MAKING LIGHT OF IT

(from Cinema 16 by Scott MacDonald)

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As is fairly familiar knowledge by now, John Cassavetes first work, Shadows, actually exists in two versions, the first having undergone significant revisions after various private screenings left a desire for further change.  Upon the release of the second version, a bit of controversy was created when those smitten with the first version, exemplified by Jonas Mekas, did not take kindly to the new incarnation.  Eventually the first version fell out of circulation, and to most, out of existence altogether, until many years later, after a prolonged search, the film scholar Ray Carney was able to track down a print.  The controversy was re-ignited when the Cassavetes estate, including Gena Rowlands, objected to the release of the first version, and interesting questions soon arose as to who could rightly lay claim to it. 

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“….There remains a serious problem, of which you already know.  I refer to the fact that a number of people—including Jonas Mekas and Gideon Bachmann—feel that the second version, as shown by us, is totally inferior and a ‘commercial compromise.’  I have spent hours with them, attempting to convince them that they are wrong.  Jonas intended to make a public attack on the film at our showing, but I convinced him to first write you, since he also plans to write in SIGHT AND SOUND and elsewhere about the new version.

    There now does exist a controversy in New York regarding the film, and a confusion as to what is the ‘proper’ version.  I have discussed this with Cassel and assume he has told you about it.  I cannot discuss it in detail in a letter, except to say that you must have a very clear-cut stand on the issue, as shown, for example, in your decision to send this new version to the various festivals and to have this be the version that will be distributed.

    You will further confuse the issue, were you to decide to permit the earlier version to be show.  The result will be that you will compete with yourself and create confusion in people’s mind, so that they will think there are two SHADOWS in existence.

    For example, it is now being stated by certain people that Kingsley financed the new version; that it was done in accord with his wishes, and that thus it constitutes a commercial ‘betrayal.’  You and I know that Kinsley stepped out of the deal at a very stage; and that, in fact, the changes are due to your desire to strengthen the film, not to commercially compromise it.

    Nevertheless, you will have to take a very strong stand, it seems to me, in favor of the new version being ‘the’ film.  I realize that this is none of my business; I am simply giving you my opinion; in fact, I do not wish to become involved in this matter and prefer my name be kept out of it completely especially since the decision rests entirely with you.  By my opinion stands…..”

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"It may seem to some that enough has already been said about John Cassavetes’ Shadows.  After seeing it again last Tuesday at the Film Center, in its original version, and after comparing the exultation of this audience with the perplexity at Cinema 16, I definitely feel that the real case of Shadows is only just beginning.

    I have no further doubt that wheras the second version of Shadows is just another Hollywood film—however inspired, at moments—the first version is the most frontier-breaking American feature film in at least a decade.  Rightly understood and properly presented, it could influence and change the tone, subject matter, and style of the ntire independent American cinema.  And it is already beginning to do so.

    The crowds of people that were pressing to get into the Film Center (Pull My Daisy was screened on the same program) illustrated only too well the shortsightedness of the New York film distributors who blindly stick to their old hats.  Shadows is still without a distributor.  Distributors seem to have no imagination, no courage, no vision, no eyes for the new.

    Again, I stress that I am talking about the first version of Shadows only.  For I want to be certain not to be misunderstood.  I have been put into a situation, one which a film critic can get into only once in a lifetime (I hope).  I have been praising and supporting Shadows from the very beginning (see Cassavetes’ letter, Village Voice, December 16, 1959; Ben Carruthers’ letter, December 30, 1959), writing about it, pulling everybody into it, making enemies because of it (including the director of the film himself)—and here I am, ridiculously betrayed by an ‘improved’ version of that film, with the same title but different footage, different cutting, story, attitude, character, style, everything: a bad commercial film, with everything that I was praising completely destroyed.  So everybody says: What was he raving about?  Is he blind or something?  Therefore I repeat and repeat: It is the first version I was and I am still talking about.  (Here is the stay-away identification marker: the second version begins with a rock-and-roll session.)

