The Truth about Acting

© Shamoni Sarkar

          The bright red lipstick matches the red beret. The black leather jacket balances out the redness and gives everything an air of casual coolness. I step out of the house feeling like one of Woody Allen’s breezy new heroines.

        Then I see Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. Suddenly I am self-aware— aware of everything that goes on inside my head as I put together my looks for different occasions. My look is done, undone and redone, until it fits with a mood: relaxed, worried, thoughtful, or Woody Allenesque. When the look complements the inner mood, I hear a voice of approval, and then I’m ready to go. I construct little film stills of myself ever so often. I am my own actress.

         But what is the point of all this acting?  

         In Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Liv Ullman’s character Marianne reads aloud to her husband Johan from her diary. She has written of a childhood spent on being pleasing and obedient to her parents, but completely ignorant of who she was or what to make of her own life. The greatest deception, she writes, came at puberty, when her mind was flooded with thoughts of sex and secret wishes to become an actress. At her father’s insistence she finally became a lawyer, but, like everything else she had done in her life, her lawyer self was also an act. Even in her relationships with men, she invented herself, because she did not know what to present to them otherwise. When she finishes reading the entry she looks over at Johan, only to find him fast asleep on their couch. If acting is a lie, then Marianne has been lying her whole life. Now, when she finally reveals the truth about her lies, there is no one awake to acknowledge her.

       Sherman’s film stills are also all about acting: trial runs, dressing up and recreating oneself. But, like Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage, she uses acting to get at a truth (or many truths). At first though, the film stills are deceptive. Each of them reveals itself to us at two levels: as a photograph and as cinema. As a photograph, each film still has a mood. Untitled 56 (1980) evokes “icy” or “cold contemplation”. The woman looks into the mirror, and her reflection looks back at us. We want to know what she is thinking, and whether she is using the mirror to validate her thoughts. But it is Sherman framing herself and posing for us. It is Sherman acting the part of a cold, contemplative woman. She has created everything that makes the photograph. But then what is true about it? Is she not doing exactly what Marianne says she has been doing her entire life— playing roles and acting?  

     At this point of doubt, the photograph becomes cinema by taking on a story. This woman could be plotting murder! I am reminded of the icy blonde heroines in Alfred Hitchcock movies. The Sherman of Untitled 56 could very possibly be a version of a Hitchcockian heroine— she is beautiful, someone who always gets what she wants, but who is generally unpopular and is about to unwittingly fall into a bad situation.

                                                                     

 

                                                                                              

      Almost all the film stills have elements running through them that we have learned to read from the cinema. They all have pointers that originate in fiction. For example, there are waiting women such as in Untitled 50 (1979) and Untitled 15 (1978). We also recognize and articulate that they are different kinds of waiting. The waiting woman in Untitled 50 seems wealthy but lonely. We assume that she is waiting for an uncaring husband to come home. But she seems disinterested and bored as well, waiting only because there is nothing better to do. In Untitled 15, the high heels, the short dress and the necklace with a cross all suggest a young small-town girl that has come to the city to chase her dreams. As she looks down from her window, she could be looking out for a man, for a friend or just for the dreams that she came to follow. There are many other pointers in the film stills, both concrete and suggestive. Though they exist in real life, we learn to identify them on screen. One notes short black hair, bonnets, staircases from which women look down or up, and shadows. They give the story to the initial mood set up in the photograph, turning it into cinema.

        When we see the film still as a whole, i.e. as one-dimensional mood and cinema coming together, we realize that we cannot really separate the camera from life, or acting from truth. We associate Sherman’s film stills with other filmic moments we have seen and probably did not even consciously remember. The cinema seems to be our only filter. In fact, even if we were not told that they were “film stills”, we would still associate them with cinematic images.

       But then is the mood fictional as well? Don’t we at least know, from our own lives, about the pain of waiting or the discomfort of coldness? And don’t we then make cinema by giving stories to these vague, but true, moods? So in a way, isn’t it all true, including the cinema? And so it would seem that Sherman is getting at the truth, or rather a truth, in each film still.   

      This still does not answer the question of why we dress up, or imagine ourselves in a certain way. Why do we want to dress up our moods? The search for a truth does not seem like a plausible reason because we cannot explain why we lie (or act) to get to it. We do not know why Marianne would need to write in her diary about her life of acting, or even why she would want to read it out to Johan. The only way she is able to get at her truth is by admitting that she has been acting. But does this revelation mean that she has stopped acting? And if she has not stopped acting, she has not been able to find that elusive truth.

