A Woman Under the Influence, John Cassavetes

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Though the films of John Cassavetes are often erroneously described as “improvised” or “verite,” claims that belie Cassavetes’s formal fidelity, it was a modernist, Virginia Woolf, who, in 1919, ten years before Cassavetes’ birth, described pretty well what would become something of a mantra for the filmmaker: “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.” It’s emotions that concern Cassavetes, who, with little care for what was popular or profitable, pioneered a neoteric style of free indirect cinema, one that drew inspiration from budgetary constraints and turned impediments into a framework for everyday follies; in seeking not to make melodrama out of life but to depict life as it is, as it feels — realism at times masochistic, and meditative, and brutally, beautifully raw — Cassavetes freed actors of the usual authorial flagging that dictates character. It’s cinematic soliloquy, nature beyond the navel. Cassavetes was […]