Jonathan Rossney in the Times Literary Supplement

Ray Carney Shadows John Cassavetes was a film-maker who tried to bring the messiness and instability of human relations to film in as honest and direct a way as possible; in doing so, he challenged the typical Hollywood emphasis on narrative clarity, clear-cut morality and simplistic relationships. His films feature intense and wrenching emotional situations which are never quite resolved, and which demand a fully involved response from the viewer. They were often misunderstood and attacked for the very things which Cassavetes was trying to achieve in them; even so, there is still a startling lack of critical writing on him in comparison to, say, Welles or Hitchcock. Ray Carney, who seems to be single-handedly intent on filling the void (he also runs a Cassavetes website), has produced this excellent little book which focuses on Shadows, Cassavetes first and most accessible film. Carney has done an extraordinary amount of detective work to untangle the knotty history of Shadows, which grew out of an improvised sequence in the acting workshop Cassavetes set up to challenge (unsuccessfully) the dominance of the Method school. It was chaotically filmed over three years in two radically different versions, the earlier one being absorbed into the later. Carney shows how Cassavetes developed in confidence and audacity, overcame logistical problems — such as the destruction of much of the original footage and consistent lack of funds — and was not above lying to his collaborators in order to get the film to screen. Through these experiences, Cassavetes learned not just what he wanted to direct, but also how to do it best, moving away from arty stylistic flourishes to a profound exploration of character. Carney's analysis is valuable not only for its insights into Shadows itself, but also into the themes which Cassavetes would explore throughout his career. On the whole concisely and clearly written, with staggeringly detailed appendices, the book should be fascinating to both neophytes and hardcore Cassavetians. Carney is obviously partisan towards his subject, but this detracts not one whit from the book. —Jonathan Rossney Times Literary Supplement (November 30, 2001)

