Shadows by Raymond Carney

Author:Raymond Carney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

High hopes: Cassavetes was in California working on Staccato and unable to attend Vogel’s Cinema 16 screenings in New York (Courtesy Gena Rowlands)

Hip and Square

The contrast between the two films on Vogel’s programme is illuminating. While Shadows uses figures like Lelia and Ben to interrogate the adequacy of Beat stances and claims of freedom, Pull My Daisy smugly, self-satisfyingly wallows in them. Frank’s film simply buys into Beat postures, while Cassavetes’ attempts to understand them and explore their emotional causes and consequences. Shadows is the rarest of works from that period – a film that analyses the fraudulence of Beat posturing, even as it appreciates why figures would want to protect themselves in this way. Imaginatively positioning itself half-inside, half-outside the Beat milieu, it reveals what is wrong with attempting to be hip and detached, while continuing to love the characters despite their flaws.

As is the case in so many Beat works (the films of Ron Rice and Ken Jacobs serving as relevant reference points), the actors in Pull My Daisy are in love with their own cuteness. They are ironic postmodernists before the fact – turning all of life into a jokesy ‘goof’ or ‘lark’. Cassavetes, on the other hand, is a deadly serious film-maker (which doesn’t prevent him from being hilarious as well). Pull My Daisy may be charming and fun, but it is ultimately a frivolous work, because it imagines creativity as off to the side of the ‘real world’, something that you do on your days off – spouting doggerel and clowning around at home. For Cassavetes, the world is the place where you express your imagination. Lelia’s theatricality, like Mabel’s or Myrtle’s later, represents an enrichment of ordinary, everyday life, not an alternative to it or a vacation from it. Shadows may be funny but is never a joke. Lelia, Tony and Ben show us that our words and actions have serious consequences.

Film-making as Thinking

Although Cassavetes and Aurthur may have begun by simply attempting to make Shadows feel less episodic, the new scenes (and the respositionings of old ones) completely changed the film. A comparison of the two versions, to the extent we are able to induce what the earlier one looked like, provides a rare glimpse of Cassavetes’ mind at work. He appears to have studied his characters and their situations and changed his understanding of them. The first point to notice is that the additions are not about racial issues but characters’ feelings. The drama moves inward. Characters are given depths of self-awareness that were largely absent from the first version.

Each of the characters is made more sympathetic by being given at least two new scenes which complicate our feelings about them. Hugh is no longer merely a failed musician who squabbles with his brother and manager, but is seen in caring encounters with Ben (in the rehearsal studio scene), Lelia (in the bus station and bedroom scenes) and Rupert (in the final Grand Central scene). Hugh’s professional problem is also changed. In

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