Word: dramas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most any director's. they hinge on the decisions of the characters within them. the completion or failure of an intended action. In such scenes Griffith cuts between the entirely separate emotional qualities and quantities expressed by the characters' faces, giving each a completely individual moral position. Splitting the drama's entire moral position. Splitting the drama's entire moral scheme into separate characters. he lets their conflicts play it out. Seastrom deals in shared emotions, unified atmospheres, and his characters' decisions are expressed in walking through rooms or in exteriors. Especially striking is a sequence with Dimmesdale in Hester...
...remarkable change of tone and import from Hawthorne's to Seastrom's Scarlet Letter can be traced in the distance between Seastrom's and Griffith's drama. One notices it first in Gish's acting. Her hands, which in Griffith persistently fluttered toward face and breast, are held in more tightly or used actually to grasp people. Seastrom gives their pure emotional energy a real application: Gish's gestures, rather than only expressing her spirit. become actions with physical and specific ends...
...social milieu Griffith would have cut between different characters. their homes, their personal peculiarities. Seastrom needs only one long shot that shows the Puritan villagers in a characteristic action and place. He uses the setting strongly and gives us masses of people never developed as characters. This leaves the drama far fewer contending moral and emotional terms. but lets it develop smoothly in one direction...
What, then, are the lessons to be learned from Grotowski and his magnificently trained ensemble company? First and foremost, that in serious drama there is no substitute for intensity. A play is like a magnifying glass that focuses the full heat of the sun on the head of a pin. Grotowski has discovered that the smaller the audience the greater the intensity. The relationship between actor and audience is subtly altered from performer and spectator to a merging of personality in which each somehow acquires the identity of the other and suffers the same strife of soul...
...drawback to Grotowski's method is that while it would work perfectly in Hamlet, it would be no good at all for a superb comedy of manners like The Importance of Being Earnest. In the arrogant exclusivity of his definition of drama, Grotowski elevates the director and the actor while excluding much of the world's dramatic literature. But when it comes to plays and themes that are stocked with spiritual tinder, Grotowski has proved that no one can set them more fiercely ablaze...