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.