Snake
Filmmaker Aleksey Lapin was also mainly interested in the performance of the actor, this time, however, in the staging of fiction:
I wanted my film to play with the contrast between fiction and reality. The protagonist is not an actor; rather, he has a role to fulfill in an action film and evolves in a fictional world. The reason for my decision to use a non-professional actor for the experiment was that I was looking for the person behind the hero-mask as a protagonist rather than a hero as a fictional character. So my protagonist is a concrete person and not an abstract hero. In this sense, my film documents the performance process instead of telling the hero’s story.
By employing this method, which consisted of having the actor perform with no one playing opposite him and giving him as few stage directions as possible, as well as filming long takes without interruption, Lapin aimed at de-idealizing the actor:
One now observes a hero without a mask; one observes how he grows weary in real time.
This mention of working with only one actor brings to mind yet another variant of staged intimacy in film. This variant makes use of the medium to visualize the character’s inner conflicts. In the best of cases, intimacy occurs in an empathetic relationship between the film character and the recipient.
(To see the video clip, click on the first picture on the right.)
