DVD: “Hello Actors Studio,” a look back at the intellectual and collective epic

Even today, it’s hard to call a great performance by an American actor without “method” and the actors’ studio: two terms that have been like the alpha and omega of American drama since the 1960s. This is Charlize Theron, unidentified monster (Patty Jenkins, 2003); Leonardo DiCaprio grimaces like Marlon Brando godfather In Scorsese’s latest, Flower Moon Assassins ; Christian Bale loses twenty pounds or gains thirty for the next shoot; And countless legend Daniel Day-Lewis is preparing for the role as a priest. The actors’ studio performance has turned into a bath of exaggeration, inaccuracies and mystifications, each actor transformed into an athlete of his discipline, obliged to excel in each new role – sometimes for the better, often for the worse.

But before it was a breeding ground for Oscar-winning artistry, the Actors Studio was a fascinating intellectual and collective epic: that’s what the documentary 1987 is responsible for recalling. On the occasion of the drama school’s 40th anniversary, French documentarian Annie Tresgot was able to enter the venerable institution founded in 1947 in New York by the Group Theater, an avant-garde movement led by guru Lee Strasberg. Their mission was to spread the dramatic art taught by their master, the Russian director and theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky.

Annie Tresgott will benefit from her visit Hello Actors StudioThe three hours are divided into three episodes, the merit of which is to avoid the main theories of filming in the present, to move from the administration to the classrooms, to collect testimonies from its greatest figures: its artistic director and columnist Ellen Burstyn, one of its founders, Elia Kazan. , as well as actors and directors such as Paul Newman, Sidney Pollack, Eli Wallach, Shelley Winters… so many stars who once again become, for this occasion, workers of the ideal of collective work and delivery.

“You have the right to be bad”

Annie Tresgott moves between the deans and recruits, slipping into the heart of the reactor, onto a stage where students rehearse under the teacher’s watchful eye. If we are sometimes surprised by the mediocrity of the performance, it is another feeling that quickly takes over: the impression that we are in front of a laboratory where failures are an obligatory step in the process. “The studio is where I was allowed to be bad. Without it, it would have taken me another eight or ten years to become the actor that I am.” Says actor Rod Steiger; Eli Valakh adds: “The guest found this replay shameful, you shouldn’t have seen it. »