Fourteen Actors Acting is one of those creative projects we love featuring on theMET. Dramatic yet beautiful, it was directed by Solve Sundsbo of Norway, a fashion photographer whose incredible work we’ve shown many times before (see here, here and here). Back in December 2010, Sunsbo made 14 short videos as well as beautiful black-and-white portraits for the article “The Scene Makers: Actors Who Defined Cinema in 2010” in the Hollywood Issue of The New York Times Magazine.
Just recently, this series, which is now called Fifteen Actors Acting, won a Gold Cube for photography at the Art Directors Club global awards. (The ADC is the premier organization for creatives in integrated media and the first global creative collective of its kind.)
If you haven’t seen these one minute videos, make sure you do because they’re quite stunning. (I’m officially scared of Matt Damon now.) Or, if you just want to appreciate the gorgeous photography, read the short intro and then see all 15 photos.
New York Times A.O. Scott said: “It goes without saying that acting is a matter of discipline and craft, and that what the best performers do is always subject to analysis, criticism and argument. They say their lines, hit their marks, suffer through retakes and rehearsals, and they trust that an artisanal collaboration with writers, technicians, directors and other actors will somehow yield a work of art. But acting is also an art by itself: alchemical, mysterious, at times almost magical. A person transforms into someone else — a dancer, a Texas Ranger, a wife exiled from her native country, a young vampire, a former militant, a mogul in old age — and in the process reveals something basic and essential that is his or hers alone. In the past, we have invited the year’s great performers to be themselves for the camera and, on video, to talk about what they do.
“This year, we asked them to do it: to show us — in a few gestures and with a few props but without dialogue or story — what acting is. And here they are, striking some of the classic attitudes of cinema, turning their bodies and faces into instruments of pure, deep and enigmatic emotion. You will, of course, recognize them immediately and admire their grace, daring and skill. But you also may be startled to see how thoroughly themselves they are in the midst of pretending otherwise.”
via [The Inspiration Room]