Minor Research: Stanislavsky- Units and Objectives.

This is a much shorter area of acting that the previous in terms of the depth and what needs to be  explained. However, this is still an important thing to establish when thinking about how the actor becomes the character. The idea of Units and Objectives essentially revolves around the motivation of an actor, this can be broadened to include the entire production and what their goal is from start to finish but Stanislavsky argues that this is too broad and instead the production must be broken down into smaller portions of the character's progression through the narrative. Allow me to put this into a real life film and try to break it down into stages. For this I will use Taxi Driver, for those who haven't seen it heres a brief summary:
Travis Bickle is a war veteran who comes home and takes the job of being a taxi driver who works any time and place because he has no love or family in his life, he tries to form a relationship with an attractive intelligent woman but can't because he is completely socially inept. Later he comes across a young girl who is a prostitute and to sum up the final part of the film he goes a little insane and kills a lot of people to free the girl from her horrible life.
So if we were to do this in one broad objective, what would it be? To function in society? a loose fit but not all that fitting to the final act. To save the girl? Well no not really because he doesn't know who she is for the majority of the film. This illustrates nicely why we need to split these into motivations in sections of the film. So then I would split it into 3, first, trying to fit into society and keep a job, secondly, trying to woo the lady of his desire, and finally trying to save the girl, these aren't the most accurate sections due to the fact that I ddi neither direct nor star in this film so I have no sure idea of what either director or actor was looking for and instead I only have the result of their work to go by, however, we these partitions it would mean that the actor is going into a scene knowing emotionally what they want to get out of it.
There is however and issue with one of these partitions, and it is the last one, this is an issue because it relies upon a physical thing that is going to happen and not an internal or emotional state. Stanislavsky states that the units should be to do with how the character feels on the inside and not so much to do with a thing they want to do physically, so in this case, saving the girl is somewhat physical, not completely so it would still suffice but it would be perhaps a better use to say "wanting to be a hero to the girl". This may seem a little but complex and not all that useful but for me I think that it is all about giving the actor building blocks for which to get into the head of and create their character and from here give a realistic portrayal.
Very briefly, to sum up how this will be useful to me, it has basically told me to be clear with actors on what it is that drives them emotionally, whether that be lust, love, anger, whatever emotion it may be the actor has to know what angle they are coming from or else it will completely change how the scene comes across to the viewer.