Interview: Peter Berg on The Kingdom

With the country now in its fifth year of a war against Iraq, filmgoers have shown more interest in documentaries about terrorism than features. Films like Syriana and United 93 received strong reviews, but failed to find an audience. The Kingdom, a Universal release directed by Peter Berg, approaches the subject from a more commercial angle. Scripted by Matthew Michael Carnahan, the story follows a team of FBI agents investigating the bombing of an American base in Saudi Arabia.

“We wanted it to be a different experience,” Berg says by phone from his office in Los Angeles. “We wanted to make a more accessible story about the Middle East, to not overly politicize or intellectualize the situation there. First and foremost, lead with strong action.”

Hong Kong films at BAMCinématek

In its heyday, the Hong Kong film industry turned out over two hundred feature films a year, comedies, romances, musicals, and dramas as well as martial arts pictures. Last year, that number dropped below fifty. Former linchpins –stars like Jackie Chan, Jet Li, and Maggie Cheung, as well as writers and directors like Wong Kar-wai and John Woo–have either moved to other countries for work or retired outright. The industry has been in a free-fall since the handover in 1997, in part due to doubts about mainland China’s demands. But even before the handover, triads infiltrated production companies, siphoning off profits while releasing inferior movies that infuriated audiences. Piracy was simply the last straw. Movies are routinely available for download or on bootleg DVDs before they open. Even the pornographic film market has suffered.

Profile: Barbara Stanwyck Centenary

What made Barbara Stanwyck a star? Her looks helped, of course, but there were scores of beauties who never got out of the chorus line. She could sling it as well as any other sexpot, but even in her loosest roles she held something back from her costars, and from her customers. She tapped into the neuroses that helped define film noir, but she played her most famous femme fatale as an icy blonde who was as dismissive of her new lover as she was of the victim he was replacing.

Interview: Johnnie To on Election and Exiled

Since the handover in 1997, no Hong Kong filmmaker has been as consistently successful and influential as Johnnie To. An increasingly prominent figure on the festival circuit, the fifty-three-year-old To has had trouble cracking the United States market. But the release this spring of his three most recent films, Election, Triad Election, and Exiled, may finally bring him the recognition he deserves.

Interview: Luc Besson on Angel-A and Arthur

Luc Besson, one of the most powerful figures in French cinema, once told a reporter he would quit directing films after he completed ten features. Now, with the release of the animated Arthur and the Invisibles and the opening in the United States of Angel-A, the director has reached his limit. Picking at a plate of berries and crème fraîche in a hotel bar overlooking Battery Park in downtown Manhattan, Besson chooses his words carefully when talking about his future.

“I’m finished,” he starts. “I’m scared of saying the same things over and over, and at the same time I have less ambition or passion. Even athletes have to accept that one day they can’t keep beating their records.” Besson has worked almost non-stop for thirty years, and collapsed twice on the set of his previous directing effort, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc. He claims to be satisfied just writing and producing films for his EuropaCorp production company. Then he offers a qualified hedge: “If tomorrow I fall in love with a script, if I have a new purpose, if I have something fresh to say, if I can take on another three-year project, then maybe I will decide to direct again.”

Interview: Jon Landau and James Cameron on Avatar

With the science fiction adventure Avatar, director James Cameron fulfills his promise to bring the 3D movie experience to a wide audience. The film marks the culmination of years of work with 3D, including developing the Fusion Camera System in order to film the large-screen documentaries Ghosts of the Abyss and Aliens of the Deep. Still, doubters outnumbered believers when Cameron announced in 2003 that his next fiction feature would be shot and released in 3D.

Vitagraph Films at MoMA

Although New York City was the first center of the film industry, almost nothing survives from those early years. The Biograph studio on Manhattan’s Fourteenth Street, where D.W. Griffith perfected his craft, is long gone, as are studios erected in Westchester and Fort Lee. Surprisingly, one of the earliest studio complexes is not only still standing, but is still being used in part as a production facility. From November 9th to the 13th, the Museum of Modern Art celebrates the centennial of the Vitagraph Studio in Brooklyn with Vitagraph: The Big V on Avenue M, a series of representative films from the studio.

