This is the second part of the eleventh essay in Bruce Hodsdon’s
erudite series devoted to Hollywood directors and the actors they worked with.
This essay digresses from his consideration of classical Hollywood by focusing
on one of the first, key American independents.
The previous essays can be found if you
click on the links below.
The
Melbourne Cinemathèque is screening six films by John
Cassavetes beginning on February
28. Click on the link for details.
* * * * * *
How might one
describe a 'Cassavetes system'? The definition of a system involves a
regular interaction or interdependence of elements forming a unified whole. In
looking at a filmmaker's oeuvre rather than an individual work it seems a more
appropriate concept than form which is more applicable to the
organisation of an individual work, or say a genre, to make ideas and emotions
intelligible.
 |
| Adrian Martin |
Adrian Martin
refers to Cassavetes as “an inventor of forms” across a whole spectrum of
cinematic style or narration, “each of his films is a distinct strange planet
with its own secret rules and hidden lines of force.” This might seem in
conflict with the concept of 'a Cassavetes system'. Implicit in invoking this
framework is as rebuttal of the criticism that his work, when at its most
personal, is little more than indulgent semi-improvised jumble. Cassavetes as a
writer-director was continually experimenting with form and working for the
freedom to do so. As Ray Carney puts it “the celebrator of pattern breaking
kept breaking his own patterns.” Serious engagement with this process as a
viewer is to be drawn into the Cassavetes system. As suggested below it is a
process deliberately left open to performative productivity in a collaboratively
personal way.
Themes
Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that “basic questions
about love, identity, and definition are at the root of all of Cassavetes' work
as a filmmaker.” To Martin, “Cassavetes' films transform human questions - what
it is to be and maintain a couple, a family, a community, an
individual-in-society - into, at the same time, urgent questions of
representation (with) every phenomenon explored by his work...treated not as a
'given' but as a question, a thing still to exist, a dream to be conjured, a
concept to be tested and tried” or, as he quotes Nicole Brenez, his films as “a
figural laboratory.” Many of his films Martin suggests are thematically about
making arrangements with the system.
In expressing his
commitment to and love for his films Cassavetes described them as “straight on,
straightforward movies about things that we don't know about, But they're questions I think people ask themselves all
the time.”
Method
Rosenbaum in a
review of Woman Under the Influence in Monthly Film Bulletin (January
1976) saw Cassavetes' films from the beginning “at once limited and defined by
their anti-intellectual form of humanism, an unconditional acceptance of the
social norms of his characters that exults emotion and intuition over analysis”
(2)
The intensity and
authenticity of human emotions and interactions in Cassavetes' films are often
fixed upon as spontaneous and unplanned even as it is generally understood that
in varying degrees his films were scripted, rehearsed, staged and blocked. He did not give his actors much direction.
They were, Jeremy Carr suggests, “given ownership of their characters.” He went
to great lengths to get their responses almost never telling the actor what he
wanted from the scene or character. He did not favour group rehearsals. In
response to assumptions by critics about actors improvising their lines, he
told an interviewer that “the emotion was improvisation, the lines were
written.”
Ray Carney
considers that style and form are not adequate terms to describe Cassavetes'
system given the way he “cultivates different ways of seeing and hearing” the
meanings in his films emanating “from the faces, bodies and voices of specific
performers.” He sees Cassavetes as “pioneering a new conception of what film can
be and do. His vision was of film as a personal exploration of the meaning and
lives of the people around him.” Carney speaks of pure emotion and being free
of what Cassavetes referred to as “the game play” in the realisation of
conventional narratives.
Cassavetes himself
described the differences between “a pre-formulated product” of “a dictated
design” and his aspiration for a work which dared to “compulsively go forward,
trying to make something out of the moment without preordaining the way the
outcome is going to be.” The crux of Carney's analysis would seem to be a
radical form of psychological realism in which the actor is a fundamental
generator of meaning compared to the prevailing mode in which the actor is more
or less the passive recipient of meanings created and manipulated by non-actors
(writer, director, cinematographer,etc). What Cassavetes is doing in his films
(from writing through to editing) is “leaving the prevailing notion of
self-contained and protected identity behind.”