Tom Charity, Film Editor, Time Out magazine, in a review

"Cast a Giant Shadow" A Review of Shadows, By Ray Carney, BFI Film Classics, 2001 Legend has it that American independent cinema was born in the dead of night, February, 1957, when a young New York actor by the name of John Cassavetes guested on Jean Shepherd's WOR talk show and enthused about his latest workshop project: an improvisation about the race problem. Shepherd wondered aloud why Hollywood wasn't tackling this kind of material, and the next thing he knew Cassavetes had invited the show's listeners to invest in "a real movie about real people." It must have been quite a pitch, because hundreds and thousands of dollar bills arrived at the station over the next couple of weeks. It wasn't nearly enough to make a feature film, but it was too much not to. So it was that Cassavetes invested the best part of the next three years to Shadows, his first movie as director, and a landmark in the history of American film. It's a true story, more or less — even if it glosses over all those alternative, off-Hollywood film cultures well in place prior to these events, experimentalists in avant-garde, animation and documentary, and dramatic forebears as famous as Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles. Nor does it touch on the arrival of lightweight 16mm cameras and sound recording equipment which facilitate low-budget filmmakers. Cassavetes chose to represent Shadows as a happy creative accident, but it was an accident waiting to happen — and it's clear he always had his eye on the most opportune chance. Indeed, he'd been trying to get this movie made for some time prior to his famous radio appeal — and may even have set up the workshops in the Variety Arts building with this in mind. Still, he could hardly have imagined this modest collaborative enterprise would come to stand for so much. Shadows was conceived as a learning exercise — only the cameraman, Eric Kollmar, and Cassavetes himself had been on a movie set before. The actors doubled as crew, built the sets and supposedly came up with their own dialogue. ("The film you have just seen was an improvisation," an end-card declares.) This was "spontaneous cinema," rough, raw and ragged; that audiences would still be watching and responding 40 years later must have been unthinkable. Even 15 years ago, when Ray Carney wrote American Dreaming, the first English-language book on Cassavetes, the director was languishing in critical and commercial neglect; his refusal to compromise deemed self-indulgent, or, at the very least, self-defeating. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie had been reviled by American critics. Opening Night was simply ignored. If Gloria fared slightly better, it was often used as a stick to beat its director with: at last he had got with the program and made an entertainment. Roger Ebert, for one, calls Gloria "fun and engaging, but slight. What saves this movie is Cassavetes' reliance on a tried-and-true plot construction. For once, his characters aren't all over the map in nonstop dialogue." Times have changed. Now Cassavetes' name is on the lips of every actor stepping behind the camera, from Gary Oldman to Sean Penn, Steve Buscemi to Ethan Hawke; he's the uncredited godfather to the Dogme brethren and patron saint to the digital generation. It's quite a turn-up for someone who fingered himself as a kind of "anti-director." As a young actor in live television and B movies he had already earned a reputation as a potential troublemaker. "On a film set the only person less important than a director is a talent agent," he told on showbiz reporter in the mid-50s. Cassavetes found film acting frustrating. He hated the inhibiting discipline of hitting marks for focus and lighting, hated the whole stop-go rhythm of shot-making. When he was able to forge his own aesthetic, it was the by-product of his shooting process: that is to say, Cassavetes' films look and feel like cinema vérité, with long takes and make-do lighting. Later he would draw a distinction between improvised dialogue and improvised motion: the actors in a Cassavetes' picture would be expected to know their lines, but they were free to act as the spirit moved them. Shadows' modesty is part of its charm, but it was ahead of its time, too. If it looked rough to audiences in 1960, that's what's most alive about it now. Shooting on a shoestring, Cassavetes instinctively stripped away the artifice surrounding mainstream cinema; he was left with little more than the actors in front of the lens. Undismayed, he determined that this provided a subject fit for any true artist. Shadows is very simply about young New Yorkers trying to be real - and it never pretends otherwise. Where other Beat films — like Alfred Leslie's Pull My Daisy — earnestly preen and posture, Shadows has the wit to see through the affectations of its characters. Where liberal conscience dramas of the 50s weighed in with heavy statements about racism, Cassavetes already appreciated that the personal is political. As he put it much later, at the height of the Vietnam era, "Emotions are the greatest political force there is … We have terrible problems, but our problems are human problems." It is surely not coincidental that this filmmaker's stock has risen so dramatically over the past ten years or so, a period which has exposed the inertia and impotence of the political establishment to affect reform of the global market system — the same market which has produced an ever more synthetic, artificial, computer-generated Hollywood movie. We turn to Cassavetes for counterpoint, for the recognition that people onscreen can be human too. This very counterpoint is one of Ray Carney's favorite rhetorical devices, waging his long, valiant campaign against the unthinking pieties of mainstream opinion — opinion which marginalizes Cassavetes in favor of what Carney denounces as virtuoso kitsch: the "idealist conception of meaning" evinced by Citizen Kane et al. "Where Hollywood is centripetal, focusing ever more tightly in on a central figure or situation, Cassavetes is centrifugal. Focus gives way to circulation," Carney tells us in his new study of Shadows. "While most American films define experiences externally (we are what we do or what happens to us), the experiences that matter in a Cassavetes film are internal (not what we do but what we are). Characterization replaces eventfulness." Crucially, because they are performative, not metaphoric, "[Cassavetes' films] deny the viewer an Archimedean stylistic point outside of the perceptual flow by which he can get theoretical leverage on it. Cassavetes is doing nothing less than offering a new understanding of experience." (If we can understand "understanding" without theoretical leverage?) The thesis hasn't changed much over four books and countless articles, but you get the distilled version here. In a nutshell: a work of art shouldn't mean but be. "Cassavetes' films are not merely descriptive, but functional," Carney concludes. "Their ultimate goal is not only to shake up their characters, but to shake up their viewers … Our supreme achievements are not imaginative and intellectual acts of understanding but sensitive, caring acts of expression." Cassavetes put it better himself, 40-odd years ago, when Benito Carruthers wanders through the statue garden at MoMa: "It's not a question of understanding," he lectures his pals. "If you feel it, you feel it …" To engage with flux and emotional mutability over fixed meaning and conceptual thinking is an onerous position for anyone who makes it their job to interpret these films in print. Carney goes much further down this somewhat paradoxical road than I would care to follow him. He can seem to be carrying the weightlessness of the world on his shoulders. But there's no doubt that he has opened up ways of seeing these films for what they really are, rescuing them from the reductive banalities of the daily reviewers. He backs up his theoretical discourse with diligent observation and dedicated research, too. Carney calls himself "the leading authority on Cassavetes" and no one can seriously challenge that. The portrait of John Cassavetes which emerges here and in Carney's concurrent publication Cassavetes on Cassavetes, is of a more complex, flawed individual than we have seen in print before: a man who would lie to just about anyone to get what he wanted, and without a shred of guilt. Mostly what he wanted was to make films his way, which is some mitigation. A lot of the lies were for public consumption, and can be put down to good old-fashioned hucksterism. ("Always remember," Cassavetes advised one of his friends when he was having trouble with the media, "you don't owe them the truth.") For example, he exaggerated the neorealist credentials of Shadows, and even suggested a policeman had fired his gun over the heads of cast and crew. Most famously, he claimed the film was improvised, when in fact at least two-thirds of it had been revised, scripted and reshot in a bid to earn commercial distribution. Carney's research puts this contention beyond doubt. The Shadows book ends with a midbogglingly detailed appendix breaking the film down, scene by scene, and sifting each sequence for clues to its shooting date: be it 1957 (the first, "improvised" shoot) or 1959 (the scripted reshoot). This is a fascinating document in itself, not only for what it tells us about Shadows, but also for what it says about continuity lapses and how forgiving the human eye can be to all manner of discrepancies (lessons Cassavetes perhaps took too much to heart). Carney's clues include the color of Benito Carruthers' skin: apparently he used a sunlamp in 1957, but had given it up by 1959. He favors a slightly different wardrobe in the two shoots, and his hair varies in length. Also, "in the 1959 shoot, the left collar on his leather jacket has curled over nearly in a complete circle, while in the 1957 shoot, the curl has not progressed as far." And so on: four pages of obsessive cine-detective work which merits the obsequious gratitude of all future Cassavetes students.