      In an interview with New York Magazine, Cindy Sherman says that she wanted to “try on” all her film still roles. She herself is unsure about why she did them, but she wonders if maybe she actually did want to be her characters and not be herself. However, she also says that she was uncomfortable with the idea of going to work dressed like her characters, because she felt she wouldn’t be wearing her “normal armor”. “Normal” suggests that there is a real Cindy Sherman, but “armor” once again suggests dressing up. Perhaps there is a certain Cindy Sherman she is most comfortable being, if she were to choose among all the other possible Cindy Shermans. And maybe this is the self she wears when she is not dressing herself up for her art.      

      If one looks at Untitled 56 again, one notices the way the side of Sherman’s face is framed, as if she handled the light in such a way that it looks like a part of her hair. But of course it isn’t, because one can see through its transparency to the way her hair actually curls, away from her face. And then, one notices the circular black object near her chin, which looks like a flashlight. Perhaps the light from that, and the natural light from the sun (which illuminates a part of the hair) create the effect that we see. But one can only guess. What is clear, though, is that Sherman has ‘played’ with the photograph. She starts from a truth, whether it is a mood, or a certain mannerism, gives it a story, and then turns it into something completely different in the photograph, by introducing something unnatural into it. But there is always a truth in them, or in her, which never gets lost. This is why she is able to keep working and changing roles, without letting go of her mysterious core. Similarly, there is something true about Marianne (a certain way of being perhaps) that she must have recognized in herself, or else she would not have been able to admit that she had been acting.

        Maybe the answer is that we want to know all of our possibilities, and so we allow life and screen to overlap, sometimes to the extent that we cannot differentiate between them. We want to know how we can dress up our truths because we do not want to remain static. But even if we resign ourselves to this answer, questions still remain. Do we really have a truth to dress up? If so, could it ever be lost under the layers of costume?

  

    

Madness and Yearning in Cindy Sherman and Pina Bausch

                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

© Shamoni Sarkar

                                                                                                                                                                    

All you can do is hint at things 

Pina Bausch

           If an artist’s “hint” is powerful enough, the audience, the art and the artist herself are embraced in a common relationship of madness. Speaking of photography in his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes describes this maddening process: “it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being. It then approaches, to all intents, madness” (Barthes, 1981). Barthes says that photography is “mad” because it shows more than it tells. It traps a real moment in time, so in a way it captures a truth, but we can know nothing more of this truth except for the fact that it happened. So if we happened to see, for example, a photograph of a young girl holding an ice cream, but with tears running down her face, we would not be completely satisfied simply by seeing a touching photograph. We would want more to complete our story and answer questions such as “Why is the girl crying when she has what any child would want?” or “Who is this child?” We would want to have a concrete detail to hold on to, to pin down our brief relationship with the picture. Barthes seems to be saying that we want to experience our own “affect” instead of looking from a distance at another’s. So in a way the photograph cheats us by not giving us everything. It is a work of art in limbo, and this is why it is “mad”.   

        The art of Pina Bausch and Cindy Sherman is mad in a Barthesian way because it feeds on affects, especially desire and yearning, to bring out its reality. It is the madness of Bausch’s work that Wim Wenders pays tribute to in his documentary Pina. In an interview, he says that the only way he thought he could do justice to her was by making the film in 3D. He does not explicitly say why, but perhaps he saw the importance of making the audience feel the madness of her choreographies at more than just the visual level. In fact, the effect of madness in both Sherman and Bausch’s works is doubled because not only are the works themselves “mad”, but the subjects represented in the works too seem mad. Madness is a more exclusive state of being than the state of feeling desire or longing. So viewers may feel that they are denied any understanding of what the subjects themselves are going through. They are denied, as Barthes calls it, the guarantee of the subject’s Being. Angered, a viewer may even question Sherman and Bausch’s motives. Do Bausch and Sherman even know what madness is? If not, how can they attempt to depict it to ignorant viewers? Are they taking advantage of their mad mediums?

