From October 2024 till July 2025 I have been given the wonderful opportunity to work with eight talented and ambitious students of different degrees of advancement in a dense and demanding 200 hours class on directing.
We agreed that the central topic of the course should be the artistic work with the actor, everything else should be organized around that centre. We approach this centre from the very practical questions that arise in the actual work with the actors on stage and on set, but also from a wide range of questions about the human image that arise from literature of all kind, from Ancient Greek drama to research literature on psychometrics. The assumption underneath is that theatre and film depend on the visible and audible behavioural conciseness of the human image in space and time, which will as much be shaped by what actually is as by what is expected. A non-naive role of a director is to build images that will show strong correlation between what they intend and what they evoke. The building of the image is the building of a communicative machine that will have to fit certain conditions given by the functions of the human perceptual apparatus. A clarification of the possible intentions of such an image machine, including first steps into the direction of developing an individual artistic handwriting could maybe named as the highest goal of the course, a more humble formulation would though be that I would try to lay some seed for that.
This page shows some preliminary impressions from the course in a combination of a formulation of my intentions as a teacher and some first outcomes of work by my students. Whether intentions and achievements of the course actually fit together is a topic for later evaluation. For now this page will grow, only semi-reflected, with the progression of the course. I will also allow myself to be a bit associative in writing, bring this or that in, simply for the reason of importance in the moment, not necessarily of overall importance. The writing might serve, besides of course being a reflection for me, as an inspiration for directing students to accomplish some of the tasks themselves. It could also serve as some additional info for my students about what I think we do, that might invite them to put it in a reciprocal questioning context to what they think we do.
Back to the Audiovisual Image/ Against Fashion Psychology
“Essences are revealed by surfaces.” — Douglas Hofstaedter, Surfaces and Essences – Analogies as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking
Film and theatre are, by their very nature, in firm opposition towards all assumptions of invisible and unhearable properties of the human. “It” has to be in the audiovisual image or it is not part of the art. The fact that the audiovisual image will elicit the impression that there is more than what can be seen and heard is the result of a carefully built machinery of what can be seen and heard and of nothing else. If we do it well, the audience of a movie will as much get the impression that there is something “going on” in the character, some feeling or thought, as that the character must for sure have a back of head. Both is in a factual sense not true. There is no character, there is no thought, there is no back of head. It is all image and inference.
My preliminary observation during the last years is that the fashion of a “psychology” that incentivizes quick and lazy inferences towards all sorts of “psychological” hidden causes has started to do severe damage to the quality of artistic images young people are able to develop. Such false inferences are probably a stable human property, but that does of course not mean that one is allowed to bow to them in any sort of education. And they seem to be quite out of control today. It must be clearly said that this might hinder the ability of young people to actually learn to see things and that this might do them harm, as it will hinder their encounter with what is, including all the loss of not-made experience that would be important for their personal growth. Educating the directors of tomorrow, who shall be able to see such interesting things that they might be found interesting by many others must therefore be done in a demanding way.
An anecdote on that: Some years ago I had a young directing student who wanted to tell the story of a young female that was being stalked by a man. She was so stuck in the assumption of inner states that she wanted to tell the biggest moment of fear by showing that female how she looked on the display of her mobile phone, where she had received a “frightening message”. She had real difficulty to understand that there was no image of fear contained in that idea. Her plot moved on in the way that the young female then did not go to the police because “she knew that they wouldn’t take her seriously”, but instead, immediately moved to another city, which concluded into a story of a female looking on the display of a mobile phone and therefore moving to another city. This is funny, but it is also problematic. If we want to tell stories of the human we must move back to the surfaces.
Re-Building a Renaissance Image: Johannes Vermeer’s “Milkmaid”
I had taught all of the participants before, but I wanted to know where they stand in terms of what they search for in an human image, what they evaluate for, what interests them. That is why I started with the task of rebuilding an image in a sort of “prototype” way, so not fully formulated, but clearly reducing to some core idea of the image. I chose one of my favourite Renaissance paintings, the “Milkmaid” by Johannes Vermeer, a female sunken into the thorough action of pouring milk, in an environment that does also add to knowing about her, but, in the perfect composition of space and light and colour is clearly opposed to all sorts of naturalism or realism. The images the participants built showed a whole range of what their interest got stuck in, from a sociological view of a person in a working context, to the capturing of an assumed inner state. One participant got completely caught up with the composition of the image, the degree of reflection he shows in the desperate mail he wrote to me in combination with the image he managed to build are a good reminder that, in the midst of the process of learning one can not simply measure the outcome, because those first in thought might often be the last ones in deed.
