Author Archive for peter

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Documenta IX

Published by peter on 2011-01-03 in Art and Minimalism. 0 Comments

The first documenta I attended was documenta IX, in 1992.  Only two artworks there moved me:  a minimalist piece by Jean-Pierre Bertrand, and a work of conceptual tropicalia by Cildo Meireles.

Jean-Pierre Bertrand (1937-2016, France) presented a wide rectangle hung on the wall, divided into 10  narrow vertical panels.  Each panel was filled with organic materials mixed together and cooked  (honey, fruit juice, cooking-salt solution) to make a smooth paste, which he then glazed.  The panels were of two different colours:  reading from the left, panels 1 and 9 were red, the others off-white.  They shone quietly on the wall, their simplicity and timeless calm an antidote to the breathless featurism of the rest of documenta,  a thousand artworks each shouting “Me! Me! Look at Me!”.

A later work by Bertrand, Bright yellow green no. 1,  was acquired by the Art Gallery of NSW, described here. As with many post-war artists and composers, his art is profoundly concerned with the materiality of the medium he uses, the actual and specific physical attributes of the oils and paints, and the ways in which these attributes influence the visual image they are part of.    This concern by visual artists goes back at least to Turner.

Cildo Meireles (1948-, Brazil) fitted a square room with 2000 loudly ticking clocks on the walls, all set to different times, and hung 7600 yellow folding tape measures from the ceiling.  To walk through the room, one had to push through the tapes, unable to see more than a step or two in front at any time.  Nothing so evoked a tropical jungle as this installation:  unable to see much, having to push vines out of the way, and assaulted by an insect cacophony.

documenta 13 will be held in 2012, details here.

Dialogs over actions

Published by peter on 2010-12-24 in Argumentation, Computer Science, Computing-as-interaction, Decision theory and Philosophy of Language. 0 Comments

In the post below, I mentioned the challenge for knowledge engineers of representing know-how, a task which may require explicit representation of actions, and sometimes also of utterances over actions.  The know-how involved in steering a large sailing ship with its diverse crew surely includes the knowledge of who to ask (or to command) to do what, when, and how to respond when these requests (or commands) are ignored, or fail to be executed successfully or timeously.
One might imagine epistemology – the philosophy of knowledge – would be of help here.  Philosophers, however, have been seduced since Aristotle with propositions (factual statements about the world having truth values), largely ignoring actions, and their representation.   Philosophers of language have also mostly focused on speech acts – utterances which act to change the world – rather than on utterances about actions themselves.  Even among speech act theorists the obsession with propositions is strong, with attempts to analyze utterances which are demonstrably not propositions (eg, commands) by means of implicit assertive statements – propositions  asserting something about the world, where “the world” is extended to include internal mental states and intangible social relations between people – which these utterances allegedly imply.  With only a few exceptions (Thomas Reid 1788, Adolf Reinach 1913, Juergen Habermas 1981, Charles Hamblin 1987), philosophers of language have mostly ignored utterances  about actions.
Consider the following two statements:

I promise you to wash the car.
I command you to wash the car.

