PERFORMANCE PERSPECTIVES

"American History X"

THE EYES HAVE IT

Having spent many years encouraging actors to seek out the power and productivity of actors maintaining eye contact, a viewing of "American History X" with its universally strong performances provided a wonderful validation of the benefits of that element of the actor's process. Searching for the maximum opportunity of assessing the thoughts of the 'other' person/actor always provides a strongly engaged, strongly interactive and highly dramatic outcome.

"American History X" is a powerful film. It has strong performances, a strong story and it also makes a strong statement. Maybe it's because of the high level of drama that it is possible to see (if you look) that a really active/interactive process is at work here. Often in this film character needs are not buried deep in the subtext but in many cases are in fact very close to the surface. When "needs" are close to the surface obsessive behaviour results. It is no criticism of the performances to say at times these characters behave obsessively; in fact the story is about obsessions.

Desperate Needs
So maybe it's because the characters do have such desperate needs that one notices how regularly eye-lines are held. It might not be that these needs are pursued 'challengingly' or 'aggressively' or 'blamingly'. Often it's 'assessingly', 'needily', 'hopelessly' and sometimes 'optimistically' that they are explored. It is also not to say that actors never break eye contact and never look away - for this not what happens either. But it is frequently evident that the potency that emerges from these performances is significantly generated from the moment when eyes meet. Vision being such a dominant sense many interactive benefits are accrued if eye-lines are held.

Because of the desperate nature of the characters individual needs in this film perhaps it is also the case that when actors disengage from eye-lines it is not to explore or assess how their emotions are responding to the circumstances but rather they disengage to assess how they are progressing with achieving their "need". Are they making ground or losing ground? How will they make the next choice? Will they succeed or will they fail? Is everything just unwinding? And as these characters mostly lose the thing they need the most then this process helps the story continue to drive towards its tragic end. So story is well served by this process as well as the truthfulness of the interaction.

The outcome of all these ingredients is performances that feed hugely off eye contact between the actors. The result of which is -

• high levels of drama
• great and open listening
• and complex interactions.

This is a film well worth watching for the structure and purpose of its story and for the quality of its performances.

Copyright © The Rehearsal Room 2002. All rights Reserved.