Celluloid and the Actor: By Micheál MacLiammóir

Micheál MacLiammóir, co-founder of The Gate Theatre in Dublin, has recently become of great interest to me – through my reading of Simon Callow’s marvelous multi-part biography of Orson Welles. I haven’t written much about it yet because I am devouring it at the speed of light (alongside of Arabian Nights, yes, I’m nuts). But in the meantime – MacLiammóir also sparked my fancy. Here’s some background on MacLiammóir (naturally, my dad is a wealth of information about this gentleman – who gave Welles his start in the theatre). And look at this absolutely incredible photo I found – of Eartha Kitt, MacLiammóir and Orson Welles from 1950:

MacLiammóir seems to me to be an example of true integrity as an artist. I need to know more.

My dad has just received in the mail a bunch of issues of a short-lived Irish literature magazine called “Envoy” – all from 1950 – and MacLiammóir has a long essay in one of them called “Celluloid and the Actor”. This is a comparative study – of the art of the stage actor and the art of the movie actor. WONDERFUL observations – I particularly liked the bit about how audiences in the theatre expect strict probability from the plots – this dates back to Aristotle and verisimilitude and all that – but are more prone to forgive the larger-than-life quality of acting, due to the medium of live theatre. Whereas the total opposite is true of cinematic audiences. They are willing to swallow the most improbable plots imaginable – but any whiff of over-acting is enough to sink the entire operation.

Lots of great observations here … and this is just the tip of the iceberg, in terms of my research into MacLíammóir. He wrote a couple of autobiographies – my dad has a copy of one, and I have ordered the other.

Taking a risk with the copyright gods – I have copied out his essay “Celluloid and the Actor” below … figuring that it is better to make it available to an Internet audience – however briefly – than let it suffer in the obscurity of an old literature mag.

Wonderful stuff – Alex, Mitchell, David, Kate – all my actor friends – you guys will love this!

Micheál MacLiammóir
Celluloid and the Actor, a Note on a First Experiement

Envoy,
Jan. 1950

1.

The art of the film belongs primarily to the director, and to those learned and secretive shadows who surround him: the cameraman, the cutter, and a hundred and one technicians whose activities, though constantly referred to under varying titles, remain to the neophyte anonymous and remote.

That curious phenomenon, part magic, part simian exuberance that we may as well agree to call the art of acting emerges in the presence of the camera and its attendants as a quality only half understood. He whose life work it is, had realised always perhaps that it was composed of divers subtle elements, this queer, yet commonplace talent he possessed of making other people laugh or cry to the tune of a poet’s words or of his own often vulgar fancy. He had realised that it was a power at once liquid and inexorable, malleable and merciless, that could gush forth, could flow and laugh and trickle and thunder and whisper, could soothe, seduce, overwhelm, submerge, destroy; that it could reflect an image, deceive an army, or occupy a thousand shapes; that it could cleanse or breed or quence or spawn or rot: that it was, in short, a fluid. Yet not until he faces the lens can he have understood that this fluid is also an essence so potent that to use it in more than the smallest distillations, the most minutely measured drops, would be to shatter the design of the master mind, which is embodied in the director, and to set the most uncritical of audiences on a roar at the wrong moment.

The actor, in short, should understand that he relinquishes, as he signs his contract and steps upont he floor, his never too-firmly established claim to be an artist in the sense of a master of a creative work, of an entire and complete composition. That task, however important he may become as a star, is left in other hands, who begin their work by skilfully stripping from him, stitch by stitch, the raiments of the craft he had laboriously pieced together in the living theatre, leaving him naked (and it may be exceedingly ashamed) to face his personality in the raw, which alone, he is informed with perfect friendliness and courtesy, is of the slightest use to him or to anyone else.

This is a lesson of grat value, if the poor devil can stand the drafts that blow so briskly around his shivering ego, as unaccustomed to exposure on the public gaze as the body of a monk; for on the stage he had learned, not to strip naked, but to assume at will what was in the main a series of disguises, to acquire a trunk frull of ingenious and sometimes beautiful costumes: a trick of expression, a movement with the shoulders or the hands, an ability to lift a scene with the rhythm of his voice, to colour a whole consecutive hour with a parade of beauty, or strength or grotesqueness donned at will; to take, in short, the action of the play at the moment of performance into his own hands, if his skill and the part he portrays allow it, and himself to work out his destiny.

All this he must forget when he passes into the studio; it is less than useless to him or to the astounding conglomeration of intellectyual simplicity and technical complication that goes to make up the work in hand; it is a hindrance. He will indeed do well to recall the statement, now so accepted as a truth that it has become a platitiude, that babies and dogs make the best film-actors, and become for the time being something that hovers between baby and dog, while retaining, if he can, qualities of a passionate belief in the moment, a singleness of thought, and a concentration of emotion not necessarily shared by these unspoilt children of nature.

