Institute History
Description
A hand grenade of a film. It is no accident that anew style of gritty, realistic films emerged from England after Shadows was a sensation in London. After Shadows caused such a stir in Europe, the Bergman of The Seventh Seal began his transition into the Bergman of Persona (Bergman would go through an even more drastic change after Faces); the Godard of the innovative but still Hollywood-referenced Breathless set out to break all the Boundaries; Antonioni developed a style that was like slow-motion Cassavetes; Fellini opted for a harsher lyricism, and a very different sense of scene time, in La Dolce Vita; and Kurosawa, as he admitted in a letter to Cassavetes, arrived at a different outlook on the use of locations. The international film community praised Shadows as the first significant leap in American cinema in decades. (Hollywood and the American critics, however, almost without exception called it “formless.”)
Shadows was improvised, and this was made much of (all the rest of Cassavetes’s films, except Husbands, have been, as Gena Rowlands puts it, “heavily scripted.”) but Cassavetes was using improvisation not as an end in itself, but as a means toward rethinking what a “scene” should be on screen. Instead of each scene being a strict, formal, one-act play, as Hollywood convention still dictates, Cassavetes cracked that formally open, so that a scene could accommodate the ambivalence of the modern mind and the vagueness and uncertainty of modern speech. What Dean and Brando implied by their way of seeming to hang back from the scenes they were in, Cassavetes now realized with an entire film.
Play Shadows on a double bill with Mean Streets, and you see how Cassavetes’s innovations were finally assimilated into the mainstream language of film; play Shadows or Faces on a double fill with Annie Hall, and you see how a stare-you-down existentialism was gentled into intelligent comedy. By challenging the conventions governing the very form of a scene, and of the way people speak on screen, Shadows planted the seeds of contemporary filmmaking.