Over the past ten years, in a torrent of essays, articles, and interviews, Ray Carney has established himself as one of America's most brilliant and merciless critics of the American film establishment in all of its crass commercialism – from the producers and directors who package "star vehicles" to maximize profitability, to the distributors and exhibitors who see to it that the same ten titles play at every multiplex from coast to coast, to the television, radio, and print journalists who all too often function as mindless extensions of the studio ad campaigns. His sharpest barbs, however, have been reserved for the academic critics and university film programs that give Hollywood the sheen of intellectual legitimacy by bringing its celebrities into the classroom and its movies into the curriculum.

Of course, we've heard much the same thing in the past decade from neo-conservative image-phobes like Allan Bloom, William Bennett, and Hilton Kramer, all of whom apparently equate the rise of the movies with the fall of Western civilization. But what makes Carney's critique completely different from theirs is that Carney, a professor of American studies and film at Boston University, does not despise movies. His complaint, in fact, is not that film reviewers, critics, and college teachers take movies too seriously, but that they don't take them seriously enough. In Carney's view, if they really cared about the art of film, they wouldn't waste their time being trash collectors in the ghetto of pop culture genre studies.

Yet being a nay-sayer is too easy. The hard thing is to show how do it right, to say what you would put in place of what you are criticizing. That is why it is a special event, every few years or so, when Carney publishes a book that illustrates what film study and analysis can be at their most visionary and inspiring. Carney is clearly a born teacher, and here as in his four previous film books his vast learning (which takes in a wide range of American art and philosophy) and his obvious love for his subject seem almost enough to win figures like Bloom, Bennett, and Kramer to the cause of film study.

Every page of The Films of John Cassavetes is informed by the passion of a man on a mission to change the way movies are thought and written about. Carney has an extraordinarily exalted view of the function of cinematic art. Film is, for him, neither escapist entertainment and recreation (as many journalistic reviewers regard it) nor an intricate stylistic game played off to one side of life (as most film professors treat it), but a way of exploring the most important and complex aspects of the human experience. What he writes about Cassavetes' work here summarizes his approach to all of the films he cares most deeply about: "[Cassavetes'] films explore new human emotions, new conceptions of personality, new possibilities of human relationship. He explores new ways of being in the world, not merely new formal 'moves.' His films are not walled off in an artistic never-never land of stylistic inbreeding and cross-referencing. Cassavetes gives us films that tell us about life and aspire to help us to live it."

While most film scholars are haggling over the date when deep focus photography was invented or how many shots are employed in the shower sequence of Psycho, Carney roves over the entire history of American film – from Griffith and Capra, to Welles and Hitchcock, to Kubrick, Altman, and Allen – and addresses ultimate questions of meaning and value. One of the most exciting aspects of this book is the impression it conveys that absolutely everything is open to reappraisal and revaluation. In a series of extended analyses, Carney takes up many of the canonical figures in American film history and offers stunningly new and controversial reinterpretations of their work. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane is criticized for its "rhetorical tendentiousness" and stylistic flamboyance, and judged to be an example of "kitsch modernism." Hitchcock is taken to task for the "shallow mystifications," emotional manipulativeness, and denial of physicality in his films. Even Robert Altman, currently the darling of many contemporary critics, is knocked for the superciliousness, snideness, cynicism, and negativity of his work.

Cassavetes, the no-budget, maverick independent, is the book's heart and soul. In his characteristically iconoclastic way, Carney argues that Cassavetes was the greatest genius of recent cinema, and unapologetically positions his films (which include Shadows, Faces, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, and Love Streams) alongside the work of many of the most important nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers. Not the least innovative aspect of Carney's writing is the degree to which it is radically interdisciplinary, and he sketches a series of strikingly original (yet persuasive) connections between Cassavetes' work and that of other American artists and thinkers: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James, John Singer Sargent and Willem De Kooning, William James and John Dewey, Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, George Balanchine and Paul Taylor. Since Cassavetes' achievement is still virtually ignored by academic film scholars, Carney is undoubtedly aware of the apparent outrageousness of the claims and connections he is urging. But I'm sure that is one of the reasons he wrote the book. His goal has always been to overturn academic apple-carts, to rock institutional boats, to gore intellectual sacred cows.

