Brando

From February 10 to April 18, 2004 – Museu del Cinema

The Impenetrable Face

About to celebrate his eightieth birthday, Marlon Brando has long outlived other legends also created in the 1950s, like Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. Trained as an actor by Stella Adler, a follower of Stanislavski's Method, and after demonstrating his talent on Broadway, Brando revealed himself to the cinema with A Streetcar Named Desire. This film by Elia Kazan produced an icon: Brando's muscular body marked by a ripped wet T-shirt.
During the 1950s, the actor became a star and created other youthful male icons, such as the rebel without a cause dressed in leather in The Wild One, while he constructed characters with an emotional intensity that endured in the adult Brando, as he showed in his role in Last Tango in Paris. Brando, always referred to as an anguished man, has dug deep into his emotions to create characters with a tough look that conceals a tenderness and a vulnerability that is reflected in his face. But Brando, a star without wanting to be who has reneged on Hollywood and has kept up a controversial militancy in different causes, has also cultivated the taste for the mask, so that makeup has served him well to play many characters, but also perhaps to hide and protect himself.
Exhibited and hidden, tender and wild, Brando remains an enigma. This exhibition bears this in mind and has therefore borrowed the title with which the only film directed by the actor was shown in Spain: El rostro impenetrable (One-Eyed Jacks).