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The following in an edited transcript of part 2 of a Q & A session I had with a young actor I am working with who was interested in my Integral Approach to acting:

Question: From past experiences with different actors on film, I get worried that I’m not getting the give and take that I deserve from them, that will help us be the best that we can be in that moment..? If I’m stuck with someone as a scene partner who isn’t giving their all, how can I get them to help me develop my character, as well as theirs in the manner they should?

Answer: From my perspective, worrying about what the other actor is or isn’t giving/doing/etc. is not your job as an actor. If you are bringing your best, deeply rooted in your character, your presence, energy, and beingness will lift every other actor to a higher level. I cannot count the number of times I have heard stories from actors how being in a scene with a great actor elevated their own performance beyond anything they could imagine. There is a term called “social contagion” which refers to the contagious nature of higher levels of presence and beingness in relation to human interaction. Your job is to be the character as deeply and fully as possible and interact with the other actors as other character-beings, no matter how flawed their beingness is.

Question: As an actor such as myself, what do you think develops first in becoming a character; The Physical or Mental or Emotional, etc?

Answer: This varies from acting school to acting school, and from actor to actor. The key to an Integral approach is to recognize that all four dimensions (physical/behavioral, experiential/intentional, relational/cultural, and environmental/sociological) co-arise. You can use any dimension as your entry point as long as you recognize and move into a place where all four dimensions co-exist simultaneously.

The following in an edited transcript of a Q & A session I had with a young actor I am working with who was interested in my Integral Approach to acting:

Question: What’s the best way to know one’s self as an actor?

Answer: That is a big and tricky question; one that every acting theorist, coach, etc. would answer a little differently depending on their approach, etc. Since human beings have varied ways of perceiving, what is the “best” way for one actor, may not be the best way for another actor. That said, my own humble opinion is that knowing yourself as a person is key; that is, becoming conscious of the many dimensions of your own being, gives you a strong foundation from which to study the dimensions of your characters’ being. Knowing your self and knowing the self of the character gives you powerful reference points of where you are at and where you need to go to become the character. For example, if you know how you perceive the world, how you relate to others, how your environment has and is impacting you, etc., and if you know these same aspects of your character, you will be able to develop a felt-sense of the difference between these two realms of beingness.

Question: Now I’ve heard of dimension before, but exactly does that mean?

Answer: As with your previous question, the issue of what dimensions we are talking about varies depending on what acting theory we are using. In my experience and research I have found that no matter what these different approaches call these dimensions or how many divisions they make, in essence they are all talking about the same basic realms. The approach I use is based on Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, which is a metatheory that attempts to integrate all human knowledge, and according to this approach we can say that we as human beings have and exist within four main dimension-perspectives: 1. Intentional/Experiential: Our thoughts, feelings, awareness, consciousness, intentions, sense of self or “I”-ness – this includes our multiple lines of development (Cognitive, moral, emotional intelligence, creative abilities, etc.); 2. Behavioral/Physiological: Our bodies, actions, the objects and other bodies we interact with – this includes our physical limitations and gifts; 3. Relational/Cultural: Our cultural worldviews and identity, how we relate to others, or our way of being in relationships or our “WE”-ness; 4. Environmental/Sociological/Systemic: The ecological, political, economic, technological systems that we were born into, grown up in and now operate in and how they have and continue to shape us. Here is a chart from my journal article on Integral Cinema that summarizes these dimensions in relation to a character:

For more on these dimensions and the Integral approach, see my Integral Cinema Studio Series at IntegralLife.com: The Holonic Lens; The Quadratic Lens; and The Developmental Lens.

Question: In your Integral Cinema Studio article on the Holonic Lens you state: “Cinematic holons also have positive, neutral, or negative charges, much like atomic particles. At the level of text, an example of positive and negative charges can be illustrated by the energetic difference between moments of affinity and conflict between characters.” Can you please clarify negative, neutral, or positive; in what aspect; for a film maker or a character?

Answer: Holons are a useful perceptual lens for all aspects of cinema (and life), recognizing that every moment, every experience is a whole in and of itself, and at the same time all the past moments and experiences in your life (or the life of your character) are part of that whole moment/experience as well (i.e., everything that happened to you is part of the whole of who you are right now)…and this whole NOW moment/experience you are having will become a part of you as you move forward into other whole moments/experiences. When we are talking in terms of “charges” connected to these whole/part moments/experiences, as related to a character: Your character can be having a negative (i.e., fear, hate, anger), neutral (i.e., indifference, detachment), or positive (i.e., love, joy, wonder) emotional experience in any given moment. This moment is experienced as a whole unto itself, yet under the surface, deep within the characters unconscious, all the other moments in their lives that resonate with this moment help to color their experience in the present (i.e., in an onscreen moment your character may be feeling love for another character, while at the same time every other experience of love in their life is swirling inside them under the surface…so for example, if your character has had bad love experiences in the past, their present moment of love may bring up a tiny quiver of fear inside them. This fear may not be easily seen on the surface, but a great actor can feel this and energetically project this undercurrent to the audience). This performance moment then becomes a positively charged whole moment with a subtextual negative charge as a part of it…a holon…a whole/part.

The term integral cinema was first used by French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac in the 1920s. Dulac employed this term to describe cinema that utilized the natural inherent language of the cinema to evoke the interior life normally hidden beneath the exterior life of the objective world (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996). This form of cinema was also called pur cinema or visual music, because of the contention by its adherents that the language of the cinema is a language all its own, more related to music or poetics, than to literature or drama. In order to liberate the cinematic image from literary or dramatic expression, “…Dulac sought to create for the spectator a ‘cinegraphic sensation’ that could be achieved through the contemplation of pure forms in movement—the melodic arrangement of luminous reflections, the rhythmic ordering of successive shots” (Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, pp. 69-70).