Acting, as he had understood the word, ceases to exist for him or takes upon itself a new meaning. I am not sure that the art of the screen-player – and those who have seen, let us say, Raimu, or Garbo, or Laughton, or Chaplin, will agree that it can be an art – should not find for itself a separate name, as the arts of sculpture and painting which are akin and yet essentially different have separate names. Film-acting has not, and I feel it can never have, that essential content of the art of the stage actor, which in common with all the arts that have down to us from the past, is of the nature of architecture: the individual working-out of a design on a given theme, the selection of material and treatment for its realisation, the slow or rapid building of its consecutive structure. Here is where what we have hittherto understood as the artist shows himself also essentially as the master: at the moment of performance he guides, however previously moulded by his director, his own destiny to success or to failure. The screen-actor has no such responsibility, being a tool in the hands primarily of those unseen powers that have made his features, his limbs, and the life that flows through them, and secondarily in the masterful imagination and will of the artist, the true artist, who, even through the split-up moments of his ultimate appearance on the screen, moulds and directs those features, those limbs, and that life.

2.

He has no such responsibliities as the stage-actor and yet, in spite of the ubiquitous models of the baby and the dog, he must be possessed, if not of more intelligence, at least of a more vivid and visible power of thought.

“You are acting it, not thinking it,” is the most contsant correction in the ears of those more skilled in the art of the stage than of the screen, and as he is not in fact either baby or dog, however much he may despairingly wish he were, neither milk-bottle nor mutton-bone may be dangled before his eyes to m ake them brighter withi desire; neither turnip-headed bogey-man nor hissing, bristling cat can be provided (out of the range of the camera) to contract his face with fear or fury; he must imagine these things as the stage-actor must, often without even the visible presence of the cause of his reaction, for frequently a scene that appears on the screen as consecutive action between any two characters will be made in sections that demand the presence of only one actor at a time, the other being free to smoke his cigarette and enjoy his weekend where he chooses (which is, as a rule, as far from the scene of action as possible). The player is compelled in such cases to imagine even the face of friend or enemy as well as the emotions it calls forth. So the victim of the celluloid must imagine it all – imagine with a deeper, less formal, and far more minute understanding than is demanded from the glamorous distance lent by stall or gallery, for the black unwinking eye of the camera reads all his thoughts and reproduces them, not, as is often supposed, with complete truth, but with all the merciless insistence on his poorer qualities that would do credit to a disapproving member of his own family. And, having imagined, he must do little more. Above all he must not project his imaginings: to do so is to offend the highly developed trades-union instinct of the camera, whose work it is to project everything itself. Nor must the old-fashioned advice simply of being natural, either at long distance or in close-up, be listened to by any but those who have never been within a hundred miles of the living theatre. The natural manner of the stage actor (I refer to him outside his working hours) appears to the layman almost invariably well over life-size: his daily training makes him express rather than repress his passions, emotions, and prejudcies; his ideas, as will be readily understood, are generally limited though none the less vigorously proclaimed; his features are mobile, his voice booms, his eyes flash a hundred communications, many of them trifling but all most vital, his eyebrows are seldom at rest, and the slight modification of these characteristics in the modern player is due almost entirely to his traffic with the world of celluloid or, in English speaking countries, to his morbid desire to pass himself off as a gentleman in good society. All this is fatal when he works for, or rather under, the camera which demands not the natural but the sub-natural; a repose that lies somewhere between that of the Sphinx and of the ideal English butler will suffice with the aid of that black, unwinking eye and the merest shadow of a thought, to appear on the screen as the embodiment of desire, hope, lechery, faith, agony, trust, ambition, despair, resignation, duplicity, revenge or what you will. A contraction of the nostrils, a twitch of the eybrows, and all is ruined, as all may be ruined by an extra ounch of superfluous flesh or one additional tone to the voice. Much of his time will therefore be spent in a casting aside of all his most treasured histrionic possessions, a process that must be careful rather than ruthless, for if he goes too far in this direction he becomes one of those myriad, mechanical shadows for the creation of which Hollywood and other centres have become so justly infamous, and passes rapidly into the ranks of well-favoured nondescripts that form the background to the average popular film. If, when he is thus physically stripped to the bone, purified, groomed and decarbonised almost beyond recognition, there is still enough individual interest left in him to work with, he will in all likelihood make a success.

3.

