The Films of John Cassavetes Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies [Hardcover]

The first book to tell in detail the story of the maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system.Extended critical discussion of six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams) reveals a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker/philosopher in the American tradition of Emerson and William James.Extended critical discussion of six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams) reveals a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker/philosopher in the American tradition of Emerson and William James.The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies is the first book to tell in detail the story of a maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system. Providing extended critical discussion on six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams), Ray Carney argues that Cassavetes' work is a distinctly life-affirming form of modernist expression that is at odds with the world-denying modernism of many of the most important art works produced in this century. Cassavetes is revealed to be a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker and a deeply philosophical thinker, whose work takes its place in the American tradition along with the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. The six films treated here emerge as expressive interpretations of the bewildering challenges in contemporary American cultural experience.Acknowledgments; Introduction: thinking in space, time and the body; 1. Selves in the making (Shadows); 2. Noncontemplative art (Faces); 3. Beating the system (Minnie and Moskowitz); 4. An artist of the ordinary (A Woman Under the Influence); 5. The path of greatest resistance (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); 6. Composl³O