The company was formed in 1896 as American Vitagraph by British immigrants J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith. Its first successes were largely faked documentaries and travelogues, such as a view of Niagara Falls that was actually shot in New Jersey. Blackton directed one of the earliest fiction films, The Burglar on the Roof, in 1897, but for the next ten years the studio struggled to survive while fending off a series of lawsuits from rivals like Thomas A. Edison. At first Vitagraph sold its films outright to exhibitors, but in 1905 Blackton and Smith realized that they could earn more money by renting their films to “exchanges” that would take over the tasks of delivering and picking up individual films.

The producers’ decision to concentrate on making films instead of distributing them happily coincided with a boom in nickelodeons, which grew from a handful to thousands within two years. Since programs changed twice a week, theater owners were desperate for product. That August, Vitagraph started work on a new studio in what was then a largely rural area of Flatbush. When it opened over a year later, the Vitagraph Studio spread between East 14th and East 15th Street and between Avenue M and Locust Avenue in what is now called Midwood. It was a state of the art facility that offered glass-enclosed stages, a tank for water scenes, a self-contained laboratory for processing film, and areas devoted to editing, props, and costumes.

The building gave Vitagraph an edge over rival studios, one that it exploited with high quality films. Vitagraph appealed to upscale viewers with films based on literary heroes like Raffles and Sherlock Holmes, but also delivered crowd-pleasing car chases, trick films, and slapstick. With their large sets and lavish production design, Vitagraph films looked better than those from other studios. Blackton experimented with animation and stop-motion photography, and was one of the forces behind Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo (1911), one of the landmark early cartoons.

With The Life of Moses (1909), the studio may have released the world’s first feature film, although it was originally shown in five separate parts. There’s no disputing that Vitagraph was one of the key players in developing the “star” system. Florence Turner, better known to filmgoers as “The Vitagraph Girl,” is just one of many performers the studio nurtured. Others who started out at Vitagraph include Norma Talmadge, Rudolph Valentino, Adolphe Menjou, and John Bunny.

Spotlighted in a half-dozen films in the series, Bunny grew up in Brooklyn before touring the country in a minstrel show. Over the years he became an actor and director in legitimate theater, working with stars like Maude Adams. In 1910 he left the stage for Vitagraph, and within the year became a sensation in a series of comedies. Over a five-year period Bunny made almost two hundred shorts, predominately comedies but some dramatic works as well. Weighing close to three hundred pounds, and with a florid, expressive face, he was an expert mime and an even greater judge of comic timing. Dressed in a suit and vest, he is like a Tenniel drawing brought to life, and wearing a straw hat, drink in hand, he is a clear inspiration for W.C. Fields. In films like Stenographer Wanted (1912), Bunny is a revelation, playing with a restraint and intuition rare for his time. He was often paired with the gaunt, shrewish Flora Finch in domestic slapstick like Bunny Backslides (1914), which features an extended visit to the old Washington Park baseball field, home of the future Brooklyn Dodgers. Since dialogue didn’t have to be dubbed or subtitled, the actor was especially popular overseas, but sadly succumbed to Bright’s disease in 1915.

After writing and directing The Battle Cry of Peace, which imagined New York City invaded by foreign terrorists, Blackton withdrew from day-to-day operations at Vitagraph. The executives who replaced him made a crucial miscalculation by failing to establish a chain of theaters to show the studio’s films. Apart from comedies starring Sidney Drew and Larry Semon, Vitagraph floundered in the 1920s. Warner Bros. bought the company in 1926, and used the Flatbush complex to film many of its Vitaphone sound shorts. The original building eventually became the site of Warners’ Ace Film Laboratory before being sold to Yeshiva University High School in the 1960s. It is now being used as the Shulamith School for Girls.

Warners built a studio across the street from the Vitagraph complex at the end of the 1920s. NBC bought this building in 1952. It was used for everything from Mary Martin’s version of Peter Pan to The Cosby Show and Another World. Since 2000, it has been the site of JC Studios. Currently the space is being used to shoot As the World Turns, a soap opera that is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary.

Eddie Cantor at MoMA

One of the forgotten heroes of vaudeville stars in two relatively rare movies screening at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, February 18. Both titles try to solve the same problem: how to adapt a hit Broadway play to film. The first showcases Eddie Cantor in what was for 1923 a cutting-edge sound process. The second, a feature-length version of Kid Boots, shows exactly what a big-budget, mainstream comedy film looked like, circa 1926.

