Sombras

Like all Cassavetes, Shadows makes every movie in recent memory seem irrelevant to your life and how to live it. The theme of 1959's Shadows centers around race and its effects on relations between men and women. As in life, this falls a distant second to the theme of the pervasive and exhausting need for love. Shadows is often billed as the story of a 'black woman who passes as white.' Cassavetes' film illustrates how these stark delineations between races harms those who exist in the shadows in-between. Lelia is a light-skinned part-African woman in New York who falls for an infantile racist white man. When Lelia's boyfriend meets her darker brother Hugh, her lover's true colors are revealed. Hugh is a dignified and caring protector who refuses to let racism erode his positive nature, though he faces blatant economic persecution in his work. Lelia's second brother, a charismatic jazz musician played by the beautiful Benito Carruthers, is also light-skinned. We painfully watch as his displacement in both 'white' and 'black' social groups gives rise to self-loathing and isolation. Ben wandering New York alone, hiding behind a series of dark sunglasses, is an enduring image from the film. One crushing scene shows Ben promising Lelia's lover that he will convey the sickly reasoning behind the rejection to his sister. Ben's palpable pain is relevant to people of every 'shade.' The dismissal of the possibility of love, based solely on race or other peripheral facts, is tragic across the whole spectrum of social relationships.

Shadows breathes the smell of New York's streets like no film before it. This kick off of Cassavetes' directorial work is as atmospheric as political and the initial spark for a renewal in American cinema.

Maybe it solicits for watching Cassavetes' first work in a double feature with another debut, Godard's À bout de soufflé. Both films shaped the cinematic production of their countries beyond decades and both breathe a peculiar lightness and jauntiness which was later rarely achieved by those filmmakers in their career.

Shadows tells from three Afro-American siblings, Ben (Ben Carruthers), Lelia (Lelia Goldoni) and Hugh (Hugh Hurd). The story is set in the New York jazz milieu and the driving rhythms on the soundtrack play a main part for the feverish, sometimes almost dreamlike atmosphere which draws through the entire film. There's not much happening in the plot. The everyday life of the three siblings is defined by problems in love relationship or in their jobs, but on both levels normality deceives. Without moralizing gestus, Cassavetes simply describes the mechanism of racial exclusion, in public and in private life. It was, regarding to the cinematic depiction of racism, a breakthrough film in the US.

This film owes also a lot to the performances of the three leading actors which were all almost completely unknown before. Especially Ben Carruthers established with his energetic portrayal the image of a new self-conception of young, urban blacks in America, an image which characterizes Spike Lee's films of the 80s and 90s. Revealingly, none of those three doubtlessly extremely talented actors was able to start a big career afterwards. Hollywood wasn't and isn't ready to ethnically expand its star system, and that is why Goldoni, Hurd and Carruthers only found small artistic niches in TV and independent films later on.

Perhaps Shadows is one of the less "beautiful" films ever shot, and one of the most beautiful ones at the same time; a film of shades and spaces, with a camera that merely watches the stream of life in the crowded street corners, bars, hotel lobbies, apartments, inducing an intriguing ramble through New York's vibrant streets.

No need to repeat what little plot there is.

In 1959, movie-making was a closed shop. Between the studios, the craft unions, and the distributors, the only films outside Hollywood were home movies. Add a restrictive Production Code to that shop, and you get a commercial product that's typically slick, entertaining, but all too predictable.

I remember being on a mid-western campus at the time and hearing about Shadows. An independent production gave me ideas that fortunately or unfortunately never materialized. But for many others, the idea took root and, most importantly, helped shake loose the Hollywood monopoly.

No, Shadows is far from a masterpiece by any standard. It is, however, a gutsy, pioneering effort that achieves its own brand of sensibility—it's certainly not slick; then too, it's more interesting than entertaining, and not at all predictable. In short, what's on Cassavetes's screen is largely in contrast to what we expected from feature films of the time.

