Detailed acting with chin, North & South

Screencap from an interview with Richard Armitage at the Strike Back premiere, London, April 15, 2010. Source: RAFrenzy. Note the chin in profile. Quite a tool. It’s looking unusually pronounced here not only because of the profile shot, but because Armitage seems to be slightly under his normal weight here.

Dear Friend and I had a long conversation yesterday afternoon about everything in our world that we can’t change, but not before we enjoyed a nice long discourse on the topic of Richard Armitage. We talk a lot about Mr. Armitage, not so much about how hot he is, although we talk about that too — and I sent her a pretty picture this afternoon to cheer her up — but about the ways he uses his body in different roles to draw the viewer in. As a film critic she watches a lot more actors than I do, and she thinks that some things about the ways he uses his body, especially the intensity with which he achieves them, are entirely unique in her experience.

Richard Armitage as Guy of Gisborne in a series of publicity stills from Robin Hood for Czech TV that I downloaded from Richard Armitage Net at some point in the last year. This is the picture I sent my friend. Looking pretty intense here, isn’t he? I’ve written a number of posts on Armitage’s processing of status issues in the role of Guy of Gisborne beginning here (and then follow the pingbacks to other posts on the topic).

She’s given me some great ideas of things to look for and comment on in posts. A lot of them relate to something that’s fascinated me since my first semester of college, when two of my best friends took Acting I as an elective. One of the interesting things they were discussing that semester was: status. I remember a lot of what my friends were doing in Acting I related to the resolution of conflicts in high vs. low status in improv, and I remember conversations where we’d be sitting out on the lawn, observing interactions we couldn’t hear from far away, and discussing the status issues involved. There’s a great discussion of this issue as a problem in acting and teaching here. (For reference I think that when I started teaching I alternately insisted upon and rejected my own authority, and that I have slowly become what he calls the “status expert.” I’ve gotten there mostly by realizing how little control I actually have in most classroom situations. The classroom is like a wave that I have to surf every day: I’ve got to have my equipment together and I’ve got be in shape, i.e., read, be prepared in the subject matter, and I’ve got to be disciplined in responding to circumstances, but the wave itself? Beyond my control. If what I’m doing works, by the fourth week or so I can anticipate where the wave might be going on a particular day a bit better, but I can never plan how it’s going to work out. Bye the bye.) Anyway, re: status, summarizing the content of the book he’s reading, the author of the blog notes the centrality of status to drama, but its simultaneous constant presence in life. Characters do not possess status, but instead, their actors in turn must perform status for them. As the blogger writes: “Breaking eye contact, keeping one’s head still, a nervous chuckle, a flap of the hand — all of these non-verbal gestures, even, are expressions of status wishes and status disavowals.”

In short, Dear Friend and I think that Richard Armitage as an actor is what Johnstone calls a “status expert”; quoting the blog author again: “But status, for Johnstone, is something one does, not something one has. It is performed, he implies, as a defense mechanism — not necessarily to exercise power over others.” I was reminded of this point while looking for a cap for the Armitage morass post. This is a topic that could be covered in encyclopedic detail, but right now I want to talk about a particularly subtle status transaction I noticed while capping a few posts back. This twenty-six seconds comes from episode 2 of North & South; it’s the conversation in the millyard between Mr. Thornton and Mr. Slickson that Margaret observes from the window while waiting for Mrs. Thornton to come into her drawing room, and Stevens observes at close range.

What I’m interested in here is the mood of tension and suppressed anger in Thornton that Armitage creates, mostly with the posture of his head and heavily with that jaw. He’s got a quite prominent chin, as I’m sure you’ve noticed and as we can see above, in the photo at the beginning of the post, so Mr. Armitage probably has to work fairly hard to keep from moving it too much. A little goes a long way and a jerking around of the chin could signal open hostility, which would be too much.

OK, so the relative high status character here is Mr. Slickson — he’s older, he’s dressed a bit more formally, and seems, from the perspective of the script, to belong a bit more firmly to the fraternity of manufacturers than Thornton, who’s younger, dressed a bit more soberly, and who’s told us in the previous episode that he’s had a great deal to recover from socially (suicide of a parent, social disgrace, pulling himself up by his bootstraps). At the same time, Slickson has apparently compromised some aspect of his status over against Thornton because of his dealings with the workers — so he has the social and interactive high ground potentially, but no longer the moral / ethical high ground. And then there’s the zero status character, Boucher, from whose perspective we observe the status transaction of Slickson and Thornton.

