The nonprofessional-actor method: stripping "the pernicious illusion of realism"

pivotal · UNDATED (method, career-long)

• When: UNDATED — his practice "up until the last phase of his career" (scene 179)
• What: A core of the aesthetic project. Like "the Parisian-French Bresson he so admired," JOI cast rank amateurs reading wooden lines off cue-cards, wanting the audience never to forget "they were in reality watching actors acting and not people behaving." Hal reads this as closer to Brecht — the real aim being that "skilled or believable acting" not "get in the way of the abstract ideas and technical innovations." Cosgrove Watt (the Dancing Gland), Paul Anthony Heaven (a data-entry drone, kept for anything needing "a deadening institutional presence"), Disney Leith, Marlon Bain — his repertory of nonprofessionals. The anti-realist method is the anticonfluential doctrine made flesh.