The Stanislavski System and Method Acting

Units and Objectives

"Stanislavski developed points of reference for the actor, which are now generally known as units and objectives. A unit is a portion of a scene that contains one objective for an actor. In that sense, a unit changed every time a shift occurred in a scene. Every unit had an objective for each character. This objective was expressed through the use of an active and transitive verb; for example, to seduce her or to annoy him."​

Ok, so Units are what I already know as Beats (scene beats specifically, though it's probably scalable or fractal just like beats are), and Objectives is also known as "What the character wants."

Interesting. I'm guessing right now that this is the source for some very familiar terminology for writers. For instance the idea of "What the character wants versus what he needs," and "The Lie the character believes."

Through line of Actions and the Superobjective

"When objectives were strung together in a logical and coherent form, a through line of action was mapped out for the character. This was important in order to create a sense of the whole. Stanislavski developed the concept of the Superobjective that would carry this ‘through line of action.’ The superobjective could then be looked at as the ‘spine’ with the objectives as ‘vertebrae.’ For example, the superobjective of one character could be to win back the love of the other character. In order to achieve this superobjective, the first character would have successive unit objectives such as, to tease her, to please her, to excite her, to provoke her and to placate her. These objectives, when strung together, revealed the superobjective, the logical, coherent through line of action. Stanislavski called this superobjective the ‘final goal of every performance’"​

Again, very familiar stuff just using slightly different terminology. Though I have definitely heard of the spine. He's talking about the scene objective, which is what holds together all the individual beats coherently, and ther larger objective, the spine or the superobjective, which is what the character wants ultimately. Each of the smaller desires are fragments of it.

This mimics what you've undoubtedly seen if you ever studied how to become successful at business or anything similar. You develop a "nested system of goals," such that if you accomplish each of your day's goals for a week then you've also accomplished the week's goal. If you accomplish your week's goals for four weeks in a row then you've accomplished your month goal, etc. All the way up to your three-year or five-year plan. It's a technique for breaking down your goals into manageable chunks that can be accomoplished easily. Well, maybe not easily, but I should say it's a sensible system. And now I wonder if that system has its roots in Stanislavsky?

As so often has happened, he seems to have discovered some psychological truths, possibly before psychologists themselves were aware of them. It's generally artists and writers who are aware of these things long before science discovers them.

There's a lot more here. I'm not going to write about all of it, but this is great stuff! Some of the next sections are about Subtext and Motivation. Here it makes motivation seem like it's the will, but elsewhere I've heard it described essentially as backstory.

Motivation is one of the three main pillars of acting, which also include Mind and Feelings.

All of these are things the actor would work to discover in the character—they weren't explicitly spelled out already in the script. I believe this is why, when you look into beats and read some beat sheets made after-the-fact from existing movies, you'll always hear that a beat sheet is not something you create from the beginning—first you just write your story or your script, and then you work from that and try to discover the beats and motivations etc. And during that process you might develop characters and the story considerably. I think this is very sound. If you'd try to pre-determine all the psychological and emotional elements right from the start it would feel unnatural. Those are subtle and organic and need to be discovered in place.

I also want to write about beats. I'm trying to decide if I should just do it in here or start a new blog thread for it. Right now I'm leaning toward including it in this one.

​

I'm sure there are lots of great videos about the System and the Method. This looks like a really good one.

I'll just drop in a couple of the best links I know of about beats and beat sheets (AKA Step Outlines). I've talked about and linked to these on the message board a few times, but I don't think I've ever mentioned them on the blog.

• Step Outlines @ The Sticking Place
• Use Beats to Move Characters within Scenes @ Storm Writing School
• What Is a Beat, Anyway? @ Storm Writing School

I've just ordered two of the three Stanislavsky books—An Actor Prepares and Creating a Role. The other one, Building a Character, is about the physical acting techniques, and doesn't seem to cover much that would be helpful to a writer.

• Creating a Role @ Amazon

The link should automatically open the Sample for the book. If you click on 1. The Period of Study, here's what it says an actor should do on first recieving a script:

The preparatory work on a role can be divided into three great periods: studying it; establishing the life of the role; putting it into physical form. ​

He means establish the inner life of the character, and by "Putting it into physical form" I believe he's referring to his techniques for physical acting, in the book I haven't ordered (but still might). I'm not sure yet if any of that stuff would be useful to a writer. So, unless you do want to try to create postures, gestures, gaits, facial expressions, quirks, etc to physically define a character, I guess you'd move on to writing the first draft. Actually I shouldn't say things like that. I want to wait to make such decisions or even ruminate much on them until after reading his books, because I really like the way he writes about this stuff.

