January 2, 2001

A Challenger Arises from the Orient

In the six months since I wrote “The Virtues of Maura,” there has been a development that necessitates an addendum to the original article. In another text I wrote that “Maura Tierney…is an actress in the Greta Garbo class,” indicating that only these two actors were on this plane of acting. However, a newcomer has appeared to make this group a triumvirate – Chinese actor Zhang Ziyi, currently only 20 years old, and to date the star of only two films: Zhang Yimou’s Wo de fu qin mu qin (The Road Home) and Ang Lee’s Wu hu zang long (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon).

Even in the infancy of her career, some fans of Zhang Ziyi are ready to proclaim her to be the best actress in the world. This may or may not be true, but I largely agree with the sentiment – she is certainly one of the two greatest actors or actresses in the world, and third place is miles behind. The praise for Zhang is virtually universal and universally justified. Richard Corliss of Time, one of the most astute critics we have on acting talent, is already raving about her. Ang Lee best summarizes Zhang’s magic: “She allows the audience to pour themselves into her imagination. It’s not really her in the movie, it’s you. That’s beyond acting; it’s cinematic charisma.” ”¹

The important point is that for the first time Maura Tierney has had a contemporary worthy of comparison – someone who, like Tierney, is capable of doing more to signify a work of art than actors are expected to do. This opportunity for comparison afforded me a firmer understanding of several aspects of Tierney’s talent. What both actors have in common is the ability to create fully realized, deeply complex and truthfully expressive human beings. Tierney has demonstrated this in every role ranging from Cherlyn Markowitz and Molly Field through to Madeline Foster and Abby Lockhart. Likewise, in only two roles Zhang has received universal praise for her roles as Zhao Di and Jen (Yu Jiao Long).

One may also argue about who is the greater actor. Zhang has certainly had the advantage of much better directors. Both are equally dominant in terms of truth of artistry. Tierney is still the more likely to invent body gestures that amaze and apply them with artistic elegance, but I suspect that Zhang is slightly more likely to find internal signification for each body gesture that she uses.

Tierney is the source of Oxygen’s deep moral conflicts and hard-edged beauty. Zhang is the embodiment of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s sensuously graceful physicality and adventurous Romanticism.

The most meaningful comparison between these two actors relates to the type of mise en scène they create. They are both truly great but truly great in substantially different ways. Zhang Ziyi is the zenith of inward-flowing acting. Tierney has the tools to be a great inward-flowing actress (as she is showing on ER) but cannot match Zhang on this front. Where Tierney is unique is her outward-flowing (or centrifugal) acting – reaching out beyond her character to signify relationships. Tierney is the source of Oxygen’s deep moral conflicts and hard-edged beauty. Zhang is the embodiment of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s sensuously graceful physicality and adventurous Romanticism. Zhang’s greatness is identified by looking at Zhang. To identify Tierney’s greatness you really have to look at the characters and relationships around Tierney. If you need a truly great actor to be the center of your film you should choose Zhang. If you’re looking for the actor who will be the centerpiece of an ensemble cast, making everyone and everything around her better, you need to call Tierney.

The area where Tierney does have a distinct advantage is who she is as a person, which is the substrate from which actors create their characters. Tierney has always seemed to be a person with wisdom far beyond her years. She is a deep and complex woman who seems to understand herself, allowing her to take any part of herself to create a character. This is the reason that she has been able to create such a startling array of characters, each of them still a whole and complex human being. Chinese director Jin Chen’s unflattering description of Zhang was to compare her to a vase, saying, “I’m not sure how much substance she has, I think it’s more superficial….”² Zhang’s reaction to this statement revealed a appropriately vigorous determination to prove Jin Chen and other detractors wrong. Zhang Yimou, who directed her in her first film The Road Home, says of her: “But when I first met her, when she was 19, she didn’t strike me as being any more mature than your average 19-year-old. She didn’t understand anything. All she knew how to do was play. When we started shooting the film, she felt tremendous pressure to perform. She wanted to study the script all the time. But what we needed for the film was a very simple, very pure girl. I didn’t want her to be under too much pressure lest it cause her to mature or to lose that simplicity and purity. So I took her script away from her and didn’t let her read it. Every day I sent her off to play because I wanted to preserve her purity, her childishness. And it worked. Frankly, even when I look at her now I see a not atypical 21-year-old [sic]. She’s still a kid. It’s just that now she can say a thing or two in an interview. She just seems mature.³ My suspicion is that Zhang Ziyi is wise for her age, but inexperienced in life. This sounds paradoxical, but it isn’t – wisdom is innate whereas experience is not. However, I don’t think she has or will ever have the degree of wisdom that Tierney has. Both Tierney and Zhang will lose themselves entirely within a role when performing, with the result that they will both surprise you with depths of expression that you could not predict. Both actors have a well-established, intuitive sense of who they are, and it is because of this that they can create such truthful portrayals on film. However, at this stage Tierney’s wisdom allows her to go places within her character that are beyond Zhang, even if Zhang would be better able to get there if she knew the way. Beyond this, I will only say that these two actors are very close in talent level. You would not want to live on the difference.

