Letter to Jane Magazine

#cassavetes

❝ I’m not interested in starting fires. I’ve never seen an exploding helicopter. I’ve never seen anybody go and blow somebody’s head off. So why should I make films about them? But I have seen people destroy themselves in the smallest way. I’ve seen people withdraw. I’ve seen people hide behind political ideas, behind dope, behind the sexual revolution, behind fascism, behind hypocrisy, and I’ve myself done all these things.❞

Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes.

I’m sure this is what heaven can look like.

On any given night, if you ask me point blank what’s the best movie I’ve ever seen I might respond with this one.

I would give anything for a time machine and access to this event.

solelysupported:

“What might happen in a space inside out? With the improvisational nature of his work John Cassavetes ‘entrusted his actors not just to portray characters but to become them, often to the extent of reacting to one another spontaneously and improvising dialogue.’ At this point Cassavetes, camera on his shoulder, began to improvise as well. Who was directing whom at this point? Where did the dialogue begin - what does the scene include or preclude? Try to establish the hierarchy in a scene from the film ‘Faces’ that involves Cassavetes moving - the arced tangent of his shoulder and the geometry of his contorted body as it twists to catch an evolutionary script that has suddenly changed direction as Gena Rowlands and John Marley unfold into their characters. My point is not to offer film theory as an antecedent to architectural design, or even to offer improvisation as a method of architectural design, but to suggest that the apparent hegemony of the visual, and the Cartesian dialectics of observer and observed, is in some way ingeniously overcome when one pushes its techniques to their limits. This overcoming of elastic limits might stand in for a lineage of architectural attempts at the authorless: the unanticipated, the autonomous…the unbounded, the inbetween, the formless. But what isn’t released in this dialectic of intuited limits is the plastic and more importantly the still discrete nature of architectural practice. The point at which a certain level of strife pushes something past the final point of stability is offered within the parameters of the finite. While one could hope that the truly new would emerge at this point, one could presumably at least count on the unpredicted.”
- Daniel Bell, “A DIGRESSION INTO FILM,” from his essay “Having Heard Mathematics: The Topologies of Boxing,” featured in Slow Space (The Monacelli Press, 1998)

Opening Night
infinitetext:

John Cassavetes, Opening Night, 1977.

Cassavetes on A Woman Under the Influence
“The excitement of making a film is a mystery. If I knew anything about men and women to begin with I wouldn’t make it, because it would bore me.”
Download the full interview