Tirez sur le Pianiste: A Stylistic Analysis (Just a Note)


Criticism of Truffaut's films draws our attention to his intuitive and instinctive investigation of human relationships. His aesthetic interest in the form of the filmic text, which is constructed and developed by considering a variety of techniques, is immediately recognizable in formalistic structure of the narrative and the image. In addition to his former films Les Mistons (1958) and Les Quatre cents Coups (1959). Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960) is prominent in terms of using camera movement, editing and framing/composition.

In fact, there is considerable evidence at the beginning of the film to make us aware of the independence of the camera through abrupt changes imposed by using of pans, tracking shots and fast editing. Obviously, the significance of the chase scene at the beginning is in producing a Brechtian distance to the audience so that this action is part of film, cinema, such as the scene in which Chico (Albert Remy) leaves the stranger suddenly moved quickly into the night. Then, camera movements in any form-pan, tracking shot and long take-try to capture him, but like all Truffaut's characters, he resists being entrapped by the frame and attempts to maintain his sense of freedom and power of maneuver to off-screen. It simply means that in Truffaut's films every individual is claustrophobically followed under a microscope of social judgment, and he is being controlled under everyone's moral and ethical interpretation folded in identity. In a similar manner, when Charlie(Charles Aznavour) walks with Lena(Marie Dubois) on the pavement in front of the bar in their first dramatic contact, however, the shadow of the camera on them through the tracking shot reveals us the action which is a fiction.

Moreover, in dealing with suspense and Hitchockian terminology, Truffaut's camera movement is skillfully manipulated to visualize the complex web of emotions involved in the sequence in which Charlie tries to invite Lena for a drink. Her disappearance caused by Charlie's hesitation to make his final decision, which is captured by a tracking shot, makes the suspense to emerge at the end of his monologue. Even more striking, though, is Truffaut's loyalty and homage to his mentor Hitchcock that is emphasized by using Hitchcock's favorite MacGuffin formula, by using the gangster genre unfolded in film noir style, to conceal the actual story(Charlie's obsession and fascination with women).On another level, most parts of Truffaut's film are structured on point of view shots. The shot/reverse-shots combined with the camera movements, such as pan, are signified by the sequence in which Charlie looks at Clarrise (Michele Mercier) (Homage to western genre) tracking off her dress, and throwing the pillow at him (audience's point of view, censorship), therefore, he covers her breast to make a direct reference to cinema: 'au cinema c'est comme ca et pas autrement' ('that's what they do in films'). Although it is Lena's voice over heard on the film track, the whole flash back in flash back sequence is Charlie's point of view shot (beginning with another pan which takes us from the present time to the past). It begins with Iris-in (homage to silent cinema) putting Lars Schmeel's(Claude Haymann) position right in the middle of the screen between Charlie and Tresea (Nicloe Berger)in the bar, and it ends with Iris-out making the similar graphic editing in the bed emphasizing his interference with destruction of the couple's life.

In the second half of the film, characterized by a slower rhythm of editing and a sense of Charlie's solitude and isolation, the images represent his obsession revolving around women as Charlie's idealized "other" and vice versa. For instance, in the sequence in which Charlie and Lena are kidnapped by the gangsters, the gangster right beside Lena speaks about women and how they try hard to attract men's attention, then, Lena tries to make a posture as the men's idealized image. In addition to Lena's example, through Theresa'a confession to Charlie about Lars Schmeel in the flash back sequence, Charlie's Point of view shot tries to capture her by camera movement in order to condemn her manipulation of narrative and simultaneously to adore her existence and sacrifice, but she runs away from being imprisoned in such static frame in that once he succeeds to freeze her, she has already committed suicide. Like Hitchcock or Lang, Truffaut's cinema is about look. In other words, how the individual characters identify with each other and how the audiences are preoccupied with the identification process through the looks of camera.

In terms of editing, therefore, Truffaut provides a good demonstration of his homage to French impressionist directors like Abael Gance, Germain Dulac and Marcel L'herbier in the ambiguous flashback narrated by the gangster in the first kidnap sequence. The frame is structurally split to three distinctive and circular frames (frame-split technique) with dark backgrounds (inspired by Abel Gance's Napolean). The differences among the temporal rhythms of each of Plyne's(Serge Davri) visual framings strikingly conflict with the linear structure of the time of the narrative between past, present, and future against the conventional style of Hollywood continuity editing. Furthermore, in Lena's apartment Trauffaut suggests the state of confusion between past and present and future by using favorite French Impressionist's techniques: superimposition and dissolve (inspired by Germaine Dulac and Marcel L'Herbier). Indeed. Truffaut simply signifies that one can never become free from the domination of the past, and it returns all the time, which is one of the most important motifs and themes in his film. Although they make love and sleep in the bed together, the poetic dissolves and the superimpositions imply the couple's desire to make the length of sleeping time and being together eternal while Lena's voice over with diegetic sound track by George Delerue impose a sense of emotional identification with her image of Charlie to the audiences.