The Films of John Cassavetes echoes with the cadences of Emerson, one of Carney's most resonant intellectual sounding boards. As I turned the pages, almost holding my breath at moments, startled by the depth, power, and unexpectedness of the argument, emotionally suspended between exhilaration and fear, I found myself remembering one of my own favorite Emerson quotes: "Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk."

A book review by Wheeler Winston Dixon, Professor of Film at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, published in The Journal of Film and Video, vol. 48 (Spring/Summer 1996), pp. 88-94.

Carney, Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies (New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

John Cassavetes’ work as an actor in such films as The Dirty Dozen (1967), The Fury (1978), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is well known, along with his numerous appearances on television series of the 1950s and ‘60s. What is less known is that Cassavetes, from 1957 on, was far more interested in the work he could accomplish as a director than as an actor.

It was as a director that Cassavetes felt he accomplished his most important work; as an actor, he would appear in almost anything that would help him pay the bills to support his art, because the Hollywood studios were unremittingly hostile to his directorial vision. Ray Carney’s The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies is a long-overdue tribute to this great artist, whose works have been generally neglected by both the critics and the public. Meticulously researched and superbly detailed and indexed, the book emerges as a deeply personal and warmly engaging study of the filmmaker as an artist.

Before his death in 1989, Cassavetes directed a series of memorable films on shoestring budgets, starting with Shadows (shot in 1957 and released in 1958, then completely reshot and re-released in 1989) and continuing on with Faces (shot in 1965; released in 1968), Husbands (shot in 1969; released in 1970), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (shot in 1972; released in 1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (shot and released in 1976, then recut and re-released in 1978 “in a completely reedited” version [(Carney 314]), and Love Streams (shot in 1983, released in 1984).

Carney argues that, as a body of work, Cassavetes’ completely “independent” films (as opposed to Too Late Blues, A Child is Waiting, and even Gloria [1980], to my mind the most interesting of his “studio system” films) “participate in a previously unrecognized form of pragmatic American modernism that, in its ebullient affirmation of life, not only goes against the world-weariness and despair of many twentieth-century works of art” but further, precisely because of their unconventional structure and content, resist “the assumptions and methods of most contemporary [film] criticism” (i) which emphasizes formalist concerns over humanist ones.

The author cites the directorial style of Welles, De Palma (who directed Cassavetes in The Fury), Hitchcock, Capra, Coppola, Griffith, and others as mechanisms of control and stylistic elegance, as opposed to the “pseudocumentary” (77) approach employed by Cassavetes, which used rough, hand-held camera work, directly recorded sound, available or minimal lighting, and meditational editing that lingered on the characters long after the tension of a conventional “scene” was dissolved.

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For this unconventional approach, Cassavetes paid dearly. During the director’s lifetime, his eight most personal films (Shadows, Faces, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Chinese Bookie, Opening Night [shot in 1977, released in 1978, then withdrawn and released in 1991], and Love Streams) were ruthlessly marginalized by poor distribution and phantom availability in 16mm or video formats. Even now, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, and Love Streams are unavailable on videotape (28). None is available on laser disc.

This inadequate distribution insured that the films would never reach the public at large; confined to “art house” openings in major metropolitan centers, Cassavetes’ films were never given the chance to attain any kind of commercial success. But, then again, given their problematic structure and subject matter, did Cassavetes ever have a hope of reaching a general audience? As the director himself observed, “All my life I’ve fought against clarity – all those stupid definitive answers. . . . I won’t call [my work] entertainment. It’s exploring. It’s asking questions of people” (184). He realized that certain people would like a more conventional form [in cinema], much like the gangster picture . . . they like it ‘canned.’ It’s easy for them. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that’s boring. I won’t make shorthand films. . . . I want to shake [the audience] up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths (282).

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This responsive, humanly chaotic visual style is directly at odds with conventional cinematic framing, giving the viewer of Cassavetes’ films “unbalanced relationships, mercurial movements, unformulated experiences slopping over the edges of the frame, bubbling over the intellectual containers, breaking the forms that deliver them to us” (91). Resolutely noncommercial and anti-narrativistic in the best sense, Faces is nothing so much as a working out of Cassavetes’ view of human fallibility as a visual as well as a situation/social dilemma. the characters in Faces are grandiose and theatrical, yet they are one with the audience, so ordinary and unexceptional that we embrace them out of a common bond of shared experience.