Even though as I said above, many of us are already familiar with his work in different form, he has a way of expounding on it that emphasizes imagination and feeling, whereas most of the writing books and blogs I've run across just lay it out in concise logical form like a recipe book. That's the real reason I posted the link at the top, so anyone who's interested can sample his actual writing. I find it makes me think about it in an entirely different way. I believe it was in this same book where he said something to the effect that what he calls Mind comprises about a tenth of our inner faculties, but Feeling comprises the rest, and that while an academic or a scientist uses mostly or only the mind for analysis, an artist uses the feeling functions. I don't recall running across advice worded like this anywhere, aside from other things written a century or more ago. Most contemporary authors just don't write like that or think like that, it's all purely rational/materialist, as if it's math. Stan (as I affectionatly call him) seems to have a good deal of romanticism in him (even though his acting techniques are aimed at naturalism).

Oh wow—I've read farther into it, and he's now talking about visual imagination as well as a few other types. The guy is definitely an artist! I've written about visual imagination a few times—I'll post links to those in a minute. But what I really want to emphasize is that you don't clearly see an image—in fact much of the time it's more like a memory of an image or simply imaginaing there's an image. It's hard to explain unless you've experienced it, but here's the crazy thing. I'll bet most if not all people have done it many times and don't realize it. Because I think when they hear the term visual imagination they expect to see crisp clear bright images in full detail, and that's just not wht it's like, at least not for me. Sometimes it's a little more clear than otehrs, especially if I'm very close to sleep. But by the same token, if I'm really tired, it's very hard to muster the concentration to cojure up specific images or to do anything with them. Or I might just fall asleep.

Probably the best way I can describe it is to say this—imagine yourself standing in your house at night, looking out a window into the yard. The room light is on, and outside there are no lights, and the moon is not very bright. You see only blackness out there right now. But if you turn the room light off and switch on the porch light or the patio light outside, now you can see what's out there much more clearly, and you no longer see your own reflection staring back at you, or the reflection of the room behind you. Now let's say the lights have dimmer switches. If you bring up the inside light just a little bit, you can now see yourself and the room again, but very faintly, and through it, much more strongly, you can see the yard outsdide. In fact you might need to make a real effort to see your reflection against that very strong imagery, but if you do, it will come into focus for you. It helps if you move around a little—wave at yourself or something.

Here are those links I promised:

• Working with mental imagery or the lack of it—digging into hyperphantasia and aphantasia
• Visual Thinking
• Aphantasia

I find it's easiest to do this kind of stuff with my eyes open and looking at a dimly lit section of wall with no decorations or distractions on it if possible, but I can actually do it looking at just about anything. As long as nothing is moving (like a Felix the Cat clock, or a television, or a real cat)—that would probably draw all your attention to whatever is moving immediately. Also, it's almost necessary to spark your imagination by telling yourself what you want to see. I subvocalize a word, like dog or cat or owl or car. This is a prompt to the unconscious, which is what's proividing the imagery. It uses the apparatus of dreaming (I believe), but of course since you're awake you don't see clean, bright, perfect imagery. You get something dim, transparent, and spotty as hell. By which I mean I often see parts rather than a whole object. I just did it a moment ago—I said Dog. It took a moment, and I started to very faintly see a dog's tail just sort of floating in the air, Not in the air exactly—it's in your imagination, so it's like it's on a different plane of existence from physical things or something. You kind of have to tune in to start to see it. It's so faint and dim that unless you really let yourself see it you'll miss it. I guess it's sort of like the phantom lights and lines you see 'behind your eyelids' when you close your eyes. They're not really there, they're imaginary, or maybe they're random firing of nerve endings or something, I don't know. Or it's kind of like an after-image. If you look fixedly at something for a while, preferrably against a nice neutral background, like say a dark object against a white wall, and then you turn and look at a blank stretch of wall, for a moment you can see an after-image. It isn't clear or solid or detailed, it's very faint and dim, and it fades as you're looking at it. This is the nature of the kind of imagery I get from my imagination. Only often I get a sort of montage, like earlier I saw parts of dogs just sort of floating near each other. A tail, a nose, a leg, a paw.

