Excerpts from a discussion of
FACES
www.Cassavetes.com

….Faces came out of one of the most troubled times in the filmmaker’s life. In the early 1960s, Cassavetes had a disastrous series of clashes with a group of high-powered producers and executives on two studio films. He was young, idealistic, and inexperienced, and could hardly believe the way he was treated when he was fired from the second project.

But rather than forgetting the whole thing, he decided to make a movie about the kind of people who had made him so miserable. He made Faces to try to figure out what made these guys tick – how they could be so entertaining and so much fun to be with in some ways, and so awful in others. He wanted to understand what they were like when they were home with their wives. He wanted to understand what their sex lives were like.

He told me he was puzzled all the way through: he wrote the script in confusion and uncertainty; he rehearsed and shot scenes in dozens of different ways to try to understand how these men would have acted in a particular situation; he played and replayed the footage on a Movieola to try to figure out what it was like to be them.

But Cassavetes also told me that a strange thing happened as he went along. His bitterness and rage slowly dissipated, and to his own surprise he began to feel a deep compassion for these men. He realized things about their lives that he hadn’t before. He began to feel sorry for them. He saw how unhappy and emotionally needy they were – how insecure and desperate for love and approval. He saw how they tortured themselves even more than they tortured others. In short, he let his film teach him.

That’s what it means not to tell a canned story in the Hollywood way, not to use the shooting process to make a set of points you’ve already decided on before you walk onto the set, but to explore difficult emotional territory. That’s what it means to humble yourself before your material, and allow yourself to learn from it – to use art as a way of understanding the hardest and most complex parts of life.

To do this is to grapple with genuine mysteries of who and what we are – not to be confused with the sort of thing that Hitchcock, DePalma, Lynch, or the Coens specialize in. There’s lots of mystification in contemporary film – the deliberate withholding of information to thrill or titillate – but no mystery. The uncertainties in thrillers are always cleared up by the final scene, which is to say they aren’t mysteries at all. Cassavetes asks questions that he doesn’t know the answers to. His mysteries have the depth of life…

Hello followers of the Films About Love Series,

The above is an excerpt from Ray Carney’s writings about FACES, one of three masterpieces (three out of nine is not bad) from the work of John Cassavetes.

All I can say, as I blurted out to him the moment I met Cassavetes, “You made me want to make films.” Some would argue that I over-respect him and others think my aesthetic is his regurgitated as a substitute for not having my own. All I can say is that I think John opened a window. That window existed in 15th. Century Commedia dell’ Arte, a sort of ad hoc form of theatre. There were elements of it in early Russian cinema, specifically in Abram Room’s BED AND SOFA. You saw a touch of it in Italian Neo- Realism, THE BICYCLE THIEF, in Godard’s French New Wave work BREATHLESS, contemporaneous with John’s first film, SHADOWS, and the Cinema Verite documentarians incorporated its genius in films such as the Maysles Brothers’ SALESMAN and Fred Wiseman’s TITICUT FOLLIES.

But John’s films opened that window wide, in fact shattered it so convincingly that I was sure cinema would never be the same again. That showed how naïve I was. No sooner had that window opened it was slammed shut again and conventional Hollywood models reasserted their sway.

So what could you see through the window John opened? You and me. Imperfect animals wearing clothes, driving cars, living in vast cement cities, performing behaviors designed to flatter our sense of superiority and dominion over the earth, while occasionally ego- broken to empathy, sympathy or even “love.” Or another way to put it is imperfect animals doing their best to get along and survive. But that sounds like I’m trying to say there’s an alternative, or that I’m posing a grim paradigm I can provide a better model for.

John saw that there’s no paradigm or model. Life is lived in a swiftly disappearing present moment as a response to the billion billion impulses in the cortexes of the billion billion people who have lived and died trying to do something they seemed compelled to attempt. John wanted to open up the window so we could see this. So we could see who we were. This is an historical moment of great significance not because he was the first person who ever had that idea. Balzac and Zola both had it. Probably Socrates had it and Rembrandt, Goya and to go on would be pointless, for that matter, because in my view all great artists have that one thing in common. They bear witness to what they see and try to know. They view the specific time and the people, and the individual institutions, ideas, qualities, surfaces, depths, and serendipities of human conduct which surround them.

John was one of those Greats and different in only one important regard. He had the equipment. He had a new kind of cinematic tool. And he saw what it could do. And he invented a way to do it in cinema: to stand in front of individual human life (because all seeing and doing is individual, done and then gone in a frame, to use the cinematic term) and create the window (which is also a mirror) of witness into his particular age and its personal behavior. Doesn’t sound like much? It’s everything. Candid witness, observation of people, actors, players, non- actors, it doesn’t matter, in moments of circumstance, life’s flow and its artistic equivalent in imaginative creations which allow for those moments to be true, honest, candid and unceasingly, beautifully ordinary, this is what art is supposed to do. He had the equipment. Fast film which could shoot in low light, hand held 16 mm. cameras with crystal sync so sound could be instantly linked to picture, so that he could enter into the flow and flux of human behavior rather than prescribe it, plan it all out beforehand, and can it. Yes, there is much in the way of pre-thought. But for John the pre- thought was like the statement of structure and intent in a jazz piece performed live by John Coltrane. The structuring, as in jazz, is a way of liberating the “living” and “being” stringing together those precious miracles of the ordinary into an “account.” I say “account” because of today’s fad to get all wet and noodly about “story”. Story is for children. Grown-ups look for something tougher, rawer, more tender, truer, violent, angry, joyful past the MDA of the easily assimilable pablum we call entertainment. This was really what John’s films were all about.

But that was years ago. Today American cinema is back to ersatz models, the best of which are wan copies, (today you can purchase sheet music of Dizzy Gillespie’s visionary solos) the worst of which are self-reflexive models of the status quo. Tragic that today film and video makers can own the means of production, post production and distribution. But do they have the curiosity, talent and tenacity to be artists?

After John, that window banged shut, particularly in America, where studios employed some of the easier ideas John introduced into cinema and got them all wrong (compare Lauren Bacall to Meryl Streep for example) while revitalizing the Hallmark card syndrome of mainstream industry production which insured a continued juvenile vision of American life. You can identify a few American films in the 70s and 80s which carried on John’s fascinations, not for cinema, but for life. But most of it has disappeared. This is why FACES is vital viewing. This is why FACES is still one of the most modern films you will see. Because it “looks” at what it sees. Because in the window you see you and me. Because its not filmmaking about film. It’s capturing behavior allowed to “be” in the moment… about lifemaking.

So please come to the Edwin Johnson Theatre, 1418 5th. St., Berkeley on Wednesday, June 20, 7:00 PM to see one of the few great, ground breaking American films.