Interpretation Of T Test

is the mid-50s we started hearing about a comedian named John Cassavetes . Coming from American Academy of Dramatic A rt

New York and marked by the method of Lee Strasberg , Man, Greek by his parents, but American in its own right, is right subsequently observed in a film of Martin Ritt , Edge of the City

(

The Man Who Shot fear
). Deserter and humanist, fiercely independent,

Cassavetes is already quite himself, but we do not know yet. Stage actor, television and film, charming and seductive as not, the future

Johnny Staccato

is designated to become a new James Dean or Marlon Brando , unless it is a successor of Humphrey Bogart , with whom he shares the small size and sharp intelligence.

Then came a bizarre event that disturbs the plans they had drawn for the future star. One evening in 1957, John Cassavetes

listening only to his impulses, which would later become legendary, decides to make a movie. He realized that but there will not. And better than that, he decided to finance the film public subscription. This will ultimately not really the case, but with the help of Maurice Mac Endres and Nico Papatakis , exiled in New York because of the war in Algeria, he will finish Shadows . As

Rouch,

Godard, Truffaut, Rivette in France, or Oshima Japan, Cassavetes brings a breath of air and life in film. Shadows as Breathless or later Love Crazy of Rivette, use methods of direct cinema to put them in the service of fiction. Yet both of them do not know each other and ignore the work that leads each of his side.

Shadows (1959)

But time is on

New Wave cinema and this moment is unique. Shadows defines, better than any other film, the axes of the method Cassavetes: complicity in the production and staging, refusal of submission to the technical relationship to the actor, explosive mixture Improvisation and writing, editing designed as a work in progress. In short, a film based on intuition and freedom controlled. A film where the human element triumph. Turn with Cassavetes for technicians like actors, requires availability at all times. Imagination is better than dry professionalism. The atmosphere is more important than the script and the actors are the princes of the film, true touchstones of the staging. From all this Shadows is completely impregnated and immediately present the quintessence of cinema

Cassavetes.

must stress one important point about this first movie is about him doubly risky for the time. First, there is interracial love between a white and a black girl, but views from the perspective of the black community. Audacity of a story that does not simplify the many ambiguities and tensions between races, and remains deeply committed to an ideal of interbreeding.

Then the brother-sister relationships are handled with subtlety, delicacy and implicitly contain rare dimension if not incestuous, or at least close to love. Slope of incest that grazed Cassavetes borrow again, twenty-five years later for his penultimate film Love Streams. But in Shadows like Love Streams is less the sexual attraction that haunts the secret affinity Cassavetes, indefinable linking a brother and sister. Concern that the close, on behalf of the cinema, the great novels that experiment the brother-sister like Pierre or the ambiguities of Herman Melville or The Man Without qualities of Robert Musil . Anyway, Shadows, which we had not seen in France for thirty years, has kept its freshness as if the 1958 New York captured live, remained eternally present. Last element of Shadows : music. Why? Simply because the author and the performer is

Charles Mingus

which improvises along with Shafi Hadi his saxophone at the time, throughout the image is so Mingus body with Shadows that we end up not knowing if the music that accompanies the plans or the reverse. In one case as in the other, phrasing, tone, pulse, pace Cassavetes as

Mingus wonders. Again, kinship with jazz when he will resume his next film, Too Late Blues , not to mention TV series Johnny Staccato where he played the title role. that Cassavetes is an independent filmmaker
does not prevent it from being noticed by Hollywood.

. Experience the second film will still be traumatic for

Cassavetes. Dispossessed of mounting
Stanley Kramer

his producer, he left the studios to find his freedom.

Faces (1968)

After a period of mild depression, Cassavetes, whose energy is as astonishing as that of a Bergman or Renoir, undertakes Faces , probably his masterpiece. On all fronts, this film is torrential and unforgettable. Faces has never been distributed in France. Its output is an event in more ways than one. Imagine Pierrot le fou remained unpublished until now and you'll see the blow is the discovery of Faces . Yet this film, shown and awarded at Venice in 1968, nothing spectacular in appearance. It is after all nothing but little bourgeois spree, women and men are deceiving each other. So where does his power, his character at once awful and vital? Certainly, this camera gestures of that intoxication, for sure, this camera gesture, which literally invades the film with the flow of speech unstoppable. There are a lot of hysteria in Faces, but she is still human too human and especially filmed without voyeurism. We viewers are involved in the experience and projected into the eye of the cyclone.

Faces is still important because it is the first film Cassavetes where the idea of troop plays a predominant role. We see at work two favorite actors of the tribe, Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands

. While the first had appeared in a jazz drummer in

Too Late Blues while the second involved in A Child is Waiting , second role behind the stars, Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster . But this time they are one and the other, finally free to move, capable of shortcuts, instant pulse invisible in traditional Hollywood films. I will add a special mention to Lynn Carlin , one of the leading actresses, who for the purpose of the film, passed the state secretary to the actress. As for John Marley , the last member of the quartet basis, we find later in The Godfather a bloody horse head in the middle of her bed. Faces

gave Cassavetes a form of recognition and a new autonomy. With this film, made friends and wrist strength, without money or nearly so, with production methods unconnected with the industry, begins the best period of Cassavetes. It connects Husbands (1970 ) who contributed a few years ago to get him back on the front of the French scene.

