John Cassavetes’s exquisite and poignant first feature (1959), shot in 16-millimeter and subsequently blown up to 35, centers on two brothers and a sister living together in Manhattan; the oldest (Hugh Hurd), a third-rate nightclub singer, is visibly black, while the other two (Ben Carruthers and Lelia Goldoni) are sufficiently light skinned to pass for white. This is the only Cassavetes film made without a script, and the only one that focuses mainly on young people, with the actors improvising their own dialogue (and, to increase the feeling of intimacy, using their own first names for their characters). Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, subtlety, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film. This movie is contemporaneous with early masterpieces of the French New Wave such as Breathless and The 400 Blows, and deserves to be ranked alongside them for the freshness and freedom of its vision; in its portrait of Manhattan during the beat period, it also serves as a poignant time capsule. With Tony Ray (the son of director Nicholas Ray), Rupert Crosse, Dennis Sallas, Tom Allen, and Davey Jones–all very fine–and a wonderful jazz score by Charles Mingus. It’s conceivable that Cassavetes made greater films than this, but it’s the one I’ve seen and cherish the most. Read more
There’s a surprising amount to be learned about the state of the world from most international film festivals, and the Chicago International Film Festival, now in its 27th year, is no exception. A film festival can impart information that’s seldom available in the kind of print and TV journalism we’ve been getting in this country in recent years: the texture of everyday life in other countries and the fantasies of other cultures; the kinds of thought, emotion, and reflection that can’t necessarily be captured in sound bites, ancillary markets, and weekend grosses; aesthetic, political, intellectual, and erotic alternatives to the overhyped fare that Entertainment Tonight, At the Movies, Entertainment Weekly, et al are force-feeding us the rest of the year.
If art offers us a prism to illuminate such matters, what are the signs in European cinema of the recent collapse of communism? It’s probably too soon to compile a comprehensive list, but foremost among the immediate signs is the international coproduction. With the virtual collapse of state financing in some countries, and a substantial rethinking of what should get state financing in others–as well as a growing desire to reach international markets the way Hollywood movies do–a curious genre of polyglot production has been developing in Europe in which two or more nationalities get jammed together into a film’s cast, its production staff, sometimes even its language. Read more
