“A mammoth undertaking which clocks in at more than 500 pages, [Cassavetes on Cassavetes] draws on an array of interviews, both with Cassavetes and with his regular 'family' of collaborators, who include his wife Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara. Carney has shaped this mass of material into a compelling narrative of an indefatigable outsider who constantly battled to get his films financed, shot and released. Cassavetes himself emerges as a contradictory, bloody-minded figure, driving those he worked with to distraction in his quest to explore human feelings on celluloid. This was, after all, a man who recut a film because it was too popular in a preview screening. But there's something heroic about his refusal to compromise his vision, and his insistence that an artist 'must try different things—but above all must dare to fail.”

”Whether you dig Cassavetes, dig him and don't dig him, Ray Carney's large collection of John's own direct words will take you into yourself. It will take you deep into the ongoing moment of love, for his films, finally, are about love, the loss of it, the gaining of it, self love, love of other, and the process that gets us there. The process that is and was Cassavetes, and his family, and his friends, for he always sought to work in the process with family and friends. For him, the shoot was an active participatory exploration. He would write his films (people erroneously think his work is based in improvisation)and then constantly rewrite on the set, after feeling his actors in their characters, for him his characters were not locked on the page, he would let the actors explore, take him into their search, and from that search would come even new insight into the characters and rewrite he would. He would also do it in the editing.

“There is the great story where the Columbia moguls were so happy with the first cut screening of Husbands he showed them, so ecstatic about this comedy that would garner Ben Gazzara an Oscar nod. Then Cassavetes turned to Gazzara, and Peter Falk, after that screening, and said, “Remember what you just saw. You will never see it that way again.” To him, Husbands was not a comedy, and he took it into the editing room and reshaped the entire thing, and when Columbia looked at it again some time hence they were aghast.

“There is the great Shadows Charlie Mingus riff. Cassavetes wanted Mingus to write the score for Shadows. Mingus needed somebody to help clean up the cat shit in his apartment. Cassavetes sent over people to clean Mingus' place. Afterward, Mingus was very depressed and said, “I miss the cat shit.” As Cassavetes sums it up...he finally did write the score...two years after the film was released.

“If anything, Cassavetes is a director who attempted to take us into the moment of his characters. He would have constant wars with his crews. No masking tape, no specific “Hey Actor Move Over Into This Light.” He wanted to give the actors and their exploring first billing in the process. He would expect his camera crew to delve into their own particular exploring rooms and be ready to go where the actors of the piece they were photographing began to flow toward. Technical rehearsals would only deprive the actor from his ongoing search.

“His process does show in the immediacy of the behavior of the people in his films. And acting is nothing more than human behavior on film. Cassavetes on Cassavetes is a resonant gift for anyone you know who loves film. It is a must for anyone who believes in the creative process.

“Ray Carney is at Boston University is fighting the long and good fight. Like Cassavetes, he has trouble finding distributors for his material. He tells me that the various publishers of film books have an A list of directors that they turn to, but if the subject of your film book is not on that list.... He did try to pitch a book on FACES, Cassavetes' first actual film away from the studio system after SHADOWS, but the publishers felt it wasn't worth the effort, though they did grace him with an okay on SHADOWS, as SHADOWS had jazz and Afro-Americans as a subject matter....”

When film scholar Ray Carney asked filmmaker John Cassavetes why he turned down a deal from Sony in the mid-1980s to release his films on video, the filmmaker said to his future biographer and most tireless critical champion, “You think I want to be popular? You think I want them out on video? I want millions of people to see my movies? Why would I?”(510). The statement, reported in Carney’s new book,Cassavetes on Cassavetes, reflects the unorthodox values of this elusive filmmaker, who regarded commercial success as a sign of artistic failure, the death of creative freedom and personal integrity.

A crash course on the fiercely independent filmmaker, Cassavetes on Cassavetes describes, largely through Cassavetes’own words, his ventures into personal, passionate, and commercially self-destructive filmmaking. Carney calls his book “the autobiography John Cassavetes never lived to write”(ix), but the book is a better autobiography than Cassavetes would have written himself. Always fascinated by the roughness of the creative process, Cassavetes would have written an autobiography as disorganized and out-of-focus as one of his films. Carney, however, has shaped a compendium of quotations into something that reads like the story of a man’s life.

Until recently, critics have mostly considered Cassavetes a minor filmmaker, and, except for Faces (1968) and A Woman Under the Influence (1974), his films never made any money in his lifetime. But he created some of the most original movies in American cinema and greatly influenced many of his contemporaries (Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, and Elaine May, to name a few), ever since his first film, Shadows (1959), helped to burst open the independent-filmmaking scene.

