Ghoulbert Taking His Lessons - photo by Mariana Jocic

I finished writing and directing my first film of the year last week. Just got the rushes back, they look great! After working for 15 years with (mostly SD) video, shooting on film (16mm) is a revelation. The Kodak 500T we used looks grainy but gorgeous. I took the opportunity to be a bit more creative directing the camera than I have previously, using more moving shots, creating a very constructed, yet hopefully dynamic, comic feel.

Big thanks to all the cast and crew, who were a joy. A special shout-out goes to Kathy and Matt, who were involved for many weeks prior to the shoot, and had so much great input on so many levels. Big thanks to Paul, for his character whom the film was based upon (which morphed somewhat through the screenwriting process) and to Marian for her original inspiration and ongoing support.

But I’ll save the full credits for the end of the film, when I’ve finished editing it For now, here’s some production stills from the shoot, taken by the lovely and talented photographer and filmmaker Mariana Jocic.

Stephen (Zac Gower) and Elliott (Kevin Newman)

Stephen (Zac Gower) & Goat - Photo by Mariana Jocic

Slasher Kitty - Photo by Mariana Jocic

Director Checks Frame on Bag Cam - Photo by Mariana Jocic

Ghoulbert's Goat - photo by Mariana Jocic

Shadows of Menace - Photo by Mariana Jocic

Harold and Maude directed by Hal Ashby

Catharsis is a point in the narrative of a film when an emotional realisation or internal transformation occurs, experienced by the audience, and often felt via identification with the simultaneous cathartic renewal of the protagonist. Not to be confused with the crisis, when the forces of antagonism reach their dramatic pinnacle, it is rather the release of these traumatic tensions within a film, as evidenced below in the examples of Hal Hartley’s Trust (1990), Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971) and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990).

Catharsis has its origins in Greek Tragedy, and is defined by Aristotle in his seminal work of dramatic and literary theory, Poetics or The Art of Poetry (c. 335 BCE). The term is derived from the Ancient Greek καθαίρειν – to purge, cleanse or purify (which Aristotle used as a metaphor, as it was prior to this a medical term for menstruation). Aristotle believed that tragedy could have a corrective effect on the audience – who may bring sadness or ill-feeling towards others from their own lives to the theatre, but through the exercising of these emotions, re-experiencing fear and pity via the story, may also find that dramatic catharsis purges them of negative feelings. This theory, and the Poetics in general, was counter to Plato’s assertion that poetry encouraged men towards hysterics and uncontrolled emotion.

Sophocles’ defining work of tragedy, Antigone (c. 442 BCE), is concerned with a main character (Kreon) who is neither purely good nor evil, who through his well-intentioned but short-sighted actions brings tragedy upon himself and his family. By executing Antigone, his niece, he inspires in the audience both fear and pity for the characters who suffer as a result – his wife and son who commit suicide and Antigone herself, whose only crime has been to give her brother a decent burial (which Kreon has denied him as an enemy of the state). These tragic events bring about a restoration of the social balance, creating a feeling of relief and transformational resolution to mitigate the sadness experienced by the audience. Another example of catharsis is to be found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the drama created by Hamlet’s inability to enact revenge for his father’s murder, and the ensuing tragic deaths of himself and many others, is released by his eventual killing of Claudius, his usurping uncle, once again re-establishing the social order.

In American director Hal Hartley’s second, and arguably his best, feature film Trust (1990), the plot concerns Maria Coughlin, an intelligent yet ignorant, materialistic and naïve (to the point where she pronounces this word “naive”) high-school drop-out and Matthew Slaughter, a misanthropic, idealistic and highly intellectual electronics repairman. These two misfits are united by fate, just as Maria tells her father of her pregnancy (to an uncaring and narcissistic football-playing boyfriend), upon which news Maria’s father dies of a heart-attack. Both desperately lonely, they face dealing with both Maria’s pregnancy and feelings of guilt at her father’s death, and Matthew’s disaffection, linked to intense bullying by his father. Amidst the chaos of their conniving and unloving families, together Matthew and Maria define the love that neither of them have ever really found (as the comically simple formula “trust, admiration and respect equal love”. The tragedy of their cerebral love-affair is that Matthew, in his attempt to do the right thing (get his job back at the factory, a job that drives him to depression and extreme acts of aggression, in order to support Maria, himself and her baby), becomes insensitive to Maria and her real feelings, and to his own true self, losing them both on a blind path towards social conformity (Maria – “Your job is making you boring and mean”, Matthew – “My job is making me a respectable member of society”).

The crisis of the film occurs as Matthew attempts to blow himself up with a grenade, taking the computer factory with him, and Maria (thinking Matthew has not only lost his way, but cheated on her with her treacherous sister) has an abortion – scratching all plans for a happy future together. Matthew is arrested, and catharsis occurs as Maria locks eyes with him as he is driven away in the police car, exchanging knowledge of their transformation in one long look. They have lost the only love they have ever had, but at least they have learned what it means, and how essential being true to oneself is to keeping it.

In Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), Harold, another love-starved misanthrope, barely out of his teens and spoiled rotten by his mother with everything but real affection, stages theatrical suicide attempts to try to get some kind of reaction. Harold’s idea of fun is to go to funerals (his everyday habit of dress allows him to blend in easily), which is where he meets Maude, his antithesis. Maude is 79 years old, and embraces life so heartily she bruises its ribs. They are opposites of their stereotypes – Harold is cynical, tired and despondent whereas Maude is vivacious, cheeky and unconcerned with consequences. Their love affair, bridging such an age gap, challenges societal convention and horrifies Harold’s family, yet is deeply transformational and educational for both Harold and Maude. Harold learns to love life, and Maude learns to love death – a necessity, she has decided, given the inevitability of her fading physical self. Maude knows that death is a natural part of life, unless it is the terrifying mechanistic death of war and genocide, which she knows well as a Holocaust survivor (this is a satirically anti-war film, released during the Vietnam war).

Harold and Maude’s intensely moving catharsis occurs when Harold, proposing marriage on Maude’s 80^th birthday, realises she has taken a fatal overdose of pills, and that this is really her goodbye party. Harold rails against this terrifying prospect, taking her to hospital in an ambulance, refusing to let her go the way she wishes to be. Finally he has no choice, she dies. Harold drives his car off a cliff, as Ashby cleverly fools the audience into believing Harold has really committed suicide this time. The film ends as we see Harold has jumped out of the car at the last moment. He plays the banjo, finally able to celebrate that both life and death are part of nature, and are to be embraced. Both fear and pity (for Harold and Maude) are evoked to great dramatic effect in this conclusion of the film, yet the natural order of life is restored and we let these feelings go again with a great sense of release and edification, as we too feel ready to wholly celebrate life and death, essential to a full experience of our own humanity.

Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands (1990) is a clear favourite of mine amongst his films, which has much to do with its intelligent and deeply emotional exploration of the extremes of man’s (or monster’s) vulnerability and kindness on the one hand, and selfishness, small-mindedness and fear of the “other” on the other hand. Its quite devastating catharsis plays a large part in it being the kind of tragic film that you want to see again and again, rather than feel too depressed about to revisit. It is also yet another film about an outsider (which says something more about my taste in narratives). Edward is an artificial boy, created by an inventor who died before he could replace the scissors he made for hands with real ones. He lives lonely in an empty mansion on the hill until an Avon lady, Peg, from the suburb below takes him under her wing, inviting him to live with her family. He gains grudging acceptance by the community for his talents at hedge and hair trimming, falling in love with Peg’s daughter Kim in the process, until two scheming members of the community implicate the innocent Edward in a theft and falsely accuse him of rape. The suburb turns against him and Peg’s family. When Edward accidentally cuts Kim and her brother Kevin with his hands, he flees to the mansion on the hill, pursued by an angry mob. Edward saves Kim from her attacking boyfriend Jim, killing him in the process. Kim tells the mob both Jim and Edward are dead, protecting Edward from their wrath. Catharsis occurs with the image of “snow” created by Edward’s annual carving of ice sculptures for his beloved Kim, falling down on the suburb every winter (despite the fact that it is Southern California, and never snows). It falls on Edward’s memory of Kim as the young woman he fell in love with. Society is once again in balance, as the boy who is too gentle and innocent for human company (despite his paradoxical built-in brutality, thanks to his scissor-hands) is exiled forever.

Featured Clips on Critical Commons

I recently finished another iteration of development on the Critical Commons website, with Andy Nicholson of Infinite Recursion. Critical Commons is an online resource for film educators that pushes the boundaries of fair use (copyright) legislation by making clips from films available with academic commentaries, in both text and audio format. The site, devised by the USC School of Cinematic Arts Institute for Multimedia Literacy, enables lecturers to organise collections of clips and commentaries as lectures for classroom delivery (such as this one on Deleuze and cinema). The website is built on the Plumi software, originally created by EngageMedia, a free open source software project to create a video sharing web application based on the Plone content management system.

We may potentially be involved in developing a mobile site for Critical Commons in the future, and/or moving Critical Commons to the new Plumi release (in beta right now). I’m hoping so, as this project has been really fun to date, and ties in very well with my film school studies here in Melbourne.

Poster for Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames"

We are off to a friend’s house tonight for a screening of Lizzie Borden’s “Born in Flames”, a 1983 film, about feminist activists 10 years after the United States has undergone a socialist revolution. We watched this the other day, but are up for another viewing already.

M forwarded me an article in The Independent film magazine, featuring an interview with the director which is definitely worth a read (linked to this article). It was particularly interesting to me in light of my recent thoughts about filmmaking. One of the reasons I started this blog was to help myself formulate my thoughts about my own film/video/art/activist practice, asking myself some fairly fundamental questions like “why make films?”. This question is particularly pertinent, given my ruminations in the last couple of months on the implausibility of a viable career in film/TV. As my friend Jean Poole asserted at Plug n Play the other night, independent filmmaking is “broken”. This came from an interview he was reading with one of the directors of Sundance, who mentioned that out of 2000 film submissions, the festival could screen 200, and out of these perhaps 20 would be picked up for a cinema release. Apologies if I am misquoting the math, and forgive me for the next batch of inaccurate arithmetic. Let’s say your chance of actually getting funding or finance to make your independent film is something like 1 in 100. Then if we calculate the chance, based on Sundance’s figures, of getting your film distributed is also 1 in 100. Let’s say then, for argument’s sake, your chances of making a film and getting it seen in the cinema are 1 in 10,000. These are really not great odds.