Compared to other great actors, what Tierney and Zhang alone are able to achieve is signification (i.e., mise en scène). This is something completely different from ‘characterization’ or ‘giving meaning to a performance.’ Acting that explains a character’s motivation is not the signification that occurs with mise en scène but instead cinematic writing in the language of experiences. Mise en scène is written in the cinematic language of desires. In the cinema a human being is not defined by the sum of their experiences but by the sum of their desires. Or another way of putting it would be: Experiences are not effectively (i.e., powerfully) communicated through the cinema but desires are. What Tierney and Zhang are thus able to do is express the full humanity, indeed the full complexity, of their characters through the expression of their human desires. The example is most clear-cut in these two actors’ greatest performances. In Oxygen Tierney deeply expresses the self-hate that almost consumes her character in a manner that becomes totally beguiling and beautiful. It is a sickness of luminous vitality because it is expressed as part of a whole, deep and true expression of a human being. The viewer cannot escape the essential femininity of the character, and it is this that provides the contrast which illuminates the psychic violence with which Madeline tortures herself. If Maura Tierney’s Madeline Foster is the definitive expression of femininity in a man’s world, then Zhang’s Jen (Jiao Long) in Wu hu zang long  (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) shares strong similarities in being an expression of youthful womanliness both at odds with and in a vibrant state of survival with the manly code of warrior ethics. In Jen we see the full scope of this young woman’s desires – of a life of freedom and of youthful passion battling against a burgeoning sense of social and filial responsibility. In Madeline we find the mature woman being forced to come to grips with the boundaries of her childhood traumas (of never being able to live up to a father who she thinks demanded perfection). In Jen we sense the girl coming to terms with both the bristling possibilities and burdensome duties of her incipient adulthood. Both characters have strength in that they are willful enough to be doing what they want to be doing. Madeline enjoys being a cop, even choosing to chase a suspect when off-duty. Jen, in seeking her freedom, chooses the warrior’s life that she loves. Because both characters are so strong, they battle against their personal demons actively rather than passively, with the result being that each character’s battle for control over themselves becomes an intoxicating sight to behold.

In short, Zhang Ziyi’s Jen approaches Maura Tierney’s Madeline Foster as a deep expression of a complex woman. When I think of all the other great actresses currently working, there are no others who have been able to reach this plane of accomplishment. Not Juliette Binoche in Alice et Martin (Alice and Martin); not Renée Zellweger in The Whole Wide World; not Veronica Forque in Kika; not Sandrine Bonnaire in Sécret Défense; not Rachel Griffiths in My Son the Fanatic; not Emma Thompson in Much Ado about Nothing; not Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth; not Nathalie Richard in Haut Bas Fragile (Up, Down, Fragile); not Annette Bening in The American President; not Catherine Keener in Being John Malkovich; not Leelee Sobieski in A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries; not Minnie Driver in An Ideal Husband; not Hanna Schygulla in Lili Marleen; not Sandrine Kiberlain in Le Septième ciel (Seventh Heaven). (Note: Don’t ask me about Karin Viard yet as the extremely scarce distribution of her best films in English-speaking countries has so far limited my assessment.) Unlike other actors, Tierney and Zhang are capable of self-signification. In a world where directors write mise en scène, Tierney and Zhang are capable of writing mise en scène by themselves. My point is not that Tierney and Zhang do things better than other actors but that they do things other actors cannot do (which is why the “Virtues of Maura” were titled ‘Vital Differences’). There are other actors whose talent may be considered great but who are unable to achieve what these two actors are capable of – they cannot be considered in the same league.

