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 Madness
and the Method
The contrast with the
Studio stung Cassavetes all the more, since he had both personal
and intellectual differences with Strasberg. He was resentful about
the power the Studio exerted over New York casting directors and
was convinced that his not being an alumnus was what had prevented
him from being hired early in his career. He was also scornful
of
what he called the "guru" aspects of the Studio, and despised the
cult of personality that had grown up around Strasberg (scorning
it as only someone half envious of it can). Cassavetes and Lane
pointedly described their own approach to students as being "anti-guru."
Cassavetes believed that although figures like Clift, Brando and
Dean had had a salutary influence on acting in the late 1940s and
early 50s, by the middle of the decade the Method had hardened
into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring
as the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle,
furrow and stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity.
Acting
as Playing
Cassavetes had one more
encounter with the Actors Studio in late 1956. One day he approached
Burt Lane and the two young men he regarded as being the best
actors in the Workshop, Tom Gilson and Tony Ray, and told them
he had cooked up a fun thing to do. The
four of them would “crash” one of the Actors Studio
auditions, scheduled for a couple days later, and show those “stars
and bigwigs” what they could do. When Lane, Gilson, and Ray
asked Cassavetes what scene he had in mind for the audition piece,
he said that would be part of the fun. They would not use a text,
but improvise something on the spot. The goal would be to hold
the stage for as long as they could. The morning of audition day,
the four of them batted around a few ideas and agreed to meet later
at the Studio. Cassavetes told his three co-conspirators
that if they were asked, they were to say that they were doing
a scene
from a new play titled Bill Bower’s Boys. It was
about black siblings passing for white.
There was an immediate
problem once they arrived at the Studio. There were no walk-ins.
Auditions were by reservation and audition days were always booked
up well in advance. But Cassavetes
was not one to let something like that stop him. According to Burt
Lane, he talked his way onto the stage and he and his cohorts
improvised the craziest, most demented, Jerry Lewis-like moment
they could come up with. According to Tony Ray, they couldn’t
have been more successful or more outrageous: “We were not
signed up to audition. We concocted the framework of an improvisation,
went to the Studio, made a big ruckus and [forced our
way] on stage. Auditions are supposed to last five minutes, but
we worked for
at least fifteen minutes before they got us off.”
It was a typical Cassavetes prank, but it also summed up the philosophical
difference between his approach to acting and that of Lee Strasberg
and Elia Kazan. The Studio's sense of acting was that it was something serious, laboured and
earnest. Cassavetes' understanding was that acting was a form of play. It could be zany,
comical and madcap. In Strasberg's vision, the theatre was a church; in Cassavetes', it was a
playground. While the Actors Studio specialised in moody, broody anguish, Cassavetes felt that
acting was fundamentally an expression of joy and exuberance.
The
Mask of Personality
There was another difference
between Strasberg on the one hand and Lane and Cassavetes on the
other. As Lane told an interviewer in 1958, the problem with the
Method was that:
In focusing
on core emotions, it removed the masks of the characters and deprived
them of personalities. In real life, we rarely act directly from
our emotions. Feeling is simply the first link in a chain. It is
followed by an adjustment of the individual to the situation and
to the other people involved in it, and this in turn leads to the
projection of an attitude which initiates the involvement with other
persons. On top of that, there is the problem of characterisation.
Actors who are preoccupied with themselves – with
examining and
recalling their own innermost experiences – cannot
properly interact
with others on stage, much less approximate the interactions of
others with themselves. Since most dramatic conflict arises either
from characters trying to get behind the personality masks of others,
or from trying to prevent others from seeing through their own
masks,
a method which neglects the recreation of a character's mask is
essentially destructive of dramatic values.
Cassavetes drew many
of his fundamental dramatic concepts from Lane, and Lane's notion
that characters wear "personality masks" informs all of Cassavetes'
work. Not only are there explicit references to masks in Shadows
in the scene in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden and in
the shot that begins the post-coital scene between Lelia and Tony,
but it is not an overstatement to say that the fundamental drama
of the film is generated by the mask each character wears.
Cassavetes felt that
the appeal of the Method arose from the fact that actors didn't
have to create and maintain a mask or a sharply defined character.
The actor was allowed to fill the character up with his own private
fantasies and emotions. Rather than going out of himself to become
someone else, the actor defined the character in terms of his own
personal needs and desires. This flattered the actor because it
told him that acting was ultimately about himself. The result,
in
Cassavetes' and Lane's view, was lazy, sentimental, narcissistic
acting. In ignoring the "mask" – the obliquity
and ulteriority – the
unique, personal colors emotional
expression took on as it passed through the prism of character
– the Actors Studio radically simplified both acting and life.
The
outside of life dropped away; characters became all inside. The
individual's social expressions of himself – the complex
algebra
of bodily, gestural and verbal interaction – ceased to matter
or
even be represented on stage. The dismissive term Cassavetes and
Lane used to describe the Method was "organized introversion."
Since
one of Cassavetes' fundamental dramatic beliefs was that individuals
are social beings, there could be no greater loss. To understand
life in terms of simple states of feeling rather than complex social
expressions of those feelings was to trivialize it – dramatically
and humanly.
Shadows, Published
by the British Film Institute (London, England)
Distributed in America by
the University
of California Press at Berkeley
ISBN: 0-85170-835-8
88 pages; thirty illustrations
This
page only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's
writing about Shadows. To obtain the complete text as well
as the complete texts of many pieces about Cassavetes that are not
included on the web site, click
here.
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