So if its so damn hard, why make films? The interview with Lizzie Borden highlights one of the really good reasons to do it anyway. Because film is transformative, not just for the audience, but for the filmmaker themselves. Lizzie Borden talks about finding her subject matter through reading the work of socialist and anarchist women writers, discussing how despite the fact that feminist ideas are often present in the intellectual vanguards of these movements, they are rarely incorporated into any actual revolution. She looked around her and saw how fractured the feminist scene was in New York City “Class and race really did divide people, and just a slightly different political stance divided middle-class women”. She looked at herself and asked “And how many black women did I know? None. And how many Latin women did I know?”.

She decided to begin the process of making a film, to bring different women together, into the film and into her life, making the film in a slow continuous process over five years, including substantial re-shooting and re-editing. The film wasn’t written as a finished script, and then produced over a year once some money had been found, it was made piece by piece, which allowed for a real evolution of the content over time. Various cast members lived in her house at different times, allowing for spontaneous shooting when the time and the ideas were right. Asked if she would do it again, she says “”if I had only made four films in my life and they were films that really changed me, I would”. Regarding the women who became part of her life, “The people I see every day at this point are different from the people I saw every day then… The most important things in life are the smallest: who you speak with every day.” Beyond this, the community around the film is transformed also, “It’s important to me when I see some of the relatives of the black women who were in the film liking the film because they wouldn’t normally  go to films like this”.

This is a fascinating departure from the ordinary process of filmmaking, which does open up the possibility for a filmmaker’s subject to feed into her life, and feedback into the film again, transforming the self and the film at the same time. The creative process, as much as the result, is a major motivating factor for most artists, which the unusual process for “Born in Flames” highlights (somewhat akin to community cultural development processes). This film is an antidote to the inevitable sense of futility that I, and many filmmakers, feel in response to such a hostile environment for our work to be supported, and seen.

Still from promo for NATO

This is one from the archives. A 35 second promo for the Northern Arts Tactical Offensive, to be used at screenings and events (obviously, or quacking for details may be somewhat less effective). NATO was a collective in Manchester who did various subversive and situationist-influenced performances and other artworks, including the March for Capitalism and a spoof tourist guide to Manchester for the Commonwealth Games (2002), directing tourists to the alternative Blitz Festival of international grassroots underground culture, in the form exhibitions, street theatre, outdoor music, film nights and presentations.

From NATO’s website: ” NATO is a Manchester-based grassroots art collective. Our work as a collective, or through collaborative projects, aims to bring grassroots and underground art dealing with current social and environmental issues out of the confines of its more typical contexts, exposing it to a more diverse and mainstream audience.

We believe art and culture can be used as part of the transformation of life, society, and our everyday reality, not just a diversion from it.

True art and imagination can be used as part of the transformation of life, society, and our everyday reality, not a diversion from it. Art can be at its most inspired when it fosters awareness of the power each individual has to act for themselves, to make their own art, to believe in their own ideas, take control of their lives and change them.”

Link to the subsequent Fundamental international art show exploring totalitarian religion here.

This program is a survey of recent radical gender/queer and trans video from Australia, curated by Anna Helme and Kelli Jean Drinkwater. “Galactic Sex Wars” rockets us into a futuristic sci-fi world where homos and heteros face off across time and space. “Jorey Corson”, “Ultimate! Dance! Video!” and “Drag Acts” address the performativity of gender, featuring queer and transgender bodies in motion, in masks and moustaches, camping it up in the streets of Berlin, tumbling across an empty sports field at night, inhabiting both the intimate and theatrical. “M.C. G.F.C.” addresses the global fashion crisis, evoking Ru Paul’s “we’re born naked, and the rest is drag”. “With Him of All People” takes a relationship drama into parallel universes of alternate gender. “Procession” is a slice of reality, albeit from a bent perspective, from the Camp Betty weekend of radical sex and politics in 2007, featuring a performative “protest”, aiming to dislocate commonplace demonstration cliches, and generally disrupt the suburbs of Melbourne.

• Galactic Sex Wars (13:54) – Robbie McEwan
• Jorey Corson (4:10) – Corey coda & Jackson monsternighttimepower
• M.C. G.F.C. (4:21) – Anna Helme
• Procession (6:51)- Anna Helme
• Ultimate! Dance! Video! (3:31)- Sarakaka and Holly Fluxx
• With Him of All People (6:24)- Kt spit and Cyd Nova
• Flipbook (0:10)- Robbie McEwan & Anna Helme
• Drag Acts (13:32)- Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore & Anastasia Zaravinos

"Galactic Sex Wars" - Robbie McEwan

"Jorey Corson" - Corey & Jackson

"Procession" - Anna Helme

"With Him of All People" - Kt Spit & Cyd Nova

"Ultimate! Dance! Video!" - Sara Kaka Harro & Holly Fluxx

"Drag Acts" - Frances Barrett, Kate Blackmore & Anastasia Zaravinos

"M.C. G.F.C." - Anna Helme

"Flipbook" - Robbie McEwan & Anna Helme

Rabid Tripped-Out Psychedelic Lesbian Koalas

I’m currently putting together a package of queer films from Australia for the Bangalore Queer Film Festival in February 2010. My friend Namita (who I met through the Transmission Asia-Pacific network of online video activists) is involved, so it’s bound to be intelligent, provocative and fun fun fun (read some of her thoughts on Queering Bollywood here or perspectives on porn from the global south here). You can find last year’s program here along with more info on the organisers. It’s a D.I.Y. event, so there isn’t much in the way of screening fees, just the joy of reaching queer Indian audiences with your work!

