The aura before Monroe disappeared after taking a systematic acting class.
After watching [You have never been here] , I was shocked by the "faceless performance" of the bearded and chubby Jackie Phoenix .
He was like [taxi drivers] and Travis [The Big Lebowski] "Christ the Lord," the fit :
The bear male has a big beard and pigtails, lives with his mother, lives casually, and has a solemn expression.
Because he was troubled by his childhood and the nightmare of joining the army, using violence to control violence and rescue young prostitute girls became his only way to fight against the nihility .
Only this time, he got into trouble and got involved in a conspiracy of politicians. His mother was killed and the girl robbed.
The story of the old-fashioned killer rescuing Lori is a bit more interesting because of the killer's few words of silence and expressionless calmness.
After his mother was killed, he was silent, his brows waved, his lips and cheeks trembling, he didn't cry or yell;
Go downstairs to shoot the intruder, calmly interrogate, and lie on the floor with each other, humming a radio song, and lying upstairs is the murdered mother.
Even with the happy ending of "Today is a beautiful day", he still has a blank face wrapped in a big beard indifferent and expressionless .
But it is strange that you are deeply moved by this, and you know that he plays well.
In fact, this role was also the winner of the " Actor " in Cannes last year .
This undoubtedly made me more interested in expressionless performances.
01.
Bresson and his minimalism
"Expression without expression" is really not "facial paralysis"!
In fact, Jacques Phoenix ’s performance in [You Have Never Been Here] was deliberately requested by director Lynn Ramsey.
And Lynn Ramsey, the British female director, is also the "iron fan " of the minimalist master Robert Bresson .
The title of Bresson’s [Death Prison Escape] is the director’s handwritten notes:
What you will see is a true story, I shot it as it is, without modification.
Basically presents Bresson's consistent aesthetic concept: the pursuit of film purity/simplicity .
"Less is more" , don't want the fancy stuff, don't the insignificant parts, just show the audience the fewest things.
In order to achieve this simplicity, in addition to a brief narrative framework and a pure audio-visual style, another important aspect is the performance of the actors .
In his [pickpocket] , the protagonist, who is a rookie pickpocket, was stopped at the subway entrance after committing a crime and asked to return his wallet.
But when you look at his expression, he is still as natural, cold, indifferent and a little cramped as usual .
Even after facing the heroine across the window in prison, there is still no sorrow and joy on his face.
In [Death Prison Escape] , the male protagonist in prison spends almost all his energy and time planning an escape from prison.
He observed the wooden door, polished the spoon, made rope with cloth strips and iron wire, etc., but waited until he finally loosened the door panel and opened the door frame--
His expression hardly changed, and he was still extremely calm .
Including when prisoners get off to escape, the police also an indifferent intimate knowledge .
From [a priest’s country diary] to [pickpocket], [death prisoner escape], and then to [money], many of Bresson’s protagonists are expressionless from beginning to end.
Whether in trouble or occasional caressing, it is difficult for the audience to see the emotional changes of the characters on their faces .
Because in Bresson's concept, there are no roles, no actors, only "models" who are responsible for completing the work .
Therefore, he never used professional actors. Every movie is based on the script to find a suitable "model" in real life.
Finally, let these non-professional actors perform with minimal expressions and movements.
Resist emotions to generate emotions .
This is also the method and concept he mentioned again and again in "Film Writing Notes".
Therefore, Lynn Ramsey followed Bresson to do this, and the Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki, who highly admired Bresson, often did the same.
His [Female Match Factory Worker], [A Man Without Past], etc., are all excellent examples of such "no expressions".
02.
No expression is a minimal performance
In 1933, Greta Garbo starred in [Queen of Sweden] .
At the end of the movie, Garbo gave up the throne for love and came to the harbour to follow his lover, only to find that his lover was dead at this time.
The ship had set sail, she walked to the bow and looked into the distance, expressionless , and she could not see any emotions or emotional fluctuations from her face alone.
