Ben Burr

Film 472 Final

March 13, 2008

Cassavetes and the French New Wave

John Cassavetes directed his first film, Shadows, in 1957 and 1959. In between

these years, the first films of what would later become known as the French New Wave

were also shot. The French New Wave would take off and become an international force

to be reckoned with. Cassavetes would have so much trouble on Shadows that the

original version would be eventually lost and not found until 2004. While Cassavetes and

the French New Wave started out on the same path, Cassavetes wouldn’t stay on track for

long. After making two films with studios (Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child is Waiting

(1963)), he wouldn’t make another film until 1968’s fiercely independent Faces. Work

for the lesser known filmmakers of the French New Wave would also wane in the years

after the five years of the movement. The two entities had so much in common but it isn’t

totally clear how the Cassavetes felt about the new wave directors but it is known that he

called Breathless (Godard, 1959) “sordid” and “negative.i” It is said that Godard really

liked Cassavetes and he is rumored to have once said that he (Godard) didn’t have

enough talent to make even the worst Cassavetes film. It isn’t really fair to compare John

Cassavetes to an entire film movement, but the similarities and differences between them

stand out so much that it would at least be interesting, if not fair.

John Cassavetes and the French New Wave had many inherent similarities that it

would be easy to say that Cassavetes stole ideas, to a certain degree, from the French
New Wave. But Cassavetes directed his first film (Shadows) in 1957 (and later would

reshoot in 1959), a year before Le beau serge (Chabrol, 1958) would hit theaters and

usher in the new wave. The biggest common thread between Cassavetes and the French

New Wave was the auteur theory. Francois Truffaut essentially put the auteur theory

down on paper in the late 1950s and he believed that a filmmaker should be the complete

“author” of the film and be in total control of its style and feel. One way of doing this is

by the director also writing the script. Cassavetes always wrote his own scripts and he

talked of the importance of it in a 1971 interview in Playboy. “The thing I feel directors

have to realize today is that they must become like the Beatles: They must write their

own material.”ii Later in the interview he would even go on to criticize adaptations of

novels and plays into films. This was a very important idea to the movement and to

Cassavetes because it allowed the filmmakers to have nearly absolute control over what

was being seen frame-by-frame. The themes of Cassavetes and the new wave were

heavily existential. The only difference between his films and that of the movement were

that the French films centered on youth and their problems while his films revolved

around middle-aged characters and the problems with marriages, relationships and

children. Both feature middle-class characters, but with Cassavetes centering more on

their daily lives rather than telling a complex story, through it started getting into

storytelling with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). With this he tends to be in sync

with Bergman’s later films starting around Through A Glass Darkly (1961) and ending

with Cries and Whispers (1972).

There were many other similarities also, mainly pertaining to production.

Cassavetes favored a handheld 16mm camera because it allowed him a freedom to get
close to the actors and would thus capture intimate emotions from the performance.

French directors, especially with the earliest productions of the new wave also used

16mm, mainly because it was the cheapest thing going at the time. Cassavetes employs a

cinema-verite style in most of his films, most notably in Faces. He uses either natural

lighting (on the rare occasion it is available) or, since most of his films are set indoor,

very sparse lighting. Budgets for Cassavetes and the new wavers were very small, both

sides having to come up with a lot of the money independently. Cassavetes got most of

his budgets from friends or his acting jobs, namely the larger films like Rosemary’s Baby

(Polanski 1968) and The Dirty Dozen (Aldrich, 1967), the latter for which he was

nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. And as with the French

New Wave directors, his budgets would get bigger. He went from a budget of $40,000 on

Shadows in 1959 to $1.5 million on A Woman Under the Influence in 1974, which was his

only real box office success. Cassavetes also despised the studios after a myriad of

problems with them, especially with the Judy Garland vehicle, A Child is Waiting.

Cassavetes used a unique cast in all of his films. Most of the actors he used were

his friends from school and the low-level actors he met while he worked on television

shows. The actor that he would use most in his film would be his wife, Gena Rowlands.

But unlike Godard and Anna Karina or Roger Vadim and Brigitte Bardot, Cassavetes and

Rowlands would be together from 1954 until his death from cirrhosis of the liver in 1989

at the age of 59. Their time together earned the duo 5 Academy Award nominations, 2 for

Rowlands (A Woman under the Influence and Gloria) and 3 for Cassavetes (acting in

Rosemary’s Baby, script for Faces and director for A Woman under the Influence). Other

recurring actors included Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel and Ben Gazzara. In Minnie &
Moskowitz (1971), he uses his family as well as Seymour Cassel’s family in the film.

Unlike many French New Wave filmmakers, with the exception of Godard, Cassavetes

acted in a few of his films.

