- The possibility of love exists
even in the most awful circumstances. Love
demands, but its costs and demands are almost
welcome as proof that love exists
- 16mm film
- Script not written in stone
- Non-professional actors
- "Temperamental"
acting
- Global improvisation (dialogues,
situations, camera, players)
-
Set design stolen from urban
landscapes
- Indifference for grammar and
syntax
- Language "roughness"
(profanity and slang)
- Reality from a player-point of
view
- Racial/Gender/Class clash (minorities
or immigrants)
- To be curious, to try, to risk
- Close-up (technique
learned from the TV years), long take
and hand-held camera
- Production pauperism
- Documentaristic stylistic
feature
- Narrative impressionism
- Unrealisticness
- Existential setback
- Couple relationship problems
- Latent homosexuality
- Banality
- Convenient happy end
- Stoicism
- Challenge to anonymity
- Continual pestering of daily
anxiety
- Theory of "here" and
"now"
- The people
- Emotional alienation in modern
society
- Subconscious desire to change
one's life, break out of the emptiness of life
and gain emotional freedom
- Stanislavkji's Method
- Italian Neo-realism (De Sica
& Zavattini,
Rossellini, Visconti, Germi), French Nouvelle
Vague (Godard, Truffout, Chabrol, Malle, Rohmer),
New York School (Rogosin, Engel, Clarke, Mekas, Frank, Leslie,
Laurot, Allen,)
- Work in progress
- Freedom from cliche' and codes
- Body, touch and gestures as
means of direct communication
- Streams of loving, fighting,
smoking, drinking, living
- Extremely few sex/nude scenes
in his movies. His thoughts were very clear: the
reason we have so much sex in movies depends on
our becoming voyeurs. The exploitation tend to
deprive ourself of the enjoyment it should bring.
Sex can be raw and dirty, not always soft and
clean as showed in Hollywood movies [I love
you, John]
- Willingness to learn from life,
openness to new experiences, change your view of
life and work depending on your new questions&answers.
- Plunge yourself into life to
discover yourself, to be open to let other people
in, to be ready to suffer and fail
- The Cassavetes Method: every
film is a strain of understanding, almost emphaty.
He don't want to judge standing outside, he wants
to understand plunging inside. Every characters
has flaws, but they are human flaws and in this
way, understandable and likable. They are, like
us, incorrigible stubborn but inevitable in love
- The only enemy we have is
ourself. No one else is to blame for our destiny
-
Usually in a movie we have a
series of scenes that pose answers to characters
(and viewers) and scenes that gives answers.
Characters know exactly their problems, they can
talk about them and (almost) always know the
answer to solve them (even if sometimes they do
not do anything about them). In a Cassavetes film
we don't have any of these tools, he does not
provide us a simple path to follow, no A to Z
road. You can understand why, used to the
mainstream fakes, many critics remained amazed
and confused. What is not understandable is their
willing to pursue the only known way.
- In Cassavetes' work, the road
to anywhere is the path of greatest resistance
- Passion, head-over-heels involvement, heart
& soul
- Follow the heart not the mind. Love is the
greatest of the emotion and the emotion are the true guide of our
existence
- Shame, humiliation and guilt.
Family, children, love, inability to communicate among partners, impossibility to love, the end of love, bitterness, pain,
the ego
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