Born in 1892, Eddie Cantor, nee Israel Iskowitz, grew up on the Lower East Side. At one point a singing waiter on Coney Island (backed for a time by Jimmy Durante on piano), Cantor worked his way up to vaudeville by 1907. Within a few years he developed a blackface character, and blackface routines would become a staple of his act. But Cantor was predominantly an ethnic comedian who geared his jokes towards New York audiences.

Cantor progressed from vaudeville to Florenz Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic, and then to the actual Ziegfeld Follies, where he co-starred with Bert Williams, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, and many others. His first Broadway vehicle was Kid Boots in 1923. After the success of Whoopee! in 1928, he starred in a string of film comedies, including Palmy Days, The Kid from Spain, and Roman Scandals. He also introduced such landmark pop songs as “Makin’ Whoopee,” “If You Knew Susie,” and “There’s Nothing Too Good for My Baby.” With hit records, a top-rated radio show, and several best-selling books, Cantor was one of the most recognizable celebrities of the Depression era, so well known that he was a fixture in cartoon parodies.

Cantor came of age professionally before the invention of electric microphones, and had to develop a singing style that didn’t rely on amplification. In other words, shouting, a technique that worked best with story songs and the blues. Cantor would basically recite lyrics, interpreting them by raising or lowering his volume. He performed love songs sticky with sentimentality, or blues laden with innuendo, in the same declamatory style. He played to the audience, rarely to his fellow performers, in fact often alone on the stage.

Cantor’s persona as an actor mirrored his singing: limited range, lots of volume. Like most silent film comedians, he was short in stature and had large, expressive eyes (in fact, one of his nicknames was “Banjo Eyes”). Avoiding the “baggy pants comic” cliché, Cantor used tight, ill-fitting clothes a size or two too small for him. They make his character even more constrained, the basis of much of his humor.

Many cultural historians mistakenly date the use of sound in movies to The Jazz Singer, a 1927 melodrama that starred Cantor’s friend Al Jolson. But merging film and sound was a goal of many early filmmakers, starting with the Edison studio, which filmed a sound experiment in 1895. The Vitaphone process used by the Warner Brothers for The Jazz Singer was a Rube Goldberg contraption that linked projectors to sixteen-inch shellac platters played on turntables. It was an arrangement prone to disaster. Better was the sound-on-film process developed in part by Lee de Forest. It placed sound within a thin strip on the side of the film, and it remained in use in films until the 1970s, when a stereo process using magnetic strips took over.

A Few Moments With Eddie Cantor, Star of “Kid Boots” was shot on a barren stage with one stationary camera. It’s a seven-minute extract from the play, with Cantor delivering a monologue laced with Jewish humor, singing “The Dumber They Come, the Better I Like ‘Em,” and performing his signature loping dance, in which he accompanied himself with emphatic handclaps. The combination of flat lighting and slow film stock makes the image blurry enough so that it’s hard to make out Cantor’s expressions, and he seems to be playing to his left rather than to the camera. He pauses after punchlines, waiting for laughs that never arrive. Still, it’s impossible to deny his manic energy, and the jokes that do click are as pleasing today as they were eighty years ago.

The feature version of Kid Boots was shot in California for Paramount, under journeyman director Frank Tuttle and with what was for 1926 a pretty strong cast. The idea of performing a Broadway comedy in mime may seem peculiar today, but silent filmmakers tackled everything from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde, even managing to make a hit out of a silent Merry Widow. The trick was to find visual ways to advance the plot, and to develop characters through sight gags. Cantor was a sight gag to begin with, with his protruding eyes, slicked down hair, slight build, and herky-jerky movements. Joke-filled titles (written by Tom Gibson) introduced the other characters and pointed out major plot twists.

Tuttle had little compunction about discarding whole stretches of the plot, just as directors do today. Which is why Kid Boots ranges from scaled-down bits of stage business in tailor shops and boudoirs to wide-open chases with horses, cliffs, and mountain lions. The plot focuses on Samuel (Kid) Boots, a clerk in a tailor shop who loses his job after infuriating a customer. He latches on to Tom Sterling, a stalwart millionaire who is trying to divorce his golddigging wife in order to marry a hotelier’s daughter. Kid Boots will be Sterling’s witness in divorce proceedings.

