Fluorescent light correction

The FLB filter corrects fluorescent light to type B film, i.e. tungsten- balanced, and FLD corrects fluorescent light to daylight film. With modern negative emulsions they are hardly necessary for cinematography, as the tubes are so much better these days and the processing laboratories have so much more experience in printing scenes shot under this lighting. Remember that if you can light all the set with fluorescent light the laboratory correction will be most successful. Mixed light is a nightmare.

 

The pan glass or viewing glass

This is not strictly a camera filter but the piece of glass, in a holder, often worn around the DP’s neck. These days it is not a pan glass at all, but its origins are so strong that the name is now synonymous with that little viewing filter and the name seems impossible to kill off. It must be said that this filter is often worn, yes by me included, as a kind of chain of office so that everyone on the set will know who the DP is.

 

In the days when all films were made in black and white, it was quite hard to visualize the scene before the camera, which was of course in colour, as it might be seen on a cinema screen in black and white. Early black and white film was orthochromatic (orthosingular, chromatic colour), meaning it was incapable of recording black and white densities as a true representation of the colour brightness. In fact, the film was sensitive mainly to blue light, which then required very peculiar make-up, ladies’ faces being painted yellow and their lips black.

 

Black and white film stocks developed into what became known as panchromatic emulsions (pan many). These emulsions were much more true in their rendition of colour brightness, as they could record some red and green. Cinematographers who were used to orthochromatic film emulsions had considerable difficulty in imagining the tones that would be recorded on the new emulsions. The solution was to produce a viewing filter that the DP could look through that would, to the eye, give a fair representation of the scene as it would be recorded on the new panchromatic film. Hence the new viewing filter became known as a panchromatic viewing filter – or a pan glass. As black and white technology progressed, various viewing filters were developed and matching pairs were sometimes available for working under daylight and tungsten light.

 

Nowadays, the viewing filters should strictly be called colour viewing filters, for they all try and show you the scene, not as black and white, but in colour with the tone scale modified to match the tonal scale of modern colour emulsions. If one is honest, the most common use of a modern pan glass is to look at the clouds in the sky to see if one can get a matching lighting state from the previous shot. Many DPs still judge their lighting by them as, particularly when using a camera operator looking down the viewfinder may be inconvenient, a colour viewing filter can be a great help in judging the lighting ratio of a scene.

 

Aspect ratios

The 35mm frame

From the various originators of the motion picture camera came nearly as many ideas as to how a piece of movie film should be laid out, what the picture size should be and what type, if any, of perforations should be deployed. In 1907, an international agreement was reached stating that the film should be 35mm wide, have a picture size of 0.980in. х 0.735in. and should have four perforations to each frame on both sides of the frame. This format is now referred to as a full aperture or as using an open gate. It is sometimes also referred to as the “Silent” aperture.

 

It can only be imagined as to what negotiations were fought over to come to an agreement where the dimension of the frame was in inches (which both Britain and America use), the width of the film was measured in millimetres (a continental concept) and all the parameters of the perforation were totally American. Nevertheless, the standard was so perfect we are still using it as the main plank of our technology today. With the coming of the sound on film, space had to be found for the optical soundtrack. The Society of Motion Picture Engineers of America standardized the required layout as one keeping the same relationship between the height and the width of the picture, but reducing the area by 24 per cent. As one side of the frame was to remain in the same place, this would leave room on the other side for the new soundtrack. This new picture size and placement is still known as the “Academy” aperture and was formally standardized in February 1932.

 

This had the added effect of widening the spaces between the frames. This was wasteful, but did come with one advantage – any need for mechanical joins could now be carried out within this new area and, for the first time, would not show to the audience.

 

The aspect ratio

Many different screen shapes have evolved since the adoption of the Academy frame in 1932, but most have remained within the 35mm four-perforation pull-down format. In order to readily describe these differing frames, we refer to them by their aspect ratio. The aspect ratio is simply the mathematical relationship between the height and the width of the screen. It is always expressed with the height as 1.

 

Therefore, if we divide the height of an Academy screen into its width and express the result in decimals we get 1.33, the width being 1.33 times the height. To be correct, an aspect ratio should always be shown with the 1 present and a ratio sign between it and the decimal, so an Academy frame becomes 1.33:1, which is said as “one point three three to one”. The joy of using an aspect ratio is that it matters not whether one is referring to a screen ratio or the aperture in the camera gate, the same figures will apply – so if a projectionist receives a tin marked as 1.33:1 they will know exactly how to present the film and in what format it is intended to be shown.

