Mai Zetterling: some notes on acting

• The season ‘Passion and All That Goes with It: The Films of Mai Zetterling’ plays at BFI Southbank, London, throughout May.

Am I really the person to write an article about film and stage acting? It is true that I have had experience in both for nearly ten years, but I consider myself still only a beginner and I feel (without trying in the least to impress with how modest I am) that after these ten years I have achieved nothing of what I really want, especially in the cinema.

I have found that even quite intelligent people (usually, of course, people who do not know anything about the theatre or the cinema) always ask: “Isn’t it difficult to learn all those lines?” They don’t understand when I answer: “That’s the least difficult thing about acting.” It is all the other things that matter so much more. But to explain one’s whole system of acting would take too much space, so I shall only give a brief outline of how I have worked, and am still working.

Perhaps I should say what literature I have read, and what books have helped me. The most important books for anybody studying our business, whether as director, actor or producer, and whether one agrees with everything in them or not, are Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares (1936) and My Life in Art (1924), and Pudovkin’s Film Technique and Film Acting (1929). I think these are an actor’s ABC.

I shall write not so much about acting, as the difference between stage and film acting. There are people who believe that film actors are not real actors, and it must be admitted that some of the people who believe this are actors themselves. But before going any further, ought we not to decide what we mean by an actor? An actor is a person who tries to imitate humanity. He spends his life learning the symbols of human behaviour, to reproduce them at will. In the theatre, there are four points to be made about the actor: (1) Rehearsal and preparation before showing the finished article. (2) For the stage player, continuity is unbroken. (3) The stage actor is in complete control of his performance. (4) The audience contributes towards the performance and is for the actor a source of inspiration.

These four conditions are inseparable from acting as a creative art. One must prepare exhaustively; one must maintain a sequence of ideas and emotions. The theatre helps the actor by its method of rehearsal. In the cinema we must find means of following the same path. The system of rehearsal is the most important factor of theatre work. Of the actor’s struggle to incarnate his role, Pudovkin writes: “It might indeed be said that realism, the lifeline unity of the image, is a problem more pertinent and urgent to the film actor than even to the actor in the theatre”.

Film acting offers none of these conditions. Firstly, rehearsal and performance are nearly always identical. Secondly, the script is a set of fragments which can be shot in any order, according to the will of the director and the technical necessities involved. Thirdly, in films, effects of pausing; of timing, tension and relaxation, are created in the cutting room by people who may never have seen the actors except on celluloid, and of whom many don’t like actors either in the flesh or on celluloid. They are essentially technicians.

There is no reason, it should be pointed out here, why the work of the real actor should terminate before the editing process. I believe the actor should take a creative part in editing, as the finer polishing of his performance, and should be as close to it as to the director.

Fourthly, of course, the film actor has no audience. He creates his fragments of acting time after time without love, laughter or applause. He goes through it until the director is satisfied that he has got one good shot and one or two good covering shots in the can. Under present working conditions the amount of rehearsal possible in a film studio is very short when compared to the time that a stage actor can devote to his work. In any case, it is not altogether true that a film actor need come to his work unrehearsed. In most cases he receives the script at least a week before the film goes on the floor, and has got enough time to read and reread the script and work out his approach to the part. The trouble is that, under the present factory system (that is to say, the more quickly a film is made, the cheaper will be its cost of production), the actor is bound to look upon film acting as the kind of acting which can be pushed through with the minimum of thought and preparation, provided he is slick in a purely surface way.

But under ideal conditions it is just as possible and just as necessary, I believe, to rehearse every shot of the film as minutely as every scene of a play, to sustain those breaks of continuity which for the actor are the most difficult to overcome. It is true that film acting is fragmentary, but it is quite wrong to pretend that any stage play (except for an occasional one-act play in which the characters never leave the stage) really preserves continuity for the actor. The play is divided into acts – two or three – and these acts divided sometimes into many scenes. The total can be as many as 15 or 20 scenes. Also, the characters go on and off the stage. All these interruptions constitute the very acting in fragments which is complained of in film acting. The fragmentary nature of stage work is, in fact, overcome by systematic rehearsal over a long period, whereby the actor gets an idea of his part as a whole, and its relation to the play.

How much more, then, does the film actor, whose part is much more fragmentary, need rehearsal over a long period to overcome these breaks in continuity. In the early days, of course, scenes could be shot as they were played in the theatre. This was film theatre. No one thought of shooting a scene in any other way. The camera framed the scene at a fixed distance, and the actors went through it in stretches of 500 or 1,000 feet of film, and then another length of film was loaded into the camera. This went on until D.W. Griffith’s development of the close-up, and his discovery of the great power of the camera to select. The second development was that of putting the camera on wheels – that is, tracking down a street, mounted on a car or a boat; and then came the discovery by the great Russian directors of the 1920s that new forms of tension, rhythm and excitement could be achieved by splitting up images, by putting one against the other in a particular order, which they called montage. These are reasons for the lack of continuity in film acting, and they are in fact the essence of filmmaking. To a film actor deeply interested in his job they will cease to be irritations and obstacles, and will be appreciated as a new means of expression.

It is true that in the film studio we are surrounded only by the camera, the camera crew, the electricians, the director sitting in front of the camera. The director is the only witness of the acting during the shooting of a film. He should try to help the actor by being a responsive and friendly, if sole, audience, by expressing admiration or disappointment. There must be an inner contact between director and actor, and trust and respect between them.

The stage and the film actor must know equally how to imitate humanity, must speak with conviction and know how to master his body. This is another thing that is very important for the actor; how he works with his body and his muscles, to get the utmost from every part of his body. When he acts, even the little toe on his right foot should belong to the character that he is trying to portray. It is vitally important, therefore, for an actor to have some kind of dance training – not necessarily ballet – to know what relaxation really means, what tension means, to heighten his portrayal of character with his body. The stage actor may insist on having certain conditions fulfilled before he can create. The film actor has discovered new ways, in fact new qualities and a new craftsmanship. His new discoveries are a part of a very new and very young medium.