The film is as much of a narrative shambles as the play must have been, only without Cantor periodically breaking into song or donning blackface. He does a golf bit, hides in closets, acts a weird skit involving an electric chair, and flirts with two of the film’s three female leads. (Top-billed Billie Dove is reserved for Lawrence Gray, the male romantic lead.) Natalie Kingston vamps it up as the golddigger, but the real attraction in the cast is Clara Bow, who at this point was on the verge of stardom. It takes the filmmakers about five minutes to get her into a bathing suit, and surprisingly she’s called upon to do most of the heavy acting.

Cantor’s greatest successes were still to come. Whoopee!, a smash on stage and as a Technicolor film; Roman Scandals, with Lucille Ball as a naked slave; and The Kid From Spain, directed by Leo McCarey. He even turned losing a fortune in the 1929 stock market crash into a best-selling book. But by the mid-thirties, film audiences had lost their appetite for Cantor’s shrill shtick. Some critics feel that efforts to “de-Semitize” Cantor backfired by alienating his core fans. Like Jolson, he endured a long decline in public. He appeared in increasingly small film roles and returned to Broadway occasionally, but never regained his foothold on the public.

Cantor’s appeal may be hard to understand today. But picture him appearing unamplified on an empty vaudeville stage, a cog in a long bill of magicians, animal acts, and novelty singers. As he noted, “A [performer] in vaudeville is like a salesman who only has fifteen minutes in which to make a sale. You go on the stage knowing that every minute counts. You’ve got to get your audience the instant you appear.”

Prix Jean Vigo Films at MoMA

Forget Truffaut or Godard or even Renoir: Jean Vigo is the true patron saint of French cinema. He never made a bad movie; you can see all his work in one sitting; and his politics will always be reliably left of center. Since 1951, the Prix Jean Vigo Committee has awarded annual prizes in his name to a “French director notable for his independence of spirit and originality of style.” Starting February 10th and extending through December, the Museum of Modern Art is showing over forty winners, both features and shorts.

The Prix Jean Vigo is as much a political award as an artistic one. As in most cultural contests, winners are rewarded for their connections and networking skills as well as their talent.. The imprimatur of approval that accompanies the Prix Jean Vigo can buoy a winner’s subsequent film career, at least for a time. Unlike the US, many French directors break into the industry through reviews and criticism, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, and Olivier Assayas, for example. Godard shows up here for A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960) screening on February 11 and 12. The movie passed from revolutionary to classic in a remarkably short period, its methods now appropriated by every director of sneaker ads or shampoo commercials who’s aiming for an “edgy” look. Without Breathless there would be no Nixon or Traffic, surely not what Godard intended.

The series includes two Assayas films, both scheduled in April. Paris S’eveille (Paris Wakes Up, 1991) captures his preoccupation with sex, drugs, and rock and roll in nascent form. Along with dialogue delivered at a blistering pace, you will find the director’s trademark digressions on motor scooter and Metro, and the inevitable humiliation of his pretty but unaware heroine.

His other film, co-directed with Luc Barnier, was originally projected behind a concert by Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore. Assayas recorded one of their performances and used it as the score for this half-hour short, which tries to find a visual approximation for Sonic Youth’s druggy drone with hazy jungle landscapes that dissolve into blurry shots of flying jets. After the relatively austere Clean, which will be opening theatrically around the same time, “Concert Film” is either strikingly attuned to the music or annoyingly obscure.

Other films include worthy if predictable chestnuts and equally predictable “provocative” films that have struggled to find audiences both here and in France. Missing entirely are the bread-and-butter hits of French cinema, the comedies and romances and thrillers that support the prize-winners. No Luc Besson, for example, and certainly no Three Men and a Baby. On the other hand, Bruno Dumant, who won in 1997 for La Vie de Jésus (screening in October), is currently teaching film on various New York campuses following the economic and artistic debacle of his 29 Palms.