Then I tried again, only not strictly visually. I thought about my neighbor's cats, who I feed on my porch every day, and I see and pet them frequently. So I got a mish-mash of montage-like imagery of parts of them, plus the feeling of their backs and their fur against my hands, and them rubbing against my legs. And the sound of the hard catfood falling into the steel bowl. And just now, thinking about it again, I got a strong purring sound and the vibration you get if you're touching them when they purr. In fact this is probably the best way to approach this if you've never done it—try to remember something you've just experienced through one or more of your sences. Call up the memory. Once you've done that you might be able to summon imaginary images and sensations and smells etc. All I have to do is think about pancakes or spaghetti, and immediately I can phantom-see and phantom-taste it and smell it. And I get the warm, full sensation in my gut. And I can also call up the fizzy sensation of drinking a Coke, and the coldness and taste of it. I suspect anybody can do this. Remembering it is only one small step away from imagining it.

Another thing to keep in mind—the imagery (or sounds or smells, whatever) isn't in the physical world in front of you, so you're not looking the same way you do at physical objects. It's in the imaginary space. You can see it anywhere you look, overlaid onto the physical objects that are really there. It's literally like another plane of existence that you can train yourself to see. Or like that pane of glass, where you can see the outdoors (physical reality) very bright and clear, but much more subtly you can also see the dim reflection of yourself and the wall behind you (your inner imagination). Once you've done it a few times you'll get it, and you can do it whenever you want.

Once you find that imaginary plane and can see things in it, however dimly, if you pay attention to those things they'll firm up and become much more solid and take on color and texture etc. As this happens it's like you're no longer focusing so much on the physical vision that sees the objects around you, and they sort of become dim in comparison. Your attention goes more to one plane or the other.

He also talks about combining traits of several people you've known or seen to make new characters. All of this is in the sample. Well, that's exactly what I did when I was writing Passing Strange to construct my characters. Let me find where I wrote about what I call character-mashing:

• Constructing Characters

Another good exercise for the artistic imagination. Yep, this Stan guy is definitely after my own heart!

Character Mashing—some elaboration:
I need to elaborate a little more on the actual technique for 'mashing' these characters together. I've had people ask me about the specifics of the process, so here they are, as well as I know how to explain it:

I just get all the characters I want to mash together in my mind, and I think about them. Of course you can't think about more than one character at a time. What I mean is I go looking for inspiration. To use the example from the Constructing Character post, when I was creating SeraFiend's character I thought about Regan from the Exorcist, Natalie Portman from Leon The Professional, Hannibal Lechter from The Silence of the Lambs, and Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream as portrayed by Mickey Rooney. It took me a while to come up with all these inspirations. They were all characters I was familiar with.* I just sort of thought about each one for a while, with the understanding that I want to mash them together into the character of Serafiend. That's really it. Then when I started writing, the character was there for me. Somehow my unconscious mind had merged all those influences together into a character that now performed for me as I wrote it. And this isn't visual imagination, I didn't see the character doing anything, I was just writing, and I knew what she would do in each situation. I understood her personality, or rather I discovered it as I wrote. This is a technique for discovery writing I suppose, which is definitely how I wrote Passing Strange.

* Except Puck. I was slightly familiar with him, but I happened to catch a little of the movie on TV and suddenly realized this is perfect to add to Serafiend's character.

All of this is a very particular way of doing things that some artists naturally use, but many don't. What would you call us? More inward-oriented I suppose? More familiar with the subconscious? Probably more interested in dreams than most people? All of these things for sure. We're also more focused on inner faculties like the intuition and inspiration, and are maybe a lot more comfortable groping through the dark for our ideas. We're probably much more comfortable with discovery writing, whereas the more practical, logical and conscious-oriented artists will do all of these things without consulting the subconscious or the inner wolrd of imagination (much). I think the main difference is that we're more aware of the inner world of imagination and intuition, and we've learned how to notice it in all its subtlety, and invoke it when we want help creating ideas or stories. In reality I think all artists use these faculties, I don't think a person can even think without them, but many people (the ones seen as logical and practical) just aren't aware of it and scoff at the idea. The subconscious is always there, always functioning, and it's always modifying our ideas and supplying all manner of intuition, gut feeling, instinct, and inspiration, but many people just take all that for granted and don't think of it as the subconscious or the unconscious. They just see it as "I came up with these ideas." But many of them are also a lot more prone to ignoring the subtle urgings and suggestions of the unconscious. It's like a quiet voice whispering inside you, and your conscious mind is pretty loud and obnoxious, so you need to quiet it down, go into something like a meditation state, before you can notice or become aware of that quiet voice—those dim subtle visual ideas, and the rest of the torrent of constant inspiration emerging fountain-like from the unconscious. The unconscious is the cornucopia that endlessly supplies gifts, as long as you're paying the right kind of attention to it.