The two statements have almost identical English syntax.   Yet their meanings, and the intentions of their speakers, are very distinct.  For a start, the action of washing the car would be done by different people – the speaker and the hearer, respectively (assuming for the moment that the command is validly issued, and accepted).  Similarly, the power to retract or revoke the action of washing the car rests with different people – with the hearer (as the recipient of the promise) and the speaker (as the commander), respectively.
Linguists generally use “semantics” to refer to the real-world referants of syntactically-correct expressions, while “pragmatics” refers to other aspects of the meaning and use of an expression not related to their relationship (or not) to things in the world, such as the speaker’s intentions.  For neither of these two expressions does it make sense to speak of  their truth value:  a promise may be questioned as to its sincerity, or its feasibility, or its appropriateness, etc, but not its truth or falsity;  likewise, a command  may be questioned as to its legal validity, or its feasibility, or its morality, etc, but also not its truth or falsity.
For utterances about actions, such as promises, requests, entreaties and commands, truth-value semantics makes no sense.  Instead, we generally need to consider two pragmatic aspects.  The first is uptake, the acceptance of the utterance by the hearer (an aspect first identified by Reid and by Reinach), an acceptance which generally creates a social commitment to execute the action described in the utterance by one or other party to the conversation (speaker or hearer).    Once uptaken, a second pragmatic aspect comes into play:  the power to revoke or retract the social commitment to execute the action.  This revocation power does not necessarily lie with the original speaker; only the recipient of a promise may cancel it, for example, and not the original promiser.  The revocation power also does not necessarily lie with the uptaker, as commands readily indicate.
Why would a computer scientist be interested in such humanistic arcana?  The more tasks we delegate to intelligent machines, the more they need to co-ordinate actions with others of like kind.  Such co-ordination requires conversations comprising utterances over actions, and, for success, these require agreed syntax, semantics and pragmatics.  To give just one example:  the use of intelligent devices by soldiers have made the modern battlefield a place of overwhelming information collection, analysis and communication.  Lots of this communication can be done by intelligent software agents, which is why the US military, inter alia, sponsors research applying the philosophy of language and the  philosophy of argumentation to machine communications.
Meanwhile, the philistine British Government intends to cease funding tertiary education in the arts and the humanities.   Even utilitarians should object to this.
References:
Juergen  Habermas [1984/1981]:   The Theory of Communicative Action:  Volume 1:  Reason and the Rationalization of Society.  London, UK:  Heinemann.   (Translation by T. McCarthy of:  Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band I,  Handlungsrationalitat und gesellschaftliche Rationalisierung. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany, 1981.)
Charles  L. Hamblin [1987]:  Imperatives. Oxford, UK:  Basil Blackwell.
P. McBurney and S. Parsons [2007]: Retraction and revocation in agent deliberation dialogs. Argumentation, 21 (3): 269-289.

Adolph Reinach [1913]:  Die apriorischen Grundlagen des bürgerlichen Rechtes.  Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, 1: 685-847.

On meaning

Published by peter on 2010-12-22 in Religion. 0 Comments

Over at Normblog, Norm returns to his argument against religion as a human activity that ultimately implies beliefs in the form of propositions.  I have written against this view before – here, and here, and here.  In his latest post, I think Norm makes two errors of reasoning common to western philosophy these last three centuries or so – that of conflating knowledge in general with a specific form of knowledge, namely know-what (knowledge of facts about the world), and that of conflating know-what with a particular representation of it in the form of propositions (statements about the world with truth values).
We can know how to tie our own shoe-laces, for example, and, as knowledge engineers in computer science have learnt these last 50 years, such know-how is not the same as know-what, and is also often very difficult to represent as propositions about the world.  Without explicit representation of the actions, one is forced to associate each action with the propositions that are true before its execution, and those true afterwards, ie, two states, or collections of propositions.  But doing so does not enable us to distinguish different actions having the same pre- and post-states, for example, two different procedures for tying the same shoelace knot.  One is therefore soon forced to explicitly represent actions.  But what exactly are these things, these representations of actions?  They are not statements with truth values; indeed, they are not even statements. And this is just for plain old actions, not even utterances about actions, such as promises and requests and commands, all of which may comprise part of a system of know-how (eg, knowledge of how to steer a crewed sailing ship, or knowledge of the process of launching an ICBM).
Even know-what may not be readily amenable to propositional representation, or at least not to propositions understandable by the human subject having the knowledge:  any propositional representation of the knowledge of the hundreds or thousands of scents distinguishable by an expert perfumier, for instance, would likely have to involve descriptions of chemical molecules in a style and formal language way beyond the knowledge or thinking or scent-memory of the perfumier.  The same conclusion is true with even greater force for the knowledge of non-human beings, such as the keen olfactory sense of most dogs or the navigational abilities of homing pigeons;  I’ve yet to meet a dog that understood a proposition, but dogs retain an ability to recall and distinguish scents despite this inability at propositional representation.   I have written before on different forms of knowledge here.  And if you think all knowledge of geography has to be represented as maps, you should see Rory Stewart’s example recounted here.
Norm ends with:

At bottom, the whole intellectual project founders, in my view, on this logical conundrum: if you really do evacuate religion of all its substantive beliefs, it will be left as meaningful as scraping a stick along a wall, or balancing a marble on your head, or pronouncing a slow ‘drooom’ into a mauve cup; and if religion has more significant meaning than that for its adherents, meaning which really matters to them, this must be because of things religion says about the condition of the universe and their place within it.”