The winner in 1995 was Xavier Beauvois for his N’oublie pas que tu vas mourir (Don’t Forget You’re Going to Die), which opens the series on February 10. Beauvois also stars as an art school slacker who turns to drug dealing when he is diagnosed as HIV-positive. While stealing from his friends, mooching off druggies, and picking up naive girls for unprotected sex, Beauvois’ character shows moviegoers how to prepare and smoke crack without leaving incriminating evidence. Be prepared for plenty of long, slow pans across classical art works, proof enough for the jury of Beauvois’ independent spirit and original vision.

Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Die Too, 1953) directed by Nouvelle Vague fixtures Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, defines better than most shorts in the series the political underpinnings of the award. Ostensibly an examination of African art, the film is really an excuse to lambaste the United States and other, unspecified “racist” countries for stealing and then entombing African culture. Through stills and stock footage (most risibly of the Harlem Globetrotters), the directors first set out a case for the beauty and importance of African art before it was corrupted by colonials, then for the racism that pervades Western culture. Watching it, you can see how Marker would go on to manipulate still images in the masterful La Jetee (screening with Statues Die Too on May 4 and 6), and how Resnais would end up superimposing pictures of jellyfish on his characters’ heads in the ridiculous On connait la chanson (Same Old Song, 1997). You’ll also see politics as wrongheaded and childish as in any Lars van Trier film. The directors pay no attention to the technique or context of the art discussed, dismissing such issues with lines like “The botany of death is what we call culture.” Of course the directors would never admit that the methods they chose to shoot and edit the art–the backgrounds, angles, lighting, etc.–determine how viewers will respond to it. Their conclusions mix the condescending (“The black can be proud of his ancient civilization”) with the dunderheaded (“Racist countries allow their blacks to win Olympic medals”).

The light, effervescent La Passion selon Flormand (1970, scheduled for November) captures the actual spirit of a Vigo film like Zero de Conduite or A Propos de Nice. It follows elderly retirees who roller-skate on the plazas surrounding the Eiffel Tower, using marches and ballads played on a portable phonograph for a score. Filmed on 16mm with only two lenses and wild sound, La Passion… is as harmless and carefree as a balloon, and utterly devoid of politics–unless you want to speculate what the skaters were doing during World War II.

Film in Catalunya, 1906-2006

Despite its illustrious history, its Gaudi architecture, and its equally imposing geography, Barcelona will always be second to Madrid, and second in line for the attention of the Spanish. For centuries the city has been the center of the semi-independent region of Catalonia, or Catalunya. Film in Catalunya 1906-2006, a series running from January 27 to February 14 at the Walter Reade Theatre, showcases over two dozen features and shorts from the area.

While the Spanish film industry is centered in Madrid, for over a century Barcelona has staked its own claim to cinema. Starting with the trick films of Segundo de Chomón in 1902, the city produced several of Spain’s most significant silents. The series includes some early shorts and 1922’s Don Juan Tenorio, an opulent but dramatically stiff version of José Zorilla’s drama.

But is there a Catalan style of filmmaking? The Secret Life of Words, which is receiving its New York premiere on opening night, stars Sarah Polley, Tim Robbins, Sverre Anker Ousdal, and Julie Christie. Directed by Isabel Coixet, who made My Life Without Me with Polley, and set on a North Sea oil rig, the film’s only connection to Catalunya is that Coixet lives in Barcelona.

Other films make a better case for a Catalan school. The defining moment for the culture in the twentieth century was the Spanish Civil War. After the Republic fell to Franco’s forces, the Catalan language was outlawed, although by 1947 a Catalan cinema had re-emerged. The series includes five short documentaries filmed in Barcelona during the fighting, all from anti-Franco factions doomed to defeat.

Subsequent Catalan films share an understandable preoccupation with the war and its aftermath, and even today unsettling reverberations emerge in unexpected moments. The years of repression during Franco’s regime have their effect as well. Many of the films tend to focus on defiant outsiders who resist the seductions of mainstream Spain. In these movies, Catalans forego Madrid to rough it in harsh mountains and rugged valleys, or to fight among themselves in the ancient streets of Barcelona.