In terms of the kind of films the festival is looking for – the crazier / more flipped out the better. Suits me! Camp, rude, trashy, experimental.. anything goes, and any kinda queer you like. So with this in mind, the working title for this program will be “Rabid Tripped Out Psychedelic Lesbian Koalas” First prize goes to somebody who actually makes and submits that as a B-movie! Shorts in particular, but features considered also. Any digital format should be fine.

If you’re interested in submitting something please contact me here via this website. Just let me know title, duration, year produced, and what the film is about. If you have some images, or a copy online, even better, please send me links to those.

It’s very soon, so there’s not much time to get cracking and send me deets on your film!

Gena Rowlands, star of A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977) and Gloria (1980), and wife of John Cassavetes

While I’m catching up on my blog today, I thought I’d add an essay I wrote last semester on three films by one of my favourite directors, John Cassavetes, starring one of my favourite actors, Gena Rowlands. Written in the midst of production of my second short film for this year, it was a bit beyond me to fully structure these thoughts in the way I would have liked to, but I found this a very useful exercise in interrogating the work of one of avant-garde cinema’s true mavericks. Cassavetes is another filmmaker to keep in mind when gathering the courage to attempt what might be a beautiful failure or just an ugly disaster rather than something more achievable, and less extraordinary.

The films of John Cassavetes (1929 – 1989) eschew many of the stylistic, narrative and generic influences of cinematic tradition, which can be appreciated when pulling apart his vibrant and distinctive body of work as an independent filmmaker working outside the studio system. Cassavetes’ disruption of conventional approaches to genre, narrative and style can be found to varying degrees in three of his films chosen from the 12 in total he directed between 1956 and 1986: A Woman Under The Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977) and Gloria (1980). While the master narrative of Cassavetes’ films can be thought of as the revealing of the performative mask of identity that each of us wear in our daily lives, and the “style-less style” he pitted against the gloss of Hollywood can be observed in each of these films, Gloria represents Cassavetes’ decision at various points in his career to veer more towards accepted modes of style and narrative, even to the point of invoking, though once again disturbing, elements of genre. In order to examine these films it is helpful to make reference to Cassavetes own description of his cinematic project, and to how his films have been treated by critics and academics, both whom tended to ignore or deride Cassavetes’ work during his lifetime. It is important to consider the prolific body of work on Cassavetes and his films that has been created by the staunchly anti-commercial academic, Ray Carney, and also to examine critics who illustrate Cassavetes’ influence in more recent avant-garde film practice such as the Dogme ’95 movement.

Ray Carney has focused on Cassavetes’ work for much of his career, having written many books on this his favourite subject, which have been partly responsible for reviving academic interest in his films. Christos Tsiolkas refers to Carney’s righteous fury about the lack of recognition Cassavetes received in his lifetime in the online film journal Senses of Cinema: “a righteousness which can seem defensive and contemptuous of any accommodation to Hollywood” (Tsolkias 2001). As Carney indicates, Cassavetes films are problematic to the traditions of mainstream cinema, and film criticism, alike. A fruitful critique of Cassavetes’ films should not only investigate how the poetry of his visual metaphor or cinematographic virtuosity measure up against the work of other directors (or they will simply be found wanting), but should include an emphasis on the elements he chose to focus on as a director, mainly character and performance, and his motivations for achieving a “style-less style” (Carney 1985).

Cassavetes’ films are like most directors’ nightmares of what their film might turn out like if they let the actors take over – stylistic and formal elements are subservient to performance. An interview in Playboy magazine, conducted not long after the release of Husbands (1970), clearly shows Cassavetes’ antagonism towards cinematic processes beyond performance: “Aside from cameramen, everyone else on a set is the actor’s natural enemy, because they don’t give a damn about what they’re doing. You’ve got to go to war with people like that.” Whereas, as one of Cassavetes most frequently used actors Ben Gazzara has said, actors are given free reign: “John creates an atmosphere where an actor can do no wrong” (Playboy 1971).

