Shadow (1959)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title shadow
Original title Shadows
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1959
length 87 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director John Cassavetes
script John Cassavetes
production Seymour Cassel
Maurice McEndree
music Shafi Hadi
Charles Mingus
camera Erich Kollmar
cut John Cassavetes
Maurice McEndree
occupation

Shadow is an improvised independent film by the American director John Cassavetes from 1959.

action

The film tells the story of the three African American siblings Ben, Lelia and Hugh, who are active in the New York jazz and beatnik scene. Above all, their everyday experiences and problems with racism and relationships are shown. For example, Lelia is abandoned by her white boyfriend Tony due to mutual prejudice, Hugh tries his luck as a jazz singer with moderate success, and the unemployed Ben likes to hang around with his white friends while he dreams of a career as a trumpeter. The film has an episodic structure.

background

John Cassavete's directorial debut, Shadow , was filmed from 1957 to 1959 on a very small budget of about $ 40,000. All dialogues and actions in the film are improvised ; the actors are laypeople or fellow students of the director who appear under their real names. This gives the actors' play an unusual authenticity and truthfulness. The absence of studio recordings contributes to this realistic atmosphere. The film was shot with a 16 mm camera, the handling of which Cassavetes had been shown by Robert Bresson . Cassavetes said of his way of working: "When I make a film, I am more interested in the people who work with me than in the film than in the cinema."

In terms of technology and content, the production represented a revolution in the film industry at the time. Schatten made a decisive contribution to the development of independent or experimental films as well as to the development of blaxploitation cinema. Never before had a (white) director been so openly concerned with the problems and everyday life of blacks in modern American society.

Directors who have been influenced by Shadows include Jonas Mekas , Andy Warhol, and Spike Lee . In terms of film history, the work is often compared with Jean-Luc Godard's Out of Breath , which was created at the same time and formed the starting point of the French Nouvelle Vague .

Shadow exists in two different versions. Cassavetes shot the first version of the film in 1957. The first version was shown in November 1958 in the "Paris Theater" in New York. After fundamental revisions and additions, the second definitive version premiered on November 11, 1959, also in New York, in "Cinema 16". The audience reactions to the first version were mostly negative. However, avant-garde filmmaker and journalist Jonas Mekas was so enthusiastic about the film that he dedicated four articles to it in the Village Voice and presented John Cassavetes with the first Independent Film Award for his performance . The reason stated: "With" Schatten ", Cassavetes succeeded in breaking out of conventional patterns and traps and restoring original freshness. The situations and the atmosphere of New York nightlife were captured alive. [The film] breathes an immediacy that today's cinema urgently needs if it is to be a living and contemporary art form. " Nevertheless, Cassavetes decided to completely revise the film. The second version from 1959, preferred by Cassavetes personally, earned him several awards (see below ). Mekas, however, described the "remake" as commercial and angrily withdrew his originally positive assessment. The first version was considered lost for over 40 years. It was not until 2002 that a copy of this version was rediscovered by Ray Carney .

John Cassavete's wife, Gena Rowlands , made a brief appearance as a party guest in the film, as did Bobby Darin in his first film role, who later became a well-known actor and composer.

music

Also due to the u. a. by Charles Mingus recorded soundtracks, Shadows is considered an outstanding example of an improvised film. However, with film music, too, a wide range of music quotes can be found, through jazz compositions specially made for the film, to improvisations that Charles Mingus with members of his band "The Jazz Workshop", as well as - especially for the second, definitive version of the Films - the saxophonist Shafi Hadi recorded. There are cross-links between the film based on music quotes and areas as diverse as rock'n'roll (at the beginning of the film: Elvis Presley's Hound Dog ), bebop , the blues ( Earl Hines / Billy Eckstine ) or the musical film ( The Great Ziegfeld ) . The music makes a significant contribution to the fact that the film can be understood as a statement for a mutual opening between 'Afro-American' and 'white' urban musical cultures.

Shadows is a unique film because of its synchronicity with jazz, wrote Eric Fillon. Much like Louis Malle with Miles Davis , the director would have worked closely with his composer to lay the foundations for music and film. Shadows is characterized by a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between sound and image . From the proposed musical material, Cassavetes kept mainly the improvised sections. “The director prefers a spontaneous approach that cannot be constrained by writing. His use of music is proof of his enthusiasm for the mobilization potential of jazz. In Shadows the music sticks and reacts to the characters, which enables a multitude of exchanges and dialogues. ”The rhythms and sounds of the music, the movements and the words of the actors become a mode of relationship between the bodies. This spontaneous representation of the individual in action is reflected in the music of Mingus. In this independent production by Cassavetes, jazz finally found its place in American cinema.

Awards and nominations

criticism

In Kay Weniger's Das Großes Personenlexikon des Films , the biography of director Cassavetes says:

“In the winter of 1957/58 he made his remarkable debut,“ Schatten ”, an uncompromising, semi-documentary, 16mm film shot on location about three different dark-skinned siblings, their lives in Manhattan and everyday, finely nuanced racism. Cassavetes did without a detail-rigid script and instead relied on spontaneity, disregarded all the rules of camera work that had previously been in effect and thus enabled a maximum sense of reality and naturalness. "Schatten" was the first film shot in the style of the "underground" filmmakers, which also attracted the attention of the general public. "

- The large personal lexicon of film , Volume 2. Berlin 2001

literature

  • Claus Tieber / Willem Strank (ed.): Jazz in film. Contributions to the history and theory of an intermedia phenomenon , Filmwissenschaft Vol. 16, Lit-Verlag, Berlin and Vienna 2014, pp. 133–158 (with a complete overview of the music used in Shadows ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ray Carney, Shadows , London: British Film Institute, 2001, pp. 39–51 and Appendix, p. 72 with a detailed tabular comparison of the two versions.
  2. ↑ Eric Fillon: Le chat dans le sac: Jazz et transcendance selon Gilles Groulx. Horscamp, August 22, 2010, accessed August 17, 2019 (French).