John Cassavetes’ Shadows speeds and skips along like its jazz score, with the hip, street-savvy spirit of structured improvisation. Images and plot points are strung together like loose, individual notes that gradually cohere into rhythm and melody and refrain.
Criterion has released restored prints of Shadows (1959) and Faces (1968) in stand-alone editions. The two films were previously available only as part of a larger box set of Cassavetes’ films.
Shadows (1959), Cassavetes’ first film as a director, was an experimental, anti-Hollywood film. Shot on the cheap on Actors’ Studio sets and on location in the streets of New York, the film essentially launched the American independent film movement with its gritty, do-it-yourself aesthetic.
With its low-budget production values—rough-hewn, high-contrast photography and an often out-of-sync soundtrack—the film was surely a challenge to the eyes and ears of the era’s moviegoers. And really, it still is.Shadows is unapologetically ragged, by both design and necessity, it’s homemade aesthetic lending it an aura of authenticity in comparison with the slick Hollywood entertainments in which Cassavetes the actor labored to finance the work of Cassavetes the director.
Cassavetes was dissatisfied with his first completed version. It was too loose, too fractured, so he rewrote and re-shot portions of the film and followed with a second version that gave greater shape to the work.
The story concerns the relationships and activities of a trio of African-American siblings, touching on many issues, from family to friendship to love to race.
In a sense, the film represents a return to the earliest days of the motion picture, when filmmakers shot on location, under the open sun and on open terrain—a time when budgets were small and equipment more primitive. With Shadows, Cassavetes recaptured the spirit of adventure that suffuses the work of cinema’s pioneers. Thus, what is often cited as the birth of independent cinema is more akin to a rebirth—one of many that the art form has undergone and continues to undergo, as each generation manages to find its own way of stripping away the layers of artifice to delve deeper into the medium, to rediscover the simple, elemental power of what is still essentially the art of photographing the human face.
Criterion. $29.95 each. www.criterion.com.
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