Ray Carney goes to great length to justify Cassavetes’ choice not to focus upon certain stylistic decisions – including formal elements designed to enhance the emotional or symbolic meaning in the scene such as the lack of “mood-music orchestrations” (Carney 1985). Cassavetes re-shot his first movie Shadows, as he felt it to be too reliant on techniques employed to manipulate the film experience – camera angles, lighting, music, other than the actors’ performance. As can be seen in A Woman Under The Influence, Cassavetes chooses not to always follow conventions such as the building of a rhythm of shot-sizes from wide, through mid-shots and over-the-shoulder shots to close-ups. He doesn’t tend to utilise perspectives such as a low-angle to indicate a character’s dominance, or dramatic lighting to indicate the importance (higher key), mystery (silhouettes or profile lighting) or scariness (lighting from below) of his characters. It is also important, however, to keep in mind the budget constraints Cassavetes has as an independent filmmaker, and his lack of formal training as a film director, which would have played an important role in many of his stylistic decisions. When complimented on his optical techniques using hand-held camera in Shadows (1956), Cassavetes countered “You stupid bastard. I couldn’t afford a tripod.” (Playboy 1971). Angelos Koutsourakis makes a comparison between Cassavetes work and that of the Dogme ’95 movement, referring to the Dogme practices of shooting on location, using hand-held camera, and the avoidance of extra-diagetic music as stylistic choices inherited from Cassavetes (Koutsourakis 2009).

Yet despite his maverick tendencies, certain basic stylistic and formal conventions are very much adhered to in the films of John Cassavetes. His actors perform roles in front of a film camera, to a script (his work is largely scripted, rather than improvised, as is sometimes assumed). His films are shot at locations or on sets that represent settings that are the real, often ordinary and domestic, places the middle-classes inhabit. His dialogue is either recorded on location, or post-synced to represent the way people converse in reality. Elements of mise-en-scene are not unfamiliar from what we find in conventional film drama, and don’t signal to us as an audience that we are watching an “art” film. The experimental nature of his work is to be found in the actors’ performance of their roles, the delivery of their lines, and the narratives that are constructed largely from the volatile motivations of these characters. Rather than following carefully orchestrated plot-points and essentialised character transformations, his narratives seem directed in a calculatedly haphazard fashion from one moment of conflict to another, exploring the performative extremes of personality. His films tend not to manipulate emotional response along a familiar arc, but prefer to veer off the path, and tear screaming around unexpected dramatic corners.

Cassavetes described his cinematic aims using the key terms “human”, “life” and “feeling” (Carney 1985). He was committed to developing original methods of directing his actors to push the boundaries of cinema, to get at what he saw as a new kind of truth in filmmaking. Yet the truth to be found in Cassavetes films is not in the realism of an exchange between his characters. It is the volatility and unpredictability of human nature, and the unreal nature of identity. Paradoxically, these truths about humanity are figured in an exaggerated and non-realistic fashion – the turbulence of human experience is externalised in a performative, and often unconvincing fashion. Yet this is a truth about experience that can’t be more eloquently purveyed. As can be seen particularly in A Woman Under The Influence, Cassavetes’ characters try to convince themselves of a course of action, with all the desperation bound up in not knowing what to do, before plunging off blindly in another direction. Koutsourakis refers to Cassavetes’ cinematic aim of discovering “truth” as finding a corollary in the Dogme ’95 movement, whose manifesto states a Dogme director’s “supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings” (Koutsourakis 2009).

Carney refers to the dominant mode of cinema as the “visionary/symbolic aesthetic”, which Cassavetes work contradicts (Carney 1994, p. 3). This cinematic mode which was dominant during Cassavetes working life as a director, which Carney differentiates Cassavetes from, does tend to essentialise and simplify story elements, editing out the boring or contradictory parts and the parts that are hard to understand. We can often be left with the reductive fundamentals, embellished with visual metaphor and sensory stimulus – rather than the cacophonous and conflicting disharmony of human stories, which can be found in A Woman Under The Influence, and Opening Night.

Given that Cassavetes chooses not to employ many of the stylistic techniques and narrative conventions found in mainstream cinema, many of his choices come down to performance and the messy, intricate narrative of each of his characters. In A Woman Under the Influence, Nick Longhetti (played by the charmingly wall-eyed Peter Falk) is torn between his natural instincts towards loving acceptance of his wife Mabel (performed captivatingly by Gena Rowlands) and her odd behaviour, and his terror and rage at how this behaviour conflicts with societal convention. He feels responsible as the man of the house for how she reflects upon him and the family, and vacillates between furiously blaming society on the one hand, and his wife on the other. Mabel represents a terrifying vulnerability, which is seized upon early in the film by a man who takes advantage of her in her drunken and emotionally turbulent state. Mabel’s vulnerability is Nick’s Achilles’ Heel, the chink in the armour of his masculinity.

To the family, to Nick’s workmates, and to their suburban society, Mabel represents a threat to the safety and comfort of their conventional middle-class lives. She is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, despite her own attempts to control her behaviour when she senses at times the extent to which she disturbs others. She attempts to adopt a more acceptable identity to please Nick, when she says, “Tell me what you want me to be. I can be anything”. Mabel operates on a much more sensitive and childlike emotional plane, which exposes the phoniness of everybody else around her, and thus cannot be tolerated. When Mabel feels like having fun, she will sing and dance, and beckon others to join her. When distraught she will walk the streets looking for a drink, and an escape.