Truffaut's experimentation with Eisenstein and Bazin's ideas about editing and depth of field in the film gives us a sense of reading an academic film text in which the masters of editing's traces are being followed very clearly from the beginning to the end. For instance, when Chico stares at Clarisse dancing with his customer in the bar, Truffaut's ability to exploit his rich store of cinematic memories seems to help him to put the actors in the depth of field in order to maintain and intensify the momentum of reality. Therefore, Chico in the foreground stares at Clarisse dancing in the middle-ground and two more customers of the bar act as his rivals, who have been introduces before to the audiences, sitting in the background. Again, in the sequence in which Charlie and Lena are being kidnapped, Truffaut manipulates Eisenstein's concept of conflict montage in the climax of the scene by showing an upside down image of the car passing through the intersection and following by police officers. Ultimately, at the final sequence, when Charlie's brother and gangsters shoot at each other Truffaut revolt against the 180 degree system of Hollywood conventional editing and they look like they are shooting at the same direction like jump cutting (from right to left). Of course, it is necessary to emphasize that Charlie's character is not authoritative enough to dominate and control of the narrative, then, he has to be helped and protected by the women in the film all the time against the generic convention of the gangster films and film noir. Charlie's symbolical point of view shot of highway in the night suggests Lena as the narrator enforcing the narrative (She drives the car) and saving him to the direction in which the threatening and the overshadowing elements of darkness of the city have to be eliminated and substituted by the brightness of the shiny day in the country.

In the case of framing, Chico and Charlie are being shown and framed most often in absolutely different compositions through the sequences, except the last one. For instance, in the beginning of the film Chico comes backstage to visit his brother Charlie after four years, and then his head is framed in the broken window from Charlie's point of view shot looking like a tableau among the other objects in Charlie's room. In general, Trauffaut emphasizes Charlie's isolation and alienation from his past, family and environment by putting Chico and him in the split frames. In other words, Charlie's obsession to search for his identity and his freedom is suggested by being entrapped in different frames and tableaux, such as painted on Lars Schmeel's canvas, reflected in mirrors in Theresa's bedroom, shown in a mirror hanging on the wall of the bar, represented in the broken one of the cottage in the country at the final sequence, and finally painted as a caricature on the ads for Plyne and Lars Schmeel.

Perhaps the single most significant outcome of the semi-success of Tirez sur le Pianiste rather than Les Quatre cent Coups was that it gave Truffaut the enough confidence to experience with French New Wave's critical and theoretical approaches to film making. The film is complex in mixing genres and tones. It is the presence of more than one genre, in other words, it includes gangster, western and even comedy genres. Like all French new wave directors, as an Auteur, he preferred to set out his own world-view to favor using his own scenario. Tirez sur le Pianiste originates Truffaut's obsessive fascination with women, thus, gender politics is an important aspect of his film. For these reasons, Truffaut defined his cinematic ideals consciously and intentionally through using variety of techniques such as rapid pan, long take, fast editing, depth of field, framing, dissolve and superimposition. Finally, the last zoom on Lena's face dead in the snow is the symbolical element of Truffaut's character in searching for any concept of absolute in life, which is typically being interrupted by the intervention of fatal elements and accidental death. Therefore, Trauffaut's final sequence of the film is the emblematic signification of the recurrent motif and its author's signature. Similarly, Charlie goes back to play the same piano in the bar which helps him to relieve his fearful pains against obsession of death and violation in the world outside. Interestingly, Trauffaut's camera cranes 90 degrees from Charlie hands to his close up, in which his face is entrapped in the split screen with dark background, reminds the audiences of the final freeze frame(the technique to visualize the element of fate and death or entrapment in Truffaut's films)on Antoine Doinel's close up at the end of Les Quatre cent Coups. In other words, in searching for his self-realization Charlie's hands are the only required tools to construct and establish the last frame of the film which give him his final identity to survive: Charlie, Pianiste.

In conclusion, in the search for absolute freedom in the film both long takes and camera movements give the characters enough space and time to overcome the claustrophobic feeling of entrapment and framing, and the editing gives them driving force and the potential to struggle with the contradictions of the life and establish a new order through confrontation with chaotic world. Trauffaut's autobiographical comment about cinema saving his life reminds the audience of Charlie's passion for his piano and profession where Truffaut as a film director identifies with his character as a piano player at the end of the movie: Truffaut, Director.


By: Morad Sadeghi

The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa, Seven Samurai: An Analysis of an Action Sequence

Akira Kurosawa's films are now part of the global cinema. Many of his films have ignited Western audiences' interests for a long time. His gunfighters and samurais are extraordinarily received by the viewers around the world as the representation of the mythical figures in the cultural structure of Japanese history. The influence of Hollywood masters such as John Ford on his cinematic texts and his influence on the 1970s and 1980s generation of American filmmakers shows the iconic representation of the interaction between different cultural issues and aesthetics of the film schools. Understanding Kurosawa's cinema seems to be regarded as an alternative model for cultural studies whose detailed insights refer to the dialectical tensions between the confrontations of the cultural modes of representations.

Kurosawa's aesthetic vision relies on his knowledge of using wide angle lenses, fast editing to create required pace for the mise-en scene of the battle scenes, the precisely calculated camera movements and the choreography of Japanese sword playing. Of course, the organizing and accurate design of the set before shooting is crucial for Kurosawa:

"After the object to be photographed has thus been "improved: and made more real, Kurosawa is ready to decide how to photograph it. Though he accomplishes this in various ways, his considerations are usually: to do it in such a way that the meaning of the shots is enhanced, and/or in such a way that economy of action is created, and/or in such away that the composition itself comments on the scene" (Richie, 234).

The camera movement in Hollywood films sometimes serves to follow  character's action. For Kurosawa the camera movements through the battle scenes explore something absolutely different in mise-en scene:

"Throughout his cinema, Kurosawa will be interested in exploring and extending the capacity of camer movement to situate characters according to important psychological and social relations prevailing among them (an interest that reaches something of a climax in Seven Samurai) " (Prince,42)

Kurosawa's choreography of battle scenes is expected to create the spatial visual field through which the continuity flow of fast cutting makes possible:

"Kurosawa's major editing innovations concern  the amount of time an image remains on the screen, the continuity from one action to the next, and the placement of the cut. the ordinary way to cut a film is wait until the necessary action or dialogue is concluded and then the end scene....If an explanation is necessary, he will interrupt the explanation and show its results (and his most usual method is seen in the many short-cuts that so tighten his films)" (Richie, 239).