While a lot of viewers find Cassavetes’s movies unwatchable, he has nonetheless gathered a loyal following and some critical praise, especially since his death in 1989. The past decade has seen more Cassavetes film festivals than in the filmmaker’s entire 30-year career as a director and writer of artistically uncompromising independent films. Despite Cassavetes’s refusal of Sony’s offer to bring out his movies on video, since his death all his films (except for Too Late Blues [1962] and Love Streams [1984]) have become available on videotape and most are also on DVD. Those who like his movies consider him a genius, a maverick filmmaker who did things with the cinema that no one else has had the talent or audacity to do. The people who do not like his movies call him self-indulgent. Most people know him only as an actor, if they know him at all. Carney’s book attempts to bring Cassavetes out of obscurity and into the mainstream that eluded the filmmaker, partly by his own design, while he lived. Unlike some of the other books in this Faber and Faber series, Carney’s feels comprehensive as a biography, an autobiography, and a collection of the filmmaker’s statements about his life and art.

Cassavetes on Cassavetes describes in detail the circumstances surrounding each of Cassavetes’s films –from their conception, to their creation, to their distribution (or failure to obtain distribution), to their critical and commercial reception –and it does so mostly through quotations from Cassavetes that Carney culled from published sources and his own personal interviews with the filmmaker. About the “realistic”sound in his groundbreaking Shadows, for example, Cassavetes has this to say: “We recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group dancing above our heads. . . . So when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the picture. So we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just went with it. Well, the picture opened in London, they said, ‘This is an innovation!’You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!”(97). We learn that some of the most interesting effects in Cassavetes’s films emerged as happy accidents, a consequence of his loose shooting style, which, unlike the rigorously premeditate Hollywood productions that the filmmaker spurned, encouraged creativity and innovation on the set.

***

At a time when it was fashionable for films to make bold political statements, Cassavetes fashioned his own intensely personal dramas that dealt less with social issues than with relationship between particular, idiosyncratic individuals. Both Faces and Husbands (1970) could have satirized male machismo and middle-class values, and both received criticism for not doing so. More interested in understanding his characters than condemning their faults, Cassavetes always respected his creations and gave them a chance to justify themselves. Shadows presents a scenario that could potentially address the politics of mixed-race relationships, and A Woman Under the Influence seems primed to condemn the institution of marriage as oppressive to women. However, the relationships in Cassavetes’s movies always seem too individualized to represent any institution, his characters too singular and human to stand for their race, their gender or their class. “I’m sure we could have had a much more successful film,”Cassavetes said about A Woman Under the Influence, “if the picture were rougher, more brutal, if it made statements so that people could definitely take sides. But along the way I’d have to look at myself and say, ‘Yes, we were successful in creating another horror in the world’“(367).

Whereas many of today’s independent filmmakers want to expose the depravity, simplicity or ridiculousness of their characters, Cassavetes sought to understand his characters’complexities. Today’s independents make mostly sardonic films –Flirting with Disaster (1996), Happiness (1998), Your Friends and Neighbors (1998), Election (1999), American Movie (1999), American Psycho (2000, Best in Show (2000), Bully (2001) or anything by the Cohen brothers –that stand so far above their characters that audiences have little chance to feel affection or empathy for them. Cassavetes, however, didn’t allow us the smug pleasure of feeling superior to characters designed so that we could feel superior to them. “I absolutely refuse to judge the characters in my films,”he tells us. “I refrain from leading people by their noses by imposing a stereotyped moral vision in my work”(158).

The book shows the under-appreciated artist failing to reach even a modestly respectable audience for some of his quixotic productions. For instance, in its entire first run, only about 500 people saw Opening Night (1978), perhaps Cassavetes’s best movie and his most disastrous commercial failure. Cassavetes pronounced the film dead. “I will never play it for an audience. I will not humiliate myself and the film by begging anyone to attend it”(432). But rarely do we see Cassavetes give in to the disappointment that would have stymied a less passionate or self-assured artist. His saddest statement comes after the commercial failure of Opening Night and after his inability to find an American distributor for his re-edited version of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (originally released in 1976, re-edited in 1978): “I’m prepared to go on making pictures in my own way and hoping they’ll relate to other people’s experience. It gets harder every time, I can tell you. Harder to go through all the shit of setting them up, then making them, and then, maybe, having them ignored. . . . Anyway, I’m glad I’m not a success, because then, though you think you have greater freedom, you in fact have a great deal less . . . I guess I’ll stick to being a well-appreciated failure”(435).

