Sunday, September 11, 2011

O, for a Muse of Fire

http://www.criterion.com/films/908-f-for-fake
In "F for Fake" illusionist, and part-time filmmaker, Orson Welles creates what he descried as a film essay on creativity, deceit, misdirection and storytelling.

Built primarily from unused footage shot for a documentary on art forger Elmyr de Hory, the film features Clifford Irving who was, at the time he was being photographed, in the middle of perpetrating a forgery of his own, the "autobiography" of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.

In asides shot in the editing bay--arguably as he was putting the film together--Welles appears almost giddy to have "stumbled" across this mirrors upon mirrors scenario.  To their stories he adds his own experience as a faker when he convinced the nation that it was under attack by Martians.

And it is against this backdrop of deception that Welles makes the startling vow right to the camera that, even though the film is about deception and features decievers, he will, for the next hour, tell only the absolute truth.

Despite this seeming like a paradox that Captain Kirk would use to overcome the logic of one of the menacing Star Trek computers,



the audience is lulled into trusting an admittedly untrustworthy guide.

This is the contract that magicians make with their audiences at every performance:  pay close attention and I will convince you that everything you know about your world is no longer true.  Regardless of the premise of a particular effect, this is the meta trick and it relies less on technique or technology than on the performer.

There is an often-told tale about Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin in which he is dispatched to north Africa to help put down a rebellion using his magic.  His mission was to demonstrate to the Marabout tribesmen that French magic was stronger than theirs.  They were unimpressed with parlor tricks, but he gradually upped the stakes to a point where he was able to convince them that he could actually drain the strength from the body of their strongest warrior.

When this story is told--and there are a number of different versions out there--it is often seen through a western cultural bias:  how stupid those tribesmen were to be fooled by such a simple principle.  That the trick is still being sold suggests that it continues to fool a variety of audiences.



The more important point, it seems to me, is that the effect was presented in a broader context of a whole performance. I don't know anything about Marabout culture, but I am pretty confident that if you picked out the strongest person in the room and then humiliated them with a trick like this, without first contextualizing it as part of a whole series of demonstrations of your power as a magician, that audience member would probably look for an opportunity to demonstrate his strength on you.

By sequencing his material, Robert-Houdin was establishing his character as a powerful wizard.  Beginning with simple coin tricks and ending with the bullet catch and the "Light and Heavy Chest," the audience was presented with a portraint of the performer as wizard.  It's no surprise then that he would define a magician as an actor playing the part of a magician.

This is another of those Kirk-worthy paradoxes:  magic, an art form that is predicated on deceit and trickery, is also dependent upon a measure of "truthiness."  The ability of the audience to trust, or believe that they can trust, the performer even as he misrepresents and misdirects is critical to the success of the tricks.  This is one of the reasons that the performer's choice of material must align with their on-stage persona, or character.  One would not, for example, believe that a performer like The Amazing Johnathan...



would ever be able to present a trick like "Walking through the Great Wall of China."



Copperfield's choice of material supports, and is supported by, his onstage character.

This brings me back to Welles and "F for Fake."

The film is a master class in these ideas. The authority of the performer is established, the premise of the effect is laid out, the audience is artfully and entertainingly misled, the trick is revealed and then the performer disappears in a puff of smoke. And all of this is done despite a context that would tend to promote an heightened atmosphere of mistrust and skepticism.

How is he able to get away with such an audacious trick?  He preys on the imagination of the audience.  He provides enough of a glimpse behind the curtain to get the audience rationalizing forgery.  Elmyr asks how he can be a criminal if so many museums buy his pictures and declare them "authentic."  Clifford Irving makes claims to have met with the world's most famous recluse, believing that he will not appear in public to refute the claims.  We watch Elmyr draw a few simple lines in the style of Modigliani and think that on our worst day, we could do as much.  Slowly, but surely, we are on the side of the forgers, the fakers.  A powerful combination of empathy, greed, imagination and trust is established.  The audience, much like the "all-knowing" art curators, is a co-conspirator in the fakery.

Shakespeare, another great faker, uses a similar portfolio of techniques to engage the audience and get them to ignore the confines of a primitive performance space in order to tell the too-big story of Henry V. 

In yet another paradox, I will leave you with my favorite reading of this most theatrical of monologues that comes to us from a film version of the play.

Monday, September 5, 2011

That's Entertainment

http://www.quasi-modo.net/Fannie_Mills.html
I studied theatre production in school.  I wasn't going to be an actor or a designer, I wanted to make things, I wanted to help create the illusions.  In addition to courses in drafting and various craft techniques, I took a number of courses in theatre history.

Before I go any farther, let me just say that I think it is important for practitioners in any medium to learn about its history and the various movements and counter-movements that wash across it like waves hitting the beach.  (I say this right up front in case there are any teachers in the audience.) 

