ARTISTIC PHILOSOPHY
As a scholarship recipient, Politti was responsible
for submitting monthly reports (in 1964) about his experiences, which he
would evaluate. Some excerpts from these reports show the lucidity of an
actor intensely focused on his profession and eager to learn and
transmit that part of art which is sacred and ceremonial.
“The dramatic arts must be the most solid school of
study that exists. And when someone like me comes along and spends his time
theorizing and intellectualizing about theater, such an encounter decidedly
brings about the consolidation of the elements that make up the work itself.
I have worked intensely in
Mendoza, added quite a number of important characters to my repertoire as an
actor, and achieved true satisfaction thanks to the very maturation I
achieved through my whole learning process. Yet I feel my work is still
incomplete because – and I have discovered this here – an actor needs
contact with that regulating and interpretative force, which is none other
than the public. Back in Mendoza, we actors work too much on the fringe of
theater and after three or four months, when we feel the production is
ready, we only have one or two opportunities to perform it. This, in the
long run, leads to frustration. I remember how difficult it was for the
Universidad Nacional de Cuyo to put together ‘Las alegres comadres de
Windsor’ and ‘Fuenteovejuna’ and the first was performed only once and the
second twice. I felt like ‘Falstaff’ needed to let go of the neurosis caused
by its exhibition and the same thing happened with ‘El comendador.’ I would
have been able to get a lot more out of my work had there been more
continuity in the presentations.”
“I
have tried as far as I have been able, and despite the lack of defined lines
drawn by our directors and actors, to find an explanation that clarifies the
process to which an actor submits himself when he goes in search of a
‘child’ to insert within himself. What actor could ever say how and why a
character was ‘born’ to him in his imagination? The mystery of artistic
creation is the very mystery of natural creation. A woman who loves can
become a mother but not by the sheer force of her desire, no matter how
strong it might be. One day she will find herself a mother without knowing
exactly what has happened. By the same token, an actor in his daily living
gathers within himself many life seeds, though he knows not why or how, and
in a given moment, one of these seeds will insert itself within his
imagination and become a live being on another life plane, superior to
voluble daily existence. Here is where my preoccupation lies; I, like the
future mother, want to go to the bottom to discover the form. The hands-on
experience is not enough; very solid elements are necessary to complete the
miracle. The actor learns a technique by virtue of practice – for example,
how to look or control the body – but if he is naturally gifted, overflowing
with talent, he could be capable of creating and performing a symphony of
different tones and hues. Unfortunately, not all of us posses such genius
and for this reason, we need a school to guide our expressive possibilities.
But in addition to fundamental technical training, such schools need to give
us the solid foundation of a teaching based on a concrete idea. A concrete
idea is, in my opinion, the marking of an imaginary line that defines
creation and from which we can arrive at real and sincere experiences. Our
actors are limited because that line is missing. I am sorry, but the way I
see it, the other actors and I have atrophied due to lack of adequate
nutrition and I cannot help but wonder what we might be capable of if our
teachers and directors occupied themselves more with giving our theater a
genuinely Argentine physiognomy. Our intuition is constantly guiding us, but
is influenced at the same time by different foreign teachers. In this way,
we find ourselves with such and such a character that we created, having
taken into consideration the advice of a French teacher who in turn refers
back to what he learned from his Russian teacher. Still, I do not discount
that perhaps one day – hopefully not too long in coming – all this influence
will be the origin of our own authentic form.”
“I
always found that after spending quite a bit of time working on a character,
I would grow bored with him, tired of repeating the same lines over and over
again, and excited only about the idea of performing. This confused me
terribly and made me question if theater was truly my calling. I have,
without exaggeration, tortured myself over this question. I was like the man
in love who lives the plenitude of a love affair and then, suddenly,
discovers a defect – as though the fire that had ignited his passion started
to go out. This, as far as the example is capable of showing, is what would
happen to me and it has taken me on a constant search, a study of the
negative factors that would cause me to feel so bad. I came to real extremes
with this that had me thinking about leaving theater. […] Fernando Labat, a
man totally integrated into theater and whose only concern is constant
investigation, has cleared up several points on how to initiate the process
of creation for me. He has given me the elements that an actor needs in
order to search for the way to fuse his own personality with that of his
character. Perhaps, from his point of view, he shared with me no more than a
couple of words, but for me it has meant a reuniting with theater, my
calling. I have recuperated my faith and my strength.”
Excerpts from “Luis Politti: cadencias y
otros cielos”,
Fabián Stolovitsky
Ediciones
Corregidor, Buenos Aires, 1995
The following interview appeared, unsigned, in
the Sunday magazine of the La Plata (Argentina) newspaper “El Día”
in September 1975.