While Dulac’s theoretical writings and public discourses on integral cinema mostly focus on this definition, her films reveal two distinct types of cinematic approaches. Whereas some of her films did seek to explore pure visual music approaches of using cinematic imagery, movement, and rhythm to reveal the interior life, films like her 1928 classic, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), reveal the raw beginnings of a more comprehensive or “integral” approach that attempts to use the inherent language of the cinema to capture and express the interior and exterior lives of both the individual and the collective. Dulac hints at this approach when she writes, “It isn’t enough to simply capture reality in order to express it in its totality; something else is necessary in order to respect it entirely, to surround it in its atmosphere, and to make its moral meaning perceptible…” (Dulac, as cited in Flitterman-Lewis, 1996, p. 49).

This more comprehensive approach hauntingly captures some of the constructs of Jean Gebser’s integral worldview (1985) and Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory (1995) while predating both by 21 and 67 years, respectively. These Integral constructs, as elementarily expressed in Dulac’s La Coquille et le Clergyman, include rudimentary cinematic representations of Gebser’s aperspectival structures of the concretion of time and interiority, and Wilber’s Integral framework of multiple dimension-perspectives with evolving levels of depth and complexity. More recent examples of these types of cinematic structures include: The concretion of time in films like Groundhog Day (1993), where concrete shifts in time affect objective and subjective realities; the concretion of interiority in films like The Matrix (1999), where individual and collective subjective realities are given concrete forms;  and multiple dimension-perspectives of evolving depth and complexity in films like Inception (2010), where the characters move through different dimensions of reality as they evolve toward deeper levels of understanding and being.

While Dulac’s integral cinema movement was a significant contribution to the evolution of the cinema in many ways, it was also short-lived due to several factors. In 1928, the year that Dulac made La Coquille et le Clergyman in France, Hollywood released the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (1927), and ushered in the sound film era. For many film theorists and historians, the introduction of sound marked the downfall of the artistic trailblazing of the silent film era as cinematic artists attempted to adjust and adapt to the new technological advancement, and audiences became enthralled by the heightened sense of reality of the talking picture (Andrew, 1976). The following year Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí made Un Chien Andalou (1929), which took the avant-garde cinema world by storm and established a precursor of postmodern relativism and meaning deconstruction as the center of gravity for the artistic worldview of experimental cinema, overshadowing Dulac’s more integral vision (Ebert, 2000; Short, 2008).

Finally, since Dulac operated from an unconscious expression of a worldview that had yet to be named or theoretically mapped, her integral vision ultimately fell dormant. Wilber notes that some kind of prescient emergence of integral consciousness appeared sporadically throughout Western civilization in the early to mid-20th century. Examples of this emergence include Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga (1921/1990), Jacques Maritain’s Integral Humanism (1996), and Vladimir Soloviev’s Integral Christianity (Kostalevsky, 1997). Wilber also notes that these integral visions, along with Dulac’s, were short-lived because they were initial emergences not supported in all four fundamental domains of experiential, material, cultural, and social realities (Wilber, personal communication, July 20, 2010).

Beginning in the mid-1990s, concurrent with the dissemination of Wilber’s Integral Theory, there has been a growing movement of individuals and groups who have been applying integral principles to their personal and professional lives. In the domain of the cinematic arts, scholar-practitioners have explored the application of Integral Theory to cinematic story creation, acting, and video game design (Melody, 2008; Ornst, 2008; Silbiger, 2010). In addition, several cinematic artists have begun to explore and engage in dialogue about Integral Theory in relation to both their personal and professional lives (Aronofsky & Davis, 2006; Brill & Wilber, 2006; Crichton & Wilber, 2004; Konietzko & Davis, 2007; Ormond & Wilber, 2004; Stone & Wilber, 2007; Wachowski & Wilber, 2004). Wilber’s Integral Theory was also an inspiration to filmmakers Larry and Andy Wachowski (Wachowski & Wilber, 2004) in the development of The Matrix (1999), The Matrix Reloaded (2003), and The Matrix Revolutions (2003). The Wachowski brothers also invited Wilber to record a commentary on the films for The Ultimate Matrix Collection (2004), a complete DVD set of the films.

Nearly three quarters of a century after Dulac’s work, many people within the integral and cinematic arts communities are raising the same question that Dulac asked many years ago: “What is Integral Cinema?”

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This material is an adapted excerpt from: Kaplan, M. A. (2010). Toward an integral cinema: The application of integral theory to cinematic media theory and practice. Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 5(4), 112-138. Copyright © 2010 by Integral Institute. The complete article is available for download at Integral+Life.com.

Germaine Dulac’s La coquille et le clergyman is available for viewing online in its entirety at: http://www.ubu.com/film/dulac_coquille.html

ABSTRACT: Germaine Dulac’s “integral cinema movement” of the 1920s and her integral cinematic work, La Coquille et le Clergyman (1928), are analyzed from a historical and theoretical perspective. Results suggest an early introduction of integral consciousness into cinematic media that corresponds to and predates the integral theories of both Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber. Defining characteristics of what may constitute an integral cinematic work are mapped out and developed into a set of evaluation criteria using the works of Dulac, Gebser, and Wilber. A test of these evaluation criteria with the viewing of several motion pictures is summarized; the results suggest that several past and recent films demonstrate qualities that could be said to constitute an integral cinematic work. A preliminary typology of forms of integral cinematic creation, and the potential benefits and challenges for the application of Integral Theory to cinematic theory and practice are presented and discussed.

Published in The Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 2010, Volume 5, Number 4, Pages 112-138.