How to Apply Stanislavski's Method Acting to Your Reading (and on the Ethics of Reading) (Patreon)

Konstantin Stanislavski's System, or "Method Acting", is one of the most profoundly influential aesthetic/intellectual movements of the twentieth-century.

The System ranks up there with Freud's unconscious and Einstein's theory of relativity for just how far its tendrils of influence reach.

Look to any great actor of the Western tradition in the last hundred years - Marlon Brando, Daniel Day Lewis, Christian Bale - and they are almost certainly using some variation or degree of method acting. 

But Stanislavski makes for riveting reading even for those of us not pursuing the art of acting. His Building A Character, in particular, goes through a number of precepts that can help our imaginations bring these Great Books to life.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 Konstantin Stanislavski's books 
• 1:00 we are actor and director of our lives 
• 1:30 reading as collaboration with writer 
• 5:00 accessing the inner through the outer (Tolstoy's art) 
• 6:00 how Proust visualises characters  
• 7:00 how reading Milton's Paradise Lost will help you see 
• 10:00 Levin's reading of Plato's Symposium 
• 13:00 love art in yourself, and not yourself in art 
• 15:35 unless art can ennoble you, flee from it 
• 19:00 never come to the theatre with mud on your shoes 
• 24:00 ritualise your reading  
• 26:30 let your imagination and subconscious play  
• 30:30 expand yourself

Happy reading!