Instead of conventional story or plot, there are several very loose narrative threads. Instead of prepared script, set, and cast, there are non-professionals and improvisation, though how much, I gather, is debatable. And in place of expected resolutions at movie's end, life simply continues much as it did before.

As a result, there's no expected moral or lesson to events. They simply happen as they happen, but within that framework, new possibilities open up, while the screen comes to look more like everyday experience than an entertainment medium. I gather the aim is to reveal truths at a new level left undisclosed by traditional narrative structure. Something like the 'truth of the moment as it's lived'.

This is certainly no place to attempt a concept like that. However, I can see how movie tradition with its emphasis on structure and artifice would override the momentary and the non-preconceived in favor of the integrity of the whole. So, it looks like Cassavetes not only helped establish the indie, but also aimed at a new way of looking at movies in general.

Anyway, I don't know how well he succeeds with Shadows. However, I do have a lasting image of New York City, that is, of the shabbily gaunt Ben Carruthers hunched down in his leather jacket, perhaps as protection against an uncaring world as he drifts aimlessly down the city street. I'm just sorry that Shadows didn't make it to my long ago campus.

What is there to say about an anti-establishment film that was produced in a time of such colourless void, social indifference and authoritarian contentment. Cassevettes first major independent film was not an instant box office success and still has not received the critical attention it deserves. I draw comparisons to this wave of American independent projects consisting of such 'Beat' filmmakers as Robert Frank and Harry Smith with the burgeoning scene emerging in Paris in the late 1950's known as the French new wave.

They discussed poetry and philosophy and vulnerability at a time when the rest of the culture was obsessed with rediscovering American cultural supremacy; even at this stage this peculiar, highly spontaneous brand of filmmaking fought against the establishment of such political lexicons and bigots that held the development of the arts in check in the mid twentieth century.

Cassevettes film examines race relations and portrays man as weak in the face of love because we, as a culture, are blinded by our own race bias and prejudice. The great element to most of Cassevettes work is that his films have almost a reversal minimalist effect; a mental reaction is evoked through subtle character relations, not so much imagery. This is why his work seems to linger because he takes a more intimate approach to defining charcters that rely less heavily on explicit actions and more upon interpretation.

Although my favourite Cassevettes film is 'Husbands', this one is his most important.

1959 was a landmark in the world of film. Several great directors of the classic era were releasing career capping classics that ranked among their best. Just a look at the titles is instructive, Hitchcock's North By Northwest, Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot, Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life. Add a couple from the previous year, Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, Hitch's Vertigo, and Nick Ray's Wind Across the Everglades, and you've got a pretty good summing up of what was possible within the classic Hollywood style.

At the same time, two films appeared that hinted at a whole new way of making films. One was Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, the other was John Cassavetes Shadows. The two films had certain things in common, largely improvised acting by non stars, handheld cameras, low budgets, and a certain youthful, jazzy swagger. In certain ways, though, they couldn't be farther apart. Godard was still a believer in the director as arbiter of style. He knew more about film than most Hollywood producers, and Breathless was filled with the iconography of the classic crime film. Cassavetes, on the other hand, was an actor, and a refugee from New York's underground theater scene. His first film shows him little impressed with the cinema, and a big believer in actors. Godard's film constantly references it's own artifice, whereas Shadows aims for a certain kind of naturalism.

It doesn't reach it, mainly because naturalism is a myth, particularly in cinema. But it feels powerful, kinetic but lilting like the cool jazz on the score, certainly the main inspiration for the filmmaking style on display here. It ultimately doesn't hold together, mainly because Cassavetes' actors here are amateurish beatniks, where Cassavetes style requires strong, imaginative actors. His later work with Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazarra, and Peter Falk blows this out of the water. Due to the director's technical inexperience, some bits of dialogue had to be redubbed later, which defeats the freshness of the improvisation. Still it's fascinating to watch, both for the great moments (like the scene where Leila Goldoni talks about her dissapointment with losing her virginity) and to watch a groundbreaking artist finding his way.