 

Widescreen

The majority of feature films are currently shot in what is casually referred to as widescreen. This leads to some confusion as there are two, very similar, widescreen formats in use. In the USA, it is common to shoot widescreen in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, while in mainland Europe 1.66:1 is more common. In Britain there is, most often, a typically British compromise. This entails using a 1.66:1 hard mask, the actual aperture cut into the camera gate, and marking up the viewfinder for both 1.66:1, the outer frame, and 1.85:1, which will be shown as two parallel lines just inside the top and bottom of the 1.66:1 markings.

 

As so many features are pre-sold to television this is good practice, as slightly more emulsion area can be shown on television than could be cut from the 1.85:1 ratio. This is done by taking the television transfer, in 4:3 format from the 1.66:1 master. A viewfinder showing all these requirements would appear as in Figure 20.3. This would translate to a camera negative layout, where the outer rectangle is the 1.66:1 frame and the inner rectangle is the 1.85:1 frame. The frame bar between the individual frames has now grown even thicker. This wastage led to experiments with three-perforation pull-down, as discussed in the following section. The area of emulsion now used by a 1.85:1 widescreen negative compared with the original full, or Silent, aperture is just 56 per cent of the original. It says a lot for the developments in emulsion technology that, despite using an image area of just a little over half the original, we think of today’s screen images as being superb.

 

Three-perforation pull-down

Some years ago, several manufacturers introduced 35mm cameras either made for, or adaptable to, a three-perforation pull-down as against the traditional four. This was because it had been noted that a 1.85:1 negative picture could be accommodated in the height of three perforations if a hairline frame bar was accepted.

 

The layout of the three-perforation format is shown in Figure 20.6.The purpose of introducing this was simply to reduce the cost of producing the master negative by 25 per cent. Despite this being a very sound idea, which the camera manufacturers could easily go along with, editing equipment manufacturers were less keen to rebuild their machines and the distributors, who run the cinemas, showed no interest at all in re-equipping the cinemas as this cost would far outweigh the saving in the cost of the print stock. As a result, any print struck from a three-perforation negative had to be optically printed up to a four-perforation print and the cost of this, compared to a straight contact print, outweighed the saving in negative cost. Perhaps, as Super 16mm had to wait, this too is an invention awaiting its time.

 

As non-linear editing has done away with many rush prints in favour of a telecine transfer, and telecine machines can usually transfer three-perforation footage quite easily, we may yet see renewed interest in this format. Three-perforation pull-down, sometime later, became very popular in the USA, where many multi-episodic television shows are now shot on this format with specially constructed cameras utilizing 2000-foot magazines to enable long takes of continuous action to be achieved. On these shows, where by far the majority of the screen time is shot in a studio with three or four cameras, very like a live television studio, a print is never struck, for the camera negative goes straight to telecine and is edited and transmitted from this format.

 

It is interesting to note that, when utilizing 2000-foot magazines, the weight transfer caused by the film moving from the front of the magazine to the back is so great the tripod heads used are specially made with a lead screw under the camera mounting plate and a small handle at the back so that the operator can rebalance the camera during the shot.

Anamorphic

In order to give First World War tank drivers a better view, a French physicist, Henri Chretien, developed a lens system that was capable of expanding and compressing the horizontal angle of view. This developed into a single Hypergonar lens capable of being fitted to a film camera and a picture, Construire un Feu, was shot in France using just this one lens.

 

By the beginning of the 1950s, American film-makers had come to the conclusion that providing cinemas with wider and wider screens was the answer to getting the audiences out of their houses and away from their television sets. In order not to increase costs appreciably, 20th Century Fox adopted and developed Chretien’s principles to produce a range of lenses, of various focal lengths, capable of shooting a film in a convenient way, on conventional 35mm film stock but with just a change of camera and cinema projector lenses.

 

This resulted in an aspect ratio of well in access of 2:1. This system they named CinemaScope and it was very successful, being the first worldwide anamorphic process (anamorphos from the Greek ana - again, morphos - to form). The horizontal compression of the CinemaScope format was 2:1. This gave CinemaScope an aspect ratio, when the 35mm camera frame (0.868in. 0.631in.) was expanded by the special lens, of 2.55:1. Pressure from the cinema owners caused this to be reduced to a standard of 2.35:1, mainly due to the architectural constraints of many existing cinemas; this was often reduced still further on showing, for the same reasons.

