Cassavetes' cinema is often stylistically structured on his desire and intention to use the interrupted conversations, the hesitated dialogues, unresolved narrative structure and unpredictability and spontaneity of the character's body movement and the gestures in the dramatic situations. In order to understand his aesthetic vision, one has to critically observe the moments which are randomly constructed and established on the irrational movements linked with the physical actions. Moreover, Cassavetes' characters and events are continuously choreographed to represent the infinite variations in the pattern of behavior. Nevertheless, it seems that his camera related strategies are discussed and observed explicitly by the critics' appropriate and adequate responses to the visual patterns of the choreographic variations in his characters' anthology of failures of communication. Not surprisingly, the photographic properties of his visual moments are implicitly measured and judged by the patented and patterned critical commentaries. In fact, most of the critical writings on Cassavetes' camera strategies are basically associated to his interviews about his style of camera and montage aesthetic:
"I feel I have to move beyond the current obsession with technique or camera angles. It's waste of time. How you shoot a film is a diversion. I think anybody can shoot a film...What are we wasting our time doing that for? It has nothing to do with life. Now we are making that a value. Pretty Photography is part of our culture" (Gelmis,82).
Like many revelations in Cassavetes' style, the hand held cameras, the shooting faces in the close ups, the long takes in the dialogue scenes, the desire for improvisation, the avoidance of pre planned shooting with the storyboards are evidences of his stylistic aesthetics to visualize the playful or deadly serious impressionistic moments of life forces reflected on his characters' faces. In order to document the truth of the human relationships and its dynamic of engaging with the reality, the progress of his films strives to shed light on the pointlessness or the absurdity of using of the conventional point of view shots according to Carney:
"His films simply reject essentializing, metaphorizing, subjectivizing abstracting and a contemplative form of knowledge and relationship...Cassavetes simply rejects that understanding of experience. Viewers are denied access to intentional depth, and asked to navigate shifting (and potentially bewildering) expressive surfaces" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 10).
Moreover, Carney states that one can essentially notice how Cassavetes subtly and perhaps consciously uses the shots and counter-shots to offer his representational skepticism to the relation between his characters' psychoanalytical deep responses and the objective stimulations of the external world: " The way of profundity in Cassavetes' work is not in moving from surfaces to depth, but in breaking down the opposition between them rather than attempting to plump depths, Cassavetes' viewers must learn to skate on shifting surfaces" (Carney, 52). Beyond that, Cassavetes' avoidance to decipher the states of indeterminate and imaginative scenarios with respect to the non-linear editing non star-centered scene making is worthy of further serious considerations. Not surprisingly, the framing of the shots in Cassavetes' films disturbs the stability of our relationship with the cinematic text and finally collapses our habitual strategy for understanding the function of the composition in each scene. Indeed, Cassavetes' use of technique of improvisation creates an accidental product in which the characteristic and dramatic function of the framing and composition have to be matched and determined with the respect to the character's social maneuverings and persona. Obviously, the framing is manipulated in such a way in which the camera that is usually close to the character's face can represent his entrapment in the confined social environment: "Characters exist within a force-field of pressures and influences, which continuously threaten them and which they can never escape" (Carney, Persistence of Vision, 42).
Of course, the time that needs for an emotion or humanly relationship to be developed is what necessarily subdues Cassavetes' compositional designs. His strategy to frame his characters and put them in the composition can be mostly considered and observed in the relationship between his individuals with the social group around them:
"Cassavetes technique of photography and editing work to reestablish the democratic contexts around any individual, to resist the individual's effort to isolate himself frame, or to elevate himself above, the social group of which he is a part...The individual character is no longer able to control or dominate the visual space of the frame or the social space of a scene as in the traditional fictional film" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 97).
In other words, Cassavetes defeats the isolating effect of the close up and his framings. In his compositions, he mostly avoids of rigidifying the space around a character such as his composition in Faces(1968) between groups of people who have conversation together:
"So that even as we are looking closely at one actor, we are hearing the voice of another off screen...even as we focus on one character within the frame, the foot, leg, arm, hand, or part of the body of that figure or another will extend out of or intrude into the corner of the frame, reminding us of the web of connections and relations outside our view at any one moment" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 101).
However, his next films conduct the viewer on thinking about his style through his filmic career. What they have in common with the earlier ones, what links them together in terms of fundamental concepts and the visual devices. For example in Love Streams (1984), Cassavetes moves the camera and uses shot/reverse shot editing while he still tries to avoid of point of view shots, and he also uses the improvisation on the movements and the close ups of Sarah's character (Gena Rowlands). The professional lighting and the character's movement in mise-en scene distinguish the distinctive differences between Faces and Love Streams. The choreographic pattern of the framing and the camera movement in Cassavetes' films often proves that his close-ups are precisely necessary to the extent that the viewer can be capable to follow the emotional signals and the evasive forms of the hysterical and the expressive moments on the character's faces. If, in Faces, the close ups and the static frame create confinement and isolation, his latest films such as A Woman under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980) are attempts to break the bleak entrapments and claustrophobic narrative confinements by allowing the characters to move in the composition. In other words,
if the composition is filled with the close up of the characters' faces
in the earlier films, Cassavetes's style is changing in terms of using the camera movement, high spirited scenes, the characters' freedom of moving and the composition of depth. By allowing the characters more freedom of movement and bodily disposition, Cassavetes justifies his previous experiments with the extreme close ups and the hand held camera movements.
