Thanks to the uncompromising nature of his oeuvre, John Cassavetes (1929-1989) is regarded as one of the founding lights of American independent filmmaking and set lasting standards with his consistent disdain for artistic restrictions. It was at a workshop for unemployed actors in 1956 that Cassavetes developed his ideas on filmmaking as a group endeavor. This produced his first film SHADOWS in turn, which was improvised and made on a tiny budget, yet opened up the doors of Hollywood to him nonetheless, although his attempts to assert his working methods and aesthetic ideas in the studio system led to disappointment. As a result, Cassavetes set up his own production company and consistently positioned himself outside the orbit of Hollywood. Working in close, steady group contexts became a central aspect of Cassavetes’s method, who preferred to work with a fixed ensemble of actors – mainly Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Seymour Cassel, to say nothing of Gena Rowlands, who he married in 1954. His cinema lives from their total physical commitment to their roles and their unconditional openness to personal fears, yearnings, and insecurities, creating a cinema of intensity and of the unflinching dissection of feelings. His stories are just as incalculable, hard to grasp, and erratic, with excesses and eruptions taking the place of predictable narratives. Uninterested in crafting traditionally beautiful images, his films resist standard patterns of seeing and are entirely constructed around people, focused on their faces and bodies. Cassavetes often earned the necessary money to make his films by acting in other directors’ films. There too, he often sought out the boundaries and explored the extreme states of human behavior, often playing bad guys, while also shining in quieter roles.
We are showing all of Cassavetes’ films on 35mm prints together with a selection of his work as an actor.
