05/15/2021
Dear friends:
Please check out my blog about directing actors and acting.
This is from my post:
The SUPER OBJECTIVE is what does your character wants more than anything from life throughout the film or play.
The SCENE OBJECTIVE is what does your character wants more than anything throughout the scene.
Prior to Stanislavski, an actor’s job was to portray a certain emotional cliché on the director’s command. There was a list of specific gestures, facial expressions, body language samples and emotions that the actors had to learn and perform perfectly. Theater was based on Result-Oriented directing, in which the directors asked for a certain final expression from the actor (e.g. “cry,” “laugh,” or “be angry”). Acting consisted of strained line readings with overacted emotions. You can still see this in low-grade movies and TV shows.
This approach leads to dead forms of acting, including fake-looking emotions. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Constantin Stanislavski faced a crisis in the theater and saw the need for a change. As it was discussed in one of my previous posts, Stanislavski recognized three types of acting:
(1) The Art of Performance,
(2) The Art of Living,
(3) The Art as a Craft.
The Art of Performance is an older technique, in which actors were trained imitate various emotions and reactions. But as noted by Stanislavski and his followers, a play or film based on the Art of Performance usually leaves the audience uninvolved and uninterested. Stanislavski brought The Art of Living into the theater, which helped audiences become deeply and personally attached to plays.
The Art of Living is the opposite of the Art of Performance. The Art of Living is not just a depiction of the external manifestations of thinking and feeling, but the creation of a scene by depicting the inner lives of the characters and infusing the characters’ alien lives with the actor’s own human feelings.
The most iconic film still from The Godfather with Al Pacino. From Art of Directing Actors book, by Ernest Goodman. “There are no small roles, there are only small actors” ~ The motto of the Moscow Art Theater.
