A Childlike Craft

With some amusement, I read about all the brouhaha surrounding 4-year-old Victoire Thivisol’s best actress award bestowed unanimously upon her by the Venice Film Festival’s jury (“Younger Actresses Get the Parts . . . and Now Awards,” Sept. 16). The not-so-quiet response and dispute by many questioning the validity of giving this honor to such a “young” actress only points out the widespread misunderstanding of the art of acting itself.

Good acting, as defined by the great Russian teacher of the “Method,” Konstantine Stanislavsky, is “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” No one is able to achieve this better than a child whose imagination and purity of emotional expression has yet to be compromised.

Sometimes we confuse performance with talent, which is altogether something else. Talent we measure by the depth and breadth of one’s life experiences and the actor’s ability to tap into the memory of those experiences and use them as a catalyst for emotional response. This, of course, grows with age and is rarely a factor in performances by the very young.

In this case, the jury was very correct in judging this category on simply the principles of “good” acting, which little Victoire has obviously exemplified. Applause for Venice!

CLAUDE BRICKELL

Los Angeles