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The Method

 
Lee Strasberg drew his inspiration from Stanislavski's teaching to create his Method, a theory about drama playing he passed on his students of the Actors Studio.

Marilyn, after her move in New York in 1955, started to work with Strasberg and soon became a great disciple of the Method.

According to Strasberg himself, the Method is the "the experience memory of all the great actors through all countries and all times. The best comes from Stanislavski, the rest comes from me. There are no rules. 
The Method draws the way which leads to the self-control rather than a spontaneous inspiration. It supposes a mixing between the actor and the character".

The teaching of this theory encouraged the actors to go beyond a simple imitation of reality, to use their own emotional field in order to call their affective memory, a phenomenon they could use in their playing as a "golden key".
For the Method partisans, the drama playing is a way to reveal the truth of the actors personality. Those ones draws the basis material from themselves, hence Strasberg's insistence for auto-learning and introspection through Freudian psychoanalysis. Strasberg gave Marilyn private lessons, on condition that she begin a psychoanalysis to sort out her problems with her past, and bring up her buried energies.

Marilyn applied Lee Strasberg's teaching for the first time in "Bus Stop" (1954), which brought her her first real critics as an actress.

But her following movie "The Prince and The Showgirl" was directed by one of the bigger Method's detractors:  British actor Laurence Olivier was convinced that the actor job was made by technique adds up with details brought by the playing. He said : "What they call the Method is not very useful to the actor. Instead of rehearsing a scene, which distract them, they talk and talk and talk. I prefer rehearsing a scene instead of loosing my time with abstract chattering. The actor's playing is based on his work. The discussions about the motivations and so on, are garbage".

To him, the actor's playing was based on a meticulous preparation and on the accumulation of exterior details allowed to make a character. In his opinion, introspection was an aberration insofar as the actor was supposed to let himself lead by the intentions of the author and his ones.

To shot "The Misfits", Marilyn followed the Method's instructions practically word-for-word, changing the lines because she thought that only the feelings were important and not the words. Arthur Miller, who severely  criticized the unconditional submission of those Method's disciples, wrote : "With her teachers encouragements, she got lost in improvisations which belong to the drama lessons, and not from the real actor's work".

The actor doesn't have to content himself with the imitation of emotional reality, but has to recreate it by having recourse to the "emotional memory" or "affective memory". Thus, for the actor's playing to be psychologically coherent, that he has to let him lead by only one element, his personality.

 
To reach this spontaneaous and lively playing, the actor has to practise improvisation while rehearasals (and even in some cases, while the performance). All those principles are governed by an almost mystical faith in theater art and with the truth he possess within himself.

It's precisely because Strasberg was convinced that the real emotion found its source in the actor's personal story, that he encouraged them to get rid of everything that could hinder the access to his interior life - in the same way, he encouraged psychotherapy and became himself kind of an analyst for his disciples.

At the time when Elia Kazan was teacher at Actors Studio, the Method favored action and emotion, absolute fidelity to the text and the characters coherence. Under Strasberg's influence, the sensory memory and the personal story of the actor were brought out with the result of a high emotionalism.




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