In contrast Nick is constantly aware of himself, attempting to shut down his emotional responses, unsuccessfully. From society’s point of view it is Mabel who is crazy, but this is a very male-chauvinist stance, given that the facts show Nick’s behaviour to be even crazier. It is Nick who threatens to kill his wife and children, who drags his kids around at the beach and gets them drunk on the way home (teaching them to turn to alcohol in moments of despair). It is he who shakes his colleague’s safety rope in a fit of rage (fuelled by his embarrassment about Mabel) causing him to tumble down a rocky slope and be seriously injured. Aggression, rage, violence, acting-out and drunkenness are all acceptable male behaviours, Nick’s masculine rights as the head of the household. Mabel’s overly affectionate, gleeful, self-harming or otherwise eccentric behaviours are interpreted as intolerable female hysterics.

While Gena Rowland’s Mabel is a fairly convincing (and utterly compelling) portrayal of a woman whose emotional distress has stunted her social behaviour and pushed her almost to psychosis, Nick is harder to understand as the foolish husband who is beyond knowing what to do, or how to react. His inner conflict is plausible, but the manner in which it is externalised is hard to fathom. One minute he strikes Mabel in front of the children, trying to contain her eccentricities, another he is shaking Mabel, telling her to be herself, drawing out her nutty behaviour, just at the moment she is trying so hard to conform to societal expectations, in order to avoid being committed again. Peter Falk is given free reign to let these conflicting forces play out in the scene, thus Cassavetes is using performance to highlight these aspects of his character, which might have been handled through the use of visual or auditory symbolic cues by other directors. But there are moments of expressional truth to be found that are unlike those in the work of any other director, in the way that Mabel’s face crumples as she’s caught in the midst of Nick’s barrage of confusing signals, or in the way Nick drags his young daughter forcibly across the sand at their “day at the beach” he has bizarrely concocted to distract his children from their mother’s committal to a psychiatric institution.

People often refer to Cassavetes’ body of work as an “actor’s cinema”. This is true in many senses – firstly the director himself was an accomplished actor, from a theatre background who later became a well-known actor in films and TV series (largely as a means of financing his own work as a director). The performances of actors in his films are also the primary communicators of meaning (however fragmented this meaning may be) as opposed to other formal elements. His cast members do not merely perform monumental symbolic actions of figure expression, but occupy their screen time with myriad actions of a more minute nature. For example, you would be unlikely to see a character in a Cassavetes film do something as simple as ride off into the sunset on his motorbike. He would be more likely to ride off on his motorbike in the middle of a conversation, get caught in traffic, make faces at girls in a limousine, veer off the road to stop for a packet of cigarettes, find he has no money, plead with an old lady for some change, end up in an argument with her, and so on. Cassavetes would also be likely to choose the take where the actor dropped his bike, his performative mask slipped, and a genuine smile or grimace emerged from underneath. In fact, what advances a Cassavetes film are not so much plot points, but moments of conflict interspersed with elements of an actor’s “business”, the things that occupy her while she is busy expressing herself. Smoking cigarettes, drinking copious glasses of whiskey and having an argument would be enough to propel many a scene, if not an entire movie.

The influence of Cassavetes’ community of actor friends and colleagues, and his family of actors (given his marriage to Gena Rowlands) is clear. Speaking in Playboy of casting for Minnie and Moscowitz (1971) Cassavetes said, ”As the casting may indicate, I believe totally in nepotism”. When asked why this was the case, he replied in true Cassavetes clownish trouble-making style, “Because it impresses the hell out of my family and friends”. A Woman Under The Influence, Opening Night and Gloria, all feature Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, in a starring role. Rowlands face is his most expressive performative surface, which catches the dynamic, shifting moments of truth he was determined throughout his career to capture. Gena Rowlands is watchable in the way that Al Pacino is watchable – you don’t even care what she does before the camera, you are bound to be transfixed – though in these three films Cassavetes gives her more to explore as a performer than most actors (and especially actresses) would enjoy in a lifetime in film.

It is easy to imagine (though unfair to assume) how life might have imitated art in the Cassavetes’ household, how the performative qualities of their acting lives may have impacted on a scene played around the Cassavetes dinner table, and how art might have imitated life in return. While Cassavetes’ characters appear unconvincing at times with their vamping and extremes of expression, they would all make more sense if they were scripted as actors themselves (as is the case in Opening Night), who are naturally more prone to externalising or performing versions of their emotional interiors. This “theatrical” quality in his characters means they are likely to express an abstraction of the way they are feeling, rather than something more direct. The surface characters show to each other, and to the audience, is not just the standard modification of underlying emotion that any person makes when negotiating a social situation, but it has been given an extra theatrical twist. Cassavetes characters endlessly play games with each other, though they may not be conscious of this in what they believe to be their sincerest moments. An audience who expects any of the usual styles of cinematic performance – from melodrama through to realism – will naturally be put off guard by Cassavetes’ decisions in this regard. The viewer must watch several of his films to begin to understand this new language of performance, to start to get the hang of a Cassavetes’ character, and feel at ease with the unpredictability and lack of inherent, stable, meaning in his narratives. Cassavetes’ narratives do contain plenty of meaning, but they do not hold the totalising meaning of other narratives, instead they involve a multiplicity of fractured meanings for each character, which themselves are always to be seen as in flux.