The courses I took were taught with great solemnity and paid due diligence to Shakespeare and Moliere, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Arthur Miller & Rodgers and Hammerstein.  We read plays and wrote papers and discussed theory and came away with the sense that the theatre was something to be experienced from the other side of a velvet rope.  Like a painting in a gallery, or one of those performance art piece where the artist crawls across broken glass and then sells boxes of shards for tens of thousands of dollars.

What is missing from this curriculum is any sense of the popular theatre.  Sure, there were audiences who would pay for the opportunity to sit in a darkened room and have actors scream at them for eight hours, but while that was happening, there was a bigger audience in another theatre watching melodramas like "The Pursuit of Happiness" or "After Dark."  In the days before movies and television, this was where the audiences went to get their fix of moral tales featuring heroes and villains and happy endings.

http://meeky-meeky.blogspot.com/
I had the good fortune to work for a time with a man who was much better read in the literature and history of the theatre than I could ever hope to be and his position was that while theatre artists were writing to the history books, the audiences were supporting a very different kind of entertainment.  For every Henry Irving there were performers like le Petomane.

As we would prepare for productions of "serious" plays where some important action such as the death of one of the lead characters would happen offstage, Van would tell me about turn of the 20th Century shows that featured elaborate chases on horseback, fires and falling trees crashing into buildings. 

I guess it has always been true that while audiences will judge a production of Hamlet on the strength of the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, blowing stuff up will always draw a crowd.  The real magic of the theatre is that it is an environment where both the serious and the popular can co-exist.

I have just started reading a book by the great Spanish magician Juan Tamiriz in which he writes about the responsibility of the performer to create a spectacular environment where magic can happen.  It's not about tricks and secrets and fooling and figuring out, but about an altered reality where amazing things can happen.  On the street, when you put an object in your hand and wrap your fingers around it, you expect it to be there when you open your hand, but for the period of time that you are with the magician that might not always be the case.

It's a simple statement that, like a good magic trick, disguises some very complex ideas.

The performer must not only master his technique, but he also must master the attention and focus of the audience.

Under the broad category of "misdirection" magicians are able to control where the audience looks and when.  And I think most people--magicians, or not--would agree that if you can get the audience to "look in the right place at the wrong time" then a lot of the otherwise impossible becomes more likely. 

To understand how a master can control the focus of his audience, I offer a few minutes with Slydini




I watch this and I am amazed that it works. I am also impressed by the understanding of human psychology necessary in order to attempt something like this.

Reading explanations of magic tricks is a lot like reading a cookbook:  they list the required equipment, lay out the steps and, many times, include the dialogue, or patter, to recite as you perform the effect.  What you rarely see is an explanation of why the trick works.

With the same need for certainty that informs my choice of which magic trick to buy, I have tried to understand more about how misdirection works.  I joined an online forum hosted by Genii, The Conjurors' Monthly and tried to find out how magicians talk to one another about misdirection and audience management.  (As no secrets are revealed, I will include a link to the thread here.)

My operating premise was that since this is such a fundamental part of how magic works then there had to be some sort of articulated understanding that was passed from one generation of performers to the next.  Turns out, however, that if I understand my correspondents accurately, misdirection more like comedic timing:  something that can only be learned in performance.

There was a time when I was reading a number of different books on comedy and comedians and trying to understand how they created their material.  Time and again I would read that they "wrote" their material onstage.  This was unfathomable to me because it suggested that they went up there with nothing and just started talking hoping to get the audience to laugh. 

In reality, there are many more steps involved including a significant amount of preparation.  A comic outlines topics and arranges them in a specific order.  Quite often you will see comics come onstage with a bottle of water and a notepad which contains their "set list."  What you don't see is the tape recorder that is capturing the performance.  The performer will then study that tape and listen for the audience response--where they laughed and where the sound of crickets was deafening.  This study will then inform the next performance and the whole process repeats.

Perhaps because I see magic as barricaded behind a wall of secrets and technical skills that, more often than not, seem impenetrable, find it harder to see the craftsmanship of the performer.

The recipe that one finds time and again in the literature of magic is study, practice and practice again.  It's never clear how a would-be conjurer knows they are ready to perform in front of an audience.  In my case, I made that decision way too soon.  And what you almost never see is that the process of continuous revision and improvement of one's abilities and material never stops.

Seen in this light, the role of the audience in creating the Tamiriz "magical atmosphere" comes into sharper focus.  The audience, and all of the audiences that have come before, becomes the uncredited co-author of the magician's performance.

This discussion of the ability of the performer to control or manage the audience implies a level of manipulation that is oppressive.  Perhaps, it would be more useful to think of it as a caring relationship.  Through his skill, the performer is protecting the audience's experience so that they will be able to enter a space where the impossible becomes possible.