Luis Politti:
Looking for a Theater with Ideas
Juat a few days after he received the 1974
Martín Fierro in recognition of his work as best actor, we had some
coffee and smoked a few cigarettes with Luis Politti. Visibly moved
by the award he had received – “it is a symbol, something concrete
after all of the effort and hard work and it has offered me the most
gratification I have felt during my professional career” – he
started offering his opinion on the different ways of doing theater
and the possibilities that film and television have in Argentina.
Actor in “Los 7 locos;” “Boquitas pintadas;”
“La tregua;” “Los gauchos judíos;” “La Raulito;” “La Guerra del
cerdo;” and “Solamente ella,” Politti aims to create a proposal that
more closely unites man with art.
His incorporation into theater and his
initiation into acting took place in a discontinuous manner: “I
started out practicing with people that did theater in the way it
has always been done in this country, until different methods and
disciplines began appearing. It was in my home province of Mendoza
that I later joined a group of people that were doing a commercial
sort of theater – what we called “rasca theater.” After
having worked for two years…”
-How old were you?
-At that point I must have been about 16 years
old and it was the same time I started studying in the School of
Dramatic Arts in Mendoza, which formed part of the Universidad
Nacional de Cuyo. The director of the school was a Russian woman,
Galina Tomalcheva, who had come to the country after the 1917
revolution and had been a student of Stanislavsky. This woman had a
very deep handle on the method of Stanislavsky – who associated his
studies with the discoveries of the scientist Pavlov – and she would
sometimes elaborate on and put into motion the entire concept that
Stanislavsky had regarding theater, either directly from the maestro
himself or via her husband who had also been a student of
Stanislavsky.
-How is it that theater involves the Pavlovian
conditioned response?
-For Stanislavsky, theater was, from the
beginning, simply a show. Everything was based on scenery, lights,
music – in other words, on all those things that he later defined as
the “involution of theater.” Later Stanislavsky entered into deep
crisis and did not know what was happening to him until he connected
with Dr. Pavlov. The latter was a scientist that studied animal
reactions and had discovered the so-called “conditioned response,”
where if you make certain sounds at the same hour everyday while
giving the animal food, the animal becomes conditioned such that
upon hearing the familiar and routine sound, it starts secreting
gastric juices.
So Stanislavsky took this element and started
elaborating on it according to what he lacked as an actor. In other
words, for him, the work of an actor had been something that came
from the outside – something that consisted of performing in
response to a pretext outside of the actor, without suffering the
internal process that would have given rise to the reflex, i.e. the
stimulation of the “gastric juices” to put it in those terms, in
order to really feel the given situation.
-When did you settle down in Buenos Aires?
-I came to the capital a number of times to see
foreign theater groups perform and always returned afterwards to my
home in Mendoza to continue studying and working. Later, I became
interested in settling down in Buenos Aires to work here, but with
the idea of finding new elements and expanding on what I had learned
with Galina Tomalcheva – not with the idea that Buenos Aires was the
“capital of success” as they call it.
So I applied for and won a scholarship from the
National Arts Fund. And that was the moment that I decided to stay
for good. That was ten years ago. Here, I got in touch with
Fernández and also with Gené, who was at that time teaching classes.
I didn’t take any classes with him because we have different
criterion and what he was offering didn’t mesh with my interest,
which was theater as a proposal – that is, a scenario where one is
able to find the answers to the questions one has, and cannot answer
alone, by working collectively with others, under the direction of
individuals who already have experience in that area…
-What are the limitations of the team and where
does the individuality of the actor come into play?
-The limitations come out in the day-to-day
living and working together. The proposal may be very interesting
and the players may have common objectives, but in the day-to-day
living, individual elements start to appear. There is a sort of
natural tendency towards triumph, so personal success within the
group is rarely seen – it is difficult for it to manifest at the
group level.
If one of the actors in the group stands out,
then he or she will receive recognition for it, but otherwise, it is
the group as a whole that receives the recognition and reward.
However, since we are taught to be individualists, group experiences
are often inhibited. Therefore, there isn’t always a lot of sense in
putting groups together in our country – they seldom work.
-In our country or within our social system?
-I think the two are in a way related. Due to
the way we are raised, we put high value on individual success,
unless we are talking about an individual who runs out on the soccer
field where the fans of both teams go wild and the two teams come
face-to-face. In this case, the two sides push hard to make sure
each of their respective teams plays well and wins. But this
situation doesn’t translate over to the esthetics and creating we
find in the arts. A painter is an individualist because there is no
other way work. The writer suffers the same fate. But the
playwright, who definitely could and should work in a group –
equipped with a particular proposal that ties the different group
members together – also falls into this same individualism…
So we actors are trained – and I always try to
avoid this – to think in terms of “what a great play” and “let’s see
if we can work on this one,” but never to think of our work as
collective, as a group project where we could create something that
allows us to express ourselves, even if only with our own noises. It
might be something that no one else understands very well but at
least we could show that we know how to form a group, that we are
returning to our roots in order to find ourselves, and as such
evolve towards something that allows us to one day communicate with
others as well as with ourselves…
-How would you concretely express this
proposal?