The audience was touched by the ending and completely confused.
They used their own experience to give her this expressionless face a variety of mental activities and emotions.
And this ending has become a classic "Expression without Expression" or "Zero Performance" moment in movie history .
A few years later, Ingrid Bergman starred in [Casablanca] .
Because the script has been changing during the filming process, no one knows the final outcome of this fateful mandarin duck.
Bergman also maintained a state of expressionless performance in it, which gave people a little more guesswork about the final outcome.
In [Beauty of the Day] , Catherine Deneuve's expressionless performance has created a classic frosty "slut" image in movie history .
In many of the Coen brothers ' films, the killer is often expressionless.
The cold-faced killer in the most classic [Lao Wu She Yi] is mostly reticent and shameless .
Even if it is a violent murder scene, or the last being hit by a car, you can hardly see much change from his face.
And the suffocating neurotic horror has already been felt by the audience in the precision of this "closed performance" .
Come to think of it, Italian neorealism does not like to use professional actors, or Miyazaki does not like to use professional voice actors, the same reasoning.
The expressionless performance is not not performing, his eyebrows, eyes, lips and teeth may also be acting, but it must be a minimal performance .
After professional training, there is always a situation of "excessive performance" .
But like [the bike thief] , using the original unemployed idlers to play an unemployed wanderer, every look in his eyes condenses into a look of suffering.
There is no great sadness, no joy in expression, only the frowning brow and the face that has never been stretched out.
So Herzog would say:
The aura before Monroe disappeared after taking a systematic acting class.
He photographed [Caspar Hauser's Mystery] for wild children and [Story of the Wanderings of Shi Chuxi ] for low-level people , using Bruno, an amateur who can't make facial expressions.
Bruno is even a really "nervous" suffering person.
His sluggish and dull face, with both childlike innocence and the mark of cruel society, looked funny and touching on the screen.
03.
Just look at it and start a war
This sentence was said by Bresson :
A glance, set off a passion, a murder, a war.
Probably only in the silence of the expressionless performance, the vibration caused by a subtle expression has the power to start a war like this.
Like the tears of the wild child in the "Mystery of Europe" in [Caspar Hauser's Mystery] .
Faced with the blind pianist and his sad songs, the wild child shed tears and said every word: "I think life is too difficult for me. I can't play the piano like him."
He came to the complex human society with the IQ of a baby , his innocence, his deformity, and his confusion.
It's all the meaning of that tear.
The unrevealed sadness of the whole movie , at this moment, spreads out, thus moving deeply.
In Aki’s [Female Match Factory Worker ] , the opposite of the boring, mechanical work and life is the cold, numb face of the woman.
But only in one encounter at the bar, you saw her shy smile .
This precious smile magnified her longing for love and life to a certain extent.
After the loss, her revenge, her expression returned to her usual indifference and calmness.
The slightest smile is the perfect expression of a woman's inner yearning and tenacious soul .
In the cold and alienated movie temperament brought by these expressionless performances, a look, a smile, or a drop of tears will set off a war.
If there is anything to say, there is a theoretical basis for this.
Soviet director Kurishov once did an experiment in which a close-up, expressionless shot was edited into different other shots and people were invited to watch it.
A bowl of soup paired with expressionless close-ups is thought to interpret the inner feelings of hunger; close-ups paired with children playing, people see happiness.
When the corpse, the coffin and the expressionless close-up were combined, people felt the sorrow in the actor's heart.
Although Kurishov’s experiment was to show the effect of montage, on the other hand, it also showed the amazing possibility of expressionless performance .
An expressionless face, in the plot relationship before and after, under the influence of other characters and the atmosphere of the movie, has a specific and open emotional expression.
And by suppressing the emotions that are popular on the surface, you gain more inner emotional power.
For example, the silent accusation of [the biker], the consideration of crime and punishment for [pickpocket], and the emptiness of life [you have never been here].
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Author/curl
The article was first published on the WeChat public account "Pocier"
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