The ragged edge

I stumbled upon the website (abwag.com) devoted to the teachings of Don Richardson, a 60's TV actor who was also an acting instructor. What struck me was his concept called the ragged edge. Key ideas:

>Don't prepare yourself to do something
>Don't smooth out things
>Don't do mental acting
>Allow the body to do what it knows
>Always find the unexpected
>Actors have to throw in difficulties

I'm not sure if this is what he meant by "actors have to throw in difficulties" but the idea immediately got me thinking about Brando in Streetcar Named Desire. Earlier I was writing about how in that film, Brando kept throwing up obstructions (eating, putting on clothes, etc.) and tried to perform through the obstructions. This would be like the complement to withholding.

In withholding, you try to withhold an emotion or idea that seeps out anyway. In obstructing, you create obstructions and then perform through them. Both concepts are essentially about obstruction. The difference is in the positioning of the actor's consciousness. In withholding, the actor obstructs. In obstruction, the actor propels through the obstruction.

Now, I have to get busy working on a film called The Five Withholdings.

You died too pretty

"You died too pretty. At the finish, you arranged your body to make a good camera shot; it would remind the audience that you're an actor and not a robber. I warned you that 'acting is the one art you can't be caught doing.'

So begins Don Richardson's segment on 'the ragged edge' in Acting Without Agony. He goes on...

"I tell the class not to try to make pretty pictures; that's the cameraman's job. Truth isn't always nice to look at, and truth is what good modern art is about. Artists have moved from the slick externals, to searching deeper for meaning. The surface is less and less important. Modern sculptors intentionally rough-up their work to find a texture that conveys feelings. The new painters learned from the impressionists; they use paint in a much freer way than the classicists, and don't run for a rag every time it dribbles. The key to modern art is what I call 'the ragged edge'....

I explain that 'making pretty pictures' comes from an actor's vanity and vanity can destroy your work. The bank robber was honest in the scene until the end, when he put himself on an imaginary cross and posed for a Pieta. You can't play the result: that's telling the audience how to react. Get them to react by planning how to accomplish it, but don't let them in on it."

I think Richardson's chapter is a good answer to the questions I posed here and here. The desire to prettify things in visual effects often leads to a poor performance robbed of its believability. Believability is not accuracy, fidelity or randomness but requires knowledge of how to perform appropriately in the various modalities made possible by cinema technology (color correction, fx, virtual camera work, crowd simulation, etc.). What makes a post-production performance interesting is is not its beauty, accuracy or algorithmic complexity, but the way a medium is used to express observation tempered by understanding.

The ragged edge and videography

With a histogram like this, you'd think I was shooting outer space.

In preparation for color correcting I've been looking at our footage on various scopes. The outdoor stuff is fine but the indoor stuff is really underlit. I didn't realize it until now but I lit the interiors film noir style. There are only two colors—light and dark. It's actually shocking on a vector scope—most of the footage is down near 0-20 IRE (7 IRE is video black). I consciously took the left-leaning histogram approach (see prolost.blogspot.com for a good overview of the left- vs. right-leaning histogram debate) but I probably went too far! It's interesting because I started comparing my footage with commercial DVDs and realized how brightly lit they are. I've always thought of Moulin Rouge, for example, as being somewhat moody and shadowy but compared to our footage the thing looks like a sitcom. Anyway, in true putting-your-head-in-the-sand fashion, I started using the RGB parade scope because the levels look much better than what I see on the vector scope. (BTW, my sole training using a vectorscope occurred when I worked at the cable TV station years ago. One day the engineer hooked a vectorscope to my graphics computer and said "make sure your whites don't go above this line!")

Actually I'm not too concerned. I'm sure I'm going to lose some quality when I push up the levels but I realize that I've been Marlon-Brando-ing my way through everything anyway. One of the reasons why I've been so enamored with the idea of obstruction is that it's what I generally do even with technical things. I get into trouble and then try to fight my way out. To me it gives things a kind of rough edge that I like. When I say rough edge, I don't mean compression artifacts or such. I actually hate poor picture quality. I mean that my projects tend to have the look of someone struggling to make things work. I'm sure the final movie will have an unprofessional unevenness with some things out of focus, some things struggling to stay within the scope, some things a bit grainy. To me, that is part of the performance that keeps things alive.

