When John Cassavetes died two years ago at the age of 59, the American cinema lost the most important director of its post-classical period.
Cassavetes was a one-man American New Wave, poking around the ruins of the studio system and returning with a few precious artifacts-which he then used to construct a system of his own, one that stood outside of the traditional Hollywood means of expression, finance and distribution.
His work is passionate and ungainly, tender and aggressive, grating and ultimately heartbreaking. No other filmmaker loved his characters as much as he did, or lived through them so intensely.
One of the first true independents, Cassavetes paid for his filmmaking debut, ”Shadows” (1960), with money raised from a radio call-in show.
Although only ”Shadows” was created through improvisational techniques, all of Cassavetes` subsequent films retained a loose, edgy, improvised feeling, in spite of the fact that most of them were tightly scripted.
Though Cassavetes did pass through the studios after ”Shadows,” for the disappointing ”Too Late Blues” (1962) and ”A Child Is Waiting” (1963), he eventually returned to his own devices, using his own money (and his own home as the principal set) to film ”Faces,” which became one of the unexpected hits of 1968.
Cassavetes accepted studio support for a few of his later films-”
Husbands” (1970), ”Minnie and Moskowitz” (1974) and ”Gloria” (1980)-
though he preferred the perfect freedom of signing his own checks and owning his own work.
Those are the films-Cassavetes` Cassavetes-that are being shown over the next six weeks at the Music Box Theater, 3733 N. Southport Ave., thanks to an arrangement with Cassavetes` estate.
The program includes most of Cassavetes` very finest work, with the conspicuous exception of his final fully personal effort and his final masterpiece, ”Love Streams,” which is controlled by Cannon Films.
Cassavetes` detractors-and during his lifetime, they were legion-invariably applied the adjective ”self-indulgent” to his work. His films were plotless and overlong, it was said, a collection of hysterically over-emoted scenes cut together with no regard for pacing, dramatic force or narrative clarity.
But rather than indulging himself, it was Cassavetes` intention not to indulge his audience, eliminating the props and cues that make it possible, and even preferable, to watch most movies in a state of semi-consciousness.
Exposition-the establishment of who, what and why-is either non-existent in Cassavetes` films or delayed so long that it becomes pointless. We have to discover and identify the characters for ourselves. We have to pay close attention to the dialogue and situations in order to discover what the characters do, what their relations are to each other and where they fit on the social scale (a scale that, for an American filmmaker, was unusually wide- ranging).
Through these practical questions and surface ambiguities, Cassavetes carefully focuses our attention on who, ultimately, his characters are. It`s a question that is never easy to answer, either for the audience or for the characters concerned.
Cassavetes was fascinated by hysterically insecure women and alcoholically pugnacious men-by characters who seem to pour out their emotions in great, ungainly torrents but who, in the end, keep their real secrets for themselves. Improvising personalities around their guilts and vulnerabilities, Cassavetes` characters are all actors, either professionally or temperamentally.
In the 1974 ”A Woman Under the Influence,” which remains Cassavetes most accessible and immediately sympathetic film (it opens the series this Friday), Cassavetes` wife and most intimate collaborator, Gena Rowlands, plays a working-class housewife who eventually collapses under the strain of hiding her own unhappiness from her husband (Peter Falk) and children.
”The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” made in 1976 and showing from Sept. 27 through Oct. 3, stars Ben Gazzara as Cassavetes` most introverted character, the owner (and, significantly, the chief director) of a Los Angeles nightclub whose exaggerated bravado gets him in trouble with the mob.
”Faces” (Oct. 4 through 10) follows the two halves of a Hollywood couple through a night of separation and attempted infidelity. A producer
(John Marley) is drawn to a compassionate prostitute (Gena Rowlands), and his wife (Lynn Carlin) attempts suicide after sleeping with a younger man
(Seymour Cassel).
In ”Shadows,” Cassavetes` first film (Oct. 11 through 17), the question of identity is shifted to a social and racial plane. A light-skinned black woman (Lelia Goldoni) and her brother (Ben Carruthers) are able to pass for white but uncertain whether they should.
”Opening Night,” the most neglected of Cassavetes` major works (the Music Box is giving it a deserved two-week run, Oct. 18 through 31), features Rowlands as a middle-aged actress who falls into an emotional crisis when she witnesses the accidental death of a young fan.
Cassavetes` characters are lonely people who are never alone. Surrounded by family, lovers, friends and the insistent press of total strangers, they struggle to respond to the demands made upon them, reinventing and sometimes surpassing themselves in the attempt.
At the end of ”Chinese Bookie,” the Ben Gazzara character, clearly speaking for Cassavetes himself, delivers the strangest and truest show-must- go-on speech ever written: ”I`m only happy when I can be what people want me to be,” he says, explaining his love of show business and urging his dispirited performers to take the stage, ”only when I can be other than myself.”
It`s this notion of life as performance that links the two, apparently contradictory sides of Cassavetes style: the extreme, documentary-like naturalism of his visual style on the one hand, and the unrestrained theatricality of his direction of actors on the other.
If Cassavetes relishes spectacular, self-dramatizing gestures, he is also sensitive to the authentic effort and desperation that lie behind them. Such gestures are a Rowlands specialty-dramatic declarations of love that wrenchingly reveal the character`s need to be loved. Theatrical extravagance is a response to the mute, tiny disappointments of life, a way of confronting and redeeming reality.
The same situations occur again and again in Cassavetes` work: drunken arguments, attempted adultery, failed suicides, barroom pick-ups, back alley beatings and woozy mornings-after. His scenes are structured around uneven numbers-groups of three or five-to prevent pairing off and encourage competitiveness and instability.
In a sense, he always tells the same story-that of the relationship between a withdrawn, controlling, self-protective male and an exposed, vulnerable, self-sacrificing female. The characters grow older, more prosperous and more established, although they never lose their fundamental innocence and childlike uncertainty.
”Love Streams,” in which Cassavetes and Rowlands play a brother and sister rediscovering each other late in life, closes the circle with the brother and sister of ”Shadows,” almost as if Cassavetes knew he was making his last movie. Yet his characters seem younger and more hopeful than ever.
So, too, has Cassavetes` work resisted age. By its nature-by its openness and energy, its honesty and prickliness-it will always seem as fresh and immediate as the day it was made.
