June 29, 2009: Shadows
I think of John Cassavetes as having lived a double life in Hollywood. He paid the bills with badass roles in movies like The Dirty Dozen, and poured his real time and passion into being one of the most honest and respected American writer-director auteurs ever to work in the industry. Cassavetes’ films became well-known through the 1970s as showcases for actors who really wanted to exercise their craft, and Shadows was the 1959 directorial debut which kicked off this marvellous side of his career.
Shadows, true to its murky and multi-faceted title, explores racial interactions among the social strata in contemporary New York City. It was a racially charged time, with equality nominally on the books but civil rights not yet fully established for African Americans. The protagonist, Lelia (played by then-18-year-old Lelia Goldoni), is a young mulatto woman with a black brother and a mulatto brother, both of them struggling musicians. She falls in love with a white man, but due to her relatively pale colouring, he doesn’t realize her racial heritage and flips out when he realizes “who she is”. Lelia later bows to pressure from her brothers and tries to date a black man instead, but struggles to understand him. Additionally, Shadows presents a real slice of life of the struggles of musicians, and the necessary decisions about where to draw the line between making a living and retaining self-respect, struggles with clear parallels to the plight of the racially (or otherwise) marginalized.
The low-budget, stark, black-and-white cinematography seen here is not at all out of place for its time, and as a bonus it provides a canvas with opportunities to present further confusion. Anyone of any skin colour can be made to look like something else, depending on the placement and intensity of lighting, and Cassavetes takes full advantage to make the point about how transient the surface impressions of people can be, and hence how meaningless. A documentary on the DVD illustrated the restoration process for the film, bringing us much closer to the original presentation and the subtext expressed through the photography.
Shadows contains elements of improvisation, and is as raw and honest as any of Cassavetes’ later efforts, if perhaps more allegorical rather than intensely personal. Overarching symbolic connections between the violence and the music may be there as well, but that’s beyond my depth to figure out – for example, if you ever catch me reviewing an Ingmar Bergman film, I’ll say something along the lines of “nice looking black and white film, but doesn’t really make sense”.
Cassavetes’ style is a bit of an acquired taste, and his later films are much more intimate, but Shadows stands as a classic American film and a solid illustration of how the director knew what kinds of films he wanted to make, right from the start.
Fascinating film and instructive social study.
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