Not only can the social status and class identity be distinguished in his samurai films, but the generic category of jidaigeki convincingly invents the emergence of jidaijeki throughout his films as a new genre which has little to do with tradition in Japanese cinema. Kurosawa's sword fight scene which is the carefully choreographed dance coupled with the avoidance of any explicit sexual scenes is either faithful to jidaigeki's conventions or a part of his formalistic approach to treat the narrative as the strong realistic and allegorical motif of the genre:"Kurosawa's approach is demythologization of the legend in search of realism" (Yoshimoto,238)

Kurosawa's aesthetic tradition represented by montage and long take is necessary to emphasize on the turbulence and tension between Eastern and western traditions. The use of anamorphic frames and telephoto lenses to create a battle sequence beside the multi-camera filming and fast editing contextualize his work not only on the ideological values but also on his visual thinking. His battle sequences are not only the scenes in which the swordplay fights and battle events can occur but also the messages of the scenes are beyond the dialectical structure of the mise-en scene:

"With Kurosawa and his work, we must employ a multiplex perspective because we are dealing with manifold levels of transformation: cultural, individual, cinematic...We may establish a pathway from Meiji, Taisho, and Showa-era into the material of the films" (Prince, xviii).

Kurosawa's style as an artist to create the combination of the sound and image in his action sequences is founded and structure on the interference of the sound with an image rather than merely an accompaniment:

"The context of the sound is equally important, and some of Kurosawa's most magical effects have been achieved through an apparently irrational use of natural sound...Reality, context, and volume are rigorously controlled in Kurosawa's sound track, and the result is careful selection of what we know we hear and what we hear without realizing it. Music is used in somewhat the same way" (Richie, 240).

As Stephan Prince suggests:

"What is always impressive about Seven Samurai is its boundless energy, the sped of its tracking shots, the aggressiveness of its wipe-linked transitions and dazzling use of multi-camera perspectives" (Prince, 204).

Seven Samurai, Kurosawa's masterpiece, is the historical reconstruction of Japanese period films which can be connected epically in a vital way to jidaigeki's genre. The film is convincingly meaningful within the framework of jidaigeki, and the validity of notorious and practical scenes at the end of the film situates him as the most successful director and the choreographer of the battle scenes in Japanese cinema. Here Kurosawa's concern as a thinker and filmmaker is about to create a cinematic text whose style of editing in fight scenes can be compared with Eisenstein and his Battleship Potemkin (1925) in terms of composing the chaotic motion:

"There is no shot that does not have motion, either in the object photographed, or in the movement of camera itself" (Richie, 103).

Kurosawa always uses short cuts rather than the long takes to hasten the rhythm of the battle. His camera brings the action close to the audience by involving directly with the mis en-scene, the audience is enabled to participate in the battle whose devastating and explosive energy can be explored only through Kurosawa's use of anamorphic frame. The exploration of heroism in Kurosawa's jidaigeki films such as Seven Samurai ironically represents samurai power in traditional context. Kurosawa has to convey the anarchy and turmoil of the conflict between Farmers/villagers and samurai/bandits social classes at the final sequence of the film just to create his ultimate humanity effect on the cinematic text:

"The warriors train peasants to defend their village against bandits and together the two classes restore peace and security. Through this success, however, the samurai make themselves unnecessary in the end" (Goodwin, 196).

In order to analyze his aesthetic style of the film, one has to understand that Kurosawa's interpretation of the Tokugawa period or the sixteenth century historical and cultural context of Japan in which the classes were separated is reluctantly meant to be required materialistic resources to create his cinematic expression as the auteur:

"His samurai were meant to stand-in their temperance and loyalty, their self discipline and austere unconcern for wealth and power-as models and leaders for all other classes...Relations among the classes and permeability of class lines are central to Seven Samurai' (Prince, 206).

As Stephan Prince Suggests:

"Individualism against the collaboration between the groups, the heroic presence of the master-pupil relationship, and the transcendental and materialistic capabilities of every character lead the spectator to be a witness of the character's traumatic encounter with battle, violence, death and sexuality. This traumatic element is obvious and there is plentitude in the final sequence" (Prince,  )

He also states that, " The final battle is a supreme spiritual and physical struggle, and it is fought in a blinding rainstorm, which enables Kurosawa to visualize an ultimate fusion of social groups. Their efforts forged by common praxis, samurai and peasant become a single team, a fearsome, efficient force defending their community. As such, they are indistinguishable, covered alike with mud and fighting with equal desperation. But this climactic vision of classlessness, with typical Kurosawan ambivalence, has become a vision of horror. The battle is a vortex of swirling rain and mud, slashing steal, thrashing, anonymous bodies, and screaming, dying men. The ultimate fusion of social identity emerges as an expression of hellish chaos, against which the final relapse into native ritual and class separation fells a relief"(Prince, 218).

Among the crucial moments of the final climactic scenes, there is a shot in which Kambei [the leader of samurai group] picks up his bow and places the arrow:

"There is an intervening shot of the bandit chieftain riding by, only in the next shot for Kambei to follow through and release the arrow. In true Eisensteinian fashion, Kurosawa has Kambei shoot the arrow in one shot, only to have it strike home in where Eisenstein has a shot fired only to cut to a woman already wounded, with the spectator experiencing the moment of impact without having actually viewing it" (Mellen, 56).

