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"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 mindbogglingly 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.
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