But there are two categories of nonprofessionals whose place in the history of the art strikes me as particularly exalted. The first is directors who act, whether in their own films or those of others. I don’t mean performers who go on to direct themselves, such as Charlie Chaplin, Jacques Tati, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, or Clint Eastwood, but, rather, directors with no acting background who took it up in the course of their own filmmaking. These include Chantal Akerman, Spike Lee, François Truffaut, Youssef Chahine, David Lynch, and—in the most dramatically complete performance by a dramatically unschooled director—Jean Renoir, with his central role in his masterwork, “The Rules of the Game.”
These indelible performances by directors are no surprise; I’ve long felt that just about all directors are, first of all, actors—albeit ones who usually reserve their performances for the members of their casts and crews. Of course, to function in any professional environment is also to perform (see under: O’Leary), but to do so as a director is to create a specific kind of drama, a comprehensive ambience that is itself a private play. It’s a form of theatre in which the synergy of technique and performance converge in the image to yield the metaphysics of cinema. Far from merely giving orders, directors are participants in a social reality in which the most important results aren’t the naked-eye ones of deeds achieved but the magic infinitesimal moments that expand into big-screen spectacles.
It’s that metaphysical element that distinguishes performance in theatre from performance onscreen—and why the very notion of a nonprofessional actor makes sense in movies but, of course, doesn’t in theatre. That’s where the second exalted form of nonprofessional acting arises: when the star is born. John Wayne was a prop assistant and an occasional extra when Raoul Walsh cast him in the lead of the spectacular Western “The Big Trail,” from 1930. Joan Crawford was a dancer in a chorus line when she was summoned for a screen test and signed to a studio contract. Jason Schwartzman was a seventeen-year-old high-school student with no background in acting when Wes Anderson tapped him to star in “Rushmore.” What all three have in common is that they became more than stars; they expanded the very art of movie acting. Each one brought an entirely new style of performance to the cinema.
Modernism in cinema is inseparable from the art of the untrained, nonprofessional actor, because there’s something about the nonprofessional that accords with the very essence of cinema: the involuntary. As soon as the camera rolls, even the best-trained actors are in the same position as nonprofessionals: the camera takes what it will, regardless of what the actor intended to give it. In the theatre, the actor gives; in the cinema, the actor is taken from. Cinema is an extractive art, which is what makes for much of the bad faith in the business: exceptional methods (including the Method) to exert control, and exceptional measures, in advertising these methods, to assert the power of one’s own exertions over the results—and to publicize one’s strenuous efforts to entertain the audience. The mystery ingredient that makes the camera love some actors and spurn others is a terror. Those who don’t have it work to overcome the lack; those who do have it work to overcome the nagging sense that they haven’t really worked for what they have—not to mention the fear of losing this intangible endowment. Nonprofessionals, by contrast, work in a cinematic state of grace. They work hard because making movies is difficult, but the implicit breeziness of their performances comes through as the fundamental truth of the art.
That’s why the casting of nonprofessionals is at the core of the modernist project of cinematic demystification, the stripping of theatrical artifice to arrive at an essence—whether social, spiritual, formal, or emotional. Specific approaches may vary. Robert Bresson, in seeking the essence of sin and grace in the slightest gesture, largely eschewed professionals in order to distill performance to embodiment. Jean-Luc Godard used nonprofessionals to rend the dramatic fabric and expose the artifices of performance. John Cassavetes, a highly trained actor, valued actors not for their training but for their freedom, and sometimes found that freedom in nonprofessionals, too. In Abbas Kiarostami’s work, embracing the way that people who aren’t in the movie business talk and move bolsters the films’ documentary essence. But in all of these directors’ productions the presence of nonprofessionals is both a pursuit of progress in cinematic form and an emblem of that effort.