The look of tragedy

One of the weird things about 9/11 was how movie-like the event looked, a fact that has probably contributed to many conspiracy theories. Here's a photo of a car running into the midst of a bicycle race in Mexico recently. It, too has that fake, movie-like look with people flying into the air. The driver was allegedly drunk and sadly one person died. Question: would this make a good reference for a visual effect? If we believe in the "ragged edge" idea, the answer might be no. Films need to look realer than real and therefore, less like our 'mind's eye' view of a crash.

Heidegger, performance and Brando

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw mind... In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. —from Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought


The question: why does digital technology seem to be un-motivating when it should be the opposite because it makes creativity so easy? I suspect this has something to do with the way that digital equipment turns artistic activity into a series of aesthetic decisions. At one time, putting together a clean audio chain required a certain kind of skill. In analog electronic audio, there is a constant mechanical battle against buzz, analog oscillators that don't hold their tune, radio interference and noise. In today's world, however, the computer offers so much control that noise becomes an aesthetic decision. Without the constraints of an analog medium, we are left with the music of the imagination. The problem of digital music, then, is that it frames everything in terms of psychology. "The only limit is your imagination." But that's a BIG limitation. It's not possible to create art that discloses a struggle against the earth. We are so removed that we can only wrestle with the world. The solution is to therefore turn to the quality of a performance. We do not need to literally use analog means to express analog consciousness.

This corresponds to my negative orientation toward "arty-ness." Arty-ness discloses imagination, psychology and subjectivity. Arty-ness is the aural or visual chatter that occurs when art becomes aesthetic. This is the art created by a world made subject to the artist. By its nature, the analog-ontological sensibility, on the other hand, is defined by the fact that the artist is made subject to things.

The art of an artist made subject to things is exemplified in the performance of someone like Brando. This is modern acting, the method. In his mumbling, Brando discloses the struggle of mind vs. the earth. In Streetcar, when he speaks while eating a fruit, he remakes Demosthenes for modernity. The post-Adler approach to acting, acting with a ragged edge, is exemplified by its rawness. It is abstract expressionism for the screen.

The question is why this approach still rings true for us. By now, approaching acting as being-in-the-moment should be an anachronism. Yet it is the approach seemingly necessitated by the scrutiny of the camera lens and by the depth of experience we have reading human faces. And watching Brando in The Godfather—speaking through a raspy throat—remains as compelling as it did 40 years ago.

Demosthenes, transparency + transcendence

Demetrius, the Phalerian, tells us that he was informed by Demosthenes himself, now grown old, that the ways he made use of to remedy his natural bodily infirmities and defects were such as these; his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation he overcame and rendered more distinct by speaking with pebbles in his mouth; his voice he disciplined by declaiming and reciting speeches or verses when he was out of breath, while running or going up steep places; and that in his house he had a large looking-glass, before which he would stand and go through his exercises.  —Demosthenes, by Plutarch


Perhaps there are two ways to think of performing through an obstruction. One approach is transcendent. We transcend the limitations of a medium with our virtuosity. Like spectacular visual effects, photographs that look like paintings, and Michael Jackson. In the other approach, there is no transcendence. We struggle with tools to produce form that never becomes transparent and still maintains its ragged edge. Contemporary theorists would likely think of this as a worn-out cipher for authenticity, the honesty of materials and modernity.

Maybe we can look at Demosthenes in two ways. In the received view, Demosthenes learned to transcend his speech impediment by filling his mouth with stones. But perhaps the "distinct" speech he learned didn't refer to a clarity of pronunciation, but a clarity of expression. Perhaps he didn't overcome his stammering but learned to use it for rhetorical effect.