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Exactly who, then, did Cassavetes make films for? Beginning with Shadows in 1957, through Love Streams in 1984, the maverick director usually worked so far outside even the Hollywood fringe that his films were barely seen, and most are just now coming out on video. His two early groundbreaking experiments, Shadows (1960) and Faces (1968), are only available through a Japanese distributor. Cassavetes, who died in 1989 at the age of 59, wouldn't have given a damn.
He made eight independent and three Hollywood-backed movies in twenty-seven years. He worked with a muscular troupe of actors that seemed to age as we watched them: Seymour Cassel, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes' wife, the luminous Gena Rowlands. He usually shot in simple locations—often his own California homeand—was indifferent to technical details. The lighting was harsh, the sound annoying, the editing, jarring. His interior sets are chock full of polished, reflective surfaces. Spotlights and household lamps glare into his lens; the rooms and streets where his people moved seemed to breathe with presence.
Cassavetes directed the studio-backed movies (Too Late Blues, A Child Is Waiting, Gloria) without final cut, and acted in others (The Dirty Dozen, Rosemary's Baby), to finance his art. And, like the work of most artists who exist outside the mainstream, he wanted to meet his audience only on his own terms. Many of his films—as difficult as an abstract canvas—are flush with a primitive intensity that makes them, at times, an ordeal to sit through.
Watching a Cassavetes film, you feel like a witness to a familial intervention, or to an all-night orgy of dysfunctional louts. His characters—over-the-hill, alcoholic, depressed, and desperate—seem to be stabbing at life, trying to find a part of it that still breathes so they can kill it, His camera is never more than an arm's length away from these cocktailhour dysfunctionals, pummeling them until they give in and tell us the truth. It is the viewer that has them on the ropes. "I hate entertainment," Cassavetes said in the documentary, I'm Almost Not Crazy, which was made during the shooting of his last film, Love Streams. "A movie tries to pacify people. I love motion, change, and I hate answers—because answers stop change."
Cassavetes, the screenwriter, refused to spoon-feed happy endings to the viewer. There was never a third act that dovetailed into a climax, or a conflict that was neatly resolved. Instead, his movies are pure conflict: drinkers and dreamers, losers and near-winners, in a tug-of-war with themselves. Cassavetes demanded that his audience ask questions of themselves.
The Kenyon Review once called him "the Jackson Pollack of cinema", and the description fits. His movies are splattered with messy, spontaneous bursts of emotion that feel like real life, with embarrassment, tedium, pain and humiliation right alongside exhilaration.
A Woman Under The Influence (1974), clocking in at 155 minutes and starring Gena conflict Rowlands as a wife going nuts and Peter Falk as her bewildered husband, is a film you keep threatening to turn off if something doesn't "happen" soon. And then something does. Rowlands embarrasses herself in front of her husband's co-workers in a breakfast scene, and then one of them sings a beautiful aria from Aida, right at the table. The moment—it feels unscripted—takes your breath away.
Not surprisingly, Cassavetes was unsatisfied with his most accessible film, Gloria (1980), a studio production. But Gena Rowlands' sly, tough performance, and the edgy, underworld atmosphere, much of it shot in bright daylight, make it a constant delight. The opening credits play over the vibrant work of painter Romare Bearden, and the music, by Bill Conti, is cool jazz, underscoring the improvisational feel of many of the scenes.
The director was drawn to the desultory hipness of jazz musicians. Their music was the perfect compliment to his rambling, jumpcutting style. "The jazz musician doesn't deal with structured life. He just wants that night ... like a kid," he said in an interview in Sight and Sound. An end title on Shadows refers to the film as "an improvisation". It features a soundtrack by Charles Mingus.
The film began as an idea in an improvisational actors' workshop that Cassavetes helped to establish in the '50s. Working with a 16mm camera and a few character descriptions, the director and his actors hit the streets, museums, and walk-up apartments of New York City. The result was a film about racial prejudice, with characters drifting in and out of conversations about love, art, and lack of success. Much of the film was shot at night, and the young director's camera, close and breathless, electrifies every scene. It now stands as a crude but forceful antecedent to the "twentysomething" movies Hollywood pumps out like play dough today.
Cassavetes had no intention of distributing the film. When it got picked up, he wanted to re-record the audio (which, like Faces, sounds as if it was recorded from inside a suitcase). But then a London reviewer said it was the most authentic sound he'd ever heard. So Cassavetes left it alone.
"All I'm interested in is love," he said on the set of Love Streams (1984). "I need for the characters to analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other." In Love Streams and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Cassavetes' protagonists believe they can advance through life untouched by love. Love Streams' hermetic writer is forced to take care of his sister, who is fleeing from a wrecked marriage. Bookie's strip-club owner reluctantly performs a hit for the mob to clear a large gambling debt. Both men (Cassavetes plays the writer, Gazzara the club owner) are wounded and weary. They keep trying to escape to the margins, but life, love, and Cassavetes' camera push them into the center. He never allows his characters to hide.
One of Cassavetes' most indelible issues/12/images occurs at night in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, when Cosmo Vitelli (Gazzara), who has just brazenly offed the bookie and several of his young hired guns, flees down a driveway that seems to sizzle with light. There are no Shadows, no dark corners to escape to; Cosmo doesn't even try to hide. All he can do is to will himself invisible.
Cassavetes' vision, as derided and dismissed as it was by critics and the public, was relentless. Even early in his career, when he had to carry his own film cans from city to city to set up screenings, he never retreated from the demands he placed on himself. He and his actors bravely risked exposure with every film. If at times his characters were obnoxious or their actions repetitive, you could not deny the courage it took to film them, the risks the director took in laying bare their torment. In that respect, John Cassavetes was the most naked of artists.
A Cassavetes Filmography
Shadows (1959)
Too Late Blues (1962)
A Child Is Waiting (1963)
Faces (1968)
Husbands (1970)
Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Opening Night (1978)
Gloria (1980)
Love Streams (1984)
If you're interested in learning more about Jolin Cassavetes, I would highly recommend a book called "The Films of John Cassavetes," by Ray Carney. Cambridge University Press, 1994—Ed.