    I have no space for a detailed analysis and comparison of the two versions.  It is enough to say that the difference is radical.  The first Shadows could be considered as standing at the opposite pole from Citizen Kane; it makes as strong an attempt at catching (and retaining) life as Citizen Kane was making an attempt at destroying life and creating art.  Which of the two aims is more important, I do not know.  Both are equally difficult to achieve.  In any case, Shadows breaks with the official staged cinema, with made-up faces, with written scripts, with plot continuities.  Even its inexperience in editing, sound, and camera work becomes a part of its style, the roughness that only life (and Alfred Leslie’s painting) have.  It doesn’t prove anything, it doesn’t even want to say anything, but really it tells more than ten or one hundred and ten other recent American films.  The tone and rhythms of a new America are caught in Shadows for the very first time.  (Pull My Daisy does it too, perhaps better, but it came out one year after Shadows.)  Shadows has caught more life than Cassavetes himself realizes.  Perhaps now he is too close to his work, but I am confident he will change his mind.  And the sooner the second version is taken out of circulation, the better.  Meanwhile, the bastardized version is being sent to festivals and being pushed officially, while the true film, the first Shadows, is being treated as a stepchild.  It is enough to make one sick and shut up."

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“Despite the fact that Jonas Mekas promised me not to write anything about the film until after having spoken to you, you will be by the enclosed that he rushed into print with his first attack on the film.

    By referring to a ‘commercialized version,’ ‘in no way to be confused with the original’ which was shown at Cinema 16, and then urging people to see the presumably ‘un-commercialized’ version elsewhere, he has compounded the confusion which I warned you would exist if two versions of what is only one film continue to circulate.

    It is clearer now that the ‘other version’ should never have been publicized and certainly should not continue to circulate.

    Retroactively, he cheapens our showing and your artistic integrity.  While as a critic he has a perfect right to his opinon, we are both harmed by this.

    For this reason, I have already sent a strong letter to Village Voice and urge you to immediately send them a strong statement of your own, upholding the version shown as ‘the film’.  Perhaps it would be good to even wire them, asking them to be sure to print your statement…”

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Excerpt from essay by Ray Carney detailing his search for the long-lost first version (a the complete essay can be found here, with a considerable amount of additional background information and further exposition on a whole host of issues involving Cassavetes):

“…One could ask whether the discovery proves Jonas Mekas right; but that’s the wrong question. It doesn’t really matter. The two versions of Shadows are sufficiently different from each other, with different scenes, settings, and emphases, that they deserve to be thought of as different films. Each stands on its own as an independent work of art.

    The real value of the first version is that it gives us an opportunity to go behind the scenes into the workshop of the artist. Art historians X-ray Rembrandt’s work to glimpse his changing intentions. Critics study the differences between the quarto and folio versions of Shakespeare’s plays. There is almost never an equivalent to these things in film. That is the value of the first version of Shadows. It allows us to eavesdrop on Cassavetes’ creative process–to, as it were, stand behind him as he films and edits his first feature….”

(all stills from the second version of 'Shadows')

As I was randomly perusing through books that I have previously read earlier today, I landed on an introductory message by Amos Vogel that was originally written for the German re-release of his Film As a Subversive Art and was included at the end of Scott MacDonald’s Cinema 16: Documents Towards the History of the Film Society.  Considering the announcement of certain dubious awards made this morning (yeah, you know the ones), and the recent end of a certain dubious festival a few days ago (yeah, you know the one), I felt it was very much in line with some of the things running through my head lately and are worth sharing here. Of course as I hope is obvious, I don’t mean to trivialize certain aspects of the piece (particularly those directed specifically at the German readership and Vogel’s heritage) by suggesting all of the expressed sentiments have been familiar to me, but rather out of respect for the author I’m including the article it in its entirety:

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“Though my book was written in English, my native language is German.  It therefore gives me much pleasure to note that the first republication of the book occurs in the German language.

It is an additional source of pleasure for me—this time, a perverse one—that it occurs in Austria, the country which, under Hitler, almost succeeded in killing me.  Obviously a new wind is blowing in my native country, though its purity is somewhat impaired by odors wafting from the direction of Jorg Haider, the hope of the New Austrian Right.

But I, in my new country, should not complain too much about others; we have our own noxious right-wing and its power, too, is growing.

