[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by gualbert

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

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.