A Woman Under the Influence (A Woman Under the Influence, 1974)

In 1973 it turns A Woman Under the Influence with Gena Rowlands again and Peter Falk he had already met for Husbands. As

Faces, A Woman Under the Influence is a great film about America and its daily average. It shows invisible characters in all of American cinema. But this time it's Ordinary Madness dominates.

Faces

featured the frustrations of a man and a woman who tore. A Woman Under the Influence shows instead how a couple is recovering. Rarely has a film been both documentary as well as modest. Moreover, the film is not limited to the couple, it brings the excess at the heart of the family. It mobilizes all the relationships and emotions that oscillate incessantly family love to alienation. This time, the footage that dominates and allows Cassavetes beautifully capture the scenes group. Three examples unforgettable: the main stage where spaghetti Mabel (Gena Rowlands ) is facing a twenty workers; the sequence that precedes the internment where the step-mother, husband, doctor, children come to form clusters of people literally intractable: the return of Mabel home. Three classic moments that have nothing yet bravura. On madness, Cassavetes never the slightest glance moralizing. He is content to record behavior and leaves us free to try or rather watching. The secret Cassavetes is to let the speak life into its excesses and outbursts. A Woman Under the Influence emerges treasures of love and most important!

Killing of a Chinese Bookie (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976) The next film, Killing of a Chinese Bookie ( 1976, first released in France under the title The Young Rascals ) belongs to a genre codified in the extreme, film noir. This could be surprising, from a filmmaker who seems to sulk the rules in force in Hollywood.

is already forgotten that Minnie and Moskowitz had all the appearance of a wacky comedy in the Capra. Cassavetes plays the game of the genre film but with its own weapons. Far from re The Big Sleep or

Asphalt Jungle, it imposed its rhythm. Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a thriller Twilight, where Cassavetes likes to shoot a Los Angeles almost desert in which killers roam ramshackle.

We must safe to say a word about the main character, Cosmo Vitelli

, played by Ben Gazzara in great shape, which is back in the clan six years after Cassavetes Husbands . Cosmo Vitelli owns a striptease box but it is also the custodian of a morality of the spectacle of Jean Renoir Cancan or of Vincente Minnelli directed

All

n would not have denied and which could be summarized in one sentence: "The show must go on." But Cosmo Vitelli is also the prototype of the self-made man trying desperately to maintain the financial independence of his small company without success. So it's a portrait of the filmmaker as a craftsman, guided by its desire for independence but watched by the money power. Cosmo sign an IOU to the Mafia and this signature is as irrefutable proof of his insanity. Opening Night (1977)

Before returning to Hollywood just to talk Mafia for Gloria , Cassavetes will have time to achieve of her most ambitious Opening Night, we may consider his poetic art. The late release of this film is an event because it is simply one of the most important works of its author. First, because it shows a side of the filmmaker, theater, very important at the beginning and the end of his career. While Opening Night is not really a documentary on the theatrical work of Cassavetes , but in any case it allows to realize the importance he provided closely with cinema. Opening Night is the story of Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands ), the narrative of a crucial period in the life of a theater actress in a crisis of identity, in confusion between life and the scene. It is also the story of a troupe with its director (Ben Gazzara

), actors (including John Cassavetes

), its author, its director of theater, stagehands, her dresser ... It's still a piece of history, The Second Woman , its repetition and its metamorphoses. Because of course in Cassavetes, the text is never sacred and life seeps through all sides of the stage for future change subtly or wildly theater. Opening Night is finally the second installment of a trilogy about the hysteria that begins with A Woman Under the Influence

and ending with

and Love Streams in which the presence of Gena Rowlands is exceptional. Here, the actress is extraordinary, playing behavioral disorders, mood changes, affective disorders and alcoholic hallucinations, nervous expenditure, with great presence Physical exceptional charge of his person literally to disgorge to the truth of the character. This gives the densest and most European films of Cassavetes, a tragi-comedy where the breath of indescribable drift away everything in its path. These five films - Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night - are shown together by the strongest of the work of Cassavetes. They are simple and direct as moments of our lives captured by a camera and friendly stalker at a time. Their discovery or rediscovery, will finally give John Cassavetes

its proper place, one of the first in modern cinema.

Thierry Jousse

------------------------- -------

VOSTF Preview: " Cinema, In Our Time - John Cassavetes "

(Time : 2 min)

Director André S. Labarthe / Authors: Andre S. Labarthe, Janine Bazin Producers: ARTE FRANCE, AMIP, INA

" For a long time Cassavetes is best known as an actor ( The Dirty Dozen

,

A blank , Rosemary's Baby ...), but obviously as a writer of films he appears here in the dawn of his career, even before he became the darling of movie buffs. Back in the 60s ... In 1965

, we are at home in Hollywood. It is surrounded by his staff. His garage was transformed into the editing room. Its editors are students at the UCLA

... " John Cassavetes 1929-1989

Filmography as Director: - Big Trouble (1986)

- Love Streams (1984) - Gloria (1980) -

Opening Night

(1977) - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) - A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)

- Husbands (1970) - Faces (1968)

- A Child Is Waiting (1963)

- A Pair of Boots

(1962) - My Daddy Can Lick Your Daddy

(1962)

- Too Late Blues
(1961)

-

Shadows (1959)

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