In actuality, it turns into a cinematic valentine to the physical and per-formative body of Daniel Day-Lewis.

But Sheridan opts for popular, saccharine appeal by romanticizing the autobiography.

Wisely, Sheridan abandons the screenplay’s gimmicky visual of a lone foot appearing on the screen to type the notice of their marriage and Christy’s death in 1981.

marvel of self-transformation, Day-Lewis’ interpretation of the USA’s sixteenth president requires the total subjuga-tion of his own persona—indeed, his whole person—to the demands of the character. His body acts as a tabula rasa upon which the healing scripts of nationhood following the conflagration of the Civil War and slavery are written.

Promoting the image of the wondrous—now dangerous—supercrip, the film significantly isolates Christy from the larger disabled community in Dublin, thus perpetuating a myth of his individual exceptionalism.

Sheridan designs the scene to show off Day-Lewis’ virtuosic outrage.

Indeed, Day-Lewis’ theatrical excesses consolidate the gaze upon his singularity, deflecting attention away from the compli-cated social and cultural issues underwriting the scene.

Sheridan concentrates on Christy’s love life

Or, to put it bluntly, do we watch Day-Lewis to see if he gets cerebral palsy “right”?

We watch in awe as Day- Lewis deftly manipulates paintbrushes with his left foot.

I didn’t want to be remarkable—I only wanted to be ordinary, like everyone else. Just because I did with my left foot what others did with their hands people said it was a wonderful thing. ... I used my foot simply because I couldn’t use my hands, but it did not make me feel proud or unique. In fact I never used my left foot in the presence of anybody I didn’t know very well, because it made me feel rather silly and awkward. I always felt like a performing monkey or seal

hen help finally arrives, the neighbors mistakenly blame Christy for his mother’s accident, labeling him an “awful cross” she has to bear.

Rather, it relies upon objectification and public dis-play to ratify Christy’s subjectivity

Filtered through Mary’s imagination, the film can no longer purport to be Christy’s auto-biography

He remains hidden from view until it is time for him to be seen, for his turn to “go public.”

Audiences watch the disabled subject on screen, yet leave the theater relieved that that reality is not theirs.

animal-like quality as Christy’s

Elevating the spectacle of Day- Lewis’ contorted, method-schooled acting over substance, Sheridan minimizes Brown’s literary significance, his prominence as a national writer.

Supercrip provides a way for non-disabled folks to be “inspired” by persons with disabilities without actually questioning—or making changes to—how persons with disabilities are treated in society.

it exploits the trope of the “supercrip.”

voyeuristic fixation with able-bodied actors performing physical distress and limitation.

That one letter, scrawled on the floor with a broken bit of yellow chalk gripped between my toes, was my road to a new world, my key to mental freedom.

The young writer finds his authorial voice, however, in the autobiography, My Left Foot, which was published in 1954 when he was just eighteen years old. Teaching himself to write with his left foot, Brown chronicles the family’s entrenched poverty, his father’s alcoholic rages, and his mother’s ram-pant fecundity: in all, his mother experienced twenty-two pregnancies, of which thirteen children survived.

His back molars crunched off each other and the sound was jarring and eerie. ... I waited for the words to follow and they did, spat out like weap-ons.

My Left Foot

A dramatic empathiser imbues the character with a reality that she, theauthor and the director collaborate to construct.

Moral contentseeps into drama classes through the crevices created by the hidden curriculum.Decisions about which plays, which movies and which characters to study and portraycan direct student attention to moral content.

I amreminded of the exemplary work that Ralph Fiennes did as the sadisticconcentration camp ofŽ cer in Schindler’s List.

Neither theactor nor the Caring empathiser becomes subject to some sort of hallucination andlose consciousness of the surrounding realit

Inherent in the experience of this split is an actor’s understanding that she is notreally the character

Her conscious sense of self splits.

or example, a Ž lm actor needsto hit her “mark”—a spot on the set where the camera waits to Ž lm the shot. Whilejuggling the numerous multilayered demands of portraying her character she must,on a particular word or phrase, get herself to that “mark”.

imagination

An actor substitutes something from her own life into theplay which arouses an emotional response similar to that of the character’s [9]

Never allow yourself externally to portrayanything that you have not inwardly experienced”

Thus, actorstrain to notice, work from and adjust to the behaviour of other people.

Method acting trains an actor to re ectupon absent, external and abstract forces impacting the characte

he examines the climate ofthe time and place; the prevalent ideas and values she uncovers comprise a framethrough which the actions and behaviour of the character are analysed.

Plays and screenplays usually differ fromnovels in that they rarely reveal explicitly the inner thoughts and workings of thecharacters that inhabit their worlds

n actor must shift out of her own perspective and into thecharacter’s (using her own emotional life) to secure an understanding of the innerlife of the character.

If she does, she risks being unable to care for herself and, by extension,the other.

It is critical to note that the one-caring does not “lose” herself in this process.

Although several strains of Method acting exist, they allpossess in common the belief that an actor begins his or her work by discovering andmaking the inner, emotional and psychological life of a character real. The externalembodiment, the character’s physical life, naturally follows [3].

via the training andexercising of the type of empathy required to create and portray believable dramaticcharacters

Levy writes that we can educate moralchildren by

The dramatic art of acting can provide one such method.

As for the curriculum, theorists almostexclusively advocate exploring the characters and worlds in literature and biographyto nurture empathic capacities

It’s funny watching Milos Forman — who directed “Man on the Moon” — refer to Mr. Carrey as Andy, but when Mr. Carrey turns into Tony Clifton something more sinister and menacing comes through.

