The Cult of Cassavetes

In line with the recent surge in popularity of John Cassavetes, ACMI is currently showing a retrospective of the director’s work. Although I found the talking heads style documentary A Constant Forge unbearable when I watched it on DVD, and after advising the girl ahead of me in the ticketing queue to skip it, I ended up seeing it anyway. This was a mistake. It’s a horrible documentary, boringly shot, completely devoid of interesting insights and critical analysis of the films, and at a three hour running time, you’d expect to come away with some feeling for the man, which you don’t. What it does demonstrate is the cult that seems to surround Cassavetes and his films. I spent the last year writing about one of Cassavetes most unusual films, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and this cult is something I found impossible to escape. Although there is some excellent writing about Cassavetes, there is even more that treats the director as a godlike figurehead of independent film. In A Constant Forge, we have people who knew Cassavetes, and people who like to think they knew Cassavetes all adulating him to the point where it becomes not only nauseating, but completely irrelevant. I am no fan of delving into artists messy personal lives, but I find it equally disrespectful to give an artist’s work no in depth discussion, and merely call everything he does genius, thus rendering it untouchable. Cassavetes apparently wanted his audiences to be jolted, to struggle with his vision, and although he seems to have nurtured the cult during his lifetime in order to get people to work extremely hard for free, he wanted to be respected as an artist, not a cult leader. This is what the cult denies him, because while singing his praises and focusing on his love of people rather than technique, they forget to engage with his films and see them as the accomplished and extremely dexterous works they are.

There is something of the hype that surrounds Jackson Pollock in this fandom. Like Pollock’s relationship with Clement Greenberg, Cassavetes has had the sycophantic Ray Carney championing his cause and casting him as an all American hero – a lone ranger thumbing both Hollywood commercialism and European experimentalism alike. But art and film, do not exist in a vacuum – Cassavetes was aware of cinema, he was aware of theatre, and he was clearly more engaged with technique than he wanted people to think. This is apparent in his unusual framing – a strong visual style that is there even in Shadows. There is a shot in Shadows where Ben’s head almost completely fills the frame, and although he is talking, his mouth is cut off, leaving his eyeline a third of the way down the frame, and his forehead filling the upper. Accidental? Bad framing left in because of a stunning performance? It’s possible, but if it were the case, why would Cassavetes choose not only to include this shot in the film, but then go on and use similar oddly cropped close ups in Faces? In fact, the cropped close up becomes a kind of motif through his work, possibly it appears in all his films – off the top of my head, I can think of examples from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence.

Other elements like the slow focus pulling, initially a result of the way the camera freely follows the actors, rather than the actors having fixed points to move to, and the inclusion of lens flare, seem to become deliberate and conscious additions. The lens flare in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, doesn’t happen at random moments, but at points where Cosmo is being engulfed by his debts, his dreams, his inability to communicate.

Cassavetes also embraced moments where abstract visuals take over from the performances. There are moments like this in the beginning of Faces when Jeannie, Dickie and Jim dance around in Jeannie’s house, and during the shows in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. At one point during Cosmo’s beloved ‘Paris’ number, the camera that has been following the action on stage, drifts off to frame the bright pink diamonds of a bead curtain, and the scene completely gives way to splotches of blurry coloured light.

These are but a few examples. In the next few posts I’ll give a more in depth analysis of the visual style of some of Cassavetes films.

Junebug

Recently married, George (Alessandro Nivola) and Madelaine (Embeth Davidtz) are on a trip to help Madelaine secure ‘outsider’ painter David Wark (Frank Hoyt Taylor) for her gallery.  As luck would have it, Wark lives near George’s family, and so, the business trip becomes a family one.  The Johnsten’s are a close knit family, presided over by Peg (Celia Weston), whose oppressive presence can be felt in the spare neatness of the house.  Also living in the Johnsten home are George’s silent father (Scott Wilson), his angry brother Johnny (Ben MacKenzie) and Johnny’s very pregnant wife Ashley (Amy Adams).  Madelaine and George arrive in the midst of what seems to be a typical morning, Johnny growling about running out of cigarettes, Peg nagging at him to help out, and Ashley chattering, over excited about the impending arrival of the newly weds.  Ashley is the one who makes an effort to make Madelaine feel welcome, taking her up to the spare room and  painting her nails, talking the whole time.  Peg is openly hostile.  In her opinion, Madelaine is too beautiful and too smart to make a good wife.  The story revolves around this clash of values, and as many reviews of the film have observed, the strong characterisation and excellent performances allow both Madelaine and the Johnsten’s plenty of room to display both their positive and negative points.

Empty rooms punctuate Junebug (2005, Phil Morrison).  Madelaine’s empty gallery after an auction, the strangely lifeless dining room in the Johnsten’s home, the Johnsten’s kitchen after a storm of words, the front lawn, green and well-watered.  These empty rooms are presented just as they are, in longish single shots, from a fixed camera position. A shot of the Johnsten’s dining room shows a gleaming table and a bit of a sideboard.  The room is too neat, the few knick knacks placed awkwardly.  Although the room is not cluttered, it is claustrophobic, and Peg’s controlling presence seems to suck any warmth out of the room – even the sun struggles to get through the sheer curtain.

Initially, my reaction was to be excited by these quiet, empty pauses, as they seemed to suggest the importance of place in the characters lives, as well as emphasising the sameness of the place.  The shots are similar to a lot of photographs of suburbia I have seen exhibited in the past few years, composed in the most obvious, anti-art fashion in order to emphasise the banality of the place.  They are unusual in the context of this film, and at first I was seduced by their strangeness.  However, after thinking about these shots more, I am unsure how much they really add to a film where the main strengths are the strong performances.  Pace wise, they seem to create breaks rather than necessary pauses, and I think that emphasising the banality of the house can sell short the way in which the characters experience their environment.  Despite their rigid and daily existence, people live here, and even though Ashley and Johnny have personalities that clash with Peg’s clean and neat aesthetic, I think Ashley’s character probably thinks of the home as nice, and despite Peg’s smothering personality, she says of the family, ‘This is my family now.’

The most successful shots of the house and its surrounds are those which include the characters in the space.  When Ashley goes into labour, Madelaine is told by Peg to stay at the house and wait for George, while the rest of the family rushes to the hospital.  As the car drives off, Madelaine is left standing on the path beside the neat green lawn, awkwardly holding her bag.  She is tiny compared to the house and garden.  The shot then flips around to show the neighbor whom we saw earlier being snubbed by Peg standing on her own vast lawn watching Madelaine.  Eventually she turns and walks up to the house.  An equally powerful moment occurs after the family return home from the hospital after the baby’s death.  The camera rests on the unused dining room just as it did at the beginning of the film, only this time, Peg walks into the frame and sits down at the table.  Eventually she begins crying.  Watching her sob in her immaculate dining room shows well the incongruity between her outward appearance and her capacity for emotion.