 

The original scene is horizontally compressed by a ratio of 2:1 by the taking lens. This is then contact printed without any optical modification. When the print is shown in the cinema, the projector lens expands the image horizon- tally by the same ratio of 2:1 and the image is restored on the screen in the original height-to-width relationship. In the early days of anamorphic photography, no compensation was made in the camera viewfinder and the operator had to compose the frame with the image compressed to half its actual width. Mercifully, most modern cameras capable of accepting anamorphic lenses can also be supplied with a deanamorphosing viewfinder, so that the operator can view the image as the audience will see it. That the early operators could compose such wonderful images with a squeezed image fills me with admiration.

 

Mm and 70mm

In compressing and expanding the camera image with the anamorphic process, some horizontal definition is lost. To counteract this, several companies decided to shoot very wide screen pictures without a compression lens but using wider film. The Panavision Company is probably the best known of the exponents of this format. Todd-AO, a name conjured from Richard Todd and the American Optical Company who made lenses for him, must be a close contender. In both these systems a 65mm camera negative is employed using standard 35mm perforations but utilizing five-perforation pull-down.

 

With all the other layout dimensions remaining similar to 35mm and the image going out to the perforations on both sides, no provision for sound is made on the camera negative. This gives an image aspect ratio of 2.21:1.This aspect ratio is very close to CinemaScope’s, but by utilizing a far larger image area gives considerably improved image quality. It also enables simple, spherical (non-anamorphic) lenses to be used. In order to deliver sound to the cinemas, the 65mm camera negative is printed on to 70mm wide print stock. So that the image can still be contact printed, both films have their perforations, and images, in identical positions, the extra width coming as 2.5mm outside each row of perforations. This extra 5mm of film accommodates the various sound and control tracks.

 

There are hybrid systems where, for reasons of origination cost, the anamorphic process is used to make a 35mm camera negative and this is then optically expanded using a deanamorphosing lens in the laboratory printer to produce a 70mm release print. It is quite common for a film shot on a 35mm anamorphic system to have a few release prints made on 70mm for the premieres around the world and still make the majority of general release prints as 35mm anamorphic prints. Clearly, this makes for a considerable cost saving.

 

It is also possible to take the reverse route and shoot on a 65mm negative, make the premiere prints on 70mm stock and still make the general release prints as 35mm anamorphic prints, though the cost savings using this route are nothing like as great.

 

Super 35

This much-vaunted format, where you get a larger than Academy frame and can use existing spherical lenses, is effectively a return to the old Silent layout. With modern film stocks it is quite possible to print a 2.21:1 section from the middle of the frame and send it to the cinema either as a squeezed anamorphic print or enlarge it to 70mm.

 

The advantages in cost savings at the time of exposure are somewhat offset by the cost of optical printing to the delivery format. For the camera operator, Super 35 can be a nightmare. In Figure 20.10 you can see what ought to be a simple two-shot, here composed correctly for the inner frame, which is 2.21:1. If, as many a producer may wish, another copy is struck for television, here shown by the larger rectangle with curved corners, the composition becomes a nonsense. The claim that you can shoot full frame and choose any aspect ratio later, from a compositional point of view, is clearly erroneous.

 

Television

Television started life as a competition between two systems, that of John Logie Baird, which had an upright or Portrait frame, and that from the Marconi Company, which displayed a horizontal, or View, frame. It was the Marconi system that was adopted with its horizontal aspect ratio of roughly 1.25:1. In 1952, the BBC changed this aspect ratio to 1.33:1 to conform with the then current cinema standard.

 

More recently, with the advent of digitally transmitted television, the world is slowly going over to the latest standard, which is quoted as 16:9 (in cinema terms, 1.77:1). Although the 16: 9 television format is closer to current widescreen cinema production, it does not conform to any existing standard and is a compromise, albeit, perhaps, a good one. At some time or another, films made in all the formats previously discussed will come to be shown on television.

 

Many will have been composed with this in mind as they will have funding from a television outlet built into the production budget. This may be all very well for the producer but it can be a nightmare for the operator, who may have to be thinking about several frame formats in the viewfinder all at the same time. For big budget pictures this presents less of a problem, as funding should have been put aside for a pan and scan telecine transfer from a master copy to the television format of choice. Pan and scan involves a telecine operator moving a television-sized scanning area left and right across the widescreen frame to obtain the best possible composition out of the original framing. This is clearly not ideal, but is far better than just letting the television framing always be the centre section. of the original widescreen frame.

