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In his new book, The
Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies (published
in paperback by Cambridge University Press), Boston University
Professor of American Studies and Film Ray Carney takes the reader behind
the scenes to watch the maverick independent at work: writing his scripts,
rehearsing his actors, blocking their movements, shooting his scenes,
and editing them. The iconoclastic, interdisciplinary study challenges
many accepted notions in film history and aesthetics. In the excerpt that
follows, which is taken from the final chapter, Professor Carney treats
Cassavetes' filmmaking as a form of thought, and argues that his work
offers new ways of thinking about thinking.
* * *
....There is a final reason
that none of Cassavetes' films was considered for admission into the
artistic
canon during his lifetime: Almost without exception, American filmmakers
and critics take for granted that art is essentially a Faustian enterprise – a
display of intellectual power, control, and mastery. They assume
that
a work's greatness is traceable to its ability to limit, shape, and organize
what the viewer sees, hears, knows, and feels in each shot. In a
word,
their conception of artistic performance is virtuosic. Leaf through the
pages of the standard film textbooks and what you will find is an
implicit
equation of virtuosity and greatness that extends to every aspect of
a film's creation: from the writer's ability to create "revelatory"
dialogue; to the director's, cameraman's, and lighting supervisor's ability
to use lighting, framing, camera angles, and movements to manipulate
what
the viewer knows and feels; to the editor's and musical supervisor's
ability to orchestrate the pacing and dramatic intensity of events down
to the
last beat.
Once one buys into this value
system it's not hard to see why Citizen Kane, Psycho, Blood
Simple, Blue Velvet, Manhattan, and Dressed to Kill
are regarded as artistic masterworks. Filmmaking within the virtuoso
tradition is essentially a celebration of knowing, and these films create
worlds in which everyone and everything of importance can be known. The
screenwriters, actors, crew, director, and the viewers all participate
in a community of psychological, emotional, and intellectual understanding.
Indeed, a large part of the critical and commercial appeal of such works
is that they allow the viewer and reviewer to feel that they become part
of this cult of complete and perfect knowledge, as they move, in the course
of the film, from confusion to clarity, from doubt to certainty, from
being "out" to being "in."
 No
set of values could be more opposed to Cassavetes' belief about either
the process of living or the
function of art. For him making a film was not a display of power and
prowess, but was rather an act of humility. It did not involve virtuosic
arrangement and masterful organization, but patient exploration and tentative
discovery. As he often said, for his actors, his crew, his viewers,
and
himself, filmmaking was a matter of asking questions to which you didn't
know the answers and holding yourself tenderly open, ready to come
across
new questions at any moment. The work that resulted was an admission
of what you didn't know and might never be able to understand. It
was not
about moving from confusion to clarity – for the actor, the director,
or the viewer. Getting lost was the goal – being forced to break
your old habits and understandings, giving up your old forms of complacency.
The
way to wisdom was through not-knowing. The master plot of Cassavetes'
work – for himself, his actors, his characters, and his viewers – is
an antivirtuosic one: moving out of positions of power and control
and into
places of fear and uncertainty. That is why the narratives themselves
are almost always about going out of control. To allow yourself to
let
go was the first step in learning anything. Everything else was what
Cassavetes called "doing tricks" and "playing games" with
expression.
 What
is wrong with knowingness is that it removes us from the stimulating turmoil
of experience. It separates the individual from the scrambling confusion
of living because it figures a set of understandings worked out in advance
of or apart from the experience. For Cassavetes, thought was not something
that was done separate from, or that allowed you to rise above the turbulence
of experience, but rather was the process of hacking a path through an
experience as it happens. Another way of putting that is to say that,
for Cassavetes, filmmaking was not something that followed the living
or analyzed the living; it was the living. The styles of Hitchcock,
Welles, DePalma, and Lynch tell us that they use film to present ideas
and feelings that they have already worked out. They do their living and
thinking, and when they reach a certain point of clarity and resolution,
they summarize it in their work. That is why they can story-board their
scenes and decide on their camera angles before they ever walk onto the
set. They use the filmmaking process to push preselected buttons, to paint
by numbers. That is not what filmmaking was for Cassavetes. Every camera
movement or refocusing, every cut in his work tells us that for him making
a film was a way of wondering about an experience while you were having
it, not of reflecting on it from a distance. Filmmaking was exploring.
Rather
than art being a mirror held up to nature that gives back a pale, partial,
or distorted reflection of life, in this vision of it, art becomes
life
itself – life lived at its most intense, interesting, and engaged.
Henry James and Balzac never lived more excitingly and alertly than
when they
sat in a room writing, and Cassavetes never lived more sensitively or
passionately than when he was making his movies. As he rewrote his scripts,
darted about on his sets blocking out actions, or compared trial assemblies
in the Movieola, he was having experiences with the highest degree of
complexity that he could ever attain. In the filmmaking, he launched
himself on an adventure of discovery more thrilling, forward moving,
and excitingly
exploratory than even those experienced by the characters within his
films.