By using of jump cut, Kurosawa moves the narrative forward to challenge the visual framing, but the combination of the character's movements in the frame while he uses the camera movements and telephoto lenses creates a centralized position for the samurais in the foreground  and farmers in the background and frames the bandits in the isolated shots and landscapes. Simultaneously, their moving appears to be significantly connected with the chaotic setting of the environment:

"Rather than depict choreographed swordfights with conventional moves, Kurosawa storyboarded more realistic fight in which characters defended or attacked in any way they could have given their circumstances" (Stafford, 71).

In order to emphasize the pressure on the villagers and samurai, Kurosawa creates the tight framings, often in depth by using the telephoto lenses in the battle scenes while helping the spectators to involve with the cinematic text:

"Kurosawa was once again an innovator in using a telephoto lens during the battle scenes in order to put the spectator into the battle" (Stafford, 59).

The conflict between stasis and motion conveyed by telephoto lens define the character's visual centrality. The structure of the closure discloses the reappearance of the class struggle at the end:

" Paradoxically, the organic community is destroyed in the moment of the victory. With the bandits gone, the farmers no longer need the samurai, and class disparity and exclusion reappear" (Prince, 218).

It will be reasonable to draw the normal conclusion from Yoshimotos' book as he suggests that:

"If Seven Samurai successfully elevates the level of jidaigeki's realism a notch, it is not by representing historical facts accurately. Instead, the film creates a heightened sense of realism by meticulously showing all kinds of details include plot and story , character traits, sets and props, costumes, and acting style" (Yoshimoto, 233)

Kurosawa's fundamental problem for his heroic and action cinema is to admit the necessity of reformulation of rhetorical structure to challenge the dialectical inquiry into the past.












Goodwin, James. Akira Kurosawa and Intertextual Cinema John Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Mellen, Joan. Seven Samurai London: BFI, 2002.

Prince, Stephan. The Warrior's Camera; The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa New Jersey: Princeton University, 1991.

Richie, Donald. The Films of Akira Kurosawa Berkeley: University of California press, 1996.

Stafford, Roy. Seven Samurai London: York Press, 2001.

Yoshimoto, Mitsushiro. Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema Duke Universdity Press, 2000.


By: Morad Sadeghi

Marlon Brando’s Evolution of Myth in God Father I With a Focus on the Method’s Techniques

In his experimentation to control the erratic nature of emotions, imagination and
spontaneity, Stanislavsky experimented with different techniques to achieve
improvisation, sense memory, relaxation, and emotional memory. His system offers a
new psychological foundation for understanding character and action. His work on
emotional memory helped the actors to achieve a sense of inner truth. Stanislavsky`s
books convey the importance of physicalization and reflect his initial concern with
emotional and psychological truth of acting. In America, his emotional aspects of the
system dominated all other aspects. In Actor’s Studio, the emphasis was on internal and
analytical action. The Actor’s Studio provided the common ground of professional stage
and film training, with particular emphasis on developing and controlling emotional and
analytical processes, and as we know, the Actor’s Studio and its Method uniquely
complemented the emerging needs of cinema in the fifties and sixties. If in
Stanislavsky’s system imagination and emotion are derived from the circumstances of the
play, in the Method acting, the emotional truth is derived from personal experiences and
unconscious of the actor while Stanislavsky’s inner and intellectual technique was
incorporated into the Method. But from the outset, the Stanislavskian principles of the
Actors Studio attracted motion picture actors as well as theatre actors. Some of the
students were Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, John Forsythe and others.

Marlon Brando’s method acting represents his sexual aggressiveness, loneliness,
and alienation with the society in his earliest films and his most celebrated moments in
his career. The improvisation through lines of action for the character, the relaxation in
intricate and psychological moments, and the experimenting with the emotional memory
are some crucial aspects in Brando’s method acting. For example, James Naremore states
that Brando’s use of improvisation is considered as a locus of Method technique in the
scenes in On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan):“Early On the Waterfront, he and Eva
Marie Saint are walking through a children’s school yard. She accidentally drops one of
her white gloves, and Brando picks it up. They pause, and he sits on a playground swing
in the center of composition; as they talk, he casually slips the glove over his hand.
Critics frequently site this piece of business as a locus classicus of Method technique”
(Naremore, 193). The goal of this essay is to suggest a framework to compare the myth
of Brando’s personae in his earlier films with his one in The Godfather (1972, Francis
Ford Coppola) in terms of using Actor’s Studio techniques and revealing an important
psychological subtext. In fact, Brando’s method of acting in The Godfather is a massive
piece of entertainment that creates three hours of intricate storytelling involving
sentiment, nostalgia, filial affection, and epic bloodletting. Brando’s myth of persona in
The Godfather is compared with the one in his earliest period of his career in terms of his
sexual rebelliousness, defensive loneliness, and violent reaction to search for the truth.