 

If the film was originally shot in anamorphic, or 65mm, the television frame section is likely to be a mere pastiche of the original concept. Figure 20.11 shows the 4:3 television aspect ratio overlaid on to a CinemaScope frame and Figure 20.12 shows the 16:9 ratio overlaid on to a CinemaScope frame. Both these recompositions make nonsense of the original framing. In Figure 20.11, the 4:3 version, three of the original four members of the cast have disappeared.

 

In Figure 20.12, the 16:9 framing, the man on the left has managed to reintroduce his ear but the other two still remain virtually unknown to the television audience. It is worth noting at this point that, while for over 60 years the film industry has referred to its aspect ratios as a ratio relative to unity, one, the television industry has always referred to its aspect ratios as the nearest whole numbers representing height and width times each other.

 

Things are not quite as bad when taking a television scan from the centre section of a widescreen negative that has been shot with a 1.66:1 hard mask in the camera gate but was framed for theatrical release in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. As we have seen, the television frame can be taken from the 1.66:1 frame, thus gaining both height and, more importantly, width of frame and getting nearer to the original composition. Figure 20.13 shows a 4:3 television frame overlaid on a 1.66:1 original, while Figure 20.14 shows the same but for a 16:9 television transfer.

 

The technique of shooting a negative in the ratio of 1.66:1 and taking the television frame from this whilst still intending to show the 1.85:1 frame in the cinema relies on the operator using a technique known as shoot and protect. This requires the camera operator to shoot the primary composition for 1.85:1 while protecting the 1.66:1 frame. Protecting, in this instance, means being absolutely certain that the 1.66:1 frame never shoots off the set, that microphones never intrude into this frame and nothing that does not relate to the story enters this, the outer, frame.

 

The technique of shoot and protect is used in many other cross-format situations and, providing not too many formats are required, is not too arduous for the operator and can be very successful. When shooting Super 16mm for television, matters are a little complicated as the world has still not gone over completely to the 16:9 television format; therefore, within the frame, allowances may have to be made to accommodate a 16:9 composition, a 4:3 composition and even an interim format of 14:9 as used on UK analogue transmissions at present.

 

High Definition – HD

Three-chip cameras

 

The first wave of HD cameras with their three-chip configuration were, and indeed still are, able to emulate the quality of image obtain- able when using 35mm film, but only if you used the finest lenses. Many so-called HD lenses produced a picture nowhere near the cam- era’s capability, which caused the cameras to get a mixed reception. Those that saw demonstration films shot with top quality lenses, such as Panavision’s, were usually impressed and those that saw material from poorer glass were usually disappointed. In some areas the HD three-chip format was very successful. For instance, within three years of the introduction of HD, nearly half the multi-episodic, multi-camera shoots for US television were shot using HD. Here the attraction is clear, with quality virtually the same as the three-perforation pull-down 35mm cameras that have traditionally been used to shoot these shows, and recording medium costing around one-fortieth the price (yes, 1/40!), the sums really worked in HD’s favour.

Star Wars – Attack of the Clones, the first full-length feature film shot on HD – looked very good indeed. Photographed by David Tattersall BSC, I could hardly tell if I was watching a mechanically projected print or a digitally projected image, and both versions were excellent. George Lucas, it is said, prefers the digital version. But why shoot a picture costing over $1000000 on HD? Surely not to save money – no, here the advantage was the ability to go straight from the camera master image directly to the computers that would be used for the huge amount of image post-production without leaving the digital domain. The need to carry out a lot of digital post-production is a powerful argument for originating on HD.

 

Single-chip cameras

Matters have moved forward and several manufacturers have introduced single-chip cameras, where the chip is approximately the size of the frame used in 35mm photography and some of them have, effectively, twice the resolution of the first generation three-chip cameras. Perhaps the greatest advantage of these cameras is their use of exactly the same lenses as 35mm film cameras. It remains to be seen if these cameras will increase the popularity of shooting feature films in the digital format.

 

Digital presentation

There are clear financial advantages for the distributors of feature films if cinemas are equipped with digital projectors of sufficient quality such that the audience is unaware of the change from mechanical to digital projectors. The savings come in some surprising places. In the distribution chain, it is said that the cost of transporting film prints, i.e. vans etc., from theatre to theatre is more than the cost of producing the prints themselves. If this is the case, were it possible to deliver the virtual digital image by, say, fibre-optic or satellite, a large cost of delivering the images to the cinema would be saved.

