|
Click
here for best printing of text
Cassavetes had
the new version of Shadows blown up to 35mm and gave it to
Amos Vogel for its world premiere on November 11, 1959 in a program
titled
"The Cinema of Improvisation" in Vogel's Cinema 16 series
on 24th Street. Shadows was preceded on the program by Robert
Frank and Alfred Leslie's recently completed Pull My Daisy (which
had been partially inspired by the Paris Theater screening of Shadows the
year before). Vogel believed in Cassavetes' film so much that he paid
him a $250 rental, four or five times more than his usual amount. Having
spent approximately $40,000 of his own money and three years of his
life
on the film at this point, it was the first penny of return Cassavetes
had seen on his investment. The screenings were triumphs. The audience
of artists, critics, and intellectuals, which included Parker Tyler,
Paddy Chayefsky, Kenneth Tynan, Meyer Shapiro, and Arthur Knight responded
with
sustained ovations. (Louis Malle had seen the film at a private screening
a few days earlier and had had an equally positive response.)
Hip
and Square
The contrast
between the two films on Vogel's Cinema 16 program is illuminating. Shadows
and Pull My Daisy define alternative paths for the first generation
of American independent filmmaking – a path of frivolousness and
a path of responsibility. While Shadows uses figures like Lelia
and Ben to complexly interrogate the adequacy of Beat stances and claims
of
freedom, Pull My Daisy smugly, self-satisfyingly wallows in them.
Frank's film simply buys into Beat postures, while Cassavetes' attempts
to understand them and explore their emotional causes and consequences.
Shadows is the rarest of works from that period – a film
that analyzes the fraudulence of Beat posturing, even as it appreciates
why
figures would want to protect themselves in this way. Imaginatively positioning
itself half-inside, half-outside the Beat milieu, it reveals what is
wrong
with attempting to be hip and detached, while continuing to love the
characters despite their flaws.
As is the case in so many Beat works (the films of Ron Rice and Ken Jacobs
serving as additional relevant reference points), the actors in Pull
My Daisy are in love with their own cuteness. They are ironic post-modernists
before the fact-posing, preening, and style-surfing-turning all of
life
into a jokesy "goof" or "lark." Cassavetes, on the other hand, is a deadly
serious filmmaker (which doesn't prevent him from being hilarious
as well).
Pull My Daisy may be charming and fun, but it is ultimately a
frivolous work, because it imagines creativity as off to the side of
the "real world,"
something that you do on your days off-spouting doggerel and clowning
around at home. For Cassavetes, the world is the place where you express
your imagination. Lelia's theatricality, like Mabel's or Myrtle's later,
represents an enrichment, and a complication, of ordinary, everyday
life,
not an alternative to it or a vacation from it. Shadows may be
funny but is never a joke. Lelia, Tony, and Ben show us that our words
and actions have serious consequences.
To read another
essay on the relation of Shadows to Beat Generation filmmaking
and Robert Frank's Pull My Daisy, look in the Beat Movement
section or click
here or here.
This page
contains excerpts from Ray Carney's writing about Shadows
and Beat film. The passage above is from Carney's book on Shadows.
Carney also curated the Whitney Museum's Beat film show and contributed
two chapters to Lisa Phillips, ed. Beat Culture and the New America
1950-1965 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art in association
with Flammarion), 1995. The Shadows book and the Beat
Culture book have much more about Beat aesthetics. For more
information about the Phillips book see the Beat section of the
site. For more information about the Shadows book click
here.
|