From the beginning of A Woman under Influences, Mabel's freedom to move freely in the frame and out of the house indicates Cassavetes' style that has been changed since Faces though she is in a prison-house. If his individual verbal miscommunication with the friends, the neighbors and the strangers automatically equates drama with action and movement through spaces in his earlier films, Cassavetes' importance of emotional moments on the character's faces turn out to more social adventures and psychological events in his latest films such as his desire to work with gangster genre in Gloria and The Killing of a Chinese Bookies (1976) such as Gloria's degree of freedom to save little Phil (John Adames) from the world of Mafia. Therefore, his strategy of framing and composing a shot needs to be evolved by maximizing action and movement in the frames. From the perspective of stylistic growth, Cassavetes' technical photographic decisions to use more distant camera set-ups in his latest films indicate his affinity to medium and long shot in which the possibility of respecting the social group creates the broader spaces for the actors to play their emotional and irrational responses to the chaotic moments and situations such as the scenes in which Mable(Gena Rowlands) and Nick (Peter Falk) eating lunch or spending their time with their own friends and relatives around the table. But at the same time, the struggle of the individual with the social forces in Cassavetes films forms the very confined framing in which the stylistic necessity of using improvisation combines with the obligations of Hollywood conventional methods of filmmaking.
But what makes Cassavetes' style of framing and composition such a complex dialectical work is his successive close ups of each important character in each of his films as the close ups in Faces between Richard (John Marley), Freddie (Fred Draper) and Jeannie (Gena Rowlands). It aesthetically seems that Cassavetes's characters attempt to enlarge the boundaries and the framing of their close ups to release and liberate themselves of the social forces that dominate on them such as Sara Lawson's (Gena Rowlands) attempt in Love Streams to get rid of Robert Harmon's (John Cassavetes) house and personal world. The greatness of his latest films that follow Faces is attributable to his characters' stylistic escape route from social influences and criticism.
According to Carney, there is no such a thing as the subjective point of view shots in Cassavetes' films that explain the psychological and internal emotions of the characters. In fact, Cassavetes' point of view shots which are designed and expressed in shot/reverse shot format are mostly echoing the social pressures and influences on the character. In slightly more complicated cases, his camera seldom penetrates to the characters unconscious mind to reveal his psychoanalytical desires and intentions: "There is nothing but surface. There are no clarifying essences, explanatory metaphor, or private depths of subjectivity by means of which we can get inside characters and events to simplify them" (Carney, Pragmatism et al, 11). Because the character's interior perception of the external world is changing, the viewer is denied and rejected to experience any subjective point of view through the character's look : "The viewer is put in the position of not knowing quite who the characters are, why they are behaving in the way they are, or exactly how to interpret their specific expressions" (Carney, Pragmatism et al, 10).
Because Cassavetes is not recognized as the Hollywood director, his work is not an attempt to display psychoanalytical issues in the characters problems. But like anything else in his style which is going to change from his earlier films to the latest ones, a sense of point of view shots are also seen more in his latest films. Of course, from Carney's view on Opening Night (1977) in the scene in which the play is done in front of the audience, point of view shots in Cassavetes' film can not be only observed from the main character's look: " Cassavetes' shifts of camera placement not the sensitively shifting and adjusted perspectives and focuses of an ideally responsive observer or a participant to a scene, but a series of irreconcilably conflicting points of view from the perspectives of many different audiences or participants" (Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes, 263). In other words, the conventional use of the point of view shots in Cassavetes films is rejected by his interest to remind us of presence of camera and shifting of psychological focus to the social field of view such as the scene in which Sara Lawson finds Robert Harmon in his dark room close to his juke box that looks like her point of view shot, but it is not.
Just like many other artists in film history, Cassavetes's visual style evolves from utter and simple uninteresting matters of the intellectual issues to the more complicated and controversial ones. One feels that he would have done anything in his power to simplify the intellectual confusions in his films. But by looking at Love Streams, one can realize how Cassavetes uses fantasy, hallucination and dream sequences at his final film from his characters' point of view shots to a degree in which his avoidance of offering any intellectual psychoanalytical criticism in his earliest films turns out to more contradictory and confusing interpretations with respect to the complexity and density of his characters' lives. Perhaps, any criticism that would adequately describe his style must attempt to be textual rather than contextual. In this sense, Cassavetes' life and work are articulated to what idealism defines in order to challenge with intellectual confusions and social chaos.
Carney, Ray. Love's Dreams: Love Streams and the work of John Cassavetes Persistence of Vision, No:6, Summer 1988.
Carney, Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism and the Movies Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Carney Ray. The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Gelmis, Joseph. John Cassavetes: The Film Director as Superstar London: Seckler & Warburg, 1971.
By: Morad Sadeghi
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