From historical viewpoint, Paramount introduced Mario Puzo to design his
screen play as a contemporary crime story and not a study of a criminal empire. Then, the
studio hired Al Ruddy as producer and Francis Ford Coppola as director, who was
regarded in Hollywood as a film maker with vitality and style and was respected as
writer, having won an Oscar as co – scripter of Patton. Coppola and the author then sat
down to write a literal translation of the book. Brando, who read the book in three days,
after the producer gave it to him, immediately agreed to play the role. Brando’s main
problem in approaching the part was one of age. He was forty seven at the time of
filming The Godfather but the film required him to play a man twenty years his senior.
He succeeded to represent his Don Corleone, who is a tough old Sicilian peasant in an
empire of Italian – American crime. Perhaps the most fascinating contradiction of The
Godfather is that although it is the story of crime, replete with much violence and brutal
killing, it is also a story of a family adhering to their own moral codes, the strongest of
which is their concern for each other. Brando plays the role of an undisputed patriarch
who seems to have a manner of religious leader. There is remoteness about him, and his
voice is quiet and rasping. It seems that Brando, according to Coppola, brings too many
ideas to his acting in the film: “Everyone advised me to assert myself with him and
say, ‘Now, Marlon, I’m the director, you just act.’ That would have been suicidal. I could
understand how he got his reputation because his ideas were so bizarre, so apparently
crazy...yet without exception every one of his crazy ideas I used turned out to be terrific
moment” (Morella, Coppola, 131). Brando’s Don Corleone is just any ordinary American
businessman who is trying to do the best he can for the group he represents and his
family. It was Brando’s concept of his role to reveal his desire to do the film with his
feelings about corporate heads’ problems in America. Also, not surprisingly, it was
Brando’s idea to put an orange peel across his teeth in the scene where he is playing with
his grandson in order to intensify the strength of the scene. Coppola has remembered that
Brando even slapped Martino around to get the right reactions as Martino would look
good. It seems that his improvisation on the set, instead of causing trouble, helped hold
the whole thing together. Don Corleone’s part called for Brando who possessed the sort
of magnetism and charisma that this pivotal role in the movie required:

“Brando emerged from his bedroom wearing a kimono, Coppola says, and he
gradually began to slide into the character. He put on a rumpled shirt and jacket, then he
took some shoe polish and dabbed on a moustache. Next he stuffed Kleenex in his jaws,
saying ‘The godfather should have the face of a bulldog.’ Then he said, ‘In the story Don
Vito is shot in the throat, so I think he should talk as if it never quite healed.’...At this
point Brando and Corsitto improvised an impromptu scene” (Phillips, 95).

Brando’s sexual aggressiveness that continues to be represented repeatedly in the
films like On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, Elia Kazan), and Viva
Zapata (1952, Elia Kazan) is losing its intensity and effectiveness in The Godfather. The
process of ageing for an actor weakens his representation of sexuality on the screen and
amplifies his vulnerability and fragility towards the end of the film. The film contains
largely of the moments in which his playful theatricality is more apparent, and he is not
scary sex object any more. Brando’s Chorleone sometimes seems to be less in touch
with sensations and emotions, but Brando’s method acting makes the audience aware
of how his performance can bring tear to their own eyes only when he tries to develop
Corleone’s character by using an affective and emotional memory that functions to add
asexual side to Chorlene’s aging character. Technically, the entire purpose of the Method
acting, here, in this film, appears to create natural and spontaneous performing that is
slightly abstracted and mostly associated with Brando’s method acting. If Brando gives
us the strong sense of his sexual aggressiveness and instinctive responsiveness to the
female characters in his earliest films, the emphasis on his ego psychology that feeds his
star personae becomes less important than James Caan’s sexual and violent image.

Putting Don Corleone in the shadows and secrecy of his office suggests
nothing less than Brando’s skill to represent an image of the character who lives in the
dark side of the world: “When The Godfather was being made, there was concern that the
images were too dark. Yet this emphasis on what can not be seen is what makes the
Corleone clan that much more threatening” (Clarke, 49). Brando’s relaxation to offer a
masculine image testifies to his great capacity as an actor as he is playing and cuddling
with the cat in his arms. The Godfather is a hymn to doorways, corridors, and rooms, to
the stable spaces of the family home around which the chaos of life inevitably swirls.
Coppola tends not to move the camera much, and this lack of mobility for the camera
allows the audience to focus on Brando’s essential moments of acting. The expansive
opening movement of the film at Connie’s wedding feels almost like a documentary of a
family wedding as Coppola often uses long lenses to give a sense of a world observed
from a distance. This distance allows to Brando to break the theatricality and encourages
him to offer us a believable image of the father of the family, the head of the patriarch,
who is in love with his family when he begins to dance with his daughter, Connie, at the
wedding ceremony. Brando’s body movements, the facial gestures, and the pause of the
speeches create the contrast with the tendency of film towards spectacle and
sensationalism in its presentation of violence. Brando’s method of acting to represent a
father who is against the violence and still believes to the moral codes of the family
controls the distancing and dampening of a potentially melodramatic events that exists in
some moments of the film. Brando’s calmness and slow body movements make his
character on the screen for the audience amiable and attractive though the audience
knows that he is the head of Corleone’s clan. His lack of sexual aggressiveness and aging
put too much emphasis on his peaceful mind and attention for his family. Perhaps, the
only scene in which the audience feels the impact of the masculine violence that is
repressed under Don Corleone’s character is when he slaps at Johnny Fontane’s face
close to the beginning of the film.

Though Vito is the Godfather of this film, Micheal’s journey is the true
focus of the story. Michael Corleone begins the film as an innocent. As the film
develops, his fall from grace begins, driven as he is by revenge for an attempt to murder
his father. Al Pacino’s character is an immensely attractive character: intelligent,
emotional and committed. In his body language, Michael is contained and understated.
Brando’s father figure and his aging figure reduces his macho power with sex, and
graceful indolence in comparison with Michael and Sanyo’s masculinity while Brando’s
childlike nature and cool posture in his earlier films suggest his sadistic and masochistic
characters: “He also lends a frighteningly eroticized quality to violence; he is frequently
depicted as a sadistic character...or, he is shown horribly maimed or beaten by people
who take pleasure in giving out punishment.” (Naremore, 196) Brando’s inclination to
avoid the romantic excess and self – destruction always accompanies with his tendency
to hide behind changes of accent and makeup. This change of accent and makeup with a
focus on his desire to depict stylized imperialist villains is realized through his reliance
on mimicry that is particularly ironic in the context of The Godfather. Brando’s work in
his earlier films needs to be prefaced by a brief history of the Method, both as a practice
and as a critical term.