In fact, contemporary America—a late capitalist colossus, owned by large corporations while parading as a democracy and dominated by rabid commercialism and consumerism—is now attempting to dominate the world via trans-nationals, Hollywood cinema and television, the export of American cultural ‘values,’ the Disneyfication of the globe.  It’s not the dinosaurs and extra-terrestrials that the rest of the world ought to be afraid of; it is the commodification of all spheres of human existence, the seemingly unstoppable commercialization of human life and society, the growing international blight of the theme parks, the all-pervasive malling of the world.  Our fate seems to be the homogenization of culture—an universal leveling down, an anesthetizing, pernicious blandness.

The space in which this infantilization of the human race is most clearly revealed in the monstrous structures of American television; for the first time in history, the most powerful mass medium of a society is totally controlled and dominated by advertisers and the marked, totally driven by commercial imperatives, saturated by ubiquitous commercials that deliver audiences to advertisers (not programs to audiences); and an ever larger spectrum t of channels delivering primarily garbage 365 days a year.  Thus has the marvelous potential of this medium been betrayed.

And the American cinema—today the most powerful in the world—is not far behind in its successful stultification of audiences.  We are inundated by meretricious stories, a failure to explore the marvelous aesthetic potential of this medium, a pandering to the lowest common denominator, a truly horrifying concentration on the most cruel violence, a smirking perversion of sex hobbled by hoary prohibitions.  This is topped by an obscene (profit-driven) blockbuster obsession leading to more and more films in the 100 million dollar range.

For those who still have resources of personal identity—an increasingly difficult and perilous endeavor—there exists no more important obligation than to attempt to counteract these tendencies.  Otherwise, future generations may accuse us of having been “good Germans” all over again; cooperating with evil not by our deeds but by our silence.  Silence, under such circumstances, is complicity.

There were moments in our blood-drenched century, when there seemed to be hope; the equalitarian impulses behind the 1917 Russian revolution (perverted within ten years); the Kibbutz movement’s attempts in Israel to establish socialist communes (today they exploit Arab/Third World labor); the promise of the 1960s (eventuating in the current world situation).  As we approach the Millennium, these humanist impulses are now behind us.

And yet, everything in past human history teaches that these attempts to transform us into humans will inevitably continue.  In terms of cinema, this explains the very large importance of independent showcases and independent festivals; it explains the ‘exceptions’ (from the Hollywood drivel); both those that constitute the content of my book as well as, even more importantly, those that continue to be made today.  Not those fake ‘independent films’ whose makers only aspire to become the next Hollywood stars—but those true iconoclasts and independents—feature, avant-garde or documentary filmmakers—who even under today’s bleak circumstances audaciously continue to ‘transgress’ (i.e. subvert) narrative modes, themes, structures, and the visual/aural conventions of mainstream cinema.

What a pleasure, then, for a man of cinema, to help discover and support these ‘exceptions’.  Though I am 76, my search continues unabated; I attend film festivals, museum series, the special showcases, serve on juries and selection committees, write articles and reviews, inform potential distributors and exhibitors and compose supporting letters to foundations and governmental institutions for grants and subsidies.

Momentous changes have occurred since the original edition of this book, among them the disappearance of the USSR and the GDR, the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the triumph, globally, of American commercial cinema and television.  Yet I find no reason to modify or change any of the basic theses or structures put forth in the original.

For me, the most important conclusion I came to then remains as true today.  Realizing its significance, I had stealthily placed it at the very end of my book, neither highlighting nor situating it in a separate paragraph, thus making sure that the real message of the work would be appreciated fully only by those who had kept reading to the very end.  There is therefore no better way for me to conclude this forward than by once again not drawing my new readers; attention to it [See ‘The Eternal Subversion’ pp. 437-39].”

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I think Vogel’s seminal book need no real introduction from me, other than to reiterate that despite sporadically drifting a little too heavily into the sort of “side-show” aesthetic occasionally leveled at his programming style, it is an extremely enjoyable, insightful and often amusing read, and a great chance to get a peek into the mind of an individual whose determined efforts had influence far and wide.  

MacDonald’s book, along with his two other works of a like-minded nature, Art in Cinema and Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of An Independent Film Distributor, offer readers a chance to examine first-hand the rise of seminal alternative film society movements on both coasts through letters and interviews with various key members, as well as assorted programs notes and listings.  They are invaluable resources for those looking to get a grasp (however unavoidably limited) of some of the historical developments in and around the field in the U.S., as well as serving as a considerable source of inspiration for those of us with similar, though perhaps a little less lofty, hopes and dreams.   

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