Backstage Truths

Last weekend, the long weekend, I was surrounded by people saying things like “frame,” “BTS,” “room tone,” “boom operator,” and many other film-related jargon that was completely foreign to me.

I was an extra in a short film called Souls that Balance. The title, taken from the first line of this poem, intrigued me from the start, and it was great fun to make my first foray into the acting world with such a great team of people and what seems like an incredibly creative script. To qualify that statement, I should hardly call what I did acting since all you can see is the back of my head, but still. I was on a film set!

A few brief observations from the weekend about acting and film-making:

• Long days, early mornings
• Details matter – like, every single detail in every single shot matters. I have so much more appreciation when I watch films now.
• A lot of waiting around. I can see how people on a film set can get really close in a short amount of time, because you’re all waiting around together in the same space. The community part of it was the highlight.
• I think there’s a tendency to glamourize actor’s lives and the work they do, but after this experience, I didn’t see any glamour—just a lot of work. Saying your line over and over again as if it was the first time. Or saying the line perfectly but having to redo it anyway because some detail was out of place, or the camera angle was slightly off. Requires a lot of patience and concentration.
• It’s all about the light. One of the other extras who’s involved in the Vancouver acting community told me she immediately knew how serious the production was by the lighting equipment on set.

Seems like so many things/professions depend on the light. Photographers, painters, lovers. This film experience made me think of the Impressionists who made light their subject. Sure, they painted boats and people and gardens, but the subject of their paintings—what they were after—was how the light fell on the boats and people and gardens: how our perception of things depends on when and how we are seeing it.

Monet. Bathers at La Grenouillère (1869)

Take Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series for an example. Over thirty paintings in total, different seasons, different times of day. As the Wikipedia entry states, the cathedral provides an interesting juxtaposition between a solid, permanent structure and the evanescent quality of light.

When the light is right, you just know. I knew when I was in New York City and took this photo. This was my favourite picture from the whole trip, all because of the light. No touch-ups, no Photoshop, no nothing added to it. Just sun and sky and stone kissing at 1047 Amsterdam Ave in Morningside Heights.

Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, NYC. Charlene Kwiatkowski 2011.

On the subject of Impressionists, Degas’ ballerina paintings similarly convey the unglamorous work that goes on behind-the-scenes (BTS) of anyone who performs. While he also painted ballerinas performing on stage in front of 19th-century bourgeois Parisians, many of his pieces show ballerinas in rehearsal—training, stretching, and yes, waiting. In this way, Degas’ works give outsiders a view from the other side, behind the curtain where it’s all work, fatigue, and routine. And some critics didn’t like this “backstage pass” so to speak because it wasn’t pretty. But it’s true.

Degas. Monsieur Perrot’s Dance Class (1875)

Degas. The Dance Lesson (1872)

Degas. Waiting (1882)

Degas. The Mante Family (1880)

In response to the painting directly above, The Mante Family, critic J-K. Huysmans wrote:

What truth! What life! How all these figures hold the space, how exactly the light bathes the scene, how the expression of these physiognomies, the searching look of the mother whose hopes rise when her daughter’s body unbends, the indifference of comrades for well-known weariness, how these are etched out and noted with the perspicacity of an analyst at once cruel and subtle.

This makes Degas a realist, or a naturalist to use the artistic term.

Degas. Rehearsal (1879)

Rehearsal (1879) says it even more. I love the way Robert Herbert writes about it in his book Impressionism, my go-to guide for painters of this style:

Here [light] models the dancers in reverse, and stresses the artifice involved, that is, natural light is made to seem artificial in the fiction of the picture, as it is in actuality: it is the artist himself who took the colors of his palette and made up the dancers’ masks. ‘Light,’ that is, artists’ paint, reveals backstage truths, the hard work and ugly grimaces which cannot be seen by spectators at a performance. This is–again!–the work of a naturalist. ‘Oh! all the things in the world, as long as one sees them from behind!’ wrote the Goncourt brothers.”

What backstage truths have you encountered, whether it be in the performing arts or other industries?

There is More Day to Dawn

I first encountered him here, in high school English class.

Then I ran into him in New York, two years ago in the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine.

probably my favourite picture from the trip, all because of the light.

A section of the floor had over a dozen plaques dedicated to American poets. He was inside and he was outside the cathedral.

A child’s rendering of Thoreau with passage on solitude

an art exposition called “The Value of Water” was taking place inside the cathedral when we visited

A few weeks ago, I encountered him at my brother’s wedding. My brother made a reference to one of these lines in what might be the most original wedding vows I’ve ever heard:

I’ve remembered these lines since that high school English class, but I never read Thoreau for myself. After these encounters accumulated for me recently, it was about time to read Walden.

Henry David Thoreau went to the woods in 1854 and built a log cabin on the edge of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. His writing is part autobiography, part social critique of the consumerist lifestyle (yes, even back then). Thoreau is one of the central figures of Transcendentalism, a philosophical movement begun in New England and influenced by Romanticism, in which divinity was thought to pervade all nature and humanity. Man is believed to be his best when he’s living independently, without society and its institutions that ultimately corrupt his inherent goodness and purity.

Replica of Thoreau’s cabin near Walden Pond and his statue

the famous quote

Thoreau calls his two years at Walden an experiment in living simply and in solitude, where he could think, read, and reflect. He confesses a few times how much he liked being alone (too much alone, in my opinion) – yet not enough that he stayed there forever.

I think it’s important he tells us why he left just like he tells us why he went:

I left the woods for as good reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.

I collected six pages of quotes from the book. There were a lot of boring parts–trodding through passages of cultivating the land (he was very proud of his bean crop) and how he calculated the depth of Walden Pond, for example. But it’s these glimpses of beauty, of the transcendent peeking out from the everyday, that made it entirely worth the effort:

However mean your life is, do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode.

Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like a sage. Do not trouble yourself to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.

The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats.

And his last words (who’s John/Jonathan? Not sure–I think he means me and you):

I do not say that John or Jonathan will realize all this; but such is the character of that morrow which mere lapse of time can never make dawn. The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.