The Misfits.
J’ai lu La Fin Du Film d’Arthur Miller et je compte emprunter The Making Of The Misfits après avoir lu cette superbe critique. J’ai beaucoup de compassion et d’admiration pour Marilyn Monroe. The Misfits a été son meilleur film. Elle a pu y révélé son talent. Malheureusement il était sans doute trop tard pour se rendre compte qu’elle était formidable.
Et pour autant que j’aime Marilyn le personnage le plus touchant des misfits reste Perce , joué par le grand Monty Clift. Sa vie fut tragique et il été cruellement oublié alors qu’il fut l’inspiration d’acteurs comme Marlon Brando et James Dean. Je lis sa biographie en ce moment. C’est incroyable ce qu’il a souffert. Un vrai martyr. Oui mais talentueux. Ce n’est pas Edie Sedgewick mais quelqu’un qui a fait front, qui a été emporté mais en luttant, en s’accrochant à sa dignité autant qu’il le pouvait.
Cet extrait me TUE:
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with the great Montgomery Clift who is, in my opinion, the definition of an intelligent (and yet also intuitive) actor. The guy had it all. He was a raw nerve, but he was also an intellect, he studied his craft. Amazing – it’s all here in his language. Listen to his openness. Is it any wonder that this man was destroyed by the mere act of living? He couldn’t hack it. Thank God he was an actor – at least he had a place where he was SUPPOSED to be that open. Oh, and believe it or not – Montgomery Clift was terrified of working with all of these people whom he considered to be giants (and they are – but so is he!) – he was intimidated by Gable, by Huston, by Miller – he couldn’t believe he had been asked to be in this thing … the beautiful (and yet tragic – because he couldn’t see his own goodness) of this man:
“What I think of Miller – boy, he represents to me such an ideal as an artist! Somehow the artists are all allied, whether it’s Miller, Cartier-Bresson, Marilyn or Huston. My feeling aobut Miller is that I sort of face East every time I see him. I’m that much in admiration of him.”I was happy that there was something he genuinely wanted me to do. Acting with all these goddamned talented people around is pretty frightening, but I look forward to it. If I were convinced they were also scared … The problem is how to remain thin-skinned and yet survive. One can uncallous one’s self, you know. I haven’t talked to John or Arthur about the part. I don’t have any desire to formulate anything too strong of my own. I don’t know what John or Arthur may be after. He knows what he’s written about. I think Taylor’s tremendously talented to put together this network of people. Nothing of him is the norm. There is the whole terrible problem of remaining vulnerable, and Taylor has the small, intimate means of making you feel wanted. And it’s a lovely thing to work with a director who is not vain.
“I have no misgivings about this character. Someone said, ‘My God, it’s exactly like you.’ Now it’s just a question of can I do it? It’s a wonderful part, and if I don’t do it justice I’ll shoot myself. You’re not the master of a film as an actor. A director with control contributes. I don’t know where contribution begins and ends. Whenever the fortuitous happens, it happens. When I see the film, if I vomit, I’ll know I haven’t done it justice.
“I find no value for myself in analyzing something down to some terribly finite Freudian point, because it loses its measure of relish. Wonderfully enough, Arthur is so wildly aware of the ambivalence in relations between people that for a performer it is almost an offense to dissect it. I imagine that he, as a writer, would not be able to write it if he consciously tried to become clinical and symbolic. Nothing would flow. I have trouble working with people I greatly admire. I started with Eli. You know, it’s been two weeks now and I can’t find one goddamned thing I don’t like about him. I’ve never worked with any of these people before.
“I wish I were more thin-skinned. The problem is to remain sensitive to all kinds of things wihtout letting them pull you down. Now, take this – the fact that someone drops a book of matches at a time when he most wants not to seem ill at ease. To a normal person that is not a terribly moving talent, but to an actor in films, such a thing maybe perhaps changes the whole relationship to the girl that dropped the matches. The only line I know of that’s wrong in Shakespeare is ‘Holding a mirror up to nature.’ You hold the magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with a situation. If it were a mirror we would have no art. Essence is a wonderful word. Miller has written the essence of Roslyn. You’d be bored to death if it were a mirror. Take the line in the script, ‘Who did this to me? The ambulance did it.’ Magnifying the essential things that liberate the imagination and enable one to identify – when one has those qualities, they are fabulous gifts. Take a pause, for example. That I call a magnification. I wouldn’t call it a mirror. The magnifying glass has been misused totally, but in this picture it has been put to the use of capturing what possibly is flitting in and out of someone’s mind and one person’s relationship to another and another, and that’s what’s fascinating.”
Et ce commentaire sur Marilyn par le grand Cartier Bresson :
- “I saw her bodily – Marilyn Monroe – for the first time, and I was struck as by an apparition in a fairy tale. Well, she’s beautiful – anybody can notice this, and she represents a certain myth of what we call in France la femme eternelle. On the other hand, there’s something extremely alert and vivid in her, an intelligence. It’s her personality, it’s a glance, it’s something very tenuous, very vivid that disappears quickly, that appears again. You see it’s all these elements of her beauty and also her intelligence that makes the actress not only a model but a real woman expressing herself. Like many people I heard many things that she had said, but last night I had the pleasure of having dinner next to her and I saw that these things came fluidly all the time … all these amusing remarks, precise, pungent, direct. It was flowing all the time. It was almost a quality of naivete … and it was completely natural.
- “In her you feel the woman, and also the great discipline as an actress. She’s American and it’s very clear that she is – she’s very good that way – one has to be very local to be universal.”
One has to be very local to be universal. Damn. Je crois que plus on est soi meme plus on est universel. Je pense que c’est ce que Cartier Bresson. Quand on est le plus proche possible de notre nature, de ce qui nous a produit, notre ‘localité’ alors on est proche de la nature universelle de l’homme.
