john cassavetes was a fucking film god!!!!
 

about half an hour ago i finished watching "a woman under the influence". holy fuck!! god damn amazing!

i have seen "shadows" , "faces" & "husbands"--- but this!!! this is the best fucking film dialogue ever!!!! oh and the cinematography, so incredibly good, proof that you don't need millions to make great movies.

by contrast i watched fucking spartacus last week and i thought it was complete shit. i couldn't believe it was kubrick. evidently it cost assloads of money to make the film, but the screenplay was awful & the editor must have been high on peyote-- so much fucking fluff-- wtf? kubrick's worst movie ever-- it was like watching cleopatra or one of those other 60's sword and sandal cheeseballs. gack! i'm guessing he must not have had a lot of control over the movie, because it was atrocious. the soundtrack btw=vomitory

anyway, enough of my rant. your turn.

yeah, you're right... my favorite is love streams, even if it's not his best.

he was an amazing guy. all the money he made from one film he used to make others and set up small film making studios etc. that in my book makes him pretty cool.

toxic johnny-- seriously??? man, you have to! most of his stuff is on criterion--- you gotta be able to find that in london, no question about it. (husbands, actually, was partly filmed in london)

start with "shadows" if you want to go chronological... otherwise, everything goes! i'm probably getting "the killing of a chinese bookie" next.

jon boy-- yes! he was a pioneer of american independent film! i mean there were more underground people, like brakhage or the kuchar brothers, but he was trying to made his own movies without "breaking" the traditional narrative of film.

i also love the feel of the movies i've seen-- the awkward pauses, the background noise-- that are almost like a documentary. low budget and just fucking brilliant.

!@#$%!... It's not a case of access, it's just one of those things... I've meant to check him out for a long time but haven't got around to it yet. I must admit I'm really really curious 'cause a lot of people who I respect [yrself included] rate him very highly.

It's really inspiring to see someone be so enthusiastic about a filmmaker!... I also get very excited about filmmaking, I go to the movies every week without fail [sometimes twice] to catch new releases and old films that I've missed... hopefully there will be a Cassavetes screening in London soon. Without being too purist about it I prefer to check a film out on the big screen first... all hail celluloid!!!.

yes yes, i know what you mean. nothing like a crisp film print and a huge screen. i unfortunately live now far away from any kind of center of culture, so i must console myself with dvd rentals over the mail. while living in dc however i never came across any kind of cassavetes retrospective... though there may have been one at the AFI (american film institute-- they actually helped him with his movies back in the day). well i hope you catch him soon anyway!

lol the dinner scene

My local library has a ton fo cassavettes

I've watched a couple of his movies.
It has Cassavetes and Gena Rowland in it, don't remember the titles.

So, there's a man and a woman who used to be in love.
And they talk, and talk and talk. (about life, mostly)

No scenario whatsoever.
An american version of Goddard.

ha ha, i didn't really mean the "double facepalm" thing, but i found the picture and this was funny. still, that appreciation is so very wrong. i'd love to stay and argue but it's 10 am and i've spent tha past 2 hours in front of the tv-- will post later.

Haha!
What part of my post do you disagree with?
All of it?

In many ways he was, but I much prefer Cassavetes. Godard's clever but his movies never have a heart. There's something far more human about Cassavetes' films.

I don't think he's anything like Godard. And I've seen every single film by both directors. Godard films have lots of dialogue, but his films are about tearing apart cinematic conventions usually... in that sense, if you want an "American Godard", check out Jon Jost.

I think Cassavetes is more like a less political, Fassbinder (like WHY DOES R HERR RUN AMOK or BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ era). They both have a very sparse but effective cinematography, not too concerned with art but able to pull off some interesting camera movements and strange subtle surrealism and humor; both focus on characters of society not usually focused on in movies, and both directors like to ramble and have lots of dark undertones.

I do love me some Cassavete though. First few films aren't anything too special imo but after a while he just became unstoppable. My rankings of Cassavetes' films!:


Shadows: 4/10
Too Late Blues: 5/10
A Child is Waiting: 5/10
Faces: 9/10
Husbands: 8/10
Minnie and Moskowitz: 8/10
Woman Under the Influence: 8/10
Killing of a Chinese Bookie: 10/10 (in my top 50 of all time)
Opening Night: 8/10
Gloria: 6/10
Love Streams: 9/10

...actually, I haven't seen Big Trouble.

hmm... yes, i'm afraid i do--sorry! and here's why

first, cassavetes is not just "people talking", the talking is fucking brilliant. i don't know what you mean by "no scenario", you mean no plot, no story? in english scenario means the setting (geographic, historical, etc), so i didn't get what you meant. but cassavetes's films certainly go somewhere. maybe you're watching with bad subtitles? that could be a problem, because the genius of the films is in both the screenplays and the interaction between the actors. it's intimate, it's intense, it's brilliant.

