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 Critics
sometimes talk as if great art gives us new thoughts, when it would be
more accurate to say it gives us new powers. If Cassavetes’ work is about
transforming his characters, it is even more about transforming his viewers.
To watch Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, or Love
Streams is to be given new capacities of sensitivity and awareness—something
much greater and more revolutionary than new ideas. Cassavetes gives us
new forms of perception, not just new meanings.
Specifically, he trains us to watch the faces,
bodies, and voices of his characters with unusual acuity. No filmmaker
has done more to make the subtlest nuances of body language the fundamental
building blocks of meaning. Every film might be said to be acted, but
virtually no film is acted to the extent Cassavetes’ are—none relies more
heavily on the viewer’s ability to read the tiniest facial flickers of
emotion or listen to tonal demisemiquavers with greater sensitivity. It
is as if the very atoms of the soul were put under a microscope and made
visible as they vibrated in place or darted back and forth between characters.
 Although Cassavetes’ work is dramatically
structured in quite elaborate ways (Faces, for example, consisting
of an intricate network of sexual comparisons and contrasts, A Woman
Under the Influence employing allusions to Rebel Without a Cause
and a series of operatic and balletic visual and acoustic stylizations,
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie drawing on Sternbergian and Wellesian
notions of art, Minnie and Moskowitz tweaking and teasing Hollywood
forms of expression), to a remarkable degree, Cassavetes’ meanings are
not created with general stylistic effects or narrative forms of
organization (the way meanings in most other American films are), but
emanate from the faces, bodies, and voices of specific performers. While,
in the other sort of film, we watch how the frame is composed, how a character
is lighted, how the camera moves or doesn’t move, etc., Cassavetes’ work
cultivates different ways of seeing and hearing. We are not looking at
the lighting or framing, but attending to butterfly flutters of feeling
in a character’s face; we are not listening to the sound design, but vibrating
to birdsong vocal tremulations in a character’s voice.
That
is, in fact, why most serious American film scholars have ignored Cassavetes’
work. The films are treated as if they were merely the record of dramatic
performances imagined somehow to be independent of them as films.
The thinking goes that when we watch a movie like Citizen Kane,
2001, or Apocalypse Now, we feel the director’s presence
and choices in more or less every shot, since we are awash in generalized
stylistic effects of lighting, framing, and sound. When we watch Cassavetes,
the argument runs, we are not exposed to the choices of the director but
those of the performers. Ergo, his work is an "actor’s cinema"—in
other words, a form of filmmaking not truly "cinematic."
The way out of the definitional trap is to
realize that the decision to make faces, bodies, and voices the sources
of meaning is as much an expression of the director’s values and vision
as the decision to downplay the expressiveness of such things in the other
sort of film. The values are just different. That is to say, Cassavetes’
style is as cinematic as Hitchcock’s. It just figures an entirely different
understanding of life and expression.
While the stylistic practices of conventional
cinematic expression (the use of light, sound, camerawork, framing, and
various symbolic and metaphoric forms of presentation) generalize, abstract,
and allegorize experience, the expressive embodiments of Cassavetes’ style
physicalize, individualize, and particularize it. Hitchcock’s characters
and situations are generic, representative, dreamlike; Cassavetes’ are
unique, specific, localized. Hitchcock gives us Everyman doing anything;
Cassavetes gives us someone doing something.
Even more importantly, in the stylistically
inflected film, meaning is tipped toward the visionary. It expresses more
or less disembodied, imaginative states (and is apprehended by the viewer’s
identification with and participation in such states of abstraction and
disengagement). Experience is turned into a mental event. In Cassavetes’
work, meaning and experience are practical, engaged, worldly. Insofar
as meaning inheres in the body and is expressed through practical social
interactions (and through the viewer’s intricate perceptual negotiation
of those interactions as he or she watches the film), meaning is not in
the mind, but in the world. Cassavetes lowers his figures’ centers of
gravity and moves his characters and viewers away from states of unworldly
vision and into practical acts of social negotiation. (Cosmo shows us
Cassavetes’ feelings about visionary stances and relations.) Characters
are not their thoughts, feelings, and intentions, but their gestures,
tones of voice, and bodily expressions.
