Promoting Intellectual Film Culture Since 1973
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Cavell, Altman, CassavetesStanley Cavell (Amazon UK
 | Amazon US ), John Cassavetes (Amazon UK | Amazon US), and Robert Altman (Amazon UK | Amazon US) have had some of the same things on their minds with regard to the medium of film, the question of human identity, the possibilities for human interaction, the state of Cavell, Altman, and Cassavetes are of a generation. Cavell was born in 1926, Altman in 1925, Cassavetes in 1929. Cavell's essay "Must We Mean What We Say?" was published in 1958, and began a series of essays leading to the publication of his 1969 book of essays Must We Mean What We Say?, which established him as an important thinker and writer. Cavell has said that the work of Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin showed him a way in philosophy, made it possible for him to do philosophy. The idea that the way we live and speak, properly attended to, can give an answer to the compulsion — the compulsion of philosophy, the compulsion of everyday life — to escape the human, to flee from it, to build castles in the air (Wittgenstein: houses of cards), or systems of suffocating rules, is an idea Cavell has linked back to founding work in American philosophy, notably Emerson, and to American literature and other artistic expression, such as popular film of the 1930s and '40s. (It is not that rules are made to suffocate life — though sometimes they are — but that life is looked through, to discern rules that seem to govern life, and, once discerned, suffocate, whereas life looked at, rather than through, makes things much more complicated, fructifying.) John Cassavetes made his first film, Shadows (1959), in the late 1950s in a determined effort to bring the American fictional film closer than ever into life, looking into the heart, seeming to follow life, like a documentary, in all life's unpredictable moves. After unhappy work directing in Hollywood, Cassavetes got the world's attention anew — or the attention of those who know what is good — with Faces, made independently and released in 1968. And he went on to work another fifteen years, until overtaken by illness, as an independent writer and director of fiction films. Shadows and Faces show enormous sympathy for their characters, but paint a devastating picture of American life at the mercy — where there is little mercy — of race prejudice, wide compulsion to self-doubt, benighted gender role assumptions, the rage to have power over others, poisonous business ethics…. Shadows and Faces are boldly non-generic films. In later work, as if to find some way out for America, Cassavetes pursues a reworking of the deep concerns of genre from earlier film: romantic comedy, I would say remarriage comedy, in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971); the melodrama of the unknown woman in A Woman Under the Influence (1974); a variation of the same in the All About Eve (1950) remake Opening Night (1977); redemptive film noir in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976). The final film, Love Streams (1984), serves as a compendium of all this and links, I would say, to the American autobiographical documentary, a mode opened by Ed Pincus and the great unknown Film Portrait (1972)of Jerome Hill (all round about 1970), and practiced by Ross McElwee, Su Friedrich, and others. In Love Streams Cassavetes casts himself and his wife, Gena Rowlands, as brother and sister, and films in his own house.  Robert Altman made his prescient (in regard to his own later work), death-haunted documentary The James Dean Story in 1957. He worked in television and began directing feature films on assignment over the next decade, finding his voice in That Cold Day in the Park (1969) and finding a large audience with M.A.S.H., which won the Palme d'Or at  Nineteen Sixty (round about) marked a crucial turn in American film history and cultural history (and in wider history than Let us bear down a bit on A Woman Under the Influence and A Woman Under the Influence gives us the story of Mabel Longhetti, played by Gena Rowlands — a married woman with three small children, a woman who listens to opera on the radio and encourages others to sing, who loves Swan Lake and at times imitates its dance, whom most people in her world, notably her husband Nick, played by Peter Falk, consider special and valuable and larger than life, yet beyond comprehension, disturbing, finally mad. The irony rampant here — and irony is so key to the tone of the earlier melodramas — is that Mabel and Nick speak an English that is two different languages. He is rhetorical (rendered beautifully in Falk's finely measured performance). She is not rhetorical: every word she says is new. In the middle of the film, after playing a mad scene that is not madness, Mabel is committed by her family to an asylum. The film announces "Six Months Later," and we see Mabel on