Bizarre can’t begin to describe Life in the Shadows (Vida en sombras, 1948), a sort of combined history of Barcelona and cinema as told by Ed Wood. Directed by Lorenzo Llobet Gracia, it follows the preternaturally thin Carlos Duran, whose childhood obsession with photography leads him to become a newsreel photographer, film critic, and director of short and eventually feature films. Duran is a bona fide geek who would rather discuss microphones and Agfacolor with his friend Luis (soon to be his lead actor) than date or even eat. Taken on the film’s terms, Duran’s inevitable success, and Gracia’s sunnily optimistic view of how movies are financed, written and shot, have a certain naive charm. But seen against the backdrop of Popular Front skirmishes that claim Duran’s wife, this Neverland version of cinema can seem absurdly disconnected. Watching Duran adjust the position of corpses while photographing street fighting raises questions director Gracia had no intention of answering. Actor Fernando Fernán Gómez’s slight resemblance to Laurence Olivier becomes a major plot factor when Duran finds himself creatively blocked in an apartment across the street from a theater showing Rebecca. It’s just the spur he needs to decide to make a feature of his own life, conveniently with the same sets Gracia used earlier in the film.

The series includes one film from the 1950s, Post Box 1001 (Apartado de Correos 1001), but it wasn’t until the 1960s that Barcelona filmmakers gained serious momentum. Included here are pivotal works like Fata Morgana (1965-67) and Dante Is Not Simply Harsh (Dante no es únicamente severo, 1967), self-indulgent experimental pieces that borrow the stylistic tics but little of the intellectual depth of the French New Wave.

Franco’s death in 1975 set Catalan filmmakers free. Director Ventura Pons explored this new liberty in his documentary Ocaña, an Intermittent Portrait (Ocaña, retrat intermitent, 1978). He is also represented by Anita Takes a Chance (Anita no perd el tren, 2001), a bland romantic comedy that proves, perhaps inadvertently, that filmgoers in Catalunya have the same appetite for escapism that everyone else does. In fact, it’s gratifying to realize that Catalan cinema has its full share of horror films, comedies, and romances, minus only Hollywood’s obsession with special effects.

Take, for example, Tapas (2005), one of Spain’s big hits last summer. Using a large cast and a rambling script made up of three interlocking stories, co-directors José Corbacho and Juan Cruz tackle older-woman/younger-man sex, the assisted suicide of an elderly rascal with lung cancer, and racial discrimination against a Chinese chef and amateur martial artist. The film’s stridently buoyant style is redeemed somewhat by dedicated acting, but nothing can rescue the script’s lazy moralizing.

Narrated by a young child, The Cherry Tree (L’arbre de les cireres, 1998) takes a quiet, deliberate look at an isolated farming valley. Apart from striking landscapes, lovingly captured in stately pans that punctuate the scenes, life here is much like life anywhere else. Marti, the local doctor, is leaving his long-time lover Roser; Andreu, his young replacement, is running away from an unspecified problem in the city. While they adjust to their new lives, a farmer pursues Roser, a teen falls for a carny at the local fair, and an ailing grandmother waits for her daughter to return from the circus. Death brings the characters together to ruminate over the valley’s pull on them. What distinguishes director Marc Recha’s vision is his ability to portray genuine characters without judging them. On the other hand, The Cherry Tree too often has nothing to say, but instead lingers lovingly over spring showers, fog-encased mountain peaks, brightly colored cottages leaning over crooked alleys, and half-forgotten songs crooned in dark taverns.

Los Tarantos (1963) may be the echt Barcelona film, a contemporary Romeo and Juliet with a half-dozen flamenco interludes. A proud, defiant Carmen Amaya stars as the widowed mother of Rafael Tarantos, whose star-crossed love for Juana Zaronga will lead to tragedy. Shot in the streets of Barcelona and in the hilltop shanties overlooking the town, the film has echoes of everything from West Side Story to La Strada. What it doesn’t have is much of a plot, apart from the requisite clinches and swordfights (done here with switchblades). The dances, choreographed by Amaya, unfold with a striking energy and immediacy, even though they’re often shot in close-up so we can’t see the dancers’ feet. The hard-edged Amaya is a force of nature, her hands in constant motion, her staccato taps silencing onlookers. This was her last film, and it’s important not just for the chance to see her perform, but also as a record of how she approached flamenco. She choreographs her dancers so that they are all undulating hips, their hands held aloft and quivering like insect antennae. The dances are battles, even when they are meant to seduce, and the dancers perform for themselves, indifferent to the audience around them.