The mise en scène written by these two truly great actors has some important differences from the mise en scène written by directors. The disadvantage of actors as signifiers is that the range of their powers is limited compared to that of a director. A director has full control over everything that appears within the frame (including, to a large extent, actors – which is why great directors extract fine performances from limited actors). An actor can signify only themselves and the objects/people they come into immediate contact with. Even Maura Tierney, whose power of expressiveness in relationships is far greater than anyone else’s in history, seems to have a twenty-foot radius of signification around her in ER. Generally speaking, a great director is more powerful than a truly great actor because of his/her greater breadth of influence.

The advantage actors have as signifiers is that the conflation of the means of expression with the object of expression results in a unity that deepens expressiveness. A director can only signify through directing or altering our gaze. In a director’s mise en scène, objects achieve the significance intended by the director by means of the way we look at them (via the camera). At the simplest level, an object is thus relatively significant if it is focused upon and relatively insignificant if little attention is paid to it via framing (camera setup) or other means. At deeper levels objects can take on quite complex and eloquent types of signification. For example, the famous key to the wine cellar in Hitchcock’s Notorious becomes signified as a highly charged physical expression of the secrecy that is shared between the characters played by Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant and that must be withheld from Claude Rains’ Nazi conspirator. Actors too function as ‘objects’ within the mise en scène, and people are the most complex and expressive ‘objects’ by far. A director has a great influence on the signification of characters/actors, but again this signification is achieved by controlling the way in which the viewer looks at or perceives the object. A director can signify, for example, a simple apple in so many ways: It can express sinful temptation (signified with an Adam-Eve analogy), it can be an expression of vitality (‘fruitfulness’ signified through an emphasis on its nature as a sweet and luscious fruit), it can be expressive of blooming sexual attraction (for example, if directed in a certain way as a gift from a woman to a man), and the possibilities go on and on; it can also be signified as nothing more than a plain apple if the director so chooses. However, there is a hard limit to the depth of expressiveness a director is able to achieve in signifying any single object. This limit is due to a fundamental inability to change the nature of an object. That is, its significance is determined by the way in which we look at the object and its relationship to other objects in the mise en scène – an outside-looking-in method – but an apple will always be an apple, so to speak.

By contrast, Tierney and Zhang are able to change the fundamental nature of the objects they are signifying (themselves) and the relationships they hold with other objects in the mise en scène, including other actors. By doing this, the means of expression and the object of expression are one. For Tierney and Zhang, signification occurs from the inside-out as objects that burst into artistic life. The reason why Tierney and Zhang are so great at signification and other actors are not is because Tierney and Zhang are much stronger expressers of human desires, remembering that mise en scène is the writing of human desires not human experiences. Furthermore, signification through direction will always have a certain amount of artificiality as our perception of the cinematic world is arbitrarily constrained by the camera. Signification through acting has the advantage of being behaviorally natural – we can keep the gaze ‘neutral’ and let the objects ‘speak for themselves.’⁴ (The only modern director who has had considerable success in bridging this ‘director’s paradox’ is Jacques Rivette, who uses a style of direction that often seems improvisational but is actually highly structured to allow objects within the mise en scène to signify themselves.)

One may argue over whether Tierney or Zhang is greater, just like one may argue over Ford and Hawks. The French have tended to favor Hawks, and Americans have tended to favor Ford. It is not a discussion without merit by any means, but my point is that the cinema welcomes diversity of greatness. I personally enjoy Hawks more than Ford, but I think both of them are truly great artists Moreover, amongst my favorite five movies of all time one is a Ford and one is a Hawks. So too should we appreciate the largesse we are experiencing in this moment in history. Not only are we currently enriched by our fair share of great directors, but for the first time in history we can concurrently enjoy the talents of two titans of acting.