Together We Were Never So Alone
Otra traducción de mi amigo y biógrafo Fernando Alvarez.
Together We Were Never So Alone
The night has fallen in the woods. Everything is the sound of grass and it is dark. A house, an illuminated window and around: blackness.
The Chimney:
In his famous experiment, Kuleshov filmed a shot of the face of an actor, then he did a sequence of images in which he «pasted» the same shot of the face of the actor with another: bowl of soup, a woman on a divan and a girl inside a coffin.
Throughout editing a tendency of reading juxtaposed shots as if they were only one and of building a causal narrative among such became evident. Spectators saw «hunger» in the face of the actor when it was juxtaposed with the bowl of soup, «desire» when the same was done with the woman and «grief» when the same face was joined with the shot of the girl in the coffin
What the experiment reveals is that the attribution of meaning to an image is with regard of the juxtaposition of such and not necessarily in what the image is in itself. It is not necessarily what the actor expresses, but how it is put in relation to what the actor expresses so that the spectator can read it.
The house:
An actor is a body and a body is a story. The actor in film is immersed in a complex system of interactions. The actor is part of something, but without necessarily understanding what happens or will happen around him. As if he was lost in the woods, he orients himself groping without being sure where he is directing his steps.
The field of action of an actor is the shot. Only there he is able to control what he says or what he does. A sequence composed of several shots surpasses him. The actor does not choose the way in which the takes are edited. His responsibility is what happens in the shot, no more, no less.
The building of the character and other concepts that we usually associate with acting are activities that are not substantive to representation. The character does not exist a priori, it is a construction of he who watches and juxtaposes: the spectator.
Some of us spend a lot of time building a «character» for life with whom we try to perform in society. But when one does the balance of the damages, he realizes that people read in us absolutely different things than those we want to project, that what we try to hide is more powerful than what he try to show. That we are not what we imagined, that we do not know what we are.
Why should a character be different? If we do not know who we are, why should characters know? Why should we build them as if we knew how?
We lend our face to a character, which is to say: a biography. The rest are obvious signs, orders for the spectators, commonplaces.
The forest:
Actors are possibly the most wonderful people I have ever met. But they are also like children. Nobody is treated with so much contempt in a film set as actors are. We are treated as children. That is why we are allowed to throw tantrums, because just like little kids you…
We are perpetual youngsters that repeat the words that others wrote and we receive instructions of how they should be said, in honor of a bigger purpose end which we generally know little about or we just tend to ignore. An actor, in the traditional scheme of film production, is always submitted to the intentions of someone else. An actor is by nature a being that likes to obey, even though we make our efforts to appear as if it was the opposite.
Cinema is a city and us actors have preferred to behave as vassals, with all the comfort that it implies, rather than like citizens, with all the responsibilities that should be faced.
One recognizes craft in the wonderful actors and actresses that are working nowadays: talent, potency, and beauty. But it is very difficult to find an idea about acting in a film actor. That is what interests me to search for.
Blackness:
«Creation is about going further, about establishing new frontiers.»
Cinema is cause and effect: it is representation of life, even though at the same time such representation is a model for living life. Any representation of reality, just as it arises from life, becomes a way of perpetuating a way of living. Representations, especially in cinema, condition our ways of facing life, they become our way of knowing and approaching situations that we haven’t lived yet.
Many of us when giving our first kiss, already knew what we had to feel, because we had seen an infinite amount of representations of a first kiss. And that is with many things, with almost all things. We build our sensitivity based on the representations we consume. And I think that if our representations were different, we would feel the world to be different and that from feeling different, we would think different and we could look for a different way to live, a better one. Personally, I think that it is all about fracturing the models through which we feel the world. Expanding molds and making space for what is different, to the unprecedented and the unknown.
We should try to do things differently, stop pretending to know what we do not know, behave like grown ups and accept that the chance to fail exists.
How can this be done in cinema? How to do this after Kuleshov?
The forest and a house. Inside the house there is a light, but the house is small compared to the forest, to the night at to the darkness.
Gabino Rodríguez
This text was written for el FANZINE, by invitation of Mariano Rocha.
Translated by Fernando Álvarez Rebeil