Martin questions
Carney's downplaying of formal invention “in the name of pure emotion and
'being'... It is a mistake to see his films as “formless” the form being
precisely in the wandering and openness.” His visual sense was intuitive but
not uncontrolled. Part of his system was seemingly a lack of system in the
sense of pre planned. But Cassavetes more than any of the other directors
discussed in this series was into asking for twenty or more takes and shooting up to a million feet of
film per picture. As George Kouvaros
suggests “each film seems to match the process of starting from scratch...
constantly negotiating a coming into being.”
 |
| Contains Myron Meisel's essay on Cassavetes |
Myron Meisel
identifies a key element of his expressive talent “lies in the cumulative power of his images
of actors. The keynote is involvement not identification but implicating the
audience in the feelings of the characters”(my italics). Meisel also
emphasises that “the first principle...is the acting - not the actor but the
acting itself- and his preoccupation with human behaviour as performance.” A
key is that Cassavetes “is the most objective of directors in the use of
close-ups.” Meisel further suggests that
a Cassavetes' film can be close to a comedy of manners most apparent with Minnie
and Moskowitz – “middle to lower class Lubitsch with a dash of show-off –
Jerry Lewis or Chaplin”.
Carney suggests
that Cassavetes in his films “asks us to pick through unanalysed perceptual
events for which the conceptual understandings are unavailable...a
fundamentally different notion of selfhood from filmmakers working in the
mainstream American tradition.”
Cassavetes presents us with characterisation and character interaction
that is open (not the same as “open-ended” in conventional narrative) rather
than closed in what Carney terms “the visionary/symbolic aesthetic” in
mainstream narrative. A rebuttal to this might be that overwhelmingly we go to
fictional narrative films to be transported into an imaginary analog of
a recognisable world. In fact Cassavetes' films are as mediated as films in the
mainstream narrative mode but pass through a quite different mediation process
which results in a perception of social relationships that is neither the
equivalent of those we experience in the everyday nor that experienced in the
standard fictional narrative.
 |
| Contains George Kouvaros essay |
George Kouvaros sees the
uncertainties in Cassavetes' films - their refusal to explain characters'
motivations and their fractured exposition - make it difficult to categorise
them. Rosenbaum's speculative proposal of “ a kind of instinctive, unsystematic
modernism” as part of his work is problematic in its falling back on the
notions of both 'instinctive' (intuitive is more apt) and 'unsystematic' (his
method was nothing if not the application of deliberate process). The man
himself said he hated the idea of both 'political' and 'art' cinemas. Yet
Cassavetes intuitively based filmmaking practice confirms his films' modernity
when compared to the conventions of mainstream storytelling. His films “not
only give us back the everyday but set about to constantly reinvent it through
the act of cinema” (Kouvaros)
Concern has been
expressed in the recent past about the “mediating roadblocks” set up by critic
and academic Ray Carney on Cassavetes studies since the 80s (see Adrian
Martin). Carney has given us valuable
biographical information published in his book length 500 pages of interviews
in Cassavetes on Cassavetes (1999) for example. He describes it “as the autobiography that
Cassavetes never lived to write.” As
much as half the book is taken up with Carney's own commentary filling in the
informational gaps mixed with his critical judgements. His analytical writing,
while often insightful, seems to read at times more like a lesson in how the
films are to be read. It could be said that he has reinvented Cassavetes' films
in the image of Carney's own philosophical, literary and cinematic frames of
reference which is not necessarily, in itself, a problem. There is more of a
problem in the way Carney presents his lucid analyses as acts of definitive reclamation
rather than tentative discovery.
The tenor of
Carney's advocacy is that he seems to be reluctant to recognise the growing
body of other approaches to the polysemic openness of Cassavetes' cinema. This
would seem to reflect the enormous amount of time and intellectual energy
Carney has invested in recovering and writing about Cassavetes' work. It would
also seem to reflect an understandable impatience with what he sees as the
ill-informed negativity of much of the American critical establishment to
Cassavetes' work.