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In [Minnie and Moskowitz], as in his other works, Cassavetes asks his audience continually to revise their interpretation of both the events and the characters they are watching on the screen and, above all, never to become complacent viewers of the human experience. According to Carney, this unwillingness to rely upon cinematic convention sealed Cassavetes’ commercial doom . . . the supreme challenge of his work is directed at the viewer. [His audiences must] keep tearing up each of the understandings that emerge in the course of the film in order to remain fresh. Like the characters, we must open ourselves to a state of not-knowing (138).

Carney argues that this open-endedness, this lack of solid ground, is a fact of existence of the human experience. Yet nearly a century of cinematic practice has trained us to accept only the knowable, to follow a certain trajectory, to have faith in certain patterns of narration, to believe that events will move to a certain, predictable closure. This reliance on the moment, this willingness to embrace the inexpressible, to allow for the constant shifts in tone that make up, as Cassavetes puts it, the “life . . . [of] men and women” (139), also alienates a good number of professional critics in their responses to his work. If a situation can’t be trusted, then who’s to say that any resolution of a scene is more reliable than any other?

That’s just Carney's point here – there is no solid ground, there is no ultimate authority. Life continually moves away from its mooring, seeks new paths, refuses to do what we expect (and/or desire) of it. Only in the movies can we escape to a predictable narrative “logic.” Nor does Cassavetes’ visual style call attention to itself in an attempt to concretize and stabilize the narratives he allows to unfold. As the author states:

According to Carney, most avant-garde films don’t arouse the degree of resistance from a viewer or a critic that Cassavetes’ work does because they implicitly marginalize their own insights. They stylistically contain the dangers dramatized; they do not release them into life. Their assaults are formal, their fragmentations are stylistic, their disorientations are intellectual. Cassavetes moves avant-garde imaginative disruptions off of the screen and into the world (134).

Carney demonstrates that for Cassavetes, it is not the practice of distanciational cinematic technical devices that is the hallmark of his work – it is his embrace of the erupting and unexpected narrative shifts of existence, told in a self-effacing, nonpyrotechnical style, that holds the viewer.

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Carney compares The Killing of a Chinese Bookie with Citizen Kane, but points out a critical difference between the two films and the aesthetic premises of the two directors:

Unlike Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie criticizes PR forms of human relationship without collapsing into PR forms of presentation. . . . It shows the fatuousness of Cosmo’s quest for contentless stylishness, charm, and elegance without itself playing the same game in its visual and acoustic effects. . . . Welles’s work is organized around a contradiction. He was guilty of the very thing he indicts in his protagonist. He was in love with stylistic razzle-dazzle. He was captive to rhetorical flourish and grandiosity. [Cassavetes] in contrast gives us an art devoid of gorgeousness and forms of acting that reject melodramatic enlargements. . . . He creates an art that repudiates stylistic virtuosity and special effects.” (230-31).

The result is a film that is dark, murky, and altogether harrowing, a view of life as a series of lies, manipulation, frauds, and tawdry spectacles. At 135 minutes in its first version (1976), and even at a reduced 108 minutes in Cassavetes’ 1978 recut, the world of Chinese Bookie is one of unrelenting nightmare, the embrace of tinsel and flash as the emptiness that lies behind the creation of packaged performance, Cosmo’s world is unendurable, except that by documenting it, Cassavetes has forced us to witness that which is simultaneously fascinating and appalling – the death of humanism created for mass consumption.

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As Carney demonstrates, Cassavetes showed us the multivalent possibilities of existence as we are forced to live them on a daily basis, without resorting to tricky camera moves or self-conscious editing, without following predictable narrative scenarios, instinctively eschewing the easy way out. Cassavetes’ work exists beyond the boundaries imposed by conventional narrative cinema – it even exists beyond the supposed freedom of the avant-garde.

At its best, Cassavetes’ cinema is raw, unvarnished, and deeply positive. If we can just see things pragmatically (as the title of Ray Carney’s book suggests), then perhaps we can live without delusion. Cassavetes’ deeply undervalued films are the personal testament of a director who paid for his art with his body (as an actor) and who compromised his artistic integrity. He emerges in The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies as one of the most important and essential American directors the cinema has given us; certainly the films he directed constitute a cultural legacy of which any creative artist would justifiably be proud.

© Wheeler Winston Dixon and The Journal of Film and Video. Copyright 1996. All rights reserved by the copyright holders.