When it comes to narrative, performance and character, Koutsourakis observes, “the major point of convergence between Cassavetes and the Dogme movement is an oppositional realist form that blurs the boundaries between being and performing.” Opening Night is key in terms of this blurring of performance and real life. In the film, Cassavetes and his wife Rowlands play ex-lovers, Myrtle and Maurice, who themselves perform roles as partners in a play within the film. These layers of confusion between life and performance drive Myrtle towards an identity crisis, which threatens her sanity. When Myrtle and Maurice are on stage together, playing a heated scene as the bitter, drunken couple Virginia and Marty, Marty/Maurice/Cassavetes strikes Virginia/Myrtle/Rowlands, and the audience is left uncomfortably unsure as to what part of this scene is performance, and what is not. Further to this, the audience is left to wonder what part of reality is not in some sense performance, a central concern of Cassavetes, most strikingly observed in this scene.

At the end of A Woman Under the Influence, Nick and Mabel have a terrific fight. In his rage Nick hits Mabel, she and the children run from him around the house, in fear, as he threatens to kill them all. In the final minutes however, Nick and Mabel come together, resolve their dispute and tuck the children lovingly into bed, telling each other they’ve gotten through the night, and that everything is okay. This neat suturing of a raw dramatic wound is simultaneously stupendously unbelievable, utterly truthful, and possibly a comment on the saccharine trend towards neat resolution to be found in much mainstream cinema. In the most immediate sense you cannot believe that these two could make up their huge differences so easily. Considering this again, though perhaps in reality the scene would not play out in such a heightened dramatic performative state, this is indeed an insight into the eye of the storm in many a troubled relationship, the moments of denial and blind optimism that can sustain a damaged familial dynamic. And finally, this almost throw-away “happy” ending seeks to protest the finality and resolution of most cinematic endings, whether they be “happy” or “sad”, which either way tend to contradict the reality of human experience. The narrative of our lives is constantly being told, and re-told. An event that occurred in the past may hold a certain meaning at that moment, then feel resolved by events experienced later in life, only to be thrown open again by subsequent events and changes in ourselves. We are constantly telling ourselves that we live and learn. The truth is that our experiences do pile on top of each other, shedding light on what has gone before, but the meaning we extract from this shifts and changes over time, as do our emotions, motivations and perspectives. The Cassavetes narrative echoes this fluxional experience, rather than simplifying elements from a story to support a particular meaning, frozen in time.

Within the mainstream of film we are taught that our films must be reducible to a basic theme, an arguable statement that may considered in the positive and negative throughout, but comes to a firm resolution by the end, either way. Thus film is a way of manufacturing seemingly complex character explorations that are in fact neat, simplistic understandings about life, ideally presented in an entertaining, ideally hair-raising, but ultimately re-asssuring manner. Films must be adequately resolved, and no messy inconclusive scenes will be tolerated, as they will leave the audience ultimately unsatisfied. Given this approach to film, it is true that Cassavetes films are often unsatisfying. Koutsourakis recalls Bertolt Brecht’s similar rejection of dramatic catharsis, as a political decision designed to leave space for an audience to participate rather than passively consume a more digestible dramatic outcome (Koutsourakis 2009).

In A Woman Under The Influence, Gloria, and Opening Night, a more open-minded audience can appreciate this rejection of conventional narrative standards that is in itself a political act designed to challenge the commerciality of the studio tradition. Though perhaps Cassavetes aims could be considered to be more spiritual or philosophical than political, or at least that his discernable filmic ideology would extend beyond the immediate social and political concerns of the day. It is clear that the director equates living (in terms of both existence itself, and the potential one has to maximise one’s life experience) with a more truthfully chaotic experience. In Gloria, Gloria Swenson makes the dangerous (and ultimately fatal) decision to leave her comfort zone to save a small boy from a mafia revenge killing, but lives and loves more in her final days than she ever could whilst comfortably ensconced in her apartment. In A Woman Under The Influence, Nick Longhetti chooses middle-class convention over Mabel and her troubling freedom of expression, to the detriment of his young family. In Opening Night, Myrtle disturbs everyone around her as her personality disintegrates into a psychotic fear of aging, as she attempts to preserve her illusion of youth, before ultimately confronting and conquering her inner demons – only to take the stage (to perform her life) once more.

In A Woman Under the Influence, Mabel Longhetti is finally committed to a mental institution by her husband and the family doctor, as her eccentric behaviour proves too much for one suburban family to handle. The family convince themselves loudly of the merits of this decision, despite the fact that it becomes clear that the only real results of these actions have been to cause deep trauma to a mother and her children at their separation. People in Cassavetes’ films don’t make the right decisions. They don’t embark on a journey of self-discovery, whereby various events and truth-tellers they encounter on the way help them to resolve an internal imbalance and learn to be better people. This is a fantasy – it happens in (other people’s) movies, it doesn’t happen in real life. In real life people do learn, but they don’t always learn the right lesson – and if they do, their experiences may cut both ways, giving them emotional baggage to carry into their emotional scenario. The sour-tasting flipside of a freshly baked Hollywood home-truth, could in reality be damaging emotional trauma.
The closest any of these three films come to a particular film genre, other than the broad category of drama, is Gloria. But Gloria is a gangster movie that defies as much as replicates elements of this genre. The film is set in a big mean city (New York City) and contains shoot-outs, moral conflicts, suited henchmen and their mob bosses, and (particularly unusually for a Cassavetes film) a stunt involving a motor vehicle, like many a gangster movie. But the film’s protagonist contradicts genre through the basic elements of her femininity, and classically feminine motivations. The plot advances with Gloria’s attempts to protect a small child against a city rife with mobsters on the look out for the boy Phil. At the beginning of the film she reluctantly helps him make his narrow escape, as the rest of his family are murdered by the mafia, in revenge for his father’s informing to the F.B.I. As the film progresses, she becomes increasingly attached to Phil, who evokes maternal instincts she has previously buried, in favour of pursuing a comfortable retirement on her own terms, without responsibilities to anyone but her cat. She ultimately sacrifices her own life to defend this innocent Puerto-Rican boy who has been caught in the crossfire, in contradiction to the pursuit of status and power to be found at the heart of most gangster anti-heroes. Rather than being pulled into the mafia’s influence despite any tendencies towards a moral existence, Gloria betrays the mobsters, shooting the guys she refers to on a first-name basis, and ignoring the advice of her uncle.