 

The other side of the distribution dilemma is interesting, as the distributors do not own the projectors: the exhibitors own the cinemas and the projectors, so the cost of conversion would fall on the shoulders of the exhibitors, who are unlikely to make any extra profit from the change-over. Currently, the comparable price of a digital projector able to give a picture of comparable quality to a mechanical projector is substantial, an HD projector costing some three times as much as the mechanical equivalent.

 

Conclusions

 

HD digital cinema, I believe, is bound to come but I suspect slowly, as there are many obstacles to overcome, though few of these are of a technical nature – all the required delivery systems and projection equipment are available today. It will need an important agreement between the distributors and the exhibitors for the revolution to happen. There will be some films that will cry out to be shot in the digital HD format and others that will not. Futuristic and hyper-realistic movies, together with those requiring a lot of digital post-production, will be well suited to HD, though I believe that for many years to come the more human story-based movies will still shoot on film. Why? Because there is over 100 years of history and knowledge in how to stir the emotions of an audience, via their eyes, that lies vested in that peculiar controlled rotting of silver. We Directors of Photography have been successfully giving our audience pictures they love, and know how to emote to, on film for those 100 years or so – long may it continue.

 

Хрестоматия для самостоятельного чтения по специальности

“Актерское искусство”

THE ACTOR

The actor must be able to stand and move with ease and grace. His voice must have range, beauty, and strength. He must know his own psychological and emotional make-up, for he must draw on his own understanding of life to recreate the lives of others.

One school of acting is based wholly on technique. The actor learns to express characterization through body and voice alone. Unfortunately, human behavior cannot always be shown by physical demonstration. As a result, this kind of acting often seems cold, mechanical, and stagy. However, it is consistent, and it can be heard and seen by the audience.

Another school is based on the Stanislavski approach. Often called simply “the method”, it is taught at Actors Studio in New York and other schools. In it the actor identifies himself with the emotional life of the character and “makes-believe with conviction”. This emphasis on creative imagination arouses great sincerity and gives the stage character a sense of real life. But sometimes it is undisciplined, loses awareness of the play, or cannot be seen or heard. If each actor is allowed to move and talk just as he “feels”, the unity of production may be lost.

The best approach to acting has the good points of each school. The best performance is given by the actor who comes to the role both from outside and inside and has a trained body and voice combined with a real response to the inner life of the character.

In working up a part the actor must understand the play, his character, and the artistic ideas behind the production. He must know how to read lines clearly - with meaning and emotion. He must be devoted to his task, responsive to his director, and conscientious about rehearsals. He knows he must memorize lines before he can build character.

The theater still belongs essentially to the actor. All other theater artists think in terms of him. The actor is a keen observer of life. He draws on what he has experienced and what he has seen. He knows that a characterization based on another actor's performance is a shallow and inadequate copy.

 

ACTING IN CINEMA

Although following the stage tradition, film acting gradually has worked out a style all its own. The performers in the earliest films of Lumiere and Edison were ordinary people playing themselves; but then, with the development of the story film, the need for professional actors appeared.

Stage actors in the 1900s ignored the new medium, so most of the performers taken for early film dramas were either amateurs or theater dropouts. They adopted a style of acting prevalent on the stage at the time - a declamatory technique characterized by bombastic speech and exaggerated gestures.

In 1908, Film d'Art, the French film company, convinced the Comedie-Fransaise to allow the filming of some of its productions with the entire original casts, including such stage greats as Sarah Bernhardt, Max Dearly and others.

The success of these productions helped make films more popular but did little for the development of motion picture art. Gestures and movements that were perfectly valid on the stage were exaggerated on film, and the result was often grotesque. However, the financial returns on these films encouraged stage actors especially in Italy and in the US, where Adolph Zukor soon launched his Famous Players in Famous Plays productions.

D.W. Griffith is credited with being the first director to recognize the need for a new style of acting for the screen. He sensed that the size of the screen image and the camera's tendency to emphasize the slightest nuance required acting that was subtler and less stylized. As early as 1909, Griffith gathered a group of young actors and rehearsed them continually until he was able to achieve a new, restrained style of acting, which had a lasting influence on the development of the cinema.

