The Last Farm

I recently watched a film called The Last Farm and found it very touching. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Live Action Short in 2006, but did not win. What I found so interesting about this film was it's use of P.O.V. In the end, when the main character is burrying his wife, we see the camera look up at him from the ground. The shot evokes a feeling of longing, as if we are his wife looking up at her husband from her grave. Another interesting use of P.O.V in this film is used a few shots later when we become the husband, lying next to his wife as the dirt falls, burying them in their graves. We first see a shot of the man, with a look of peace on his face, and then we are looking through his eyes at the sky and the dirt as it falls and eventually convers the entire screen. I also really liked the way the last shot is framed. We see the last few flecks of dirt fall onto the grave right as the man's daughter pulls up to the house. The camera contiues to pan, away from the grave, the daughter in her car, over the lovely landscape that this man and his wife must have admired, and finally ending on the sky, signifying heaven; the afterlife; peace. 

Actors are weird.

So this is my first blog post...ever...I know I am a shame to our generation so let us hope I do not botch this up too much. My post seems to be different from the other posts so I hope I am not doing this wrong. This entire weekend I have been home attending my friend's father's funeral and Shiva, I am not going to lie it has been mentally and physically exhausting for all parties. While I was sitting at the deceased's house nibbling on a Jersey Sloppy Joe, which seem to have a monopoly on every funeral/wake event I have ever attended, I found myself thinking of actors, specifically Method Actors.

In a nutshell method acting is using real emotions, and real life experiences to act out a scene. Many method actors believe that they actually are the character they are portraying. Some of them also say that you can only properly perform a role with actual experience, for example you cannot play a lawyer without actually being a lawyer since the emotions and actions would not be genuine.

Thank God he doesn't think this way or it would have been very...messy on set.

Jumping back to the Shiva in a small Jewish house in a small suburb in Jersey I am still sitting down with a New Jersey Sloppy Joe watching my friend's family grieve over the loss of a loved one and I cannot stop but think about how crazy some actors can be. If a method actor has to play a role in which their father is dead they actually believe that their father is dead and some do not think you can play the role unless your father was actually dead. This is something that I cannot fully grasp, I have recently seen this raw emotion of agony and despair and the slight thought of losing my father is something I loathe to have in my head. But there are actors out there that willingly endure these thoughts and feelings to make genuine characters.

Eventually we will all work with actors one way or another and I thought I'd share this information so we can acknowledge or even appreciate this level of determination, commitment (and in my opinion zealotry) of actors.