Norm’s  understanding of “meaning” seems only to be know-what; a wider view of meaning throws that final “must” into serious question.  The meaning of scraping a stick along a wall may be the pleasant sound this action leads to, or the pleasure is gives your hand as the stick undulates with the surface of the wall, or the pleasure it gives you to have a hand able hold a stick, or the presence of friends and family doing the same action with you, or that doing this enables you to recall past times, when you were younger perhaps, when you enjoyed doing the same thing, or that your ancestors likely did the same as long there have been walls  and you wish to honor them by repeating the action, or the sense of bliss or ecstasy or contentedness or calm that scraping sticks along walls may induce in you.  The meaning of a stick against a wall for you may even be its complete lack of any ostensible meaning, its complete and utter time-wasting lack of utility, especially for us western moderns in a culture obsessed with achievement, success, progress, time, self-improvement, and bildung.
All of the meanings I’ve listed here apply equally well to religious activities and other rituals, both social and personal, such as prayer and meditation and attending church services.  And I find it hard to believe that someone who follows sport with enthusiasm should appear to insist that all human activities should have meanings to their adherents that entail propositions testable by external observers, as if all our actions were subject to some community test of significance of meaning.   Does the thought that cricket really matters to me necessarily occur because of things cricket says about the condition of the universe and my place within it?  This I doubt.  If it’s not true for cricket, why should it be true for religion? If Norm wants to insist on religion satisfying such a test, then this constraint says more about his paucity of understanding of religious practices and ideas than anything it might say about religion itself.

Antikythera

Published by peter on 2010-12-18 in Classics, Computer Science, Computer technology, Computing-as-interaction, History, Mathematics and Prophecy. 0 Comments

An orrery is a machine for predicting the movements of heavenly bodies.   The oldest known orrery is the Antikythera Mechanism, created in Greece around 2100 years ago, and rediscovered in 1901 in a shipwreck near the island of  Antikythera (hence its name).   The high-quality and precision nature of its components would indicate that this device was not unique, since the making of high-quality mechanical components is not trivial, and is not usually achieved with just one attempt (something Charles Babbage found, and which delayed his development of computing machinery immensely).
It took until 2006 and the development of x-ray tomography for a plausible theory of the purpose and operations of the Antikythera Mechanism to be proposed (Freeth et al. 2006).   The machine was said to be a physical examplification of  late Greek theories of cosmology, in particular the idea that the motion of a heavenly body could  be modeled by an epicycle – ie, a body traveling around a circle, which is itself moving around some second circle.  This model provided an explanation for the fact that many heavenly bodies appear to move at different speeds at different times of the year, and sometimes even (appear to) move backwards.
There have been two recent developments:  One is the re-creation of the machine (or, rather, an interpretation of it)  using lego components.
The second has arisen from a more careful examination of the details of the mechanism.  According to Marchant (2010), some people now believe that the mechanism examplifies Babylonian, rather than Greek, cosmology.   Babylonian astronomers modeled the movements of heavenly bodies by assuming each body traveled along just one circle, but at two different speeds:  movement in one period of the year being faster than during the other part of the year.
If this second interpretation of the Antikythera Mechanism is correct, then perhaps it was the mechanism itself (or others like it) which gave late Greek astronomers the idea for an epicycle model.   In support of this view is the fact that, apparently, gearing mechanisms and the epicycle model both appeared around the same time, with gears perhaps a little earlier.   So late Greek cosmology (and perhaps late geometry) may have arisen in response to, or at least alongside, practical developments and physical models.   New ideas in computing typically follow the same trajectory – first they exist in real, human-engineered, systems; then, we develop a formal, mathematical theory of them.   Programmable machines, for instance, were invented in the textile industry in the first decade of the 19th century (eg, the Jacquard Loom), but a mathematical theory of programming did not appear until the 1960s.   Likewise, we have had a fully-functioning, scalable, global network enabling multiple, asynchronous, parallel, sequential and interleaved interactions since Arpanet four decades ago, but we still lack a thorough mathematical theory of interaction.
And what have the Babylonians ever done for us?   Apart from giving us our units for measuring of time (divided into 60) and of angles (into 360 degrees)?
References:
T Freeth, Y Bitsakis, X Moussas, JH Seiradaki, A Tselikas, H Mangou, M Zafeiropoulou, R Hadland, D Bate, A Ramsey, M Allen, A Crawley, P Hockley, T Malzbender, D Gelb,W Ambrisco and MG Edmunds [2006]:  Decoding the ancient Greek astronomical calculator known as the Antikythera Mechanism.  Nature,  444 (30):   587-591.  30 November 2006.
J. Marchant [2010]:  Mechanical inspiration.  Nature, 468:  496-498.  25 November 2010.

