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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25, No. 6. 1962.

Home Movies

page 5

Home Movies

I can imagine it pleasing the weirder elements of the university population, but exactly why John Cassavetes' Shadows should have excited so much praise from more serious film goers I find it hard to understand. Supposedly an "improvisation," it was shot on 16mm in New York with a hand held camera and used unknown young actors, both white and negro. With a saxophone aimlessly and monotonously filling the gaps in the sound track (the music is by Charles Mingus) the film chronicles the happenings in the life of a group of layabouts and their friends for a day or so in New York

Now, I've nothing against technical shortcomings as such If they result from the, limitations of locale shooting, Ho that the often over grainy photography and sometimes inaudible dialogue didn't particularly worry me, but the film's faults go deeper than that.

The Man in the Street

Its biggest disadvantage is the total boringness of these people and their lives. The life of the common man is not interesting to others, is not glamorous and is not worthy of comment unless it is altered, in its description, by artistic manipulation. And if you put a camera on the events of any Tom, Dick or Harry for a day or so, using available light photography and on the spot tape recording, it doesn't mean to say that you are going to get a good film. Quite the reverse it looks what it is, a home movie.

The artistic manipulation is done by the man behind the camera, he is the selective agent, and If he has no inspiration (I prefer the word ability), it doesn't matter how he gets the finished film onto the screen, whether he shoots it with a pinhole camera or shows it with a camera obscura. The means is unimportant if the creator has something to say which Is worth saying and can present the old in a new way.

And really, there is nothing in Shadows that we haven't already seen in a hundred other films about people who don't conform, belong, are a social or anti-social or whatever word you prefer, and the very spontaneity (i.e. lack of preparation) in the treatment ensures that we get no insight into the motives or reasons for the characters' behaviour.

Themes v. Entertainment

Of course, the only valid test of a film is, is it entertaining? It doesn't matter two roubles if it has the noblest and sincerest theme or message in the world; if It doesn't interest, it is worthless. There are, after all, only a handful of themes available for treatment anyway, and probably the most overworked of them all is "the loneliness of the individual" that Is "his inability to communicate" (what?) with the cadet version of the same message, "the inability of the younger to communicate with the older generation."

The distressing thing is that a field of "sociological" criticism has grown up around this ethos; great message equals great film. (A good example of the desire to read a sermon into every film, whether one is intended or not, can be seen in the "Listener" critic's review of Fanny.)

MOVIES

Similarly, the viewer may read whatever he likes into Shadows— a tract on race relations, the emptiness of contemporary city life, its lack of values, the loss of meaning in sex, every man is an island, and so on (even a crack at modern ail if you want it.)

Off the Top of his Head

Cassavetes claims that his film is an "improvisation." Well, if you use the term as meaning the result of what, say, a musician does when he ad libs, then this film is obviously not the same kind of thing at all. And when we find that no script was used, that seems to have been the only justification for the term being applied to the film. For there is continuity of a kind, there is some plot line and the same characters appear all the way through. No, the earliest directors often had no script or formal shooting schedule either, but they provided a film with a plot, characterisation and interest. And just recently the makers of Nice Time did the same thing for Piccadilly Circus as Cassavetes does in New York. Though that didn't quite come off, It certainly had more punch and life than this pretentious piece of home movie making.

(Footnote: It's infuriating to see the Paramount up to its old trick of chopping up the image to fit the screen. What a farce!)