SHADOWS A
USA (87 mi) 1959
d: John Casssavetes
Shadows was an
experiment. It predominantly came out of a workshop. We were improvising on a
story, one that was in my mind. It was my secret. Every scene in Shadows was
very simple; they were predicated on people having problems that were overcome
with other problems…There was a struggle because firstly I had never done a
film before, and secondly the actors had to find the confidence to have quiet
at times, and not just constantly talk. This took about the first three weeks
of the schedule. Eventually all this material was thrown away, and then everyone
became cool and easy and relaxed and they had their own things to say, which
was the point.
As you go along in
life sometimes your innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you, and
once you lose them you don’t have anything else. I don’t think anyone does it
purposefully. It’s just that a lot of
people are not aware of losing those things.
I found myself losing them too, and then suddenly I woke up by accident,
by sheer accident of not getting along with something, with something inside.
—John Cassavetes, 1968
While Cassavetes often receives credit with this film for
being the father of American independent filmmaking, he was heavily influenced
by Italian Realism films, especially screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, who
Cassavetes claims “is surely the greatest screenwriter that ever lived,” along
with American studio directors Frank Capra and Robert Rossen, also independent
directors Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, and Morris Engel’s Little
Fugitive (1953), where cinéma vérité was an American artform long before
the French adopted it. This is a landmark
Black and White film, originally shot by Erich Kollmar on 16 mm, later
transferred to 35 mm, a contemporary of French New Wave works like Godard’s BREATHLESS
(1960) and Truffaut’s The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), or perhaps more significantly, Rivette’s
PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), as this has a New
York Belongs To Us feel about it, as the streets of Manhattan and the music
of Charles Mingus mix with a free-form jazz improvisational style expressed in quick,
jerky, handheld camera movements attuned to Beat movement music and rhythms, producing
a grittier realism along with the feel of unscripted dialogue and humor, a
wonderful glimpse at a spirit and energy of American youth yearning for
freedom. From Jonathan Rosenbaum,
“Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, subtlety, and raw feeling emerged so
naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film.” Written, directed, and co-edited by
Cassavetes, this is an exuberant film about love, race, changing identity, and
searching for meaning in relationships, where each character has a hard time just
being themselves, as they’re continually caught off guard, where you catch a
glimpse of “I love you truly, truly dear...,” a song that reappears later in
all its glory in MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ (1971).
The opening sequence of three young guys with three girls, without a
clue in the world what to do, yet covering it up with forced laughter and comic
showboating, is exactly what the grown men do a decade later in HUSBANDS
(1970).
Made for $40,000 using a nonprofessional cast and crew,
using borrowed and rented equipment, the texture of the film comes from the
grainy film stock, the constantly roving camera, and restless characters that
refuse to sit still, as even when standing or sitting their minds are
constantly on high alert, sending out streams of energy that are the signpost
of this breakout film, where perhaps the underlying theme is coming out of the
late 50’s, an era of suffocating conformity, where learning to eschew the
conventional pathways and follow your own path was essential, as it was
especially important to believe in yourself and trust your own instincts. With astonishing raw intensity, the film
rushes ahead at breakneck speed while also probing into the psychological
interiors of the characters who each lay bare their souls. All using their own first names, two brothers
and a sister live together, but only the oldest is dark skinned black, while
the two youngest are light skinned enough to pass for white, a matter of
consequence as the film progresses. Lelia
Goldoni is stunning as the sensual, yet often opinionated young 20-year old sister
who is delightfully confused with the attention of two white guys and one black
guy, where we follow her friendships, arguments, sexual encounters, parties and
dances, as she tries to blend in and pretend that race doesn’t matter and that
“casual” sex has no consequences. Abandoned
by Tony (Anthony Ray), one of the white lovers when he discovers her race, her
world turns upside down, Shadows by John Cassavetes YouTube (4:46).
The other younger brother (Ben
Carruthers) is an unemployed trumpet player caught up in the bohemian Greenwich
Village scene where he’s always trying to find the elusive mood of hipster cool
and spends most of his time unsuccessfully chasing girls while out with his
friends. The older brother (Hugh Heard) is
the only one working, responsible enough to continue chasing after third-rate
singing jobs to pay the bills, but he’s tired of being passed over for lesser
talents and for the way he’s continually mistreated in the business, yet he tries
to be the strong, protecting older brother.