Artists who are exceptionally gifted with the ability to harness the unconscious are often called visionaries or mystics. ​

They probably have a very powerful ability to see visuals supplied by the unconscious, and to hear the 'voice' of it. The unconscious has a different set of qualities than the conscious mind does. It's a lot less limted in its abilities. The conscious mind is the newer part, at least the very highly developed conscious mind of human beings, so much more powerful than the tiny rudimentary conscious awareness posssessed by some of the higher mammals we're familiar with, like dogs, cats, and apes. They get by almost entirely on the unconscious mind. Usually thinking is done as a collaboration of the two, a sort of ongoing inner dialogue, where you can ask questions of the unconscious, prompt it for what you want help with, and it will supply subtle hints constantly. Those of us who really like dreams and pay a lot of attention to them have noticed the quiet voice and the subtle imagery it supplies, but many people never quiet down the rowdy boisterous conscious mind enough to let the unconscious be heard, so while it's definitely helping them along the entire time, they refuse to believe in it, or just ignore it, and many imagine they're doing it all themselves (consciously), without any little companion who functions like a muse or a genie (genius), connecting you with that inexhaustible fount of inspiration.

I just realized probably one thing that helps some of us come into better communion with the unconsious is that we pay attention to our dreams. To do that you have to learn to lie quietly when you wake up, rather than immediately start thinking consciously about waking-world stuff. The moment you do that you break your conenction with the unconscious, and the memories of the dream will fade very quickly. But you can trian your mind to rest qiuietly, which is very much the meditation state, and notice the unconscious activity that recently happened, and that is still ongoing to some extent, though much less when awake, or much harder to notice.

Appealing to the unconscious for help with a creative problem or for suggestions and ideas is the same thing as prayer or certain types of contemplative meditation. It's maintaining a connection with the inner realm, the magical world where things work differently than they do in the mundane world of conscious awareness, where you can only think about one thing at a time. The unconscious can grasp any number of things all at once and work with all of them simultaneously. This is how it's able to contain and work with all the characters you put into it and mash them together into one coherent and functionaing character. You can't consciously think about more than one character at a time, but it can and routinely does.

If the cornucopia of unconscious inspiration is like a fountain constantly pouring forth ideas, some artists and writers stand away from it and let its inspiration puddle uselessly on the ground, while those of us who value it step right up and drink of its bounty, soak ourselves in it. Those more practical-minded types still get some of the spray on them now and then, or occasionally a stream from it hits them for a while, but they tend to step away with distaste when that happens. It also must be kept in mind that this is a very subtle fountain, almost invisible and unnoticeable much of the time, unless you're tuned in on it and are looking/feeling around for it.

Besides paying attention to dreams, using a lot of metaphor and symbolism is another way of connecting with the unconsious, since these are its native languages. Myth and religion are written very much in the language of the natural inner mind, the creative cornucopia of the unconscious, and this is why they tend to be so dreamlike and strange, and yet to contain profound truth.

Another way to see it is that we have filters that block off the unconscious material when we're awake. Some people have very effective filters, and some have very porous ones or nearly no filters at all. Mine are somewhat porous, but I wish they were more so, or that I had an easier time accessing the cornucopia. It takes a good deal of effort and I need to be writing certain kinds of stories that allow for a lot more imagination, like fantasy comedies or something a little bit surreal. When I stick too close to realism the fountain nearly dries up. It becomes more like a sodden puddle I can dip a toe in now and then.

When I was writing Passing Strange it was a powerful geyser, probably because the story was set in the world of a massive shared dream and I was able to freely play around with the 'reality' of the world and the characters. Nothing had to conform strictly to reality. It was very much in the tradition of Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz in those regards. The ones I'm writing now are much more realistic and make it difficult to use much dreamlike unconscious inspiration, though some does bubble forth now and then, in little spurts and surges.