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Cassavetes's Organic Cinema
Ahead of the major retrospective at the Irish Film Institute, Michael Open offers an overview of the career of John Cassavetes, an icon of American cinema who has been overassociated with the notion of improvisation.
One of the most irritating aspects of media coverage of cinema is the tendency of journalists to try to encapsulate complex artists into a single epithet. Hence Welles = deep focus cinema; Renoir = humanism; Lubitsch = sophistication. Apart from the inevitable dumbing down that such a practice entails, the judgement is at best a gross over-simplification and at worst plain wrong. With John Cassavetes, who died almost 20 years ago, the shorthand is almost always 'improvisation'. Now a major retrospective season of his most important films is coming to Dublin (IFI July/August) and we will have the opportunity to closely compare his work with its reputation.
Cassavetes was born into a family of Greek immigrants in New York in the late 1920s. In 1950 he graduated from New York Academy of Dramatic Arts, embarked on an acting career and married actress Gena Rowlands. Disappointed with his lack of success, he began to teach method acting in 1956. It occurred to him that one of the more elaborate improvisations that came from this group would make a good film and, when he mentioned this on a radio show, $20,000 flowed in from listeners wanting to invest in the project. With a similar sum forthcoming from his various show business friends, he made what became Shadows (1957/9), an originally improvised film about a family of two brothers and a sister set in quasi-bohemian New York. However, though the film won an award at Venice in 1960 and was nominated for three BAFTAs, it was not a major commercial hit. During the 1960s, Cassavetes tried his hand at directing for Hollywood. When this failed to satisfy his artistic ambitions he returned to acting, making memorable contributions to The Killers and The Dirty Dozen for Don Siegel and Rosemary's Baby for Roman Polanski.
In 1968, having saved enough for another privately financed film, he embarked on <I>Faces<I>. The film was very well received and, in addition to winning the Volpi Cup at Venice for John Marley, it gained Oscar nominations for Lynn Carlin and Seymour Cassel as best supporting actress and actor respectively.
The full article is printed in Film Ireland 117.
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