-For example, Shakespeare wrote plays in a very
particular manner, with a solid structure. But in order to present a
simple situation he would take up about ten to fifteen pages. We
have had certain inner life experiences that have allowed us to cut
that time from what Shakespeare needed to what we presently need to
get a certain point across.
This work is about recreating. If we take a
character who is debating whether to love or not to love and we work
the situation with a totally updated mentality without forgetting
Shakespeare’s ideas, then we are recreating Shakespeare. And this
includes, for example, developing a point in the play to which the
author gave little importance but which to us, today, is quite
significant…
We have seen this experience literally played
out in theater and it has received a varying array of criticism.
In “Hedda Gabler,” by Ibsen, we were able to
see a very precise case of this kind of search for the inner
functioning of the characters. Ure, the director, was looking to
work on the unconscious. We know very little about the unconscious;
we know that there are aspects of ourselves that are repressed and
that we send everything we consider to be “junk” to certain secret
places where they get “dammed up,” only to bubble over in different
moments and bother us deeply and profusely. So Ure proposed we work
on this play by Ibsen and told us, “What I want you to do is to
develop your undeveloped areas.” In other words, he wanted us to
work concretely on that which was connected with our undeveloped
reality. For example, if I see a woman on the street that I like but
I have trouble expressing myself – but at the same time I can’t let
her pass me by without telling her, I have to find a way to do it.
This impediment would be an undeveloped area of me. I think
psychoanalysis calls it “inhibition.”
So this is
the work Ure proposed. It went well as far as personal experience
goes, but failed in terms of what happened with the general
structure of the play, since he didn’t have clear objectives. But
let me be clear here: Ure wasn’t interested in getting “Hedda
Gabler” up on the marquee; he wanted the public to be able to
witness the experience we had had…
-Which was a
success…
-Right, but
the public didn’t understand it and pulled the curtain on us. They
said, “This isn’t Ibsen,” “This is horrible,” “This is worthless.”
But then there were also those who loved it and cheered out and
cried, and said, clearly moved, that never before had they seen
anything so beautiful. Even Gené climbed up on
the stage, moved, and admitted that he had wondered how one could do
Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” and that he had seen it there for the first
time in his life.
-And in film?
-I am finishing up the filming of a movie by
Lucas Demare, “Solamente ella.” His book is linear – it keeps to a
sort of outline form and the authors, Demare and Marta Mercader,
have not developed it. They explain their piece of work through the
dialogue – at least we know this about Demare because we have seen
earlier films of his and he is one of the most important figures we
have in Argentine cinema. He did “Los isleros,” “La guerra gaucha,”
and “Hijo del hombre,” which in addition to some other films make up
a sort of “lifestyle” of Argentine film.
Also, the subject of the film is a tango and
tango – except for in the case of poets like Homero Manzi, Discépolo
and Cátulo Castillo – is very linear, very schematic. It tells you a
story that you have to internally develop.
So I thought I would be able to have an
interesting experience with the character that they offered me,
believing that I could proceed with the criterion that I mentioned
earlier. But that idea was quickly forgotten because Demare has a
way of working which is very different from mine, and although I
don’t follow his method, I think what he does is just. For him it is
rich and deep because he understands it that way and I respect him
for that. Needless to say, “Solamente ella” did not turn out how I
had imagined. And so the same thing happened to me that had happened
to some of the public that went to see “Hedda Gabler” when they
found that the play we put on had nothing to do with the book…
-And in “La Raulito”?
-That was Lautaro Murúa’s work, similar to
Bresson’s films, with those internal journeys and suffocating
situations. His style escapes the linear sort of model of film – one
can appreciate this in “Shunko” and “Alias Gardelito.” Murúa
transmitted what he knows to me in a very authentic manner and my
experiences with him were very interesting for me. I am not saying
that he is the best for me or anything but it is really important
that in Argentine film – which is still so undeveloped – there is
someone like him who has a style that he is able to express in that
way…
-What about with Renán?
-No, not with Renán. The work he did was very
traditional.
In reference to the television version of “La
tregua,” he himself pointed out that it was more authentic and loyal
to the original book that the film version. Renán and the producers
know why that was. Very important parts taken out of the movie were
emphasized in the television version. In the book, the most
important point is the problem the guy has: the main character had
suffered an emotional loss twenty years prior and one day he finds
himself with a girl who stirs up everything within him and he starts
comparing her life with the only point of reference he has – the
woman who had died twenty years back. And that part wasn’t in the
movie – or it was subdued at least…