As we know, Method acting consisted of series quasi – theatrical exercises
that tried to develop an affective and emotional memory. Players who used the Method
continued to work and did the training to enhance the potentiality of their emotional
memories: “The point of training was simply to put performers in a receptive state,
thereby facilitating what was already recognized as good realistic drama.” (Naremore,
197) The directors such as Kazan were interested in a subtext of intimate, emotionally
charged acting. The word of Method acting appears in the writings of Robert Lewis,
Stella Adler, and Elia Kazan. The works in Actors’ Studio were easily assimilated into
the mainstream of realist acting. Brando was trained at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic
Workshop where he learned about Brecht. His most influential teacher was Stella Adler
who discouraged the use of effective memory and believed that an actor must make
choices, and the final choice determines the effectiveness of the final performance.
Strasberg’s romanticism and his emphasis on ego psychology were retrograde
developments in more productive Stanislavskian tradition that precedes him: “In the
rather parochial teaching of the Actors’ Studio, Stanislavsky’s approach had been
narrowed down to a quasi – Freudian ‘inner work’ fuelled by an obsession with
the ‘self’” (Naremore, 199). Strasberg took on the role of analyst. His teaching
impoverished the theatre: “They impoverished the theatre – feeding the star system,
promoting conventional realism at the expense of the avant – garde, and giving American
drama a less forceful social purpose.” (Naremore, 199) Nevertheless, Naremore believes
that Strasberg was unquestionably a gifted teacher: “His teaching manifested a tendency
toward the kind of theatre for which Stanislavkian aesthetics had been originally
designed, thus contributing to a proliferation of naturalistic social drama in the fifties.”
(Naremore, 200)

Brando’s loneliness in The Godfather is slightly abstracted and has something in
common with his earlier films in which his Method acting reaches its ultimate form in
what Strasberg called the private moment. In the Actors’ Studio, Strasberg frequently
requested professional actors to imagine an experience for themselves. In The Godfather,
Brando never seems to be lonely, but, paradoxically, his stress on inwardness sometimes
resulted in almost introverted quality, that enhances his performance, and it gives his
acting an emotionalism that is read as a reinvestment of emotionality in the narrative
film. Don Corleone seems to be with his family all the time and being with his family
brings us back the contrast of Brando’s earlier films in which he tries to overcome his
solitude by manipulating the violent action as if he is truly feeling the emotions he acts
with The Godfather. Brando’s lonely scenes have the threatening dynamic moments in
which the audience expects him to control his psychological reactions by deliberately
accentuating his low – key behaviour. Brando ultimately involves a choice between being
lonely in the group and being lonely in the private. His loneliness in the group undergoes
a variety of quick, apparently spontaneous changes as the film progresses.

If Brando is less dissociated from his body than the typical leading man of
his day, and his eyes are able to express a wide range of understated emotions in an
instant of time in his earlier films, his association with his group of family in The
Godfather contradicts his body language and a series of relaxed poses that imply athletic
grace and sexuality. Though he seems to be alone in making decision on the future of his
family and businesses, he seems to be working subtly against the acting that is heavily
associated with his star image that is deliberately accentuated in a picture like
Waterfront. Brando realizes that Don Corleone has to be patient with the changes and
tolerates everything to avoid the maximum violence. Don Corleone can not be more
violent and aggressive than Sanyo and Michael. His quiet manner and behaviour leads us
to a climactic moment at the end of the film when Michael creates a massacre while he
attends in the baptism as the Godfather of Connie’s baby in the church. Perhaps, Don
Corleone’s loneliness is getting introverted by resigning as the head of the family’s
business and assigning Michael as the leader of Corleone’s clan. The scene in which Don
Corleone is going to die represents him as a lonely man for whom the passing time is the
greatest enemy. Brando’s acting in that scene amplifies the impact of his loneliness and
intensifies Coppola’s overriding aesthetic on which Brando compels audience sympathy
and, ultimately, ends his life as an old man anxious about the security of his dynasty, of
his family, apart from the business world he moves in. In fact, Brando’s expressions of
family and honour are winningly powerful. Don Corleone is a character who feels an
older world code has died away. Throughout The Godfather, Vito Corleone expresses
unease at the incursion of the narcotics trade into the business interests of the Mafia
families. The theatricality is the film’s biggest especial effect. Indeed, the film’s visual
power is complemented by the structure of the story and richness of its characters, which
are the most powerful aesthetic elements. Sicilian dialect, criminal codes and body
language allow the audience to focus predominantly on the characters. Also, at the same
time the distance often put between the camera and the action creates an emotional
distancing effect that brings an added chill to many powerful and visceral scenes.