Although clearly written by an affectionate fan, the book does not refrain from revealing some of the filmmaker’s unattractive qualities. For instance, after insisting to the principal actors and crew of Shadows that the film belonged to them and not to him. Cassavetes made a distribution deal with British Lion that reduced their shares by almost 90 percent. Carney writes, “It was a classic bait-and-switch. Cassavetes promised them the moon, told them that he would fight anyone to the death to defend their ownership of the film –and, once he got what he wanted from them, made a deal that vitually cut them out”(99). The book reveals Cassavetes’s lies to those who could help him with his career, and the difficulty his actors had working with him as a director, because of his manipulative treatment of them. However, Cassavetes also emerges as an unexpectedly generous man, one who would gladly risk his career and money for an artistically brave project –acting in student films, helping his protégé Martin Scorsese, giving jobs or money to friends in need.

***

Cassavetes scholars will happily mine the book for quotations and Cassavetes on Cassavetes will become the starting point for anyone who wants to read or write about the filmmaker.Cassavetes on Cassavetes is a portrait of a man whose artistic integrity and whose pleasure in the creative process condemned him to a life of professional frustration. But the book shows us that, time after time, Cassavetes willingly chose to lead exactly the life he led. Indeed, reading Cassavetes’s own descriptions of his “personal madness”as a filmmakers makes it seem perfectly sensible to risk everything one owns and devote oneself to a life of creative expression in order to become a largely underappreciated artist and a commercial failure.

© Todd Berliner and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Copyright 2003. All rights reserved by the copyright holders.

"Hay seres a quienes es mejor leer que encontrar. Hay otros a quienes es mejor encontrar que leer. Hay autores muertos que parecen tan vivos como nuestros amigos y hay autores vivos que parecen tan muertos como el que “escribió”con pinturas en las cavernas de Lascaux.Pero cuando el autor es realizador cinematográfico siempre puede hacerse presente.

Entre mi escueta colección de admirables, John Cassavetes es el único hombre al que me hubiera gustado conocer. Alguien que, habitante inaccesible de un país lejano, y cuya lengua desconozco, me hizo amarlo en ausencia y esfinge. Pero amarlo es un sentido más preciso que el de erotizar su rostro estilo El Cerebro Mágico –una imagen que decoraba un juego de ingenio de los años cincuenta–, sus cejas en forma de acento circunflejo y sus labios cuya carne parece oponerse al ascetismo de un esqueleto que simula estar a flor de piel. Quizá lo que amo de él es su forma de amar a una mujer –haciéndome identificar con ella–, a la suya propia, Gena Rowlands, a quien dirigió en varias de sus películas (Gloria, Torrentes de amor, Minnie y Moscowitz, Una mujer bajo influencia, por citar las que más se sostuvieron en la carteleras de Buenos Aires). Sobre todo en Torrentes de amor, adonde él la acompaña como actor en un vínculo lo suficientemente ambiguo como para que el espectador ignore si los protagonistas son dos hermanos o dos ex amantes. ¿Un chiste privado entre los integrantes de un matrimonio de larga data? En esa película, John parece decir: el enamorado es animista a su modo; el dolor de amar se materializa allí, en el interior del cuerpo, en el océano de la sangre, de sus ríos adonde –según la filosofía hematológica–cada ser es único a pesar de sentirse intoxicado totalmente por el otro. El amor no podría alojarse en las vísceras (continentes bajos), ni siquiera en el cerebro y en el corazón, que deben estar regados por la sangre para conservar su función mítica. El amor es un torrente... sanguíneo. Las metáforas son precisas y vienen de lejos: “lo escribiré con sangre”, “me has herido”, “quisiera abrir lentamente mis venas”, “El torrente para”, le dice el psiquiatra a Sarah Lawson (Torrentes de amor). Ella le dice que no, que no es posible. Si el torrente pasa, ya no queda aire en los pulmones, ni pensamiento en la mente, el cauce está seco. John suele filmar a Gena como una loca de amor, pero no desde el lugar de la ilegítima o de la amante sino de la esposa, de alguien que sostiene el amor al extremo, el derecho a vivir como desollada viva o enhebrando uno tras otro momentos supremos en el interior de la familia: Sarah Lawson y Mabel Longhetti (Una mujer bajo influencia) oscilan entre el hogar y el manicomio. John sugiere que la pasión no se opone a la familia, y además filma con parientes propios y de su esposa. Gena a veces trabaja en compañía de su madre Lady Rowlands y de su hermano David. Lady Rowlands es la madre de Minnie en Minnie y Moscowitz y de la de Mabel Longhetti en Una mujer bajo influencia; su hijo, el psiquiatra de Sarah interpretado por Gena en Torrentes de amor, donde Alejandra Cassavetes es la corista del bar nocturno. Otros nombres familiares insisten en los créditos de las películas de Cassavetes, sus primos (los Papamichael), Diana y Margaret Abbot, los Gazzara, los Cassel. Katherine Cassavetes es la madre de Nick (Peter Falk) en Una mujer bajo influencia. John trabaja con los de su sangre en una mezcla de tragedia griega y magia italiana. También ha dicho a menudo –y sus personajes–que toda mujer tiene un secreto y que lo interesante es que ella lo entregue voluntariamente.