And, every so often, Kaufman’s notorious alter ego Tony Clifton, an obnoxious lounge lizard, muscles in to upend the entire thing.

smartly set his focus on Mr. Carrey.

Is Mr. Carrey smiling at his words or his memories (or at us)?

hardly get at the strangeness that materialized (and lingers).

Jim only came to work two days during the filming.

Mr. Carrey found the character in big and little ways: in Kaufman’s many voices, his fixed stare and in the walks, stances and gestures he used to play characters or when he was just being (or playing) Andy.

fantastically entertaining account of its two strange, twinned and messy geniuses.

It’s an amusing pileup that in its excess hints at the rich weirdness that emerged when Mr. Carrey nearly went off the rails playing Kaufman in the biopic “Man on the Moon.”

Lawler reminds them repeatedly that, in real life, Kaufman was a kind man whom he considered a friend.

But then Carrey goes so far as to romanticize Kaufman’s death from lung cancer as some sort of grand, graceful exit.

Kaufman’s real-life family members.

Given recent stories of despicable behavior by the likes of Jared Leto, it’s difficult to see this as anything other than further proof that, more often than not, method acting just means being a dick.

While Carrey talks unselfconsciously about his career and his ambition, Smith uses clips from his movies, from The Mask to The Truman Show to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, to create, in essence, a character arc.

It’s like when someone says that literally anything other than jazz is “like jazz.”

fully understand him

perspective and context

And, to the misfortune of the viewer, Carrey is the only person interviewed in the present day, which accounts for the movie quickly disappearing up its own ass and staying there.

long-windedly psuedo-philosophical

He’s talking about his preparations to play Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman’s Man on the Moon and, despite the fact that both Carrey and Kaufman are known for making people laugh, he’s not trying to be funny with that ridiculous statement. That’s the problem with Jim & Andy.

I stood and looked at them for a while, just paying attention while I leaned on my cart—before I remembered where I was and realized that I was standing in someone's way.

gleaming.

because the world is more complicated than we are.

It's a formulation of the theory that the poem has been moving toward all along: that our glory is not our individuality (much as we long for the romantic self and its private golden heights) but our commonness.

a little comedy can also help to hold terrific anxiety at bay

shimmers on.

which is composed of us, yes, but also goes on without us.

everything I saw—was informed by that loss, by the overpowering emotional force of it

though it was clear there was more to be done.

a meditative pacing

A poem is always a made version of experience.

here were false starts, wrong turnings that I wound up throwing out when they didn't seem to lead anywhere.

A direction is coming clear, and it bears within it the energy that the image contained for me in the first pace. Now, I think, we're getting down to it.

toward the focus my poem would take

There's something else, some gravity or charge to this image that makes me need to investigate it.

metaphor

I know that what I can see is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg

Sometimes it seems to me as if metaphor were the advance guard of the mind; something in us reaches out, into the landscape in front of us, looking for the right vessel, the right vehicle, for whatever will serve.

For a striking few seconds, it seems all too real.

endering authentic experience.

the violent gyrationsof the woman’s hips become fluid wave-like motions, her intakes of breath arenow drawn out, lingering and unrushed in the air

they too prioritize story-telling over perfect representation.

he inevitably unsuccessful attempt to render a moment exact-ly as it was experienced

of an event; it is impos-sible for an experience to be rendered authentically through artifacts and doc-uments, by cold and uncolored means that do not tap deeply enough intofeeling (101)

ut also necessary to reach audiences “atother points of the spectrum of communication.”

“enters”

Sischy believes Salgado’s art fails to actively engage theviewer in the human struggle it seeks to represent

Through his physical responses to his subject, Mantle’s presence lieswithinthe scene rather than behindit.

The Blair Witch Projectand Cloverfield

The woman’s violent movements and emaciated body are ren-dered ever starker as the frame shakes imperfectly, uncontrolled, the camera’smovements almost a reaction to those within the scene.

When the film screened at the Toronto International FilmFestival in 2009, it was reported that an audience member vomited in the the-atre, while others walked out of the screening (McGinn)

His muscular body contrasts with the limp, sickly hands thatsprout from the tree like malignant growths. Still, the couple seems not tonotice or seems incapable of noticing this apparition—nor do they really care.Actually, they look turned on.

This scene is from Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist,

her intakes of breath are now drawnout, lingering and unrushed in the air.

throaty gasps imply both a struggle for air and an outcryof passion.

Having escaped her husband after herefuses to continue sexual intercourse, the woman retreats to satisfy her needshere, in the forest, a place that—as she professes to him earlier—harbors hergreatest fears

Anaked figure masturbates amid the gnarled roots of a tree

It is a gaze—a glimmer—into the root of under-standing.

“war criminal”

ust as you must become vulnerable to violenceto explore the effects of an abusive relationship.

ermeer, in his creative process and his creations,advocates for empathy

worth of the individual i

both the painter of the subject and thesubject itself

Has the girl just turned toward us oris she just about to turn away

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Teeming with the contradictionsthat make her real, she demands to be looked at much in the way deKooning’s Woman Idoes three hundred years later.

issolve into their subjects.

ame.

In writing Black and White, I aspired to a truthful homage to my father. Itook lines of dialogue verbatim from arguments I witnessed between him andmy grandmother.

Looking at Woman I,I am reminded of a time when I attempted to trans-mit subject onto canvas

(123)

Come hither

he lusciously repulses.