Gloria parodies the gangster tough-guy, whilst simultaneously turning this character on its head. She is a force to be reckoned with, can wolf whistle a taxi down from a hundred yards, shoot a carful of mobsters dead at point blank range, and tells anyone who bothers her to “take a walk”. But her tough-guy act backfires, when she tests Phil’s commitment to her, giving him a tough-love ultimatum to follow her inside a bar, or go his own way. Phil goes his own way, and Gloria is forced by her conscience and her growing affection for him, to search for him desperately, getting embroiled in another gun-battle and chase-sequence for her pains. Phil makes pathetic attempts to wrestle the power back from Gloria early in the piece, citing the patriarchal legacy handed-down to him from his father before he was murdered (“I am the man! I am the man!”), which only heaps more contempt onto this classic gangster motif of masculinity.

Finally the bizarre fairy-tale ending of Gloria defies the gangster genre, once again rejecting any traditional resolution. Gloria has been (presumably) killed by her ex-lover’s henchmen, in a final attempt to save Phil’s life through negotiation. Given her failure, Phil should be left alone to mourn her in the cemetery in Pittsburg, but instead a dream-like sequence ensues where Gloria returns in the disguise of an old woman, to sweep him up in her arms in emotionally accented slow-motion (a rare use of such an effect by Cassavetes). The viewer can’t help but be confused as to whether this fairytale ending indicates the whole film has been a fairytale, or if it is just a tragically hopeful hallucination on the part of Phil. If the latter, it is a darkly ironic way to finish the film, that takes away the dignity of the image of a boy left alone in a cemetery, surrounded by death. Either way, it feels reckless, even throwaway, and you certainly would not expect to see such an ending in any conventional gangster movie.

In Opening Night, Gloria, and A Woman Under The Influence, Cassavetes chose to favour character and performance as his primary focuses, largely letting these elements dictate narrative, and relegating other stylistic elements to a secondary role. Out of these three films Gloria is the closest to the trend of mainstream cinema, giving us a clue as to how his experiments in performance might have influenced broader cinematic tradition – whereas Opening Night and A Woman Under The Influence are much closer to his vision of a style-less style, and a more pure focus on explorations into character and performance, that have influenced avant-garde filmmakers ever since.

REFERENCES

Carney, R 1994, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Carney, R 1985, American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

Koutsourakis, A C 2009, John Cassavetes: The First Dogme Director?, in Bright Lights Film Journal, accessed 10th May 2009, from http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/63/63cassavetes.html

Playboy Interview: John Cassavetes 1971, Playboy Magazine, July, p. 55

Tsiolkas, C 2001, Meet John Cassavetes, in Senses of Cinema, accessed 10th May 2009, from http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/books/01/16/cassavetes_meet.html

Final shooting finished on my current short film production “Scrabbled Eggs” a week ago, but I haven’t had time to post the photos from our photoshootuntil now as I’ve been busy working on my classmates’ shoots since then. These photos are a few I picked out from the photoshoot we did in Collingwood a couple of weeks back, I’m real happy with how they turned out, mostly thanks to my most wacky friends who were kind enough to be in it :{) This sequence features the two main characters Missy Spelling-It (Eva Pears) and Thesaurius B.I.G. (Ryan Burrett) along with their respective posses played by Texta, Katie, Doushka, Crystal, Ben Hastie, Ben Stegh, Dan and Lachlan. These photos aren’t the exact snaps I’ll be using in the film, or in the exact order, but you get the idea.

After finishing up on other peoples shoots next week I’ll be getting down to the task of post-sync recording, visual fx and music in preparation for editing in early October. The movie has to be finished by the end of October, and there’ll be a cast n crew screening at 303 on High St in Northcote (which was also our location for the cafe in the movie) on the 10th of November.

Image from Newspaper Mock-Up Prop for "Scrabbled Eggs"

It’s 11:37pm on a Friday night and I’m at home working on my film… must be production time! Yes shooting for “Scrabbled Eggs” starts in less than 2 weeks. This is a digital image I just made to use in a mock-up newspaper that the main character, Missy Spelling-It will be reading whilst sitting in the cafe… More soon!