 Finally, stylistic effects, as they occur
in the mainstream film, to a large extent, stand still. If an interaction
is kick–lighted one moment it will tend to be kick–lighted the next; if
the music is suspenseful at the start of a scene it will generally still
be suspenseful a minute later. In Cassavetes’ work, because the meanings
are a matter of particulars of timing, pacing, body language, facial expression,
and vocal tone, nothing will stop moving or summarize itself in this way.
Meaning is as labile as voice tones and facial expressions. To watch these
films is to inhabit a world of exhilaratingly, scarily, shifting meanings.
There is no predicting the next beat.
Not only can Richard and McCarthy or Nick
and Mabel tonally be at knife point one moment and best buds the next,
but even in getting from one point to the other, they can go through dozens
upon dozens of zig–zag swerves. In Love Streams Sarah and Jack
cycle through twenty or more tones and relations to each other, Judge
Dunbar, and Debbie in the hearing room in three or four minutes. To watch
Robert interact with Albie at the bar or with the transvestites in the
nightclub is to watch meanings that shift from second to second. It’s
an extraordinary place to get a work of art to—where streams of microscopic
energy are flowing, coruscating, flickering more rapidly than we can keep
up with them. There is no Archimedian stylistic point outside of the flow
by which we can get theoretical leverage on it.
That’s what makes Cassavetes’ films so different
from their summaries or the memory of them. In summary, A Woman Under
the Influence might seem like a fairly clichéd depiction of
"a misunderstood, neurotic housewife" (as one early reviewer
put it). In actual experience, it is entirely different. The summary doesn’t
even come close to touching the actual experience of what we see and hear.
It is not a film of generalizations, but of startling, unclassifiable,
individualized, unpredictable, astonishing details. Consider just
the first two or three minutes in which we see Mabel: the way she is dressed,
her hopping around on one foot, the way she rides the bike to the car,
the way it won’t fit into the trunk, the way the trunk won’t close, the
way the car stalls (a detail added in post–production), her shimmering
tones. Nothing is generic, representative, or indicated. Every instant
is new. Every local detail stunningly realized.
To cycle back to my beginning, that is ultimately
what it means to say that Cassavetes’ works are perceptual more than intellectual
events. To put it more precisely, one might say that they redefine intellect
as perception. Sarah and Mabel aren’t a set of ideas about
women (the way Thelma and Louise are); they are a set of specific events.
Cassavetes’ films are all details—all the way down to the ground.
They tell us that specifics are, in fact, all there are.
 The
de–ideologization of Cassavetes’ depictions, the semantic embodiment of
his expressions, the emphasis on perceptual events figures a comprehensive
vision of all of experience. T.S. Eliot said of Henry James that he had
a mind too fine for an idea to violate it, and of Cassavetes it might
be put more strongly: In his work ideas are opposed to understanding.
Like William James, Cassavetes saw conceptual relations to experience
(including the ones that generalized stylistic effects create and the
ones critics that explicate such films habitually indulge in) as betraying
it, because they abstract us from and stop the motion of life. While sensory
experiences never pause, ideas stand still. All of Cassavetes’ work is
an effort to capture the feeling of unconceptualized experience, to replace
conceptions with perceptions. He tells us we must learn to think without
ideas.
One might say that the reason Cassavetes’
films feel so different from mainstream works is that he is doing nothing
less than swimming against the entire Western intellectual tradition as
it was inflected by Plato—contravening two millennia of post–Platonic
contemplativeness, dephysicalization, disembodiment, and spiritualization.
This page only
contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's John Cassavetes:
The Adventure of Insecurity. To learn how to obtain the book, please
click
here.
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