Issue 67. Acting Interculturally Competent

Have you ever seen a really stunning performance by an actor? Belatedly, I recently viewed The Lives of Others for the first time and was blown away by the performance of Ulrich Mühe, for which he named “Best Actor” in the European Film Awards.

I’ve been thinking about actors recently because I began to realize how their skills and awareness are related to the kinds of skills and awareness that we need to empathize and to communicate well across cultures. Much of this has to do with the way that skilled actors handle and communicate emotion. They also need to have different repetoires of physical expression of emotion. Much of Ulrich Mühe’s award-winning portrayal was handled in stillness rather than motion, with subtle shifts in facial expression, with tall or slumped shoulders.

Actors need to be highly aware of their body language and of the various non-verbal elements of their speech such as the tone of their voice, the speed and rhythm of their delivery, pauses, and so on. Most of the meaning is not found just in the text of the lines they deliver. This is why I always prefer to watch movies in the original language, with subtitles, rather than a dubbed version where another actor — even though that person may be equally skilled — supplies the audio portion of the performance. I want that contextual communication first hand, not interpreted. The text itself I can as easily read as hear. Since I don’t speak German and could not grasp on my own the nuances of the language, it may also be true that I paid much more attention to the non-verbal communication than I might for a Hollywood production.

It has been proposed many years ago by Edward T. Hall that cultures can be distinguished by being High Context or Low Context. Though the USA is generally considered to be a ”Low Context” culture, for reasons I understand, it is still true that much of the communication within the USA is high context, particularly the informal communication among friends or colleagues, where it is no longer necessary to explain but only to refer to shared knowledge and experiences. Emotional communication in particular is contextual. Though the self-help culture and years of psychotherapy try to encourage us to express our emotions verbally, it is still not the words a person speaks that tell me how that person is feeling, but rather body language and non-verbal communication: the lack of words, the untouched food, the sparkling eyes, the tightly-clenched jaw, smiles and frowns, an expression I can only describe as “puzzled.” 

There is also the particularly powerful non-verbal communication that I think of as electric or chemical, when you viscerally register the emotion communicated by another person. When this type of reaction is triggered by the performance of an actor, I often wonder how the actor managed to do that. Actors probably perform best when dealing with characters that are culturally familiar to them, and from his biography, it seems that the film character was created with Ulrich Mühe in mind.  When Mühe was asked how he was able to portray the Stasi agent so effectively, he replied, “I remembered.” 

And for those of us who did not have the experience that Mühe remembered, we have his unforgettable communication that impacts our understanding of that experience.