Towards a Methodology for Improvisation Practice.

Deciding on a creative strategy towards my own filmmaking practice proved a difficult first step, particularly as I had no previous first-hand experience of improvisation in a practical filmmaking context. At this juncture, my working knowledge of improvisation had been largely influenced by key texts such as The Improvised Play: The Work of Mike Leigh (Clements 1983), Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre (Johnstone 1989) and Improvisation for the Theatre (Spolin, 2000), and analysing a range of fiction films that purported to use improvisation within their construction, including: The Blair Witch Project (1999), Tina Goes Shopping (1999) and Vera Drake (2004). I chose these texts because I believed that they offered some valuable insights into developing an improvisation practice, such as Mike LeighÕs casting and workshop methods and JohnstoneÕs observations about status17, as demonstrated in the master-servant improvisation games18, and explorations into accepting and blocking within an improvisation. By comparison, the films proved more problematic to unpack, particularly as exemplars of an films employing improvisation practices. On the one hand, LeighÕs work presented itself as being the product of a considered and ÔplannedÕ process, employing institutional methods of production, encompassing all techniques that work to create an ÔinvisibleÕ cinema that does not draw attention to film form. For reasons that will be discussed later, LeighÕs films appear to be quite removed from the ephemeral and ÔliveÕ aesthetic that vŽritŽ styles might evidence. In fact, the critic may reasonably pause to question what remains of LeighÕs improvisation process, following the complex filtering       

17

Johnstone points out that ÔStatus is a confusing term unless itÕs understood as something one does. You may be low in social status, but play high, and vice versa.Õ (1989:36)

18

In contextualising the Master-Servant improvisations, Johnstone says that ÔThe relationship is not necessarily one in which the servant plays low and the master plays high. Literature is full of scenes in which the servant refuses to obey the master, or even beats him and chases him out of the house. The whole point of the master- servant scene is that both partners should keep see-sawing.Õ (Johnstone 1989: 63).

process that his institutional production methods employ. This is certainly an area that I was forced to question with regard to my own working practices, particularly after completing Birdman in 2008. By contrast, when looking to the examples of Myrick & Sanchez and Woolcock, I felt that these films clearly exhibited the hallmarks of a live process, which was epitomized by distinct vŽritŽ styles of practice. Both The Blair Witch Project and Tina goes Shopping utilize modes of representation that are analogous to the documentary form, resulting in filmed material that is hand-held, often poorly lit or filmed with available lighting, employing jump cuts and lacking in non-diegetic music. As was the case with The Blair Witch Project, the documentary aesthetic was part of the filmÕs illusion and attempt to Ôclaim the realÕ, and present a living text through its stylised mock-documentary form 19. Undoubtedly, film form problematizes reading and deciphering the application of improvisation within a completed film text, as the mediation process promotes questions of authenticity and ÔtruthÕ with regard to what is being presented. However, if one ignores the aesthetic differences of form, the handheld the locked off camera and beautiful lighting, then it may be possible to differentiate between films that have been scripted and those that are spontaneous, as represented by The Blair Witch Project and Tina Goes Shopping. The basis of this differentiation is located in the actorsÕ gestures and pacing, as well as other verbal and non-verbal signifiers. In Chapter 4, Practice Based Research, I specifically address the matter of reading an improvised performance by looking at the codified facets of improvised performance in relation to practices in my own films.

       19

ÔMock-documentaryÕ is a term examined by Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight in Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality (2001). ÔMock-documentaries are fictional texts which in some form ÔlookÕ like documentaries. These texts tend to appropriate certain documentary modes, as well as the full range of documentary codes and conventions. They frequently appropriate the observational mode, (especially ÔrockumentariesÕ, themselves a sub-category of the observational form), and interactive and expositional modes of documentaryÕ (Roscoe, R. and Hight, C. 2001: 49).

Practice as research has afforded me the opportunity to ÔplayÕ with the improvisation process and develop a personal working methodology. Apart from the commentaries surrounding LeighÕs working practices, the techniques of working with improvisation in film production have been largely un-documented. It was not until I had undertaken my first practical steps that I began to realise the complexity of improvisation in relation to cinema. The process of ÔmediatingÕ an improvised performance through the language of cinema raises questions about what the director and audience are expecting to see within an improvised film performance and whether or not the filmmaking process facilitates improvisation practices. Early in my research, I began looking for a guide or ÔmodelÕ of improvisation practice that might be common to a number of filmmakers using improvisation.