Bob's your uncle

Published by peter on 2010-12-17 in Africa and History. 0 Comments

Being a colleague of Robert Mugabe greatly increases your chances of an early death, especially in a car accident.      Here’s a list of people who met unexpected ends while working with Bob (showing the year of their death).  No doubt the car accidents are due to chance.

  • Herbert Chitepo (1975), ZANU leader, killed by car bomb in exile in Lusaka.
  • Josiah Tongogara (1979), ZANLA leader, died in a car accident in Mozambique during return from exile.
  • Charles Tazvishaya (aka Lovemore Mawisa) (1986), personal private secretary to Prime Minister Mugabe, survived a gunshot wound to the head inflicted in the bedroom of his house and then died in Parirenyatwa Hospital, Harare, a fortnight later, after his medical drip was detached from the source medication.
  • Maurice Nyagumbo (1989), Minister for Mines, died from ingesting pesticide.
  • Border Gezi (2001), Minister for Gender, Youth and Employment, died in a car accident.
  • Moven Mahachi (2001), Minister of Defence, died in a car accident.
  • Elliot Manyika (2008), Minister Without Portfolio and National Political Commissar for ZANU-PF, died  in a car accident.
  • Susan Tsvangirai (2009), wife of Morgan Tsvangirai, the new Prime Minister in the Government of National Unity, died in a car accident.
  • General Solomon Mujuru (aka Rex Nhongo) (August 2011), former Commander-in-Chief of the Zimbabwe Armed Forces and husband of Vice President Joice Mujuru, died in a house fire which destroyed his farmhouse near Beatrice.

Concat: The crisis in macroeconomic policy execution

Published by peter on 2010-11-30 in Concats, Economics, Global Economic Crisis and Globalization. 0 Comments

During the Great Depression, as the Bank of England and British banks were attempting to renegotiate the terms of their loans from the USA, the British sent Sir Otto Niemeyer to Australia to prevent Australia doing the same for its loans from Britain.    The injustice and unabashed hypocrisy of this – where you stood on the issue of debt repayment clearly depending on where you sat – always angered me.    Had I been around in 1932, I would have supported New South Wales Premier Jack Lang’s refusal to hand over moneys from the NSW State Government owed to the Australian Commonwealth Government for its payment of interest on NSW foreign debts.
We seem to be in for more hypocrisy and hard times, as the share-owning class, having received bailouts from western taxpayers for their investments in failed and paralyzed banks, now raise a wacka wacka huna kuna against public sector debt.    The plain people of Ireland, for example, will now be paying for the malfeasance and incompetence of their richer compatriots.
Two illuminating posts from Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman on our failed western political system, which seems unable to fix our failed economy, despite us knowing what should be done:

