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John Cassavetes
Director / Screenwriter / Actor
1929 - 1989
Born December 9, New York, New York, USA
Key Production Country: USA 
Key Genres: Drama, Psychological Drama, Ensemble Film
Key Collaborators: Gena Rowlands (Leading Player), Seymour Cassel (Character Player), Fred Draper (Character Player), Al Ruban (Producer/Cinematographer/Editor), Peter Falk (Leading Character Player), Bo Harwood (Composer), Phedon Papamichael (Production Designer), Ben Gazzara (Leading Player), Tom Cornwall (Editor), Val Avery (Leading Character Player)

Highly Recommended: Shadows (1959)*, Husbands (1970)*, A Woman Under the Influence (1974)*, Love Streams (1984)*
Recommended: Faces (1968)*, Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Opening Night (1977)*, Gloria (1980)
Worth a Look: A Child is Waiting (1963), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)*
Duds: Big Trouble (1985)
* Listed in TSPDT's 1,000 Greatest Films section.

 
 
 
Links: [ Amazon ] [ IMDB ] [ TCMDB ] [ All-Movie Guide ] [ Film Reference ] [ The John Cassavetes Pages (Ray Carney) ] [ Strictly Film School ] [ American Masters ] [ DGA Article ] [ Senses of Cinema Article (2001) ] [ Various Quotes by Cassavetes ] [ kamera Article ] [ Bright Lights Film Journal Article (2005) ] [ Senses of Cinema Article (1999) ] [ Film International Article (2006) ]
Books: [ The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies ] [ Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film ] [ Cassavetes on Cassavetes ] [ John Cassavetes: Lifeworks ] [ John Cassavetes: The Adventure of Insecurity ]
 
Shadows (1959)Husbands (1970)A Woman Under the Influence (1974)Love Streams (1984)
 
     
  "The director himself provided the essential key to his approach when he said, "I am more interested in the people who work with me than in the film itself, or in cinema." That's perhaps why his films are further than most from the conventions of art or entertainment, but at their very best moments are closer than most to truth, or at least to the subjective reality of its participants. Critics and audiences either love or hate Cassavetes' free-wheeling work. His films are as disturbing as they are erratic, leaving no one indifferent." - (The MacMillan International Film Encyclopedia, 1994)  
     
  "Actor-director John Cassavetes is remembered as the godfather of American independent film-makers. Although Shadows (1959), his breakthrough film, was not the first American movie outside the system, it became a rallying point for future generations... Cassavetes was often labelled an improvisational film-maker, but his films were almost entirely scripted. Yet he had a preference for documentary-style camerawork and was obsessed with human interaction." - Ronald Bergan (Film - Eyewitness Companions, 2006)  
     
  "The amalgam of improvisational acting, hand-held camera work, grainy stock, loose editing, and threadbare plot give his films a texture of recreated rather than heightened reality, often imbuing them with a feeling of astonishing psychodramatic intensity as characters confront each other and lay bare their souls." - Bill Wine (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)  
     
  "His films are preoccupied with a heavily realistic, often elliptical, tone which works best in Faces (68)." - William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978)  
     
  "There's a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. And there's a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. Or making choices as an actor. As a writer also, as a person who's making a film, as a cameraman, everything is a choice. And it seems to me I don't really have to direct anyone or write down that somebody's getting drunk; all I have to do is say that there's a bottle there and put a bottle there and then they're going to get drunk." - John Cassavetes (Directing the Film, 1976)  
     
  "People who are making films today are too concerned with mechanics - technical things instead of feeling." - John Cassavetes (1980)  
     
 
Please note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director that we haven't seen include Too Late Blues (1962).
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"John Cassavetes’s independent films challenge distinctions between documentary and fiction films. Described sometimes as home movies, they seem to capture authentic moments of individuals’ experiences. The films’ intimate quality reflects Cassavetes’s career-long collaboration with cinematographer Al Ruban and actors such as Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Seymour Cassel… As with the work of Jean-Luc Godard, Cassavetes’s films have been seen as a type of direct cinema, one that acknowledges the filmmaker’s impact on the material presented and that attempts to reflect or reveal the material itself. For both filmmakers, actors function as graphic or narrative components effectively controlled by the director and as documentary evidence of social and emotional realities that simply cannot be represented in a fictional film narrative." - Cynthia Baron, Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

 
 
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See Also
Robert Altman
Ingmar Bergman
Shirley Clarke
Jean-Luc Godard
Spike Lee
Elaine May
Arthur Penn
Bob Rafelson
Jacques Rivette
Alan Rudolph
Martin Scorsese
James Toback
 
 
 
         
         

 

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