His is the problem of the tightrope, the agonising nicety of balance between the obedient puppet necessary to the director’s will, and the scientifically poised and intuitive intelligence that can interpret the process of thought and emotion to an enormous and international public which, perhaps by very reason of its lack of aesthetic education, is all the more shrewd at distinguishing between an authentic and a synthetic form of behaviour. The audiences of the theatre and of the cinema, it seems to me, differ most profoundly on this point: that whereas the former will be critically fastidious about the probability of a dramatic situation, rejecting as absurd some machine-made twist in plot or narrative or dialogue, they will readily accept as a traditional inevitability these very qualities in the mannerisms of an actor, whom they allow to boom or gush, to overplay or underplay to his heart’s content, so long as he is possessed of the skill to disguise these weaknesses beneath the trappings of verve and personality, the opposite is true of the film audience. These, it is well known, crowd nightly to the cinemas of Europe and America in order to devour with eyes and ears stories that would barely deceive a centenarian, let alone a sensible child of seven, yet they in their turn will reject as unconvincing the faintest divergence from normal behaviour (usually behaviour of the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon school, too, so famous for understatement) in the portrayal of some personal reaction. One false movement, one slight exaggeration, one slip of the tongue, one relapse into heroics, and a buzz of antipathy goes round the audience, an uneasy stir, a titter of frozen laughter. And that actor is dead for the night, and, it may well be, for many nights to come.

I do not mean by this that more is demanded of the film than of the stage actor. Less is demanded in the matter of style and of those qualities that separate a work of art from the life it seeks to express: more is demanded in power to imitate exactly the surface of that life, and never for a moment to step beyond the bounds of its most commonplace manifestation. Less is demanded in the matter of the cration by the actor of a mood to be sustained by him and his fellows for a considerable length of time; more is demanded of his ability to leap with superhuman suddenness and an apparently complete sincerity into the heart of a scene, the beginnings of which were probably completed some weeks or months previously and since dropped, and, with a single line, led up to by nothing but hours of waiting in an overheated studio or wind-swept exterior, persuad himself and the world that he loves a woman, hates a man, is hungry, cold, furious, or weary unto death; the latter sentiment being, it is unnecessary to state, by far the easiest to express with any conviction. This need for instantaneous potency is unlike that expected from the prize-fighter, whose eyes and muscles are trained in the primeval art of expecting the unexpected, the first instinct of human survival, developed in the ring to a technical formula. No such fundamental impulse of nature lurks in the brain-cells of him who is invited to say (for no reason in the world that he can gauge or anyone else tell him but that it is part of that scene where he, Jack, threatens Don Juan, before setting fire to the hacienda, surely he remembers?), “And now, my Dago friend, get out of here before I …”; just that and no more.

The following excerpt, like the dialogue, is imaginary, but the situation is literal and accurate. The tim eis 10.45 a.m., the actors, honest Jack and Conchita the Spitfire, ahving breakfasted on orange-juice at six, have been on the set (dressed and made-up) since seven, and now, with a promptitude quite unusual under the circumstances, all is ready. The take – for that one pithy and athletic line comprises the take – has been rehearsed to a smoothly running accompaniment of encouragement and invective from the director about a dozen times, the technicians, crew, continuity girls, and the rest form an attentive and critical semi-circle, the make-up man dabs the sweat gently from the noses of Jack and Conchita, already eyeing each other with mingled pity and animostiy, the hairdresser gives a last nerve-racking tweak or so to their locks; Don Juan (for he is not in the shot) lolls in a distant chair and regards himself in a mirror, the crew takes on itself the intense yet slightly incredulous air of an Irish football crowd, Conchita slips at an angle of several degrees and numbing discomfort into Jack’s arms, Jack toes the chalk-marks previously marked out for him, both artists screw their faces about like paper bags, blink several times, moisten their lips, avoid each other’s gaze,a nd lower their quivering eyelids, as a weary and wiry little man like a retired fly-weight darts forward and thrusts between their features and the camera a black-board furnished with some numbers, a handle and a clapper. The numbers are yelled out, the clappter provides a nerve-shattering demonstration, the director’s voice intones the word of doom. “Action,” he says, and the scene is shot. This involves, as well as Jack’s advice to Don Juan, a neat piece of business with a gun, a shifting from one of the hero’s arms to the other of the heroine, some complicated footwork on the part of both of them, and also a retreating movement of the camera until the joyful word “Cut” is heard, and the thing is done, though not yet finished. In the first shot the gun goes wrong, in the second Jack fails to hit his marks, in the third Conchita’s right shoulder is hitched too high and masks the hero’s well-known features at the beginning of his speech, in the fourth a reflector gets loose and causes the light to quiver, in the fifth Conchita glances down at the floor to find her marks, “what a naughty girl I am, and I’d no idea I was doing it.”

The morning went on. The director’s voice, so full of bright, hard, matinal decision at rehearsal slowly takes on the moribund and caressing tones of him who begins to understand the terror of eternity; it grows fat, flat and soothing like the voice of an experienced nurse with a peevish and incurable patient who hasn’t the remotest chance of dying for years.