her return to family — immediate family, parents, mother in law, and others — where she plays another mad scene amid managing to control herself for the sake of contact with her children, and being contained by the fearful and conventional people around her, who do not want to push things too far at this point. The film's final moments, with the husband and wife calmly preparing the bed for the night in a mood of acceptance, have been likened by Ray Carney to the ending of Ozu's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), another story of marital turmoil patched over.1 A Woman Under the Influence is a harrowing experience. Hardly ever has a film brought us into such raw and sustained contact with a woman of compelling depth and originality, desperately reaching out, trying to carry on as who she is, disappointed, rebuked, abused, at moments here met part way by a husband who can go no more than part way. She is convinced that she sustains her children spiritually, and wants to make any compromise that will prevent the world from denying them to her. Gaslight, Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Now, Voyager, Stella Dallas were driven by film's wanting to bring us, as film's audience, to see and hear and acknowledge a woman as no one in the woman's own world will do. Cassavetes has this motive. He and Rowlands believe their audience needs this, in fact wants this. Cassavetes replays the older films, breaking through to us with a new realism in depicting a working-class milieu (which is not exactly what Mabel herself comes from, complicating things), and with a new improvisatory intensity in the acting and in shooting long takes with a handheld camera. This is profound older    The film does not present the striking linear development and character metamorphoses of the earlier films. But in the few days and nights we are given of this family's life, Mabel does constantly evolve, finding herself anew and anew. The process has begun well before the film starts, and it will continue. The evolution is there in Rowlands's amazing performance, her body and her face never still, reactive and registering revelation about herself and the world, projective, expressive, creative. In the final episode Mabel comes into her greatest madness at the same time she is at her most effective at seeing what the world wants and accommodating it, for the sake of her children and, to an extent, for her husband, her marriage itself, her compromised marriage. Ray Carney calls his chapter on this film in The Films of John Cassavetes "An Artist of the Ordinary" (and repeatedly invokes Emerson on self realization).2 Indeed Mabel, like the women of the earlier films, is an artist of life. She engages herself, as Thoreau puts it, "to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…morally…."3 She takes up her life as a creative medium, and like the earlier women on film, and like Thoreau, calls upon us all so to take up our lives, to open ourselves to such a taking up. Mabel's pervasive creativity is figured — concentrated in moments — in her directing people to sing and to dance and to enter into a play that responds to life and extends life — herself directing and in part entering into what she directs, working like Cassavetes himself. And as with the women of the earlier films — a matter Stanley Cavell discusses so richly — Mabel's imagination is indissoluble from film imagination. The final episode of A Woman Under the Influence bears an uncanny resemblance to the ending of Blonde Venus (1932), with Marlene Dietrich — the film Cavell has named as the earliest of the melodramas of the unknown woman.4 A wife and mother return to her family and determine to contain her extravagance — perhaps. In both films great play is made with a set of sliding doors, easily readable as a figure for the film screen. The woman in each film opens the doors (her husband has closed them) and penetrates the realm of children, where woman and child are lovingly filmed close up, in intimacy. Through the doors, the screen, is, as it were, the world of the woman's creation, her film, her offspring, and her interior (Mabel has said earlier to the children, "I never did anything…I made you and you and you"). The world through the doors gives Mabel the motive and the strength to play out her return, more or less tactfully. She emerges from the inner room and is framed for the ensuing scene in long-shot against the now-closed doors/screen before an audience of relatives, and us — Mabel as if impaled on the doors/screen, but making it her medium. Later this film of a mostly realistic and straightforward (though unconventional) shooting style, finds in the bizarre image of Mabel's out-of-focus hand floating and gesturing in the foreground as she dances on the couch, the perfect realization of who she is in her depths. Mabel is film. Altman's Nashville is full of women singing about wanting to go somewhere but not knowing the