Although commentaries regarding the working methods of Leigh, Myrick and S‡nchez have been available through interviews and secondary sources, much is missing from these filmmakersÕ accounts by way of a detailed evaluation of the strengths or weaknesses in their approaches. In thinking about the workshop processes employed by Mike Leigh, it is worth noting that much of the improvisational work that informs character is jettisoned through the actuality of Leigh distilling the ideas into a structure and Ôshooting scriptÕ. The timespan between Leigh setting up the exploratory improvisations and distilling these ideas into a shooting script could be many months. In commenting on this process Leigh remarks:

ÔHaving worked at the characters for ages, the actors can go into character and do a wonderful improvisation that might go on for one or two hours non-stop. That doesnÕt give you a scene. That merely suggests a scene. My job is to distil that into something that happens in a few minutes and says just as much. And indeed says more, because obviously my job is also to inject things into it and edit things out, and to open up stuff thatÕs dormant.Õ (Actor Hub, 2014)

Whilst this gestation period allows for the synthesis of ideas, the end result is, nevertheless, a script. ÔLeigh writes an outline of scenes which then can become a general outline for the final film or play. The actors improvise specifically around these scenes, while an assistant takes notes. The best lines and moments are then distilled and scripted, and shooting can at last begin.Õ (ibid)

It is not a map for improvisation on camera. Clearly, LeighÕs process results in the mediation and reinterpretation of improvised ideas that were previously explored within a workshop environment, and this ÔliteraryÕ transformation, into a shooting script (Raphael, 2008), must inevitably result in a synthesised version of the original improvisation. Whilst the actors of a Mike Leigh film may be able to recall the workshop experiences, leading to the discovery of character and a particular set of narrative circumstances, the thoughts and feelings created in the improvisation workshops have become ÔrememberedÕ experiences that are re-articulated through rehearsal. Therefore, what is filmed becomes a number of stages removed from the original improvised moment, as Leigh clarifies, ÒWhat I shoot is quite structured. Though the dialogue may at times be improvised, the intentions are all planned and very precise.Ó 20(ibid)

Sally Hawkins describing her experiences on Happy-Go-Lucky (2008) says, Ô.. every day presented a different challenge. It felt at times like I just had to keep running, to keep going from scene to scene with lines learnt only days Ð and, sometimes, minutes Ð before the camera started rolling.Õ (Actor Hub, 2014)

In looking at LeighÕs relationship to the improvisation process, in spite of the actors being allowed to ÔdiscoverÕ and improvise their character within the workshop environment,

20 _{This is an interesting point because in the discussions and contentions surrounding notions of authorship in}

relation to LeighÕs films, Leigh can justly claim that the filmÕs characters have been mediated through his ÔscriptingÕ (for which he always credits himself) and the filmmaking process. This is because the characters are specifically ÔcontrolledÕ versions of material that was offered through the improvisation process. 

Leigh is quite clear that his process does not permit exploratory work to be extended to the set. What is filmed is the product of a thorough investigation.

By contrast, the aim in writing an outline/shooting script for Blood Offering was not to distil performance choices, but to provide a ÔspringboardÕ for further performance activity; a starting point from which the actors could develop a scene. As I discovered in my own practice, to develop authenticity in a performance, the director needs to create a dramatic context whereby the character can get behind the logic of their own beliefs, as Stanislavski articulated:

In a play the whole stream of individual, minor objectives, all the imaginative thoughts, feelings and actions of an actor, should converge to carry out the super- objective of the plot. The common bond must be so strong that even the most insignificant detail, if it is not related to the super-objective, will stand out as superfluous or wrong. (1981: 271).

Psychologically, this momentum exists within a theatre performance and leads towards a rising dramatic curve, in what Stanislavski would define as the Ôthrough-actionÕ or Ôthrough- line of actionÕ21 (Benedetti, 2000:83). The problem with narrative film production is that the momentum and interaction between character and their dramatic situation is repeatedly broken through the intervention of filmmaking practices.

       21

Jean Benedetti (2000) produced a table of comparative terminology that identifies the differences between StanislavskiÕs description of an actorÕs analytical task and how this has been labelled through translation by Elizabeth Hapgood. Within this table both terms describing the ÔThrough-actionÕ invite the actor to ÔCheck whether the sequence of needs and actions is logical and coherent and relates to the subject of the playÕ.