And here is Barry Eichengreen on the Irish bailout:

Some older articles on the crisis:

 
 
 

Art: Bridget Riley at the National Gallery, London

Published by peter on 2010-11-28 in Art and Music. 0 Comments

I saw an exhibition of Bridget Riley’s work in a career retrospective of her work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art some five years ago.  With what great delight her paintings shimmered, danced and cavorted across the canvas before one’s very eyes, while the waters of the sunlit Harbour did the same through the MCA’s windows!    I was reminded of this seeing the current, small exhibition of her work in the Sun-Lit Room at the National Gallery, London.  While “sunlit” is an aspirational term in London this week, her paintings, some of them painted directly onto the walls themselves, still dance before our eyes.  Robert Melville, writing in the New Statesman in 1970, expressed it  best:   “No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley.”
Morton Feldman once said of the paintings of the abstract expressionists that they only perform for you as you leave them.  “Not long ago Guston asked some friends, myself among them, to see his recent work at a warehouse.  The paintings were like sleeping giants, hardly breathing.  As the others were leaving, I turned for a last look, then said to him, “There they are.  They’re up.” They were already engulfing the room.”   (Feldman, p. 100, cited in Bernard, p. 182) Riley’s paintings are up and dancing before you even enter the room!  What pleasure these paintings give, what delight one has just being in their company!
References:
I have posted before about the art of the national treasure who is Ms Riley, here.
Reviews of the NG exhibition here:  Hilary Spurling, Maev Kennedy, and Adrian Searle.    And images from the Exhibition here.
The image above shows two assistants of Bridget Riley painting her work Arcadia 1 directly onto the wall at the National Gallery. Photograph credit: The National Gallery.
Morton Feldman [1965]: Philip Guston:  The last painter.   Art News Annual 1966 (Winter 1965).
Jonathan W. Bernard [2002]:  Feldman’s painters.  pp. 173-215, in:  Steven Johnson (Editor):  The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts. New York, NY, USA:  Routledge.

Your PhD viva: the snake fight

Published by peter on 2010-11-28 in Humour. 0 Comments

Luke Burns at McSweeney’s has written an FAQ to the “Snake Fight” portion of the PhD Thesis Defense:

Q: Do I have to kill the snake?
A: University guidelines state that you have to “defeat” the snake. There are many ways to accomplish this. Lots of students choose to wrestle the snake. Some construct decoys and elaborate traps to confuse and then ensnare the snake. One student brought a flute and played a song to lull the snake to sleep. Then he threw the snake out a window.
Q: Does everyone fight the same snake?
A: No. You will fight one of the many snakes that are kept on campus by the facilities department.
Q: Are the snakes big?
A: We have lots of different snakes. The quality of your work determines which snake you will fight. The better your thesis is, the smaller the snake will be.
Q: Does my thesis adviser pick the snake?
A: No. Your adviser just tells the guy who picks the snakes how good your thesis was.
Q: What does it mean if I get a small snake that is also very strong?
A: Snake-picking is not an exact science. The size of the snake is the main factor. The snake may be very strong, or it may be very weak. It may be of Asian, African, or South American origin. It may constrict its victims and then swallow them whole, or it may use venom to blind and/or paralyze its prey. You shouldn’t read too much into these other characteristics. Although if you get a poisonous snake, it often means that there was a problem with the formatting of your bibliography.
Q: When and where do I fight the snake? Does the school have some kind of pit or arena for snake fights?
A: You fight the snake in the room you have reserved for your defense. The fight generally starts after you have finished answering questions about your thesis. However, the snake will be lurking in the room the whole time and it can strike at any point. If the snake attacks prematurely it’s obviously better to defeat it and get back to the rest of your defense as quickly as possible.
Q: Would someone who wrote a bad thesis and defeated a large snake get the same grade as someone who wrote a good thesis and defeated a small snake?
A: Yes.
Q: So then couldn’t you just fight a snake in lieu of actually writing a thesis?
A: Technically, yes. But in that case the snake would be very big. Very big, indeed.
Q: Could the snake kill me?
A: That almost never happens. But if you’re worried, just make sure that you write a good thesis.
Q: Why do I have to do this?
A: Snake fighting is one of the great traditions of higher education. It may seem somewhat antiquated and silly, like the robes we wear at graduation, but fighting a snake is an important part of the history and culture of every reputable university. Almost everyone with an advanced degree has gone through this process. Notable figures such as John Foster Dulles, Philip Roth, and Doris Kearns Goodwin (to name but a few) have all had to defeat at least one snake in single combat.
Q: This whole snake thing is just a metaphor, right?
A: I assure you, the snakes are very real.

