Shadows: filmmaking as framing incidents
By Aimée
John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), with both the conception and the style indebted to neo-realism, offers a humanistic description of interracial friendship and romance in Beat-Era New York City. Shadows features the story of three African American siblings, two of whom are light-skinned and often pass for white. Although Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) has a superficially similar plot and set of characters, Shadows departs drastically from Imitation both thematically and stylistically. As a result of a shoestring budget and Cassavetes’ conscious efforts to challenge conventional Hollywood studio superproduction, the resulting work is a cinema full of incidents. Shadows distinguishes itself from its Hollywood melodrama counterpart mainly for its realist style: episodic narrative structure, inconclusive events, on-location shots, depth in image, and lack of ornament in mise-en-scène etc.
However, despite its documentary visual appearance, the film is not an attempt to document or record events factually. Rather, Cassavetes uses a realist style to interiorize drama instead of exteriorizing it, rendering a different visual experience from what a capitalist film production offers. A conscious choice of a realist style locates the drama in the interior of ordinary people and in the everyday situation. As the camera goes out in the streets and becomes less restrained, a shot or a scene becomes full of unpredictability, changes, and incidents. By allowing the camera to film incidental occurrence and to retain the incidents that happen in the process of filmmaking, the film effectively asks the spectator to examine life both on the screen and in reality by taking an analytical look at things. Ultimately, the humanized camera strengths the spectator by proposing a new way of looking that promotes an appreciation for the everyday situation, for the ordinary people, and for the imperfections in life.
Cassavetes shortens the distance between images on the screen and images in real life by incorporating the ordinary details of life into his artistic production. In his view, Shadows differs from any other picture because Shadows emanates from character while in other pictures the characters emanate from the story. He creates the three central characters (Hugh, Lelia, and Ben) by basing the characters on the actors and actress’ real personalities and everyday experiences. For example, Hugh is a jazz singer with a stagnant career in the film and Hugh Hurd in real life at that time was also an underdog, an aspiring opera singer who did not make much progress in his career. In his enterprise to bridge the performance on screen and the actual experience of life, Cassavetes also instructed Huge, Lelia, and Ben to live as an off-screen family so that they could act as an on-screen family more believably. The everyday experiences in this way are valued and transformed onto screen. Moreover, differing from Stanislavski’s Method acting, Cassavetes asks his actors and actresses to define their characters in terms of their own personal fantasies and desires instead of enacting imaginary characters and becoming someone else . The methods indicate that Cassavetes values the actual daily experiences of people as equally as the imaginative experiences that originate form minds, if not more. As Bazin maintains, “we should talk today of a cinema without acting, of a cinema of which we no longer ask whether the character gives a good performance or not, since here man and the character he portrays are so completely one.” As the realist camera locates the drama in the interior of ordinary people and in the everyday situation, at times life and art become indistinguishable. What happens in life directly become materials or even reality in film; what is being performed in film carries on to real life.
Nevertheless, the realist style of Shadows is significant not just because it strikes many as being more similar to the their experience of reality than an extravagant melodrama that resembles almost no one’s real life. Its significance does not solely result from its proximity to reality for its choice of ordinary streets instead of well-decorated studio sets. Neither does it obtain primacy for the preference for making diegetic events appear disconnected and unadorned as real-life events over rendering the events self-resolving and embellished as in a Sirk picture. As the images are produced through a mechanical camera and projected on the screen, at a fundamental level, a degree of digression from reality is inevitable for any film. As Balazs points out, what one sees on the screen in a series of photographs that have previously existed in reality already – the film is a photographic reproduction of a past performance . Whoever in control of the camera already pre-determines aspects such as lighting, exposure, angle, and composition of a picture in a different temporality and pre-mediates the way the spectator sees. A realist style thus does not make a film any more real or more significant than a non-relist film despite of its seemingly proximity to reality. Instead, the significance of Shadows’ realism lies in its effects: it interiorizes drama and locates it in ordinary people’s life.
Interiorizing the inner drama of his characters means that the rendering of a spectacle no longer relies on the construction of perfect illusions Drama no longer depends on the expressive external means that can be solely achieved in a studio set: perfect lighting contrast that mirrors a character’s inner turmoil, sudden pouring of rain that symbolizes a tragic death, and so on. An ordinary event possesses great emotional depth and dramatic value as well. In the scene at Tony’s apartment, the room is poorly lit, the decor is mundane, and all seems so ordinary. After showing Lelia hesitantly walks to Tony, the camera cuts to the shadowy way, on which an ordinary stone mask with closed-eyes hangs. The linearity of events is disrupted because Lelia and Tony’s lovemaking is only implicated and cut out from the diegesis. As in real life one cannot fully see everything, the realist camera is not omniscient either. The camera vertically moves downwards in a slow pace and delves into the darkness of the bedroom without much surprise. However, the scene becomes emotionally charged as the camera finds the bed where Lelia and Tony lay and gains focus on Lelia’s face. A contrast of texture between the hard stone sculpture and soft bedding plays out an uneasy feeling. The sustained close-up of Lelia’s face with her eyes resignedly closed strikingly matches the stone mask in facial expression. The series of images with mundane visual appearance unfolds on the screen as a succession of ordinary events, but it reaches a dramatic peak as the spectator comes to the realization of the emotional depth of Lelia’s experience.