“Dear Anne,
Sorry for the delay, attached you will find my grief solution without a person!
Here are a few takeaways:
– Lens seems…difficult…. I tried 18-75 on an S35 and nothing would have been suitable. You also need a lot of distance, so I opted for the mobile phone, which was the closest. Distances were still very strange. I would actually say that the picture was ‘painted’ with a telephoto lens.
– Box on the ground to the suspended basket with a person standing in between. Also quite difficult.
– The shadows look very harsh in daylight. I can’t really manage that in daylight. Sometimes it’s also confusing, because hers is very soft and the lamp casts a very hard shadow. It would also be very difficult to illuminate inside and outside with the right contrast. You would actually have to use frosted glass or a filter. But then the shadows wouldn’t be so hard again…
– The reflection on her dress compared to the table has a different effect.”
Photo: Rosalie Jakob
Image: Pia Tepass & Midjourney
Photo: Rosalie Jakob
Photo: Roland Dietz
Sophocles, Psychometrics and Condition Instead of Opinion: Antigone
The first piece of literature we started with was Sophocles’ masterpiece “Antigone”. I chose it because of its clarity and reductionism, it is actually free of all noise that makes a play “realistic” or “natural”. It is a showdown of the basic tragic story of the one versus the many, where the basic brother-brother conflict, which is always about status, elicits the basic sister-sister conflict, which is always about social acceptance/ conformity. To put it into the most simple terms: After one brother has attacked the city and has been killed by the other brother, one sister wants to bury the dead brother although it is forbidden by law, and the other sister doesn’t want to.
After having read the play under the application of the basic rule of thumb “the playwright is probably smarter than you” we focused on the conflict between Antigone and her sister Ismene. As expected I found that sympathies were clearly with Antigone, as some sort of Pippi Longstockings who did what she wanted, who had the better opinion, and the more cautiously behaving Ismene was seen as a sort of female that we don’t promote in our days. But that is of course not the story and it had to be questioned. First of all, somebody who attacks his own city is what we today would actually call a terrorist. If this person were the child of a ruler, it would of course become a highly political question how to deal with his burial, even today. It would be clear that family ties or the feelings of a sister towards him could not easily outweigh a terrorist attack. So, it might not be so clear that Antigone is the one that is “right”. Secondly, the identification of the students was probably wrong. Who are we, Antigone or Ismene? To put it very simple, everyone who has never been in fundamental ethical conflict with law or authroity should probably think of himself of more of the Ismene type of person. And, to put it very simple once again: Everyone who has never had an insight into what it means to raise children should at least remain very cautious towards a general condemnation of behaviour driven by higher degrees of anxiety and the urge to get along with others peacefully. Biology is not about morals, it is about survival and it makes no sense to generally condemn these traits as expressions of the female. And it doesn’t require extreme neuroticism or agreeableness for not wanting to die, being average on both is completely sufficient, Ismene is the norm, Antigone is the exception, that is why there is no crowd behind her. Third point: Although we live in the “age of opinions” I don’t think that an explanation for a situation where one sister voluntarily goes to death and the other sister tries to convince her not to do that should be explained on the level as that the two have “different opinions” on the topic. “Opinion” is quite a weak concept for the behaviour of an individual, one doesn’t die for opinions, nor does one let one’s sister die for them. There is an “Ockhams’s Razor” variant for animal behaviour, that, what can be explained by more basic patterns of behaviour should not be explained by higher ones and we live in a time, when it becomes measurable that very basic properties of human behaviour that we tended to consider as self-chosen, turn out to be probably far more ingrained into our genes than we want to believe. This is especially true for political “opinions”. That is one of the reasons why I think that the so called “big five personality traits” should be of high interest for the art of acting. It might shift the acting from the “wants to” towards a “is not able to do otherwise”, which might pose far deeper questions on how we humans can live and live together. In the case of Antigone and Ismene looking at them through the lense of individual differences within the two traits “agreeableness” and “neuroticism”, might shed new light on how to play their conflict at the walls of the city of Theben. I introduced the concept of the personality traits to the students, including its origin in a lexical study of “all words that can describe a human” and, as often, due to lack of time I had to leave them with further recommendations for reading.
