"Action is dramatic when it is cause by conflict and done in order to resolve it." (Krzysztof Szwaja).
"Director" is an invention of the 20th century.
Why do we need him?
A century ago the great technological revolution brought directors to theatre. The electrification -- including the new medium "Film".... somebody has to oversee the overall harmony of many messages in many languages of stage. The drama itself went through radical transformation (see Ibsen and Chekhov and Realism). The acting school went through the Reformation.
What do you, actor, need to know about the Mind of Director?
First, it works differently from yours.
See Self-Directing for Actors!
Some directors act, some actors direct. That is the difference between Meyerhold and Stanislavsky.
Often I find myself in a position of a couch. Of course, actors are insecure, even the most arrogant ones. How else? How do you know that it is right whatever you do? You're in, you don't see yourself. You only have a feeling -- yes, yes, but....
I leave this situation with a thought that each actor has to learn how to be his or her own couch and trainer. It does take skill of self-evaluation, critical observation, living a separate non-actor's existance. One tool I always adviocate -- Actor's Journals (you it from your classes). You have to record your state of mind, your progress, your goals -- you have to talk to yourself!
Another -- developing a little director sitting inside you with his voice and his talk. It takes a journey into other lands -- general understanding of the script ourtside of your role, understanding designers, even the ideas behind the lighting plot. Yes, it will help you to remember the laws of the acting areas. You will remember that once established your positions can't be change -- and you better be sure that you are where you want your character to be.
Directors love actors who meet them half way; we are digging the channel from two opposite sides, friends. We have to develp the macro-action (director) which coinsides with the micro-actions (actor). Actor has to welcome the limitations imposed by the text, directions, design, etc -- only than you have YOUR ACTOR's SPACE for development of your role. Do you know where this space starts and ends?
Thinking about Bergman and reading philosophy books... I talk about film-directors only because directing film is the extreme expression of this profession.
Bergman has too many talents. He writes and writes well. He directs for stage. This is not good for a filmmaker. Film director should be like an artist or a musician, they don't write or dance. Film directing asks for self-limitations. No, I don’t
believe in actors-directors.
If a director can express himself in words, he should have emormous self-discipline.
I always wanted to stage "Wild Strawberries" -- it has a lot of theatre structure. I won't do it with 8 1/2 (unless it's an experiment like with "Potemkin" in France).
I consider the big film directors to be new philosophers, the postmodern type of discourse... feeling=thinking.
Art always had philosophy in it, but the subject of "War & Peace" is not philosophy. Films, even movies, because of the
technology build-in, do have IDEOLOGY in everything.
Film is musically organized, but unlike music the last structural principle of Aristotle -- the Idea -- is the form! Film is a THOUGHT.
Watching? Experiencing the thinking, a living reasoning...
It's ONE idea demonstrated in two hours.
They say film is dream-like, but what are my dreams if not THINKING while my brain sleeps? So, it is thinking without
thinking! Pre-thinking? Or maybe PRIME THINKING, the only thought process whereI do not control it -- and do not
lie!
...when I am free from myself... as if God speaks through me!
Ideology is one-dimensional. The Idea-Drive, excluding the rest, because it's full of desire, or WILL as Nietzsche would say. Of course, it's POWERFUL.
Each good film is a state of mind. It has to be static in order to have evolution within. Film is the STOPPED TIME
(Faust), only then we can experience time (Deleuze + Bergson, time, duration and memory). Eisenstein with his dialictics called it "spiral" structure, when we return over and over again. To the same face for example (CU), as if the eternal return (Nietzsche again). How else can we keep time frozen?
The After-feeling: "lost time" (as if I didn't live for two hours). There is no time in eternity. [Eternity is a questionable idea; life denounce it.]
Film is experience (see cultural studies and Baurdaugh). film doesn't exist outside of being consumed and consuming. It's not about "understanding" -- there is nothing I do not understand because I SEE everything.
In that sense film is anti-intellectual experience as we know it. Post-human, or pre-human.
Film is language I can speak with animals (and we will when we master 3D technology). It's REAL. Not just a "refliction" of reality as it was with art before, but the reality itself. Resurrected and immortal
reality.
Film is nothing but SELF. That is what resurrected world is about -- it doesn't exist outside of being SELF, i.e. it's subjective reality. There is no division between subjective and objective anymore, SELF is both. My feelings are very OBJECTIVE, pain is extremely real. The so-called "objective" world follows the logic of Kant; it is a thing-in-itself. Film is only now considered as art form, in the future it will the art-of-living. Of course, each his film is about Bergman. It is his self-portrait of inner-world. The filmmaker doesn't have to be on the screen (I do not see myself in my dreams), I am always the center of drama. Everything focused on me and about me.
Self-centered, introvert existence. Read again Heidegger: Being is Becoming and Becoming is Being. There is no Being outside of this process, no existence without being the time itself, without becoming the time.
Heidegger on Nietzsche (Chapter 8): Will as Affect, Passion and Felling. Another tupe of logic. (from Volume I: The Will to Power as Art).
"Nietzsche" -- the name of the thinker stands as the title for the matter of his thinking -- the first phrase in the Foreword.
Knowledge is supposed to be private and personal. Film in itself is the act of WILL to POWER.
Film is the pick of meditation!
Greeks: psyche is "soul" -- that is the material and method of film.
Heidegger (p. 61):
Will to power is never the willing of a particular actual entity. It involves the Being as essence of beings; it is this itself."
My SEEING the world is outside of my will, it is The Will to Power which is I. The power of film in it. The SEEING is this resurrection (becoming=being). Hegel would say the self-realization of the Spirit ("energy of thinking, the pure ego").
That is the subject of film and Bergamn makes it into HIS subject. Not just abstract "being" but his own being equated with the Being.
There is no world without or outside this personal and private Being, no truth without THAT truth. That's is concrete enough to be true.
"I" speaks...
We say -- camera...
My personal resurrection can't take place with participation of all (technology). There is not enough technology yet, we are
not ready...
We are getting there...