“Yo no dirijo a los actores”, se jactaba. Es cierto: era un amo más feroz, quería enfrentarlos con quienes son, hacer emerger sus deseos más ocultos. Quizá porque difícilmente las mujeres reales entreguen su secreto o mientan, esto le sirvió para seguir filmando. Para el común de la gente, la mujer con más secretos es la que pasea por la ciudad con todos sus despojos hogareños en un changuito, envuelta en una frazada, sin lugar a donde volver. Poco antes de morir, John Cassavetes escribió una obra de teatro titulada A Woman of Mistery. Es sobre una de esas mujeres sin techo. Lleva dos valijas con sus cosas, camina. Le dio el papel a Gena como si le anticipara: “Muerto el jefe de familia y con una casa inestable, ¿qué te queda sino la calle?”. Una muchacha llamada Georgi conoce a la mujer misteriosa y afirma que ésta es su madre, quien la habría abandonado al nacer. La ama y como si el amor fuera contagioso (y lo es): un hombre y luego otro se enamoran de la homeless. Al igual que en los cuentos de hadas, ésta pasa de la calle y los andrajos a una velada de gala en donde luce un vestido de satén negro. A la larga, Georgi probará que su certeza no es una ilusión. Pero esta mujer, la mujer misteriosa, no puede retribuirle su amor. En la última escena vuelve a estar sola con sus valijas. En la calle, John le ofrece así a Gena la profecía de una resurrección, a la manera de la familia, por el reencuentro con un lazo de sangre. También le profetiza que, muerto él, ya no sabrá amar. Pero, mediante una transacción, la libera: en realidad, la última escena no prescribe la soledad sino la continuidad del misterio. Como si dijera: “Si se nos ha amado, se nos volverá a amar”.

É se es mi tipo.

Ray Carney's done a great service to film fans by bringing Cassavetes' scattered talks and interviews together into a coherent statement on art. Carney shows how Cassavetes' whole process of filmmaking was tied to his outlook on life. Combative, spontaneous and deliberately amateur, he aimed for situations where writer, actor and viewer are all left without direction, forced to respond to the story as individuals rather than reach for pre-approved 'social codes'. He savagely edited his films to defy audience expectations, usually rejecting versions that the studios, his collaborators and even his wife liked best. Some of Cassavetes' statements made me wonder if he did this to edit some part of himself--the Greek immigrant son made good, with the blonde wife and kids and Hollywood home. In some ways he was an insider desperate to stay on the outside. Conflict was fun for him, he thought America needed more of it, and the messy collaborative 'families' he built around each film were his alternative to the button-down corporate society he fought against all his life.

As Carney presents him, Cassavetes wasn't out for the money, the glory, the ego or ultimately maybe even the art. He wanted fun, he wanted friends and he wanted people to really live as individuals. Are there folks like this around anymore? We need them more than ever.

Cassavetes lived life so completely that it might be truthful to say he did something the average person would call foolhardy nearly every day of his life, in some way or other. But in spite of this, or because of it, it's impossible to come away from this book without an awakened admiration for him.

“Throughout, family and love are front and center: these were so deeply important to Cassavetes and were primary themes in his films. I also take away from this experience—because that is what this book is to me— a new inspiration to try to find a way to live and work that places things like security, conformity, and even acceptance in a more healthy perspective.

“Anyone contemplating the arts, film theory or technique, criticism, or just personal or professional growth should read this book. It is a delightful, consciousness-shifting walk through another way to be creative and just to be.”