Publications by Ray Carney about John Cassavetes' Shadows

Ray Carney, Shadows (BFI Film Classics, ISBN: 0-85170-835-8), 88 pages. This book is available directly from the author via this web site for $20.

John Cassavetes’ Shadows is generally regarded as the start of the independent feature movement in America. Made for $40,000 with a nonprofessional cast and crew and borrowed equipment, the film caused a sensation on its London release in 1960.

The film traces the lives of three siblings in an African-American family: Hugh, a struggling jazz singer, attempting to obtain a job and hold onto his dignity; Ben, a Beat drifter who goes from one fight and girlfriend to another; and Lelia, who has a brief love affair with a white boy who turns on her when he discovers her race. In a delicate, semi-comic drama of self-discovery, the main characters are forced to explore who they are and what really matters in their lives.

Shadows ends with the title card "The film you have just seen was an improvisation," and for decades was hailed as a masterpiece of spontaneity, but shortly before Cassavetes’ death, he confessed to Ray Carney something he had never before revealed – that much of the film was scripted. He told him that it was shot twice and that the scenes in the second version were written by him and Robert Alan Aurthur, a professional Hollywood screenwriter. For Carney, it was Cassavetes‘ Rosebud. He spent ten years tracking down the surviving members of the cast and crew, and piecing together the true story of the making of the film.

Carney takes the reader behind the scenes to follow every step in the making of the movie – chronicling the hopes and dreams, the struggles and frustrations, and the ultimate triumph of the collaboration that resulted in one of the seminal masterworks of American independent filmmaking.

Highlights of the presentation are more than 30 illustrations (including the only existing photographs of the dramatic workshop Cassavetes ran in the late fifties and of the stage on which much of Shadows was shot, and a still showing a scene from the "lost" first version of the film); and statements by many of the film's actors and crew members detailing previously unknown events during its creation.

One of the most interesting and original aspects of the book is a nine-page Appendix that "reconstructs" much of the lost first version of the film for the first time. The Appendix points out more than 100 previously unrecognized differences between the 1957 and 1959 shoots, all of which are identified in detail both by the scene and the time at which they occur in the current print of the movie (so that they may be easily located on videotape or DVD by anyone viewing the film).

By comparing the two versions, the Appendix allows the reader to eavesdrop on Cassavetes' process of revision and watch his mind at work as he re-thought, re-shot, re-edited his movie. None of this information, which Carney spent more than five years compiling, has ever appeared in print before (and, as the presentation reveals, the few studies that have attempted to deal with this issue prior to this are proved to have been completely mistaken in their assumptions). The comparison of the versions and the treatment of Cassavetes' revisionary process is definitive and final, for all time.

This book is available through University of California Press at Berkeley, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and in England through Amazon (UK) and The British Film Institute. For a limited time, the Shadows book is also available directly from the author (in discounted, specially autographed editions) via this web site. See information below on how to order this book directly from the author by money order, check, or credit card (PayPal).

Clicking on the above links will open a new window in your browser. You may return to this page by closing that window or by clicking on the window for this page again.

For reviews and critical responses to Ray Carney's book on the making of Shadows, please click here.

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In addition, a packet comparing the two versions of Shadows is available: A Detective Story – Going Inside the Heart and Mind of the Artist: A Study of Cassavetes' Revisionary Process in the Two Versions of Shadows. Available direct from the author through this site for $15.

This packet contains the following material (most of which was not included in the BFI Shadows book):

• An introductory essay about the two versions of the film
• A table noting the minute-by-minute, shot-by-shot differences in the two prints. (In the British Film Institute book on Shadows, this table appears in a highly abridged, edited version, at less than half the length and detail presented here.)
• A conjectural reconstruction of the shot sequence in the 1957 print
• A shot list for the 1959 re-shoot of the film
• The credits exactly as presented in the film (including typographical and orthographical vagaries indicating Cassavetes' view of the importance of various contributors)
• An expanded and corrected credit listing that includes previous uncredited actors and appearances (e.g. Cassavetes in a dancing sequence; Gena Rowlands in a chorus girl sequence; and Danny Simon and Gene Shepherd in the nightclub sequence)
• Notes about the running times of both versions and information about dates and places of early screenings
• A bibliography of suggested additional reading (including a note about serious mistakes in previous treatments of the film by other authors)

Very little of this material was included in the BFI book on Shadows due to limitations on space. This 85-page (25,000 word) packet is not for sale in any store and is available exclusively through this site for $15.

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The Shadows BFI book and the packet about the two versions of the film may be obtained directly from the author, by using the Pay Pal Credit Card button below, or by sending a check or money order to the address below. However you order the book or books, please provide the following information:

• Your name and address
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Checks or money orders may be mailed to:

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