The subsequent conversation reveals that the lovemaking is Lelia’s first time. In her rambling, Lelia confesses it is awful. The post-coital conversation is casual, self-contradictory, and without substance. However, the undercurrent feelings of fear and sadness leak out through the surface of the beats, the hesitations, the inflected tones, and the silent pauses during the conversation. This very moment is emotionally powerful precisely because the drama explodes in the interior, or through interior means that do not require external cues to signal its occurrence. The drama explodes while the event maintains a mundane and insignificant appearance. Throughout the film, Lelia puts on the mask and poses as a flirtatious and sexually mature woman, but her actual self is much less assertive and mature. At this very moment, Lelia’s mask disintegrates and her true feelings are uncomfortably exposed. She is unable to react to the situation as her mask is half taken off, so she rambles. Without presenting anything externally spectacular, the intensity of the undercurrent emotions is by no means undermined. What Bazin says about Bicycle Thieves also applies to Shadows: "the film has transcended the contradiction between the action of a spectacle and of an event." Cassavetes, by locating the focus of drama in the interior of ordinary people, transforms every day situation into a spectacle.
From the very start of production, Cassavetes’ approach is introspective, human-centered, and ordinary-life oriented. A conscious choice of a realist style locates the drama in the interior of ordinary people, in the everyday situation, in the mundane words, and in the unremarkable inflections of tones. As Balazs maintains that the film is the only art born in the epoch of capitalism, cinema is essentially a capitalism-based medium . However, the capitalist mode of filmmaking is not enough for the world. Although one needs to take Zavattini’s claim with a grain of salt, there is truth in his assertion that, “whereas we are attracted by the truth, by the reality which touches us and which we want to know and understand directly and thoroughly, the Americans continue to satisfy themselves with a sweetened version of truth produced through transpositions” Although it is arguable whether Sirk’s Imitation offers a less true version of events than Shadows, the latter does offer a new way of looking at things. For one thing, Shadows does not offer a sweetened or bitterer version of “truth” by fictionally resolving conflict as Imitation does. Ben’s confusion about his identity or his desire to pass for white does not directly or indirectly causes anyone’s death. In contrast, lighted-skinned Sara-Jane emotionally drains her mother Annie and metaphorically causes her death. At the funeral of Annie, Sara-Jane comes back and confesses her love for her mother in tears, fictionally resolving the emotional tension that has been accumulated throughout the film.
In contrast, Shadows ends with Ben wondering off in the street in a long shot. The ending, reminiscent of Antoine’s long run in the last scene of Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959), is a refusal to give fictional solutions on the screen. The ending is not a resolving point. The event is not given much more significance than any other events in the film; it seems like a night version of the street scene at the beginning of the film where Ben walks across road to find his friends. In effect, “the events are not necessarily signs of something, of a truth which we are to be convinced, they all carry their own weight, their complete uniqueness, that ambiguity that characterizes any fact.” Allowing space for ambiguity by not attaching different degrees of weights to specific events, Cassavetes therefore invites the spectator to be engaged in a process of seeing and examining things on their own to discern their individual significances. Ben, as an exemplar of the Beat generation, is not the only person who sits in coffee, jokes around, goes to bars, picks up fights, and wears sunglasses day and night. Another hundred and thousand of Bens wonder off the street aimlessly, as Ben does in the beginning and the ending of the film. However, the commonness or ordinariness of the situation on the screen does not destroy its uniqueness, since the visual experience is personal to any spectator who has previously experienced such wondering in real life. The realist camera does not add weight or significance to events. Instead, it guides the spectator to look at the ordinary to discern its significance.