        But are they consciously depicting madness, or are they just hinting at unnameable things? In Cafe Müller, the madness is all in Pina’s body: her skeletal figure enters wearing a white nightgown, arms stiff and outstretched with palms facing outward, and eyes closed. For the next forty-nine minutes, she flails purposelessly, despairs silently and gets trapped in the circular motion of the revolving door. She strays away, but always comes back to the same position, and always uses the same wall as support. The initial hint is the entry. It is strong enough, and is used repeatedly throughout the piece to tell us that this woman is lost to herself, sad, desperate, and perhaps blind. She should feel lost to us as well, but yet she does not.  

       Igor Stravinsky composed the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps inspired by the story of the Russian pagan ritual of the self-sacrifice of a young girl to the God of Spring. Bausch’s choreography of it takes it beyond the simple plot and fills it with innumerable possibilities of meaning. One may think of coffee plantations, a violent rape or the loss of protection. Again, all that we have are hints: the bare setting strewn with something that resembles mud, the red dress that replaces the white after the girl has been “chosen” by the man, and the desperate, throbbing circle of bodies that the women form when they are threatened. The bodies of both the men and the women convey anger, power, necessity and desire in every collective gesture, whether they lunge forward at each other or contract their arms and fists, resisting. As they dance and move, their faces always look mad, but it is an internal, undirected madness. We do not know where so much feeling comes from, but we can still see it unfolding before us. “Where does all the yearning come from?” Bausch is quoted as having asked one of her dancers. Perhaps she worked only to answer this question, and found that she could only hint at the answer.

                                 

         In Sherman’s Untitled 122 (1983), the body of the woman photographed also hints at her madness in very similar ways: stiff, straight arms, a thin body wearing clothing that is more protective than attractive or comfortable, and clenched fists. Her eyes are open, but mostly covered by her unruly hair— another hint. 
        Bausch and Sherman hint at things we have already learned to associate with madness: desperation, loneliness, gestures, and challenged femininity. But once we separate these qualities from the idea of madness, we realize that we have seen or known them in our own lives. We have known desperation and loneliness, and perhaps sometimes we have even felt as if our identities have disintegrated and we have been left with nothing. We have all been mad before, and we are able to see hints of our own madness in dance or in pictures. Madness is grief and desire, and understanding this much is enough, for the artist as well as the beholder.

                                 

           In Untitled 92 (1981), desire and madness are entwined to the extent that they seem perverse. The information on the wall tells us that the series of photographs in that particular room were modeled on pictures in men’s erotic magazines. Our eyes are drawn to the checked skirt resembling a school uniform, the way the girl poses on her hands and knees, and the ambiguous blue eyes. But her eyes do not look submissive, nor do they have the devouring stare of invitation that one normally sees in models in erotic magazines. In their unknowable blueness there is a hint of fear but an even larger hint of madness. The blueness of the eyes captures the blue lighting of the photograph and the blueness of the skirt, as if the madness of the entire photograph converges in them. The madness is adult and a startling contrast to the girl’s schoolgirl demeanor. Desire is engineered in this photograph: We imagine a man watching and wanting the girl, and the girl looking back at us and at him, conscious of being looked at. But unlike in Bausch’s work, there are no real feelings conjured by the photograph for us to identify with, so we can only be perplexed, and perhaps discomforted, by its madness. What draws us to the kind of madness in this photograph? What guarantees its Being?

         Barthes likens photography to a “science of desirable and detestable bodies” (in reference to the entire body of the photograph and not just the individual bodies portrayed in them). Cafe Müller is filled with darkness but we feel the warmth, or rather the consolation of it because we can somehow identify with what is being hinted at. We desire the body in Cafe Müller more. Sherman’s Untitled 92 is cold but we do not turn away from it. But do we detest it? Perhaps some would object to the suggestion of a child in the photograph, or to the uncomfortable position Sherman puts them in as viewers. But the most detestable thing about the picture is probably that we do not understand the truth contained in the blue eyes. We go back to madness— a madness that we cannot feel. But whether comprehensible or not, Barthes appeals to us to protect Madness and to save Desire to truly experience what a photograph can give us. “You just have to get crazier,” Bausch tells one of her disillusioned dancers. Both she and Sherman invite us to fall deeper into madness and desire instead of distancing ourselves from them. It is an invitation to go beyond incomplete understanding and lose oneself in one’s own mad feelings.