Acting in the Stillness of Silence

Disclaimer: The following acting tip is not for the professional. You already know how to do this. You’ve trained for it. Spent long hours grappling with yourself to evoke, on demand, emotions called for by the script.

In his book, “Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style”, Steve Vineberg describes Marlon Brando in a scene from Fred Zinnemann’s The Men. In the movie, Brando played Bud Wilochek, a paraplegic confined to a hospital bed. Of the scene, Vineberg says, “Struggling to pull himself up into a sitting position in his hospital bed with the aid of a bar suspended above him, Bud presses his eyes shut and quivers with the pain of the exertion; if Zinnemann had wanted to shoot the scene with nothing but a close-up on Brando’s face, we would measure Bud’s progress exactly by the gradations in that quiver.”

So how would you do that? How would you let your audience know exactly what you’re going through, without speaking a word?

You may, of course, deconstruct the scene beforehand, mentally sketching each gradation like a storyboard, and practising those gradations until you get it right. However, there’s a danger that you may lose some of the freshness of the scene. Your act may seem too practised, too contrived.

Try Mental Verbalisation instead

“Don’t tell me the story!” I heard a young amateur actress exclaim exasperatedly once, when the student directors were attempting to explain how they wanted a particular scene played, “Tell me what you want me to do.”

We were shooting a film, a project by students of Mass Communication. That particular scene had already been shot thrice, and the directors were still not happy. The poor, inexperienced students knew what they wanted. They just didn’t know how to tell her what they wanted. So they told her the story over and over again. “Your father is dying,” they’d say, “you are approaching his room. There’s a play of emotion on your face. Your body language says that you want to be strong, but at the same time you feel the vulnerability of a child who is about to lose her father.” After hearing this for about the fifth time, the poor actress was ready to cry from frustration.

As the directors went into a huddle to discuss camera angles, I called the young actress aside and took her to the spot where the scene was to be played. I first asked her to define three emotions she needed in the scene. Pat came the reply, “Fear, resolve, uncertainty.” Then I asked her to define a spot for each emotion. She carved the set into three areas, with a prop to trigger each emotion; a door for the first, a painting on the wall for the second, and finally, the closed door of the father’s room for the third.

Then I asked her to think of a sentence representing each emotion. She defined her three sentences. Then I asked her to simply say the sentence in her mind as she approached each trigger prop.

“Action”, came the call, she came through door, a flicker of fear registering on her face. There was a curious, huddled cast to her body as she walked. When she reached the painting, her body came erect and her jaw set in firm resolve, only to melt into uncertainty seconds later as she approached her father’s door and reached out a trembling hand towards the doorknob. “Cut,” yelled the elated director. There was a moment of hushed silence, then a whispered, “Beautiful!”

How it works

When we think “actions”, we try to visualise ourselves, but we aren’t all directors. We can’t direct our actions like our teachers did in school, when they directed us in the school play. Trying to visualise and direct our own actions, therefore, leads to awkward, artificial performance. Our minds are busy on the actions, and we fail to feel the emotions.

Actor Simon Callow puts it well, in his book, “Being an Actor”:
“An actor who performs in a certain way because the director told him to, is not really there at all. He’s in the past, his mind always harking back to the rehearsal room, thinking desperately: `What did he tell me to do now? Oh, god, I’m sure that’s wrong.’ And so on. The performance will never grow, the actor’s tension will block off any real expressive vibration because another, irrelevant person has clambered onto the stage between the actor and the audience: the director. The actor must own his performance, and the director must make sure that he does.”

Verbalisation, a mental conversation you carry on with yourself, is a good way to own the performance. Your mind has no time to think of cameras, and lights and actions and expressions. It is busy telling the emotional part of itself what to feel. When the feelings are there, the actions follow.