Coupling preferences and decision-processes

Published by peter on 2010-11-28 in Decision theory, Economics and Joint-Action Society. 0 Comments

I have expressed my strong and long-held criticisms of classical decision theory – that based on maximum expected utility (MEU) –  before and again before that.  I want to expand here on one of my criticisms.
One feature of MEU theory is that the preferences of a decision-maker are decoupled from the decision-making process itself.  The MEU process works independently of the preferences of the decision-maker, which are assumed to be independent inputs to the decision-making process.    This may be fine for some decisions, and for some decision-makers, but there are many, many real-world decisions where this decoupling is infeasible or undesirable, or both.
For example, I have talked before about network goods, goods for which the utility received by one consumer depends on the utility received by other consumers.   A fax machine, in the paradigm example, provides no benefits at all to someone whose network of contacts or colleagues includes no one else with a fax machine.   A rational consumer (rational in the narrow sense of MEU theory, as well as rational in the prior sense of being reason-based) would wait to see whether other consumers  in her network decide to purchase such a good (or are likely to decide to purchase it) before deciding to do so herself.   In this case, her preferences are endogeneous to the decision-process, and it makes no sense to model preferences as logically or chronologically prior to the process.   Like most people  in marketing, I have yet to encounter a good or service which is not a network good:  even so-called commodities, like coal, are subject to fashion, to peer-group pressures, and to imitative purchase behaviors.  (In so far as something looks like a commodity in the real world, some marketing manager is not doing his or her job.)
A second class of decisions also require us to consider preferences and decision-processes as strongly coupled.  These are situations where there are multiple decision-makers or stakeholders.     A truly self-interested agent (such as those assumed by mainstream micro-economics) cares not a jot for the interests of other stakeholders, but for those of us out here in the real world, this is almost never the case.  In any multiple-stakeholder decision – ie, any decision where the consequences accrue to more than one party – a non-selfish decision-maker would first seek to learn of the consequences of the different decision-options to other stakeholders as well as to herself, and of the preferences of those other stakeholders over these consequences.  Thus, any sensible decision-making process needs to allow for the elicitation and sharing of consequences and preferences between stakeholders.  In any reasonably complex decision – such as deciding whether to restrict use of some chemical on public health grounds, or deciding on a new distribution strategy for a commercial product  – these consequences will be dispersed and non-uniform in their effects.   This is why democratic government regulatory agencies, such as environmental agencies, conduct public hearings, enquiries and consultations exercises prior to making determinations.  And this is why even the most self-interested of corporate decision-makers invariably consider the views of shareholders, of regulators, of funders, of customers, of supply chain partners (both upstream and downstream), or of those internal staff who will be carrying out the decision, when they want the selected decision-option to be executed successfully.    No CEO is an island.
The fact that the consequences of major regulatory and corporate decisions are usually non-uniform in their impacts on stakeholders  – each decision-option advantaging some people or groups, while disadvantaging others – makes the application of any standard, context-independent decision-rule nonsensical.   Applying standard statistical tests as decision rules falls into this nonsensical category, something statisticians have known all along, but others seem not to. (See the references below for more on this.)
Any rational, feasible decision-process intended for the sorts of decisions we citizens, consumers and businesses face every day needs to allow preferences to emerge as part of the decision-making process, with preferences and the decision-process strongly coupled together.  Once again, as on so many other aspects, MEU theory fails.   Remind me again why it stays in Economics text books and MBA curricula.
References:
L. Atkins and D. Jarrett [1979]:  The significance of “significance tests”.  In:  J. Irvine, I. Miles and J. Evans (Editors): Demystifying Social Statistics. London, UK: Pluto Press.
D. J. Fiorino [1989]:  Environmental risk and democratic process:  a critical review.  Columbia Journal of Environmental Law,  14: 501-547.  (This paper presents reasons why deliberative democratic processes are necessary in environmental regulation.)
T. Page [1978]:  A generic view of toxic chemicals and similar risks.  Ecology Law Quarterly.  7 (2): 207-244.