Each seems to be fooling themselves in a film that captures the
immediacy of the moment, the importance of now, leaving one to wonder what to
do in the next moment.
SHADOWS, like Cassavetes’ later work GLORIA (1980), are two
of the best films ever made showcasing the streets of New York, where even a freewheeling
discussion about art (“You don’t have to understand it! If you feel it, you feel it, that’s it man.”),
which may as well provide an underlying context of the film, makes beautiful
use of the Museum of Modern Art, Shadows (Dir: John
Cassavetes) - YouTube (2:07). Two
years after the original shoot, however, in February 1959, Cassavetes spent two
weeks reshooting several scenes, such as Lelia’s unflinchingly honest love
scene where the director shows an inordinate amount of concern for the
confusion in her character about what happens next, Shadows (John Cassavetes) YouTube (3:42),
or her prolonged walk down 42nd Street alone where she gets accosted by a guy
and none other than Cassavetes himself as a complete stranger comes to her aid,
Shadows [Dir: John
Cassavetes] - Leia y el jazz YouTube (1:21), or her quarrelsome dance scene
at a club with her black partner, all of which round out her character, adding
greater depth without altering her initial identity — interesting that with
this version, Goldoni provides one of the more memorable and underrated
performances in film. Seen today, one
might marvel at the particularly effective use of close ups, but one of the
most startling aspects is the use of sound, how there are so many street scenes
with no natural sound, something very prevalent in filmmaking today, instead
there are eloquent jazz passages to fill the silence or sufficient quiet to
“hear” what they are saying to each other, while at other times conversations
struggle to be heard over the noise of the room, which is one of the key
elements of the film, as these characters are continually striving for a level
of understanding they haven’t reached yet.
Amusingly, by the time Cassavetes made HUSBANDS, his characters would
fly to the other end of the earth in search of finding something to say. The film won the Critics Award at the 1960
Venice Film Festival and drew the attention of major studios, offering
Cassavetes opportunities to make Too
Late Blues (1961) and A
Child Is Waiting (1963), both of which failed both critically and
financially, where in the latter, Cassavetes was fired before completing the
film, eventually placed in the hands of Stanley Kramer to reshoot and recut the
film. But like Hugh, those films brought
in paychecks, as did his continuing acting work in mainstream films, all so he
could make the kind of films he wanted to make in his own characteristic
style.
What can you say about Cassavetes? He’s a director that evolved out of a love of
actors and what they could bring to the screen.
To Cassavetes the actor’s performances were more important even than the
director himself, as a film is a composite of multiple forces and ideas, all
moving in different directions, each with different responsibilities. But onscreen, the director has an opportunity
to create something meaningful by having actors come to life in front of the
camera, where their lives can connect with the audience if they are believable
and feel like real life. This means no
phony performances, no method acting in front of the camera, simply
characters naturally being themselves onscreen, where the job of the actors is
to find and honestly identify with the character they’re playing. What this likely means is that actors have to
live with their roles for awhile in real life, where they don’t break
character, where they explore what possibilities unfold in differing
situations, usually rehearsing for months with other actors in workshops until
certain characters and scenes develop.
In this manner Cassavetes scripted his films, as they evolved out of
rehearsals. The jazz soundtrack by
Charles Mingus and his saxophonist Shafi Hadi is immensely significant, as this film grew out of the postwar 40’s and 50’s, a golden age in hard driving Bebop jazz,
characterized by uptempo virtuoso performances of recognizable melodies
followed by improvisations on the original theme. It was an energetic style of music that
brought together people of all races, including Beats, where many of the most
celebrated jazz artists of the era were black, though certainly not
exclusively, and the audiences that adored them were an eclectic group that
came from all walks of life, all drawn to that special feeling discovered in a
more liberating and spacious style of music.
Much has been made of the film’s closing title sequence, “The film you
have just seen is an improvisation,” where many get the idea that the film was
unscripted and simply improvised on the spot.