Kouvaros
argues that Cassavetes' films “are concerned with thinking about performance as
a temporal process...marked by a deliberate attempt to open out and pressure
the space and time through which character and scene emerge.” He used
improvisation to workshop his script with the actors in rehearsal encouraging
them to make suggestions. He went through a script in this way dozens of times,
making changes before shooting, an indication of the priority he gave to such
collaboration. This was then extended into the filming of the script in his
deliberate policy of over-shooting with dozens of re-takes, “a technique,”
Kouvaros suggests, “ designed to open the moment of filming to those gestures,
actions and movements not determined in advance by the script...An extreme
attentivenes to unexpected surprises and discoveries...transforming the moment
of filming into a productive event.” Jean-Louis Comolli described this use of
cinema not “ as a way of reproducing actions, gestures, faces or ideas but as a
way of producing them.”
Kouvaros adds that
these forms of improvisation are “a deliberate attempt to open the film up to
questions and points of view which cannot be answered or contained by the
narrative.” The policy of over-shooting is also linked to the allowing “a sense
of the performers before the scene and after it passes” placing
the standard representational economy of character and scene in doubt.
Cassavetes thus ignored the dictum that “a film shows only those things that
are important” in other words, that move the narrative forward (3).
Kouvaros's
observations about performance in A Woman Under the Influence carry over
into other of the films in noting that the “characteristic where meaning of
words spoken between the characters is often less important than the way they
are spoken.” Performance in Cassavetes' films epitomised by Gena Rowlands (but
not so much by Ben Gazzara in Chinese Bookie for example) has a
theatrical play of gestures, codes and sounds, part of a distinctive pattern of
“performative excess” which together with the use of music (eg opera in Woman)
surprises while maintaining the illusion of narrative space. This involves our
participation in “the unfolding of a performance rather than the gradual
evolution of a character or individual psychology.” Kouvaros further notes that
“in Cassavetes' films crises of emotion and identity are never located within
individuals... (but) are always configured in the spaces between the
characters.
Notes
1. Rohdie ventures to describe a classical system “as primarily imitative
(of nature, of existing forms) and the great classical artist is someone great
for his or her ability to imitate not innovate, who obeys the rules with grace
and style...If classical forms are remarkable for their objectivity, rules and
clarity modern forms are celebrated essentially for their subjectivity, an
artistry that goes beyond the norms and establishes a new set of forms and
language.”
2. Rosenbaum in his 1989 obituary for Cassavetes in Sight and Sound,
while again noting the anti-intellectualism informing Cassavetes' work, refers
to his reinvention of tenets of modernism such as unorthodox continuity and
exposition, fractured narratives and dissolution of personality and even of
psychology. A couple of years later
Rosenbaum refers to the notion of “a radical humanism” most evident in
Cassavetes' work as a playwright and director on the stage and his concern in
his films only with “what they show and we see and hear,” a disregard for
audience expectation that backgrounding be included in the narrative. Rosenbaum
also refers to Cassavetes liking for characters that are mediocrities which can
be off-putting. “Yet he loves, respects and defends them with such unqualified
fervour that the very expression of this sentiment becomes a political act.”
3. It should be noted that the corollary to Cassavetes 'over shooting
policy' was a lengthy editing process in which he would often prepare multiple
versions (see note on Husbands in part 1). What should further be
emphasised is how integral to the system was the writing of the script.
Main Sources Ray Carney Cassavetes on Cassavetes 1999; The
Films of John Cassavetes 1994; Interview with Carney by Jake Mahaffy
2001 here George Kouvaros “Improvisation and the Operatic:
Cassavetes' Woman Under the Influence, essay in Falling For
You : Essays in Cinema and performance, ed. Lesley Stern & Kouvaros
2001. See also interview with Needham in Senses of Cinema Myron Meisel, essay on
Cassavetes in American Directors Vol 2 ed. Jean-Pierre
Coursodon 1983. Adrian Martin “Myths that Stand in the way of
the Proper Appreciation of John Cassavetes on his highly esteemed personal website Jonathan Rosenbaum notes on
Cassavetes, Placing Movies 1995. See also in part 1
reference to online essay by Jeremy Carr on Cassavetes in Senses
of Cinema .
My thanks to the
staff at the AFI Research Collection at
RMIT Melbourne (afiresearch@rmit.edu.au ) for their assistance.
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