On Monty

Published by peter on 2010-11-26 in Books, Culture and Film. 0 Comments

Montgomery Clift is one of the silver screen’s greatest actors.  I have written before about his intensely-naturalistic speaking style, with its pauses and false starts and mid-sentence hesitations and apparently improvised modifications on-the-fly.    To speak as he did, in so many films, showed that this speaking style was probably not an artefact of all the screenwriters involved, especially when so few other actors in these or other films of the time spoke like that, but instead evidence of his own great intelligence and superb ear for speech.

Amy Lawrence has now written a fascinating book on his screen acting across his career, analyzing in detail what he did and how, and how he achieved his effects.  By studying his own, hand-annotated personal copies of film scripts, for example, she is able to identify his particular contributions to the scripts and the dialogue of the films he acted in, and is able to demonstrate the artistry and diligence behind his naturalistic speech.   And to show it, in many cases, as his personal artistry, as he worked to revise and rewrite dialog that was often originally stilted or unnatural.

By careful exegesis, Lawrence is also able to debunk some myths.   Clift’s shambling, addled performance as a courtroom witness in the late Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), for example, is usually presented as evidence of the drug and alcohol addictions he is supposed to have succumbed to following his near-fatal car accident in May 1956.  This accident destroyed his face and left him in pain, and led him to taking pain-killers and to drinking.   But, as Lawrence demonstrates, his court-room appearance in the 1961 film shows many of the same personal characteristics and mannerisms of his court-room appearance in A Place in the Sun, filmed in 1951 – “tightening his fists, flexing his fingers, pushing against the armrests with his elbows” [Lawrence, p. 212].   Clearly, the origin of Clift’s witness-box performance is not drugs, but acting chops.  Speaking of the character played by Clift in Nuremberg, she says:

Peterson’s gestures are emphatic, not neurotic, but combined with his broken syntax and repetition of sentence fragments, Clift clearly suggests in his performance that the character is not in control of himself.  But the actor is.  When we see the recurrence of these gestures across time and roles, before and after the accident, it seems reasonable to call them choices characteristic of the performer.  Clift is not a mess; he plays one.” [Lawrence, p. 213]

Lawrence also notices how Clift, throughout his career, often acts with his back to the camera, either fully or partially.  These episodes usually signal that he is engaged in some intense, interior, psychological reaction to some event or person, as if he could better tell us what he is thinking by not showing us his face.   That he would even try to do something so counter-intuitive, let alone that he usually succeeds, demonstrates the great actor Clift was.

I had only one, very small quibble with Lawrence’s book.  She describes (on page 63) the scene in The Big Lift (1950) when Clift’s character, about to receive an award for helping in the Berlin airlift, turns and sees for the first time that the official award-giver is a beautiful woman.   Lawrence does not describe Clift’s eyes as he suddenly sees this woman:  his pupils dilate widely as an expression of his character’s plain delight. We know of course, that the actor Clift must have practiced and rehearsed this dilation until he could undertake it at will.   But knowing this fact increases our admiration for his acting skills, since it shows the dedication and diligence he brought to the task.

Clift’s acting art was artless, and like all artlessness, took immense preparation, intelligence, practice, and persistence to achieve.

Reference:

Amy Lawrence [2010]: The Passion of Montgomery Clift. Berkeley, CA, USA:  University of California Press.