Cassavetes, however, was a stickler for writing meticulously composed
scripts, where like the jazz performances the film emulates, there are stated
ideas and themes, followed by spontaneous emotional eruptions which may as well
be the improvisations.
The idea for SHADOWS grew out of Cassavetes’ acting
workshops in New York, where in the mid 50’s he and theater director Burt Lane
(actress Diane Lane’s father) founded the Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop. From
the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006:
To an interviewer who visited the
workshop, Cassavetes somewhat vaguely tried to describe the classes as being
designed to teach students to 'act naturally,' so that their work didn't look
'staged' or 'artificial.' He said his goal was to bring 'realism' back to
acting, and that the highest compliment that could possibly be paid to one of
his actors was to say that he or she didn't appear to be 'acting,' but simply
'living' his character. The journalist regarded the explanation as fairly trite
until Cassavetes added that the 'artificiality' of the expression of emotion
was more than a dramatic problem. It was a problem in life. The young actor
argued that most lived experiences were as 'staged' and 'artificial' as most
dramatic experiences, and that the real problem 'for modern man' (as Cassavetes
inflatedly put it) was 'breaking free from conventions and learning how to
really feel again.' It was a daring leap: lived experience could be as much a
product of convention as dramatic experience, and in fact one sort of
convention could be the subject of the other. it was the first and most
succinct statement of the subject of Shadows
and of all Cassavetes' later work.
In particular, Cassavetes was displeased with Method actors,
especially Actor’s Studio founder Lee
Strasberg, whose students included Elia Kazan, Marlon Brando, Montgomery
Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino,
Dustin Hoffman, and Jack Nicholson, where actors were encouraged to draw upon
their own personal experiences.
Cassavetes believed Strasberg’s protégée’s accumulated too much power
with the studio casting directors, and while they were initially seen as
something of a revolutionary breakthrough, they also became factory generated
products. From
the Short Stack: Ray Carney on John ... - Slant Magazine Matt Zoller Seitz on Ray Carney’s book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, from Slant magazine, March 5, 2006:
By the mid-'50’s the Method had
hardened into a received style that was as rigid, unimaginative and boring as
the styles it had replaced ten years earlier. The slouch, shuffle, furrow and
stammer had been turned into recipes for profundity. The actor filled the
character up with his own self-indulgent emotions and narcissistic
fantasies…Normal, healthy, extroverted social and sexual expression between men
and women dropped out of drama. Inward-turning neuroticism became equated with
truth. The result was lazy, sentimental acting.
Using money he had earned from the Johnny Staccato (1959-60) television series, Cassavetes enlisted
the actors from his workshop along with more lightweight and mobile 16 mm
cameras and took to the streets of New York, where the initial shoot, “entirely
spontaneous and improvised,” took ten weeks, from February to May in 1957. Cassavetes also decided to plug his movie idea
on the radio, which produced surprising results, from Cassavetes
on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows by Ray Carney:
I was going on Jean Shepherd's Night People radio show, because he had
plugged Edge of the City, and I wanted
to thank him for it. I told Jean about the piece we had done, and how it could
be a good film. I said, "Wouldn't it be terrific if [ordinary] people
could make movies, instead of all these Hollywood big-wigs who are only
interested in business and how much the picture was going to gross and
everything?" And he asked if I thought I'd be able to raise the money for
it." If people really want to see a movie about people," I answered, "they should just contribute
money." For a week afterwards, money came in. At the end it totaled
$2,500. And we were committed to start a film. One soldier showed up with five
dollars after hitchhiking 300 miles to give it to us. And some really weird
girl came in off the street; she had a mustache and hair on her legs and the
hair on her head was matted with dirt and she wore a filthy polka-dot dress;
she was really bad. After walking into the workshop, this girl got down on her
knees, grabbed my pants and said, "I listened to your program last night.
You are the Messiah." Anyway, she became our sound editor and straightened
out her life. In fact, a lot of people who worked on the film were people who
were screwed up – and got straightened out working with the rest of us. We
wouldn't take anything bigger than a five dollar bill – though once, when
things looked real rough, we did cash a $100 check from Josh Logan.
But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse
and his group dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I
never considered the sound. We didn't even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So
when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that
was the sound of the picture. So we
spent hours, days, weeks, months, years
trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just
went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London they said, "This is
an innovation!" You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin
that innovation!