way, about never getting enough of what they hunger for, about the secrets of their love they will never tell (why? because the world will not tolerate such secrets?). Women who do not sing, wish to sing, try to sing. And the sense of inner depths the women point to through the art of song, is compounded with madness, most strikingly in the scene of the breakdown of the great country singer Barbara Jean, played by Ronee Blakley, on stage outdoors at Opryland (on a riverboat set reminiscent of another of Cavell's named melodramas of the unknown woman, Showboat (1936: first version, with Irene Dunne). Barbara Jean/Blakley's breakdown is one of the great mad scenes in film, reminiscent in its exhaustiveness of Harriet Andersson's breakdown before the "spider god" at the end of Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly (1961) (earlier in Nashville Geraldine Chaplin, a foreigner, wanders into the strange world of this city and remarks, "it looks like Bergman"). But Karin/HarrietAndersson succumbs to terror, whereas Barbara Jean, like Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, talks to an audience with some enthusiasm about, while drifting off into, her world of memories and projections, pain mixed with ecstasy, and she is disconcerted to be stopped and led off stage — "I ain't done. I ain't done." Otherwise in  But Nashville does not do all that film can do to allow any one of these women to be as fully as possible what she is, to allow the audience for film to see as fully as possible, and to make contact with, what those in the woman's own world will not see and make contact with. Altman feels compelled to deal with more than one woman, and to keep moving from situation to situation, giving us fragments — establishing a film form he would become known for. Altman is interested in a system, a network or web, wherein individual lives take place. With the slow-moving but restless camera within one situation, and the cut from one situation to the next, we feel that the forces of one life, and the forces playing upon one life, affect the next. It is like what the cultural critic discerns, but something only the eyes and ears and movements of film can give us.  Stanley Cavell speaks about the religious dimension in Letter from an Unknown Woman (its crosses and nuns), saying we must understand something about this woman's life — Lisa/Joan Fontaine — as if the life is from the beyond.5 Mabel Longhetti is seen in her house in one characteristic long-shot, the space of the house dwarfing her, offering to absorb her, this time the woman standing backed up to her kitchen sink with a cross placed above it, in sign of some source of renewal, her destiny and her refuge (St. Paul: I die daily). The center and hinge point of Nashville is a series of Sunday morning church service scenes, one featuring a full immersion baptism, death and rebirth (earlier, at the airport, Barbara Jean bade goodbye to the crowd of well wishers welcoming her, "Like my granddaddy always used to say, if you're down to the river, I hope you'll drop in"). At the end of the churches sequence the film finds the hospital chapel and Barbara Jean singing for the first time in the film, singing of her contact with God. Christ-like, Barbara Jean had succumbed physically on Friday. She has since been seen laid out unconscious on a hospital bed surrounded by wreaths of flowers, as if dead. Now she has risen on Sunday morning, and found her voice. At the end of the film, after being shot, she is carried off the stage, her husband, with his hands on her, shouting, "I can't stop that blood, man!" It is the blood of the artist, there for those who will take it in — the singer, the artist of life, the artist like Altman who offers the shock of a step toward humanity for those who will accept his radical, Swiftian satire and the disorienting energies it sets loose. Charles Warren is Adjunct Professor of Film at Boston University, and Associate of the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard University. He is editor of Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film (1996), and with Maryel Locke, of Jean Luc-Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film (1993).
[1] Ray Carney, American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience, University of California Press, 1985, pp. 193-94. [2] Carney, “An Artist of the Ordinary (A Woman Under the Influence),” The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies, Cambridge University Press, 1994. [3] Henry David Thoreau, “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Walden: or, Life in the Woods, ed. Robert F. Sayre, Library of America, 1985, p. 394. [4] Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman, University of Chicago Press, 1996, p. 14. [5] Ibid., p. 109. Cavell has elaborated on this point in his many lectures on the film over the years at Harvard University. |
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