The Films of John Cassavetes
Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies

The first book to tell in detail the story of the maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system.

Ray Carney (Author)

9780521388153, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 28 January 1994

336 pages, 35 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

"There is plenty of sturdy analysis here and. . . Carney makes a strong case for his subject." Times Literary Supplement

The first book to tell in detail the story of a maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system. Providing extended critical discussion on six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams), Ray Carney argues that Cassavetes' work is a distinctly life-affirming form of modernist expression that is at odds with the world-denying modernism of many of the most important art works produced in this century. Cassavetes is revealed to be a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker and a deeply philosophical thinker, whose work takes its place in the American tradition along with the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. The six films treated here emerge as expressive interpretations of the bewildering challenges in contemporary American cultural experience.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: thinking in space, time and the body
1. Selves in the making (Shadows)
2. Noncontemplative art (Faces)
3. Beating the system (Minnie and Moskowitz)
4. An artist of the ordinary (A Woman Under the Influence)
5. The path of greatest resistance (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie)
6. Compositions and decompositions (Love Streams)
Epilogue: The religion of doing
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index.

Subject Areas: Films, cinema [APF]