artist's lecture:

March 16th 2006 at 7:00PM       

hosted by the College for Creative Studies   

@ the Wendell Anderson Jr. Auditorium       

201 E. Kirby, Detroit 

(admission free) 

IN CHARACTER

by Roger Ebert

 

 

One of the most famous experiments in the history of the movies

was conducted by Lev Kuleshov of Russia in the early 1920s. He

wanted to prove that audiences did not see each shot separately

but rather added them up to produce an effect. He photographed

a bowl of soup, an attractive girl, a teddy bear, and the coffin of

a child. They Then he matched each image with identical shots

of an actor named Mozhukhin. Audiences said the actor’s face

reflected hunger, lust, tenderness, and sorrow.

 

This experiment is always interpreted as proving that the actor

was not acting – that the audience, inspired by the effect of

montage, brought the emotion to the screen. I disagree. Mozhukhin

was by definition acting even if he wasn’t consciously doing

anything, because the mechanism of the film was providing the

audience with the effect of emotion – and the effect, not the

means by which it is created, is the point of acting.

 

What the experiment did not ask was, what happens next? The

simpleminded response to Kuleshov was that he proved acting

did not matter, that montage was everything. But an actor cannot

go emotionless throughout a film, cannot always exhibit a

poker face (although Jean Gabin, in movies like Pépé le Moko and

Touchez Pas au Grisbi, came close). There are speeches to make,

longer scenes to negotiate, subtler emotions than hunger or lust.

Kuleshov’s simple montages were level one, and while they prove

something basic, they leave everything else to speculation. They

ignore the need for actors to carry emotion far greater distances.

As I read In Character and experienced the photographs by Howard

Schatz, I began to understand how some of that distance is traveled.

 

This is a wonderful book for reasons beyond its obvious

appeal. It is not just actors “making faces,” but actors extending

themselves into imaginary situations as if, for a moment, they

are real. To journey through the book and see familiar faces was

to realize how much, during a career of looking at movies, I

have come to love actors, to appreciate the gifts they bring.

First I looked at the pictures. I tried to guess the emotions, and

while in a broad sense I was always right – love does not look

like terror – I found that when I read the suggestions scenarios,

dialogue and emotions directed by Schatz, I noticed greater

exactness of detail. Was this because I had been nudged by the

prose or was it really there? I paused at Robert Loggia (p. 227)

(“You are a veteran Chicago detective hearing an inconsistency

in an overconfident suspect’s alibi after a six-hour interrogation”).

The first detail I noticed was the smile; not a happy smile,

but one with a certain weary contentment. After reading the

instruction, I looked more carefully at the eyes, and I found

knowledge in them; he had just seen something that changed

everything. Acting was happening.

 

 

You can see that over and over again in this book. These actors

know what they’re doing (a few overdo it, but you can decide

that for yourselves). And they are playing to the medium: they

know they are in closeup for a still camera, and they try to

modulate the emotion for the medium and the distance.

In their comments, which are often revealing and filled with

lore, they speak again and again of the differences between their

media.