 This
is thought at its fastest and most acute (and as my cross-references
throughout this book have been
meant to suggest, thought fully as profound and complex as what one encounters
in Emerson's and William James' philosophical writing), but we need
a
new definition to do it justice. Living in the shadow of Plato, all of
our thinking about thinking is tainted with a contemplative bias.
In the
Platonic view, thought is something that we do when we are not experiencing
life. It is an intermission from responding to events. It happens
in our
heads, not in our bodies. It is theoretical and intellectual, not active
and practical. It is rigorous, systematic, and consistent, not playful,
experimental, and revisionary. Our thinking about art is similarly biased – favoring
the distancing effects of contemplation over the involvements of action,
the stabilities of explanation over the turbulence of experience, the
essences of epistemology over the flowing movements of history. Cassavetes
reversed these valuations and practiced a different kind of thought – thought
not as a meditative step backward from the chaos of action and event,
but as a plunge into it; thought not as something static and detached
from experience, but as engaged and on the move; thought not as a time-out
from the pressures and limitations of experience, but as a path of performance
through them. This is thought unsupported by (and unfettered by) system
and theory and regularity; thought as a state of abandonment to the pursuit
of an impulse; thought allowing for continuous shifts and revisions
of
course.
When Charlie Parker and Dizzy
Gillespie were jamming together, they were thinking this way – not
deliberating in advance of the act, not reflecting on it from a distance,
not meditatively
rising above the pressures of the performance – but thinking in
deed and action. Their thought was the activity of negotiating both sensory
and
theoretical pressures and constraints, of performing with them and against
them, and of shaping a continuously adjusted path of advance along them.
In this non-Platonic model, the engagements of action replace the disengagements
of contemplation as a way of moving through life.
In these creative circumstances,
the nature of meaning itself changes. Whereas the Faustian filmmaker
sets
out to display an intellectual and emotional superiority to experience,
to bend it to make a series of predetermined "points," in
Cassavetes' vision of art, there is no argument, meaning, or point
to prove. There
is only exploring and moving on, with no end to the process of experiencing,
and no goal to reach. That is why he was indifferent to his films
as finished
products. As he often said, the films didn't matter. What mattered was
the doing, the learning, the scrambling, the growing, the discoveries
along the way. The work itself (as a series of characters, blockings,
camera angles, and editorial choices) was only the tracks left behind
as the artist moved through a set of challenging, stimulating experiences.
It was the historical record of a series of choices. What this entire
book has been devoted to demonstrating is that, to the most alert viewing,
that is what the films become again – not bodies of codified
knowledge, not a series of views, messages, or statements about
experience, but examples
of the experiences themselves.
 This
is film not as about thought, or as documenting the conclusions
thought has arrived at, but as an act of thought in itself – as
a great jazz or dance performance is an act of thought. And like a lucky
recording of one of Louis Armstrong's or Charlie Parker's more exultant
solos, the film stands not as a statement about something, but
as a moving illustration of thought in action – thought at its most
brilliant and exciting, happening in the present tense. The films are
captured records of courses of events – experiences of living intensely,
responding rapidly, and feeling your way in the dark. They are enactments
of what it is like to live at the highest pitch of awareness, at a level
of engagement and responsiveness that we rarely reach in our lives. To
a viewer agile enough to keep up with their twists and turns, they become
inspiring examples of some of the most exciting, demanding paths that
can be taken through experience. It's as if Cassavetes hacked his way
through a jungle of experiences and we were left studying the moving record
of the trail his movements left behind. That is to say, the films are
records of movements, not presentations of positions. They display meanings
in motion that stay in motion. They offer a vision of a new form of truth
– truth not as a place of rest, truth not as a conclusion arrived
at, but as a path of performance within and against a series of ever-shifting
resistances. Cassavetes' films don't yield up meaning as a product, but
offer inspiring examples of the energy, intelligence, and emotional agility
it takes to have experiences of the most meaningful sort.
Cassavetes' supreme accomplishment
is that as a viewer watches his films he actively participates in the
same process of exploring, learning, wondering, and changing his mind
that the filmmaker did in making them. If we are nimble and strong enough,
we move through these experiences the way we move through life at our
best. The films themselves are the closest thing to life lived at its
most intense; they allow us the experience of fresh, growing, changing
experiences. That is why, in the end, we remember them only to be able
to forget them. We go to them only to leave them behind by moving beyond
them in our own experience. They bring us back to life.....
Excerpted from: "Meanings
in Motion: New Forms of Knowledge," The Boston Book Review,
Volume 1, number 2 (Winter 1994), p. 36; adapted from Ray Carney's The
Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
To read more of Ray Carney's
views on film and film criticism, see the Films of John Cassavetes, Films
of Mike Leigh, and Independent Vision sections.
This
page only contains excerpts and selected passages from Ray Carney's writing.
To obtain the complete text of this piece as well as the complet texts
of many pieces that are not included on the web site, click
here.
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