Acting Hollywood Style [antikvár]

f reviewiGreta Garbo's famous offscreen gaze at the end oiQiieen Christina (1933). What does she see.' What do we see?TWO CLOSEUPS.1. On the prow of her ship the former monarch stands like a statue. Her lover, for whom she has abdicated, lies behind her, slain in a senseless duel; now, without a country to rule or a great passion in which to shelter, she gazes deeply into offscreen space. What does she see? What do we see.'As if lying in wait for revelation, the unmoving camera stares at the woman's face. In the absence of dialogue and with no protection from the peering camera, it is through her face alone that the actress must "write" this climactic scene.At first her face seems frozen, as unyielding as her posture. "I will not show you anything you want to see," her mask seems to tell us. "I will not cryI did that for you before; I will not grieve, for isn't that what you expect from me, a queen who has lost her kingdom and her count.' I will not, I will not " And yet as the camera remains in place, her mask flickers, emitting almost subliminal signals of strength, pain, resignation, the memory of an exalting love, the fleeting implication that for her the world has been well lost.In this famous closeup at the end oiQueen Christina (1933), Greta Garbo's face, tantalizingly, is both open and closed, legible as well as veiled. It is available, yet mysteriousher face contains the imprint of her character's inner life as thoughts seem to pass behind her eyes. "What should I think of.' What should I do?" Garbo is supposed to have asked her director, Reuben Mamoulian, before shooting the scene. "Think of nothing, empty your face of thought," Mamoulian is supposed to have answered. Those watching her on the set that day may indeed have thought she was a blank slate, but the actress and her director knew that her "empty" look was addressed to the transforming eye of the camera. Nearly sbrty years later the message it sends is still potent. How to speak to the eye of the cameraoften, as in this scene, without words or without any visible assistance from the camerais the task of all screen players, and few in the history of the art have understood the language as shrewdly as Garbo.