The refusal to rendering any fictional solution not only encourages a new way of looking, but also advocates a more courageous approach to life than the escapist approach that is often suggested by many Hollywood productions. In a long take, the camera tracks Ben as he moves across street through passing cars. The street is dimly lit, and Ben almost merges into the background of darkness. However, as Ben walks through the passing cars whose metal surfaces reflect shop’s neon sign lights, the scene becomes darkly intimate and marvelously lively. After Ben arrives on the pavement and continues to walk in a long shot, the depth of images allows the spectator to see the well-lit interior of a diner where a waitress is interacting with a customer. Although during the scene Ben has no interaction with his surrounding and everything seems to be just passing by, the visual depth offers a layered perception in which the spectator can see the engaging energy of the city and its people. As the reflected and ever-changing lights on the metal surface of cars accompany Ben, it almost seems that the lights encourage Ben to engage himself in the world than just passing. Denying an escapist illusion to real-life problems, Shadows encourages each member in the audience to look at everyday situations to discover their potentiality and to face reality courageously.
Shadows has many random inserts of episodic events that are segments of life, as if the camera goes out in the street and captures life in its full potentiality. The opening credits scroll over a raucous rave-up in a crowded apartment. The camera shifts between close-ups and medium shots of the reveler’s faces and bodies, as they dance and sing along to an impromptu jam. The scene does not seem to have been arranged in order to advance anything; instead, it is just here for the audience to look at and to enjoy. In the rehearsal studio scene, after Ben obtains money from Hugh and exits the frame, the camera stays with Hugh for a while to show his embarrassment and frustration after accepting the job that requires him to introduce club’s dancing girls. However, the scene does not end with Hugh’s frustrated face. Instead, the camera slowly pans from the left to the right and gives a full exposure of the carnivalesque yet undeniably lively room. The energies of people diffuse and permeate the space. In a deep-focus, one sees in the foreground the nameless piano player wink at a girl in the chorus line and soon the chorus girl’s hand reaches in and touches the player’s shoulder while in the background the line of chorus girls dance in circle. Ray Carney argues, “where Hollywood is centripetal, focusing ever more tightly in on a central figure or situation, Cassavetes is centrifugal. Focus gives way to circulation.” The humanized camera does not formulaically follow the main characters. Rather, the camera eye mimics the curious human’s eye – it gets distracted by the little things nearby and cannot resist to capturing life in its minuet details. The images of visual depth offer random bits of reality and cultivate an analytical way looking on the screen. One can employ such way of looking to reality, learning to see and appreciate the world of images.
Just as life is full of imperfections and incidents, the production of Shadows is fraught with mistakes and unexpected problems. From the point of view of production, Shadows “unfolds on the level of pure incident.” Cassavetes concedes that the things the film receives praises for are actually the things he has tried to avoid; the brilliant things are accidents instead of “strokes of genius.” Unable to afford a dolly, the director uses long lenses; unable to afford to go inside a place to shoot, he photographs in the street. To make the situation even more chaotic, he encouraged everyone to take turns operating the camera when the hired cameraman Kollmar was not around – the resulting images are variances in exposure or focus even within a single sequence. As demonstrated by the scene in which Lelia and Tony walk along the pavement, two different operators film the scene. Whoever shots the close-ups of Tony’s face takes care to focus the camera sharply while whoever shots the countershot close-ups of Lelia with a telephoto lens seriously misadjusts the focus. The resulting images cultivate a different way of looking at things, for the incidents do not essentially correlate to a negative experience of filmmaking or watching. Zavattini enthusiastically argues in his thesis on neo-realism that,
“The time has come to tell each member of the audience that he is the true protagonist of life. The result would be a constant emphasis on the responsibility and dignity of every human being. This is exactly the ambition of neo-realism: to strength everyone, and to give everyone the proper awareness of a human being.”
The imperfections that would seem so out of place in an illusionist Hollywood superproduction fit in well in the realist film. The realist style tolerates the incidents and gives expression to them, thus cultivating a different way of looking at things both on screen and in life. In Cassavetes’ realist cinema, the incidents such as Lelia’s disappointing sexual adventure and Ben’s fight with random guys at the bar do not correlate to negative experiences – the camera only gives a humanistic and sympathetic look at their frustrations. The accidents such as misjudged focus and poor exposure in the process of filmmaking obtain positive meanings too, as they become innovations and incidents of beauty enabled by the camera. Essentially, Shadows proposes a different way of looking that strengthens the spectator, because it raises an appreciation for the everyday situation, for the ordinary people, for failures, and for the imperfections in life. Realism is more than an aesthetic for cinema; it proposes a way of inhabiting the world and enables an empowering visual experience.
Bibliography
Balazs, Bela. Theory of The Film. New York: Dover Publications, 1945.
Bazin, Andre. What Is Cinema? Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.
Carney, Ray. BFI Film Classics: Shadows. London: BFI Publishing, 2001.
Carney, Ray. Cassavetes on Cassavetes. London-New York: faber and faber, 2001.
Overbey, David. Springtime in Italy: A Reader on Neorealism. London: Talisman, 1978.
种族隔阂下的爱恨情仇
