031 - Shadows, 1959, United States. Dir. John Cassavetes.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

031 - Shadows, 1959, United States. Dir. John Cassavetes.

John Cassavetes was an actor's director.

He created spaces, atmospheres, in which the actors could work, and then allowed them to explore.

He gave them the freedom to develop their characters.

He would improvise together with them and then film what came out of it.  Then he would write a script.  They would memorize their lines and film it again, while retaining the improvisational freedom they had before.  They are now saying written lines but continuing to improvise their emotions and movements.

In the case of Shadows, his first film, he tried it the first way and screened it.  The results were poor, so he went back and did it again, the second way.  This developed into a technique.

The acting community has a word for this kind of approach.  Take the noun workshop and turn it into a verb.  To workshop.  The actor engages in a process called workshopping.  The actors workshop their characters to discover their objectives and relationships.  The scene unfolds organically from that.

His wife, Gena Rowlands, called it "the pleasure of discovery."

Cassavetes was a successful actor in Hollywood.

We will see him as an actor in The Killers (1964) and Rosemary's Baby (1968).  He also played in films such as The Dirty Dozen (1968) and Two-Minute Warning (1976), among many others.

However, he felt creatively stifled.

The way most movies are made--and it is still this way today--the director sets up the shot according to the lighting and camera angles first.  Then he establishes marks that the actor must hit at a given moment.  The actor must hit his mark at the given time while making it seem natural and spontaneous.

There is nothing wrong with doing it this way.  In fact, it provides greater creative control for the director and precision for the other departments.  Great actors hit their marks every day, and they make it seem natural and spontaneous.

However, Cassavetes wanted to explore the possibilities that might arise from reversing the order of priority.  Instead of making the actors conform to the positions of the lights and camera, what if he made the lights and camera conform to the positions of the actors?

This meant that he had to create more generic lighting rather than specific lighting.  He could not place a catch light in an actress's eyes or a hair light on the outlines of her head.  Rather, he had to light the room and then allow the actors to roam about within that space.

This also limited him to using mostly a camera on a tripod in long takes of master shots or else a handheld camera following the actors around.

But it was a way of doing things, and it opened up a new world for actors and filmmakers to follow.  The American independent cinema world, and in turn the international independent cinema world, owes a Cassavetes the honor of its gratitude.

In 1956 he was teaching an improvisational acting technique at his school, The Cassavetes-Lane Drama Workshop, and out of that workshop came the film Shadows.

Shadows takes place in New York City during the Beat Generation.  It follows three African-American siblings--two brothers and a sister--as they go about their lives.  One of the brothers is a jazz singer.  The other brother is a jazz trumpeter.  The singer, Hugh, is the only dark-skinned member of the family.  The other two, Ben and Lelia, are light-skinned enough that strangers do not always know that they are African-American.

This makes a difference in 1959.

The sister dates three different men in the course of the film, two white and one black.  One of the white men balks when he discovers that she has a black brother.  This is the moment that came out of the improvisation exercise at the workshop.

Shadows fits in the cinema verité tradition.  Watching it feels like watching a documentary, or better yet, like watching life happen spontaneously through a hidden camera.

The scenes are mostly ensemble, meaning that multiple people may be talking and moving at the same time, as in real life.

Shadows did not find distribution in the United States, but it got accepted into the Venice Film Festival.  And won.  It was then brought back to America as an import!

The actors who worked with Cassavetes speak of him in glowing terms.  They love him.  They talk of him as viewing everyone as a jewel, of being interested in love, and exploring through his filmmaking only love.

In the accompanying documentary, Peter Faulk states, "He was a wild animal, but at the same time the family was central to his universe."

The actress who plays the sister in Shadows, Lelia Goldoni, adds a beautiful story about him.

She says that he told his father he wanted to be an actor.

She asked him, "Did your father fight you about being an actor?"  Cassavetes said, No.

His father said, "That's a very noble thing to do.  But do you know what kind of responsibility that is?  You are going to have to be truthful to each of those character's human natures."

Goldoni concludes, "He listened to his Daddy."