Film Culture (Winter 1955)

~ACTING IN FILM AND THEATRE Josef von Sternberg “THE MANAGER: Not at all. Your soul, or whatever you like to call it, takes shape here. The actors give body and form to it, voice and gesture. And my actors—let me tell you—have given expression to much better material than this little drama of yours, which may or may not hold up on the stage. But if it does, its merit, believe me, will be due to my actors. THE FATHER: I don’t dare contradict you, sir; but it is torture for us who are as we are, with these bodies of ours, to see those faces. . THE MANAGER: (Cutting him short and out of patience) Good heavens! The make-up will remedy all that, the make-up. . .’ —PIRANDELLO The rice fields of Java remain in my eyes as if I had been there yesterday. Standing in the center of these lovely green stretches furrowed with quiet water are the most interesting scarecrows that can be found on earth. High over the rice on bamboo stilts is a palmleaf-covered hut and long strings with hundreds of tiny bells reach from it to the far corners of these plantations. When the birds come for the rice, a graceful Javanese woman lazily stretches out a shining copper-hued arm and frightens the birds away with an eerie tinkle. The actor is the opposite of a scarecrow—it is his function to attract. The easiest way to attract is to be beautiful. Arnold Schoenberg’s wife once said to me with a gcod measure of unnecessary passion: “How can a person think and not engrave the face with ugly wrinkles?” Though this is far-fetched, it may not be entirely without foundation. It is not particularly necessary to think deeply, but it is, perhaps, superfluous for a handsome person to think deeply. Fortunately, the ability of an actor to think is not subjected to the same strain as his appearance. The sing-song girl, wheeled in a festively lighted jinricksha through the streets of China, has a simple task. The girls who live on flower boats have a simpler task. They are not required to sing or to move. Not always is entertainment expressed in this primitive form. The ricepowdered geisha in Japan is many steps higher and often has achieved enough grace and intelligence to make her charm and wit the prime essentials. The theatre tries to make use of all these values. Generally speaking, the original attraction of the theatre was carnal rather than intellectual, and is still so today. But no matter how beautiful men or women may be, they rarely are content to live by looks alone, and the theatre has witnessed interesting combinations of beauty and intelligence. Beauty alone has little lasting effect and so, because of the necessity to interpret elements other than empty beauty, the stage accumulated many who were forced to combine a portion of brain with a portion of beauty. The creator of The Underworld, The Blue Angel, The Last Command, Shanghai Express, and The Devil Is 4 Woman, shows how the art of acting has to be transformed in order to enter the specific synthesis of the film. Though the balance to date is strongly in favor of good looks only, we can observe side by side with it old age and ugliness. This would not be tolerated on the stage without compensating qualities. And we often find those who have grown old with countenances so noble that we know their possessors have worked hard to remove every trace of cheap sentiment. Even when an actor has an apparently repulsive face, his features, on closer inspection, have a baseness of classic quality; and in the ugliest faces are found twinkling eyes determined to present their masks relentlessly to portray the basest instincts for critical inspection. Trained memories that know the classics, ability to simulate age or youth at a moments notice, joy and grief projected by precise control of feeling, personal suffering forgotten to portray impersonal happiness; a vast army of actors and actresses lurk in every cultural center to carry out the innermost thoughts of dramatists, to whom few, if any, human impulses have remained secret. What sort of human being is this actor and how does he differ from those who form his audience? The most essential qualification in an actor must be not to conceal himself but to show himself freely. All those things which move the engine of our life and which we do our best to conceal are those the actor must do his best to show. What we are most ashamed to acknowledge he does his utmost to accent. No corner is dark enough for us to hide our love, no stage is bright enough for him to display it. The idea of killing inspires us with horror—it fills the actor with celestial delight to hold a dagger or p‘stol in his hand. Death to us is not pleasant, but no actor I have ever known fails to relish the idea of showing the agonies of abandoning life, gasn bv gasp. His life begins when the eves of others are levelled at him, it ends when he exits from the stage. He is helpless in the face of flattery and dreams of applause when he shuts his eves at night. He nrefers being hissed to being ignored, and his private life can be an unpleasant break in his design for living. These traits have been registered for many centuries, and often with little affection. Lucian writes in the year 122: “Take away their mask and tinseled dress, and what is left over is ridiculous!” Hazlitt in 1817: “It is only when they are themselves that they are nothing. Made up of mimic laughter and tears, passing from the extremes of joy or woe at the prompter’s call, they wear the livery of other men’s fortunes; their very thoughts are not their own.” A doctor I knew had many contacts with actors and told me that when he was much younger he had been constantly puzzled by finding symptoms of claustrophobia every time he was called in to treat an actor,