Qualities of performance

It's a little embarrassing. I didn't know I was such a by-the-book modernist when it comes to performance. Here are the qualities of performance I always seem to be looking for—

1. Struggle, working oneself out of a series of difficulties, disclosing the struggle of something coming into being, the struggle of an incongruity with the world. We become embedded in and must work our way through history and the presence of things past.

Practically everything I've written about in this blog is about this in some way. Noise shows the struggle of its inception; we learn as we go. Our mistakes determine the outcome of the film. The film is correction-in-motion. It takes the uncinematic and struggles to make it cinematic enough, mostly just hanging by a thread. Brando struggles through obstacles.  My disaffection for films like Goodfellas in which the cinematic virtuosity is astounding, but it  lacks any sense of wonder or experimentation. It is an ostentatious showy blonde of a movie. The handheld camera in Episode II telegraphing, knowing ahead of time where to focus during the Clone Wars sequence.

2. Becoming engaged with the earth and the elements: weather, aging, chemical process. We, our tools and processes become subject to things and do not make all things subject to us.

This is the problem of Beowolf. We see Beowolf standing there on the ship and yet he is unblinking, impervious to the rain. This makes him seem less heroic, not more. He becomes an object, not a person persevering through the rain which was added only later in post. The characters in episode II talking calmly on helicopter-like gunships like they're on the subway, the only clue to the fact that they are flying is fan-driven hair. The work reveals something about its process whether shot on 3 chip or CMOS or film. The use of faux film techniques evokes the desire to return to a world where we are subject to the earth. Yet, because these effects are digital, they once again become aestheticized as an effect.

3. The lack of self-conscious artistry and overstyling. Being in the moment vs. seeing creation in terms of aesthetic or psychological or social decision-making.

My dislike of conventions that falsely convey authority. Episode II—the overly art-directed Clone Wars, the contrast and composition too perfectly control. Heaven's Gate. Dave McKean.

4. Life and expression—something comes across in the public sphere having a lively quality.

The character has inner necessity. They do things congruent with their speech. It doesn't matter whether actors/animators work inside out or outside in. There just has to be a sense of life, of doing things that make sense, of being a part of a moment happening for the first time. Life is the post position that looks like the pre-position.

5. Observation trumping artsy-ness potentially leading to invention. Understanding and knowing instead of recycling or the unimaginative use of tropes.

Abuses of the shaky cam as trope. The problems with Stealth. and its self-conscious performance.