There are basic differences in conditions under which actors perform on stage and on screen. Although the stage actor is able to show the life of the character throughout one performance, the screen actor has both the advantage and disadvantage of film technique - short takes, out-of-continuity shooting, angle variance, and endless repetition of scenes until they are just right.

A stage actor must make certain adjustments when appearing in films. Although he does not have to memorize many lines or sustain a performance, he must be able to respond with a display of a given emotion at the time it is needed and without the chance of coming to it step by step. Since scenes in a film are shot out of continuity, he must have a firm grasp of the character he is portraying.

Most important, it is much more difficult to play a false emotion on screen than on stage because of the closeness of the camera. The camera’s ability to capture and magnify the smallest detail of personality that flashes across an actor’s face has led some theoreticians to say that what was needed in film was not acting but being. Certain directors feel that if this is the case they would rather use real people whose appearance and personality match those of the characters to be portrayed, thus hoping to achieve a stronger sense of reality.

The nonprofessional actor has been used extensively in European cinema, particularly in the Russian silent films of Eisenstein and Pudovkin. The latter called this use of nonprofessionals “typage”. Though the practice has never been widely used, it reappears from time to time, notably in the Italian neo-realistic films of Vittorio De Sica and in the later films of Robert Bresson.

The introduction of sound removed the last traces of stylization from film acting. The pantomimic exaggeration of gesture and movement was gone forever. Many of the silent era stars were unable to hold their own because their diction and voice quality were not perfect. Stage actors, whom producers began to import in large numbers, were successful to some degree, but many of them failed to make the transition because the screen demanded a more natural way of speaking than did the theater.

The contribution of acting to the total quality of a film varies from production to production. Certain directors, such as Clarence Brown, Sidney Franklin, and George Cukor, are known as "actors' directors" because they tend to rely heavily on the talent and personality of their performers. Others, such as Josef von Sternberg and Alfred Hitchcock, tend to treat actors as just another element of their mise-en-scene.

In recent years, there has been a definite swing in public as well as critical thinking toward the acceptance of the director as the primary force in the creation of a film, with a resulting minimisation of the role of the actor. However, some directors, such as John Cassavetes with SHADOWS (1960) and HUSBANDS (1970), are inclined to rely to the improvisational skill of their performers.

CONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKI

During the 1950s the Actors Studio in New York City became well known in theater circles for teaching method acting. The work of the school - under the guidance of Lee Strasberg from 1948 to 1982 - was an extension of the teachings of the outstanding Russian director, actor, and producer, Constantin Stanislavski. What distinguished his method from other schools of acting was the insistence that the actors identify with a role by becoming totally involved in the inner life of the character. His severest criticism directed at an actor's performance was “I do not believe you”.

Constantin Stanislavski was born Constantin Sergeyevich Alexeyev in Moscow on January 18, 1863. He was the son of a rich industrialist. His stage name, Stanislavski, was taken from an actor whom he met in amateur theatricals. Stanislavski’s excellent classical education included singing, ballet, and acting lessons as well as regular visits to the opera and theatre. He made his first stage appearance at the age of seven in a series of tableaux vivants organized by his governess to celebrate his mother’s name day.

But his real debut as an actor was made in September 1877 when he was 14. Four one-act plays were staged and as a result of that evening an amateur group, the Alexeyev Circle, was formed, consisting of Stanislavski’s brothers and sisters, cousins and one or two friends. After completing his formal education, Stanislavski entered the family business, enthusiastically devoting himself at the same time to a career in semiprofessional theater. In 1888 he established the Society of Art and Literature as an amateur company. He directed and acted in performances for the company.

On June 22, 1897, Stanislavski met Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a successful playwright and teacher in the Moscow Philharmonic Society School, at a Moscow restaurant in order to discuss the reform of the Russian stage. Out of their 18-hour meeting came the establishment of the Moscow Art Theater as a protest against the artificial theatrical conventions of the late 19th century. The opening production in October 1898 of Alexey Tolstoy’s Tsar Fyodor Ioanovich was a tremendous popular success because of its realism. But Stanislavsky thought that only with the production of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull he discovered a play ideally suited to his artistic aspirations and realistic methods. A successful staging of The Seagull inspired the playwright to create Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard especially for the theater. Stanislavski himself acted leading roles in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard. In the next 2 decades the Moscow Art Theater attained international recognition with productions widely ranging in style: Maxim Gorky’s drama The Lower Depths (1902), Leonid Andreyev’s symbolic The Life of Man (1907), Maurice Maeterlinck’s enchanting fairy tale The Blue Bird (1908), and Hamlet with settings by Gordon Craig (1911).