“Much better that time, much the best so far for the artist; it was spoilt by the dolly wobbling like bloody hell.” And with relief and rapture, for he knows that to bully either Jack or Conchita at this crucial moment will reduce them to even lower depths of incompetency than they have hitherto plumbed, he vents his real feelings on the crew. They, of course, are used to this and take it like men, with silence if not with strength. The fifteenth shot is ruined by a flyl settling on Conchita’s nose; the twenty-fifth is good all round, “but let’s try one more for luck,” so its excellence is soon forgotten in a series of unprecedented disasters that follow one another with nightmare agility. The thirty-fifth shot is mechanically perfect but marred, it seems, by Jack’s performance having, quite inexplicably, become a trifle unreal.

“Dear old boy you’re going to be so impatient with me but it didn’t mean a damn thing. I mean it wasn’t true, it wasn’t alive, I just didn’t believe it: that’s all.”

Jack listens to this little speech (delivered without the flicker of an eyelid by the director) with an expression so genuinely exhausted as to allow one to expect the obvious retort, and says, in a bright voice, what about trying it again? This suggestion is accepted more in sorrow than in anger, both make-ups, now at the clogged stage, are attended to, and the scene goes on … and it goes on and it goes on.

When at length a shot is made that is worthy of preservation, camera angles and lighting are readjusted, a matter sometimes of hours, and the scene favouring Conchita instead of Jack is retaken, necessitating much the same process; then for a third time the thing is repeated in order to reveal to a world-wide public the reactions to Jack’s unflinching eloquence on the sinister features of Don Juan.

4.
It will be seen by this scarcely exaggerated description of a simple moment in a simple scene (probably, when all is done, to be expurgated by the cutter, to say nothing of its fate in the hands of censors of varying local and moral scruples) that the screen-player’s path is no easy one, and that the obstacles with which it is strewn are not all connected with the art of acting. There are indeed moments when the actor feels that in playing for the films he undergoes a combination of experiences that combine: a severe Training for the Commandos, a Lesson in Gymnastic Precision, a Turkish Bath, an Ocular Test, an Essay in the Virtue of Patience and Obedience, and an interminable Session at the Photographers. Few shots in a film have longer endurance in their completed condition than a minute, hardly any, I think, longer than four and a half, which is less than the time that the average stage artist requires to get to grips with his scene; the most convincing moments are often achieved by a lucky chance, such as a stumble on a slippery groundl or by a deep-laid plot on the part of the director, such as an unexpected blow on the face which not unnaturally produces a surprise so genuine that the highest art could hardly improve upon; and these accidents, shifts and stratagems are a commonplace in the studios. Yet there are lessons for the actor to learn when he faces the lens as well as those of fortitude and tricky technicalities, and, strangely enough, in this atmosphere of synthetic aids and augmentations, the greatest of these I think is the study of the inner life, of the depths of the mind, of the birth of thought and passion, of the ego’s function; not merely of formalised representation of its results, wherein lies the actor’s great danger. For what is that false quality we all “staginess” but a forgetfulness of the roots of the tree of human life, and a reducing of the flowers and fruits to a conventional design that grows with ease into mere mannerism? What in the theatre we call a “ham” is in reality no more than one who has learned the outside of his craft merely, which is the exposition of the passions, and who has discarded, or maybe never understood, the fountain of passion itself, so that his portrayals of men and women grow into caricatures which even when they have style and skill are so lacking in understanding, in life, in truth, that they become ludicrous. To save the theatre from this degeneration is a work no ingenuity of the writer, or designer, no magnificience in light, colour or pageantry can achieve: it is a work for the actor who is the medium, and the director who controls him, and nowhere can this work be more rapidly learned than under the camera’s eye. That this should be so, that the emotions of the human system should be more accessible to the student, in a setting of mechnical chicanery than in the living theatre, seems a paradox. That it is so I am persuaded, as I am persuaded that the Muses, always at war with the times, are searching for a way back to simplicity through the mastery and the ultimate rejection of that elaborate technique which took five hundred years to perfect and is now for a spell in decay, partly beack to the recapture of the primitive world, and when I say this I am thinking of painting, and of Picasso, of Rouault, and of Miro. The Muses search with whatever means come their way, and science, in this century it has made its own, has thrust its most complicated ingenuities across their path. That the drama should have been so swift a Muse to flirt for a while with these perilous mechanisms is a link, it may be, with those mysteries that bind all the energies of aesthetic intellect and emotion to life and to the fates; for I believe that machinery may be seeking to destroy the world as it is already destroying what we have hitherto understood as the arts; and that, perhaps, is why the arts, in seeking to preserve themselves, are endeavouring to discover a means by which some armistice may be made with the enemy, that humanity may live in sheer simplicity side by side with its armed forces and yet not all be lost. And what is so in tune with the destruction of the ancient arts as the discovery of the movie? And what art is so instinctive, so childish, so unchangeably inconsequent as that of the actor; what more ingenuously human flower has ever grown on the bough of an ancient and impressive family tree?