The practical tasks the students had to solve were:
Write a casting call for the roles for an Antigone movie
Find an ideal, first choice cast for this movie
Do stage rehearsals of the scene between Antigone and her sister Ismene in the beginning of the play, with an emphasis on searching for the artistic means to make the differences between them visible and audible.
A first principle of Western theatre is the artistic autonomy and freedom of the individual in the creation process. The high quality of theatre comes out of negotiation based on liberty and can never come out of top-down imposed aesthetics rules. The arts were once a place to find freedom for those for whom the conformities of normal life were too narrow. Recent developments in making the filming of sex scenes more “safe” have put that freedom severely in danger, and it makes it even more problematic that this is done without any empirical data that would legitimize such strong interventions against a first principle as artistic freedom is. It must be reclaimed culture and practice that is based upon freedom of thought and exploration is possible, if you provide students with the individual abilities to cope with all sorts of situations instead of taking every possible measure to avoid them.
After thorough preparation we spent one project day on filming tiny sequences of sex scenes.
Preparation included:
Viewing and analysis of the famous “first female orgasm in film history” scene from the 1933 Czechoslovakian romantic-erotic film drama “Extase” by director Gustav Machatý, starring Hedy Kiesler, who later became known as Hedy Lamarr.
As a contrasting case, a pornographic film from 1930. This was worth seeing in the sense that it was basically the same as today, only beats per minute are fewer and stimuli are smaller (as in the overall development of film). Even the dialogues are very similar, but, as it was a silent movie, were written on ornate cardboards.
An image by image analysis of a quite sporty sex scene from the 1996 Philip Ridley horror movie “The Passion of Darkly Noon”, starring Viggo Mortensen and Ashley Judd.
A reverse engineering of a self-chosen sex scene from a movie, back to a storyboard and a script
The preparation for the own scene, either by trying to replicate a scene from a movie or by writing a new scene
The technical organization of the day on set
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Directing Emotions
The Final Scene of Henrik Ibsen’s “Nora”
“I am not a member of the Women’s Rights League. Whatever I have written has been without any conscious thought of making propaganda. I have been more poet and less social philosopher than people generally seem inclined to believe. I thank you for the toast, but must disclaim the honour of having consciously worked for the women’s rights movement. I am not even quite clear as to just what this women’s rights movement really is. To me it has seemed a problem of humanity in general. And if you read my books carefully you will understand this. True enough, it is desirable to solve the woman problem, along with all the others; but that has not been the whole purpose. My task has been the description of humanity. To be sure, whenever such a description is felt to be reasonably true, the reader will read his own feelings and sentiments into the work of the poet. These are then attributed to the poet; but incorrectly so. Every reader remolds the work beautifully and neatly, each according to his own personality. Not only those who write but also those who read are poets. They are collaborators. They are often more poetical than the poet himself.” — Henrik Ibsen, Speech at the Norwegian Women’s Rights League, 1898
Filming Emotions
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Photo: Pia Tepass
Students
Roland Dietz, Alexander Haberl, Simon Mitteregger, Turgut Murshudlu, Mariya Olshanska, Pia Tepass, Vera Valduga, Timo Vogt
Contributors
Actors: Valentina Körber (Sophocles, Antigone: Ismene), Katharina Tupy (Sophocles, Antigone: Antigone), Andrea Müller (sex scenes), Stefan Fleischmann (sex scenes), Maria Anvidalfarei (Ibsen, Nora: Nora), Joshua Schleinzer (Ibsen, Nora: Torvald), Bernd Gordon (emotions), Ines Reibnegger (emotions), Sarah Schuster (emotions, Sartre, The Respectful Prositute, Lizzy), Clemens Lüer (emotions), Miloje Pajkanovic (Sartre, The Respectful Prostitute, Senator)