During this period Stanislavski worked out his theories by exploring the most difficult problems of acting with his company. Rehearsals, which often resembled acting classes, began with discussions of the “super-objective” and the “through action” of the play, and at the same time the actor examined the previous history of his character, the “pre-text”.

Stanislavski believed that, through study of the play, analysis of the role, and recall of previous emotions, the actor could arrive at the “inner truth” of a part by actually experiencing the emotions he conveyed to the audience. Furthermore, the actor didn’t have to lose control of his creation and had to have the technical discipline to repeat his previously experienced emotions at every performance. This training, which aimed at stimulating the artistic intelligence of the actor, developing his inner discipline, and providing perfect control of such external means as voice, diction, and physical movement, is known in the United States as the “Method”.

In 1912 Stanislavski became the acting director of the Bolshoi Opera Studio. In 1918 he established the First Studio as a school for young actors. In 1922-24 the Moscow Art Theater company toured Europe and the United States. “ My Life in Art ”, the only book by Stanislavski published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime, appeared in 1924. While performing on October 29, 1928, he had a heart attack. He then concentrated on directing until his death in Moscow on August 7, 1938.

A THEATRE IN DECLINE

Russian theatre in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was in a poor state. There were great stars ofthe Maly Theatre, but they were mainly of the older generation and they were surrounded by mediocrity. The monopoly of the imperial theatres was abolished in 1882. After that commercial managements threw on plays to make quick profits. As Stanislavski remarked, the theatre was controlled by barmen on one hand and bureaucrats on the other. A few brilliant individuals shone here and there.

In an unpublished manuscript Stanislavski describes a typical rehearsal period. First came the reading and the casting of the various roles. Then they had some discussion of the play but generally there wasn’t enough time for that. So the actors had to find their own way themselves. After that came the first rehearsal. It took place on the stage with a few old tables and chairs as a set. The director explained the decor: a door centre, two doors on each side etc.

At the first rehearsal the actors read their parts book in hand and the prompter was silent. The director sat on the forestage and gave his instructions to the cast.”'What should I do here?” asked one actor. “Sit on the sofa”, the director answered. “And what should I be doing?” asked another one. “You are nervous, wring your hands and walk up and down”, the director ordered. “'Can't I sit down?” the actor persisted. “How can you sit down when you are nervous?” replied the bewildered director. So the first and second acts were set.

On the next day, that was to say the second rehearsal, work continued in like manner with the third and fourth acts. The third and sometimes the fourth re­hearsal consisted of going through the whole thing again; the actors moved about the stage, memorizing the director’s instructions, reading their lines in half-voice, i.e. a whisper, gesticulating strongly in an attempt to arouse some feeling. At the next rehearsal they had to know their lines and to play without script but still at half voice. The prompter, however, worked at full voice. At the next rehearsal the actors had to play at full voice. Then dress rehearsals began with make-up, costumes and the set. Finally there was the performance.

That seemed to be a comparatively disciplined affair. But very often the actors simply took over, ignoring the director. An actress could move to the window or the fireplace for no better reason than that was what she always did. The script meant less than nothing. Sometimes the cast did not even bother to learn their lines. Leading actors could simply plant themselves downstage centre, by the prompter’s box, waiting for their lines. Then they delivered the lines straight to the audience in a ringing voice, giving a fine display of passion and “temperament”. Direct communication with other actors was minimal. Furniture was so arranged as to allow the actors to face front.

Sets were as stereotyped as the acting: wings, back-drops taken from stock, doors conventionally placed, standing isolated in space with no surrounding wall. The costumes were also “typical”. When Stanislavski attempted to have costumes made to specific designs he was told, with some asperity, that there were standard designs for character types and would continue to be. There was no sense of a need for change or renewal. The amateur theatre reflected the practice of the professional, only worse.

Wishing some models or guidance Stanislavski had to look back to the great days of the Maly Theatre when artistic standards were set by two genius men, the actor Mikhail Shchepkin and the writer Nikolai Gogol. And the actors Stanislavski so admired were impres­sive not merely because they had talent. They had been trained in the school, where the first steps had been taken towards a genuinely Russian theatre and the creation of a genuinely Russian style - Realism.