Shooting without permits, running cables and wires down the
street, all designed to make quick getaways from the police if needed,
Cassavetes invented a kind of guerrilla shooting inside restaurants, looking out
their windows onto the street, or capturing the street activity in various
parts of New York City. SHADOWS was
initially screened in November 1958, when the film had three free midnight
screenings, catching the eye of Village
Voice film critic Jonas Mekas, one of the leading advocates of American avant-garde
cinema, who immediately championed the film, calling it a “spontaneous
cinema” masterpiece, “the most frontier-breaking American feature film in at
least a decade…More than any other recent American film, (it) presents
contemporary reality in a fresh and unconventional manner. The improvisation,
spontaneity, and free inspiration that are almost entirely lost in most films
from an excess of professionalism are fully used in this film.” From Cassavetes
on Cassavetes: The Making of Shadows by Ray Carney:
I went to a theater-owner friend of
mine and I said, "Look, we want to show our film and we can fill this
theater." It was the Paris Theater in New York and 600 people filled that
theater and we turned away another 400 people at the door. About 15 minutes
into the film the people started to leave. And they left. And they left! And I
began perspiring and the cast was getting angry. We all sat closer and closer
together and pretty soon there wasn't anyone in the theater! I think there was
one critic in the theater, one critic who was a friend of ours, who walked over
to us and said, "This is the most marvelous film I've ever seen in my
life!" And I said, "I don't want to hit you right now. I'm a little
uptight, not feeling too hot and none of us are, so" And he said,
"No. This is really a very good film." So, like all failures, you get
a sense of humor about it and you go out and spend the night – when it's bad
enough, and this was so bad that it couldn't be repaired.
I could see the flaws in Shadows myself: It was a totally
intellectual film – and therefore less than human. I had fallen in love with
the camera, with technique, with beautiful shots, with experimentation for its
own sake. All I did was exploiting film technique, shooting rhythms, using
large lenses – shooting through trees, and windows. It had a nice rhythm to it,
but it had absolutely nothing to do with people. Whereas you have to create
interest in your characters because this is what audiences go to see. The film
was filled with what you might call "cinematic virtuosity" – for its
own sake; with angles and fancy cutting and a lot of jazz going on in the
background. But the one thing that came at all alive to me after I had laid it
aside a few weeks was that just now and again the actors had survived all my
tricks. But this did not often happen! They barely came to life.
Cassavetes, however, was not interested in making an overly
intellectual, avant-garde film, but wanted to connect with the audience, so he made
an adjustment and recalled the actors, reshooting much of the movie again in two weeks around February,
1959, this time adhering to a script while still capturing the feel of
spontaneity. However, while he kept
about half of the original footage in the revised film, the earlier version has
remained a source of controversy. When
SHADOWS opened commercially in New York in March 1961, a month after
BREATHLESS, Mekas was appalled, calling this new effort “a bad commercial film with everything that I
was praising completely destroyed.”
Cassavetes countered, however, claiming his final cut was in “no way a
concession and…a film far superior to the first.” While all prints of the original version were
believed lost, in 2004 Boston University professor Ray Carney, author of Cassavetes On Cassavetes and leading
Cassavetes scholar, announced the discovery of the original print, which
consisted of two reels of 16mm black and white film with optical sound,
apparently spending years with the daughter of a downtown Manhattan junk dealer
who discovered it abandoned in the New York subway. The 78-minute film played at the 2004
Rotterdam Film Festival, some 45 years after the original midnight screenings,
having developed the reputation of the ‘holy grail’ of independent cinema, but
hasn’t been seen since. Gena Rowlands,
Cassavetes’ leading lady and surviving spouse, the executor of his estate,
claims the film is stolen property and threatened legal action to prevent the
first version from being screened, contending that the SHADOWS film her husband
released to the public is the only one that should ever be seen. SHADOWS remains today a seminal work, the
most influential independently produced film of its era, a “virtual
breakthrough” for American alternative cinema, giving rise to a group of
independent filmmakers that still thrive today making often less technically
polished, less commercial, low-budget alternatives to bigger budgeted Hollywood
studio releases.