Cassavetes did differ from the new wave directors in a few major ways. The first

and most important way is that his films seem to lack style. And it isn’t even a case where

the lack of style is actually the style. Cassavetes main reason for making films is to show

a side of life that is almost always ignored in mainstream Hollywood cinema. The

directors of the French New Wave each had their own style. Godard had is

pretentiousness and intellectual jargon, Truffaut had his personal reflective style and

Chabrol had his lighthearted dramas. Cassavetes’ films didn’t rely on a director’s style at

all. Films to him were all about the emotions that the actors were portraying. Often times

he wouldn’t even frame a shot and would have the cameraman find the shot. At times,

especially in Faces, he uses the handheld camera a great deal. Other films like A Woman

under the Influence have some handheld shots but there are also a decent amount of static

shots. The one filmmaker that he does resemble, both as a filmmaker and by having a

similar career path, is Eric Rohmer. They both seem to treat the camera as a passive

viewer, someone just tucked away in the corner of the room. As for their careers, neither

of them had serious success until almost a decade into their filmmaking lives: Rohmer

with Ma nuit chez Maud (1969) and Cassavetes with A Woman Under the Influence in

1974.

Another way he differed from the new wave directors is that all of his films are

heavily scripted. Cassavetes would work tirelessly on the scripts and the actors would

work within them. Instead of letting the actors improvise, he would let them decide on
the delivery of the line anyway that they wanted. The only film that he made that relied

on improvisation was Shadows. Most of the French New Wave films relied heavily on

improvisation, most notably Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. Cassavetes has always caught

slack for was that he never judged or condemned his characters. He would never say

whether what they were doing was right or wrong, he would just let them do it and the

viewer would try to decide for themselves. He is really one of the few directors that have

ever been able to pull that off, the best and most recent example is Pedro Almodovar’s

Talk To Her (2002).

The Cassavetes’ film that would most closely resemble a French New Wave film

in both technique and content is Faces. The film was shot in 16mm black and white. The

cast includes Rowlands, John Marley, Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin, the latter two

receiving supporting Academy Award nominations. The story revolves around a middle-

aged married couple (Marley and Carlin) who are on the final legs of their fourteen year

marriage. After a fight they both spend the night with other people; Richard (Marley)

with a prostitute (Rowlands) and Maria with the hippie, Chet (Cassel). The next morning

Richard returns home to find Maria with the hippie. Neither really knows where to go

from there. The film is shot cinema-verite style and is more reminiscent in look to D.A.

Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967) than any Godard or Truffaut film. But the extreme

use of handheld, though more barbaric than the French, still can draw comparisons. At

the same time, the film does bring Godard’s Une femme mariee (1964) and Alain Resnais’

Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), mainly for its extreme close-ups of body parts, mainly the

face, hands and arms.

 One of the most powerful scenes in the film brings back memories of Louis

Malle’s car thieves/German-tourist murdering lovers from Elevator to the Gallows

(1958). Like the lovers, Maria swallows a bunch of pills to try to atone for her sins. In the

morning, Chet finds her and tries every method to revive her. At the climax of the scene,

Cassavetes cuts between two shots: a long shot through a doorway looking at the two

hovering over the toilet (Chet behind her) and a close-up of the two head-on (as if

looking at them through the mirror). Chet repeatedly, and somewhat graphically, sticks

his finger down her throat to induce vomiting. This scene is one of the most intense in the

film, and seems like a twisted interpretation of Bergman’s iconic shot from Persona

(1966). The film ends with one of the few noticeably framed shots of Richard and Maria

reunited on the stairs. Cassavetes has a long shot of a stairway with Richard sitting at the

bottom and Maria at the top, both smoking. This shot shows the separation between both

characters and shows how genius can frame a shot when he wants to.

There are other similarities to the French New Wave also. The film begins in a

screening room and the impression is that the people in the seats are watching Faces.

This goes hand in hand with the self-reflective shots of filmmaking from Une femme est

une femme (Godard, 1961) and Le Mepris (Godard, 1963) and also from Persona, which

the film seems to pay slight homage to. There is reference to other films, but not to the

extent Godard’s films are. La dolce vita (1960) is mentioned in passing and Bergman was

mentioned in one of the truest exchanges ever on film. (“There’s a Bergman film at the

theater. / I don’t feel like being depressed tonight.”) But if Ingmar Bergman would have

been able to make a film in the French New Wave, it would probably look a lot like

Faces.
 John Cassavetes will never receive as much attention as the superstar directors of

the French New Wave. But his work should go hand-in-hand with theirs to help form the

cannon of cinema based around independence. Where Le beau serge started the French

New Wave, Faces started the American independent film movement. But the films that

come after, films such as Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969), Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger,

1969) and Panic in Needle Park (Schatzberg, 1971), seem to lack the passion that

Cassavetes and his humble band of actors put forward onto the screen. He always knew

he had something special going and it’s time other people realized that too.
i
Tsiolkas, Christos. “Meet John Cassavetes.”
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/01/16/cassavetes_meet.html
ii
Playboy Magazine. July 1971. http://www.filbert.net/images/cassavetes/cassavetes02.jpg