portion of the work Rouzbeh Rashidi and I have produced but have included the basic acting techniques required for this kind of improvisation. Furthermore,  I believe Rashidi-Devereaux Cinema is charting a new course for the actor-filmmaker relationship. As micro-budget feature films proliferate, filmmakers must see the benefit of eschewing the industrial casting process which largely treats actors as expendable, interchangeable pieces. It’s a process which often corrodes the filmmaker’s respect for acting and in turn robs actors of their most valuable gift, their creative generosity. Instead, filmmakers should seek out high calibre actors and form ongoing collaborations with them, growing with them artistically, building trust along the way. This will be extremely important in this coming era of feature film production which is taking on a more personal character. Actors, for their part, need to take greater responsibility for their work, offer more, show greater dedication and behave not as an employee but as a creative partner. A collaborative approach to feature film making offers enormous creative possibilities for both actor and filmmaker, it is simply about being alive to those possibilities, envisioning them and taking action.

 

Originally published in Experimental Conversations.