From the beginning of the scene, Thornton is walking away with but also away from Slickson rather briskly. Right away, it’s clear that status is at issue, as Thornton is criticizing Slickson’s behavior but with his face away from Slickson, as if what he’s saying is too vehement to be expressed frente a frente. At 0:06, note the whirl of the body, led by the jaw, to establish a firm position of the body in retort to Slickson at 0:07. This is a frequent Armitage move, the raising of the jaw and resettling of the feet, in a dancelike move that somehow manages to convey both self-assertion — pushing forward — and a slight feeling of unsettledness at the same time. We see, in order: whirl with a sudden check of the body, then slight pull back of the head and raising of the chin, planting of the feet and moving forward of the head, almost as if Thornton is expressing an aggression he has to keep in check, and then — preceded by a slight grinding of the right side of the jaw, the pull down of the chin.

The final down position of the chin is what’s so ambiguous in terms of the signals it sends and makes the acting here so intriguing to watch, over and over and over again. In itself the lowering of the head is an expression of a lower status, defensive gesture. At the same time, the lowered chin and aggression of Thornton’s tone here make us think of a bull just holding itself back from a charge — a low status creature that is about to take the high status, but then pulls back from it. Armitage delivers Thornton’s line just at the point that he holds Thornton’s head most immobile and furthest down: “I wouldn’t ha’ pretended I were thinking about it and told them to come back on payday so I could turn them down flat and provoke them.” (The way that the northern accent shortens the long vowels in “payday” and the clear enunciation on the end of the consonant in “flat” enhances for me the threatening mood of Thornton’s line — it’s “flat” that’s really the end of the sentence, as Thornton is turning away from Slickson for the last three words, as if his energy won’t allow him to control his jaw in that position any longer.)

It’s also the movement of his lips on the “fl” sound in flat that reveals the height of his scorn for Slickson, as we see above. (Guy also sneers his f consonants from time to time — interestingly, we don’t see Lucas do it nearly so often).

Then an interesting expression on Thornton’s face, as he turns to walk away from Slickson: several frames of fatigue / closed down face / as if the encounter is ennervating for him.

These expressions are what tends to make me see the status transaction as a defense mechanism on Thornton’s part, even though he’s got the moral high ground — he believes what he is doing is right, and yet he resents having to defend his status, particularly in a situation where he feels like he’s being forced into accepting a strike. We see this ambivalence between high and low, between sincerity (he’d like to accuse Slickson) and sarcasm — a traditional “weapon of the weak” (he knows he daren’t) — underlined with the cast of his jaw and position of his lips when he begins the turn back to reply to Slickson:

There’s a sort of coolness in the position of his features, that suggests he’s preparing himself for a cool but cutting reply, particularly in the way he’s holding the upper lip here, that ends, as we see shortly, in further resentment.

At that point, Slickson is asking whether Thornton’s accusing him of trying to encourage a strike, and Thornton whirls back toward Slickson to reply, “it’s only that it wouldn’t have suited you.” We can’t see Armitage’s face at this point, but there is a slight shrug of the shoulders and move of the chin, again, at 0:18. We see a very brief, compressed recapitulation of the posture we saw in extenso above as Thornton says, “it’s their lives and our livelihood you’re playing with.” Thornton turns away again, apparently catching a glimpse of Boucher, who’s watching. Armitage underlines this with the grinding motion on the right side of his jaw timed with “lives” (0:20):

At this point we see Boucher more clearly, and then the end of the scene, where Thornton is now far enough ahead of Slickson to be winning the status contest, forcing Slickson to walk faster to keep up and eventually dismissing him with a “good day” that we hear only from Margaret’s perspective at the window.

What we see here, through the combination of facial and head postures, is the beleaguered mill owner who has to assert his own status not only with his workers, but also with his fellow manufacturers, and who’s caught in the dilemma between what he sees as his ethical position and his social standing. Masterful work, Mr. Armitage. It’s amazing how, again and again, you manage to display for us through these gestures the fundamental problems of Thornton’s status in Milton society. As an actor, you are a true “status expert.”

~ by Servetus on February 1, 2011.