Peter Cowie states that Brando’s voice, eyes, and muscles helped to enhance the
reality of Vito Corleone’s character along Brando’s acting:

“Brando, apart from exercising his superstar muscle by arriving late on set from
time to time, approached The Godfather with professional devotion. His donned ear
– plugs to make it more difficult for him to catch lines, strengthening the impression
that the Don was hard of hearing. His voice assumed the hoarse texture of a faded tape
recording. Special effects expert Dick Smith constructed a mouthpiece that caused
Brando’s jaws to sag and his cheeks to puff out. His eyes according to one observer on
set, drooped at the corners, and his skin was covered with a thin network of the wrinkles
fashioned from latex rubber. The star was also equipped with a padded false paunch his
suit, and weights were attached to each of his feet so as to give his walk a ponderous
quality. Brando or smith )or indeed Coppola ) may have glanced at Orson Welles’s old
man Kane make – up before tackling the task, for those stuffed cheeks, straight – back
hairstyle and tucked – in jaw recall the Xanadu scenes of Kane” (Cowie, 65)

Brandon’s Don as he listens to Bonasera’s muttered lament in the beginning of the film
stirs our awareness of the need of the simple – minded for a strong, protective authority.
While Brando sits in monolithic silence, stroking a cat in a telling visual metaphor
for the hooded claws of his domain, his Method acting relies heavily on imagination,
role analysis and improvisation. In fact, his slow rhythm of body language and heavily
style of talking provide a solid framework for Brando to achieve truthful performance
on stage and screen through analytical, emotional, and physical techniques while he
embellishes with a full awareness of the character’s inner life. Not surprisingly, he is
one of the most inventive actors cinema has ever known. He is so full of ideas that he
almost gives too much. Brando used Method techniques in The Godfather for emotional
involvement and characterization. I won’t be able to prove that how his use of affective
memory techniques and personal substitution helped involve him in the character’s
inner life without having profound knowledge of everyday life behind the scenes. But
according to Coppola, Brando spent a great deal of time in preparation, including script
analysis, imagination, and character development. Brando’s approach to his role remains
consonant with those developmental techniques established by Stanislavski: exploring the
use of emotional recall, imagination, concentration as the inner work and physicalizing
the character through body movement and voice as the outer technique. The end result of
Brando’s acting style is an effective, unified expression of all psychological and physical
behaviours.

Brando’s characters’ violent reaction to search for the truth seems to be
particularly valuable in his earlier films while it was Kazan who the most had
pronounced impact on Brando’s Method acting to represent the vulgarity. Kazan built
each scene through awareness of analytic structure, and cast Brando in the stage and film
versions as someone who seems to be invulnerable but, in fact, needs to protection.
Indeed, Brando has the cruelty and sadism and, at the same time, has something terribly
attractive about him. For example, in On the Waterfront, he performed all the tasks on
the way that the audience would be able to analyze the structure of his acting with
considering his violent action that forces him to seek for the truth. The audience can
immediately identify a basic element in Brando’s method acting that defines the
psychological progress of his characters from On the Waterfront to The Godfather. This
element of performance in the Stanislavsky system establishes Brando’s psychological
progression as the searcher for the truth that allow him to experiment with the character
and to find a truth about him that Brando conveyed on the screen. However, In The
Godfather, the naturalistic rhetoric and the feeling of power and nobility hidden behind a
vulnerable, inarticulate surface, help to account for Brando’s impact in the sequence after
Sanio’s death, which encapsulate the film’s major themes in a single, virtually self –
contained, episode and forever establishes one definition of the Method. The physical
and rhetorical requirements of the scene in which Brando confesses to Michael that he
always thought that Sanio becomes the head of Corleone`s clan not Michael are minimal,
with two actors placed in relatively gestureless position, so that inflections of Brando`s
tone of voice carry the meaning. The scene’s climactic speeches derive much of their
power from Brando`s rhythms and gestures, which reveal tides of emotion running
beneath Vitorio Corleone`s supposedly quiet manner. All of Brando`s energy to search
for the truth in his earlier films seems to lose its strength and turns out to become a
shadow of bitterness and disappointment crossing his eyes in The Godfather. His lack of
violent reaction is substituted with his matured pessimism, and his naturalistic inflections
of performance always consist of underlying logic of well – made theatre. We should not
be surprised at this phenomenon; as a result, such acting tends to undermine stage
rhetoric selectively while adhering to melodramatic structures of character and action.
What seems distinctive about the scene between Brando and Al Pacino is its underlying
approach to transcend the popular idea of the Method. Brando’s own cleverness fostered
such a definition. His lack of violent reaction to search for the truth in the film makes his
performances more real; in practice, however, he became real godfather in the film.
Brando’s improvisational strategy relies heavily on his physical expression.

The action of the eyes, the tone of the voice, the position of the head, the
posture of the body represent the passions and habits of the mind, and the qualities which
are necessary to create an actor. The first requisite is to understand a character, and the
second is sensibility. Brando’s ability to feel the energy transfused within him which
arises from his highest creative centers forms in a definite manner his mimicry and
gestures. Also, the growth of consciousness and fitness of internal feelings are worked
out by Brando in relation to his vocal equipment. In fact, Brando develops within himself
the natural musical speech by practising his voice with due regard to his sense of reality.
He listens to what his partner says to him and answers naturally, delivering his part as
though it is his own words and not lines that he has memorized. Brando learns how to
master different degrees of muscular tension and to transfer muscular energy from one
part of the body to another. He knows how to relax his whole body and how to sit and
walk in such a state. Control of his body directly assists his work on a part, as when he is
practising the gait of a given character, his manner of expression, etc. Without changing
his pose, he can observe himself, relax his muscles, and exerts only the effort required to
retain the pose. If we sympathize with Brando’s Corleone, if we approve of the
character’s actions, then our aim will be to rise a question that how his method of acting
determines the emotions of the character and the actor’s very nature of a serious approach
to the art. While viewed from the angle of study course an actor performing upon the
stage can be considered an apparatus set up for certain functions such as a person’s
manner of thinking and feeling and his own ways of expressing his feelings. These
functions must, under favourable circumstances, be released into action with more or less
spontaneity. Brando’s ability to improve himself is the basis of the every elementary act
that can be realized when an inner impulse to work is present. This constant readiness
towards creative work develops within oneself the ability for an actor to speak not words
but thoughts. Brando’s lack of movement and immobility must be justified from within.
It will not seem artificial or invented to the audience if each actor who participates in a
given scene will justify for himself the halting of a movement.

