anti-theatricality at the movies

"They're fiction, but you know you're not being lied to"

- Gena Rowlands on the films of husband John Cassavetes

The whole of Opening Night seems to roil around a set of deeply conflicted feelings vis-a-vis the histrionic arts, actors and acting, how to achieve reality onstage (the actress played by Rowlands is tormented, driven almost mad, by the feeling that the script, characterisation, etc is false.. and ultimately she is compelled to sabotage the whole thing in order to open up the possibility of some kind of reality, an Event). 

It becomes a bit like an American theatre version of Jim Morrison's latterday concerts with the Doors

^^^^^^^^^^^

Struck by the fact that Fassbinder started out leading a troupe of actors called Anti-Theater. 

Not seen many of his films but they do seem to turn around the collision between stageyness (all the Douglas Sirk melodrama stuff) and the compulsive irruption, within the artifice, of the real, the ugly, the profane, the abject, the scatological, the grotesque

Not unlike the drag aesthetic as it fed into Theater of the Ridiculous, or John Waters early movies - glamour and grossness shoved together.... glittering stylized exteriors stained and soiled by the interior-body muck of secretions and urges