now, to say that cassavetes is just a "version" of a french filmmaker who was younger than him is misguided. cassavetes released his first feature (Shadows) in 1959, godard only came up with à bout de souffle in 1960. but that wouldn't mean that godard is a french version of cassavetes. they are very different filmmakers.

cassavetes was a hollywood actor, his approach came from both the actors studio (method) and improvisation, and the power of his movies comes from the people in it and how they interact. godard on the other hand was an egghead critic before making films, and he's most often trying to make a theoretical point that he illustrates with his chess pieces. godard is more political, cassavetes is much more psychological, he deals with the details of how people relate to each other, and he portrays emotional subtleties that are not a part of the godard universe.

also, cassavetes strove for realism, which is why in a woman under the influence he shows family disfunction raw and unadulterated, more in the cinema verité tradition, whereas godard is full of film quotations and homages to other films and directors and has a very highly artificial style. don't get me wrong, i love godard, but he is nothing like cassavetes.

the last thing is that cassavetes is historically important here because, even though he had a bit of support from the american film institute, he had to fund his movies from his acting career, his friends, and anywhere he could borrow-- there is no american "culture ministry" and there is little national support for the arts. so he was the forefather of independent film in this country, he broke away from hollywood in any way he could while milking the system-- in the end, hollywood mangled his last film.

i don't know how godard paid for his films, but i doubt he had to mortgage his house for them, or be anything other than a director, so he's been allowed to be prolific. also, he's got a supportive audience in his national public. americans with the exception of those in the know have mostly ignored cassavetes, so he had to go against the grain most of his life, he wasn't a "national treasure" or got decorated by the president or anything like that. this is a country who buries its great artists not in the panthéon, but next to gas stations (scott fitzgerald is next to one today) or in unmarked graves (poe). (the grave of poe has a monument to him that was erected by... france). godard has had the luxury of refusing such decorations, but here when someone makes art it's mostly in spite of the government.

Good post, a few corrections:

Godard had short films back in 1957. Shadows is actually probably Cassavettes most Godardian -- it's also terrible.

Godard comes from an extremely wealthy family, that's how he can continue to make films even though every single one of his movies has "failed" aside from Breathless and A Married Woman. (I think Contempt might have made a small profit too, and I think Slow Motion did at the time since it was his "comeback" film and heavily advertised as so) Godard also made commercials and television shows which made him tons of money. He mainly just got by on his name.

...Strangely, even though I'd call Jost the American Godard, he is actually a lot like Cassavetes too, in the rambling improvisations and whatnot.

Anyway, I really love Faces because the whole film is talking, I mean it's nearly 3 fucking hours of people screaming and running around. It's brilliant, definitely one of the most important films ever. Killing of a Chinese Bookie is my favorite by him, though, because it's just so fucking WEIRD. It has everything I look for in a film.. the dark atmosphere, the neo noir storyline.. at times, there are moments of true brilliance, and at other times, the whole thing seems terrible and inept, on purpose. It's very strange, and it's actually a bit Godardian too, I guess... But yeah those two directors are pretty much complete opposites, all in all.

don't bother, it was his spartacus.

----
edit:
yes, but i doubt that cassavetes saw godard's shorts (ha ha ha-- that sounds funny). besides, the first version of shadows is from 57 and this movie made it to the venice film festival in 59, so i'm guessing that godard knew about cassavetes before cassavetes knew about him. i love shadows, by the way.

I heard about Cassavetes first from the Fugazi song of the same name. Lol, I thought it was the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Fifteen years later my enthusiasm has waned. Maybe my life became like a Cassavets film so the films became superfluous. Recently (March 2010) I borrowed Shadows and Faces and my enthusiasm came back. But it was brief. I am overwhelmed by the quantity of independent films available in NYC. My solution is to take in very few. Plus I cannot afford Netflix or weekly screenings.

On another note, I highly recommend the book John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and Movies by Ray Carney. It's academic but not too theoretical.

Can't believe we went a whole thread without someone saying..

WHAT'S YER TAKE ON CASSAVETES?

Come on, that's just nitpicking


They are different but in some way's they were national equivalents of one another. Effectively they were both fusing genre film with European Art cinema. Godard did via a French filter (at least during his first films), Cassavetes did it through an American one. Godard quickly moved in a direction where that equivalence soon broke down but for a while, I think it's a valid comparison.


Again, national equivalence: Godard was exploring realism in light of European developments (Brecht/Neo Realism) while Cassavetes was exploring it through American/Hollywood conventions.