TEAM Comparisons of Stanislavski and Brecht

Comparing Elements of the Stanislavski and Brecht Five Truths Videos

Although both the Stanislavski and Brecht videos from the Five Truths series portrayed the same scene from Hamlet, they use their practices to create distinct TEAM. The lighting and color of the pieces is a very visible piece of contrast. Stanislavski’s video was flooded with natural seeming orange light. Some stage lights were used so that the actress’s face would be more illuminated and thus more visible at times, but the illusion was still that the lights were only from the lamp on stage. In contrast, the Brechtian video had a void-like appearance because of its writing. Ophelia’s desk almost floats as the only two light sources, ceiling bars and a thin lamp, give off a sharp white buzz. Unlike the Stanislavski piece, the colors of the actress, the props, and their environment do not blend at all. The edges are cut straight clean, which also plays into the focus of Brecht’s video. At the start of the scene, instead of utilizing the slow, meandering movement and focus of Stanislavski, Brecht makes the evidence bad immediately identifiable; there is a set intention for the all-business Ophelia, who is taking her father’s items for their monetary value as opposed to its possible sentiment. This is a deep insight into Brecht’s style, as it gives the audience a deep and unnerving ‘why’ question to consider.

 

Another aspect of the contrasting focuses deals with the emotional effect of facial features. Stanislavski uses camera angles that shy away from close-up shots until the disturbing end. Meanwhile, Brecht chooses to focus on the clownish nature of the actress’s mouth, showing a high-definition zoom of her lips. She also stares directly at the audience when singing her’s fathers song. Instances like this and the nonsense fourth-wall breakdown of dialogue all relates back to Brecht’s hope of making an audience feel disillusioned and uncomfortable. His goal is to always have the audience aware that what they are seeing is not the real world. Even the appearance of the actress and her use of makeup is determined by this method. Ophelia begins barefaced before almost stopping the scene entirely to put on blush, mascara, and lipstick in a scheduled and frantic manner. In the closeups mentioned before, the audience is able to see the detail in her skin and how her blush is caked, uneven from her frantic application.

Stanislavski takes a much different approach, in large part because he believed in having his cast fully immersed whenever they acted. The actions and dialogue of his video appear in a very metaphorical sense, as the emotion of the character can be hard to decipher. Ophelia in his piece has a face frozen from shock and exhaustion. Her grip on the flowers are shaky but the cigarette in her hand, present for the whole scene, is stable as she delivers her dialogue in the style of a eulogy. With Brecht’s method, although the actress is at first aggressive towards the flowers, they are what illicit her first visible feelings. She raises her eyebrows and comes close to smiling at the daisy before putting her mask back up once again.