Brando was the actor who felt the urge and the necessity for a given
camera position for the shooting of any given piece of his role in precisely the same way
as a stage actor feels the necessity, at a given point in the course of his role, for making
an especially emphasized gesture, or for advancing to the footlights, or for ascending two
steps of a scenery stairs. Brando clearly understood that the moving of the camera from
place to place is not simply means of the possibilities. Brando profoundly embodied
himself into his role in the course of his work on the image, and he didn’t forget the need
always to consider also the objective content and the value of the final result, his
behaviour in acting on the stage during the actual performance portrayed to the audience.
When Brando was mainly seeking and feeling for ways of embodying himself as a given
individual in the image he intended to play, he was yet clearly conscious of and sets
before himself. The image he finally found and fixed in himself and in the performance,
he never separated from himself as from a living, feeling, and speaking person. Also, the
word rhythm which is hard to define was in practice very familiar to Brando. He knew
that every role had its own distinguishing rhythm. Moreover, Brando approached the
problem posed by the director and handled it in a resourceful manner. He was able to
seize the inner meaning, the essence, inherent in the particular demonstration and
independently translate the idea into terms of Method techniques.

We all know that desire is the motive for the action. Therefore the fundamental
thing which an actor must learn is to wish, to wish by order, to wish whatever is given
to the character. Brando was an actor who tried to grasp with bare hands at feelings and
tried to give a definite form to their expression. He had always the desire to invent a
gesture and improvise an action on the set. According to Coppola, Brando also used to
exercise before starting to play on the set. In fact, it is true that sense – memory exercises
develop the feeling of truth and also train the actor in the proper scenic awareness. The
truthfulness of scenic behaviour is dependent upon his physical self – awareness and
the set of circumstances in which the actor finds himself at the given moment. Physical
self – awareness and concentration of attention are the conditions necessary for Brando
to achieve the state wherein he may go on doing his work in public without being at all
self – conscious. These exercises for Brando strengthen the feeling of truth. There are
actors who no sooner try to do something than they are immediately checked by the inner
fear of a false tone. Such excessive feeling of truth may paralyze the will, and should be
treated by exercising the will and the attention. Brando’s exercises of sense – memory
with actions lacking any object help to turn perplexity into brazenness and impudence.

In The Godfather, Brando’s method acting pleases the interest of great many,
and the rhyming pattern enables Coppola to develop a profound compound between Don
Vito in his heyday and his son, Michael Corleone, during the most heinous years of the
Mafia’s influence in the United States. Brando’s Don radiated an irresistible charm and
nobility with the result that the audience allows itself to be duped, lulled into accepting
the legitimacy budding Don’s crimes. Coppola says that even before The Godfather
he had always been interested in making a film about a father and a son at the same
age, in the father you’d see the potential of the son, and in the son the influence of the
father. Both men win their spurs by destroying an arch foe of the Family. The Godfather
acknowledges a debt to the classic gangster movies of the 1930s.Gordon Willis, the
director of photography on The Godfather trilogy, outlines his aesthetic in The Godfather
films by saying that his work is a form of romantic reality. The exterior scenes of the
wedding were intentionally overexposed to contrast with the shadow of the inside of the
Corleone home. Indeed, one of the motivating factors in the lighting design for those
scenes in the Don’s den was to make Brando’s make up look real. Coppola persisted in
his belief that Brando was the ideal candidate.

The money generated by The Godfather was colossal. Coppola himself was
stunned and delighted at the financial results of the film. Brando’s performances have the
effects similar to Gordon Willis’s style of photography and Coppola’s style of editing.
Like all the best screen adaptations, The Godfather remains faithful to the spirit of
original novel Brando’s sensitivity and inventiveness serve to fuel the charge of violence
and resolve in Michael’s isolation at the end of the film. Brando’s attempts to enact
emotions were the best ways to perform the specific task in The Godfather. His creative
activity on the stage environment, including the plot and its development, has reality for
him. Every Brando’s gestures in front of the camera establish significance, and every
word, every movement, every sound have its raison d’etre. Brando’s motivation was in
complete accord with the character and situation. A given motive fed Brando and gave
him the opportunity of arriving at newer and more distinctive creative images. Finally, if,
therefore, there is anything at all in the stage business which remains obscure to Brando
must be his lack of conviction in the slightest detail that sometimes throws him off –
balance and dangerously threatens his creative functioning.

.Blum, Richard A. American Film Acting: The Stanislavsky Heritage Michigan: UMI

Research Press, 1984.

.Carey, Gary. Brando New York: Pocket Books, 1973.

.Clarke, James. Coppola Great Britain: Virgin Books Limited, 2003.

.Cole, Toby. Acting: A Handbook of The Stanislavski Method New York: Crown

Publishers, Inc. 1983.

.Cowie, Peter. Coppola London: Andre Deutsch, 1989.

.Goodwin, Michael & Naomi Wise. ON THE EDGE: The Life and Times of Francis

Coppola New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1989.

.Morella, Joe & Edward Z. Epstein. BRANDO: The Unauthorized Biography New York:

Crown Publishers, Inc., 1973.

.Naremore, James. Acting in the Cinema Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

.Phillips, Gene D. GODFATEHER: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola The University

Press of Kentucky, 2004.

.Thomas, Bob. Marlon Portrait of the Rebel as an Artist New York: Random House,

1973.



By: Morad sadeghi