This month’s Pop-Up Cinema Club belatedly celebrates what would have been Cassavetes’ eighty-fifth birthday, had he not passed away from cirrhosis of the liver ten months before his sixtieth birthday in 1989.

 

Known to the general public only as an actor in Hollywood films like his Academy Award nominated performance in Robert Aldrich’s “The Dirty Dozen” and Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby”, very few were aware that John Nicholas Cassavetes was also a filmmaker. 

 

Actors turned directors were nothing new in filmmaking by the late 1950s when Cassavetes decided to try his hand “behind-the-camera”, but few if any would have his lasting influence.  Beginning with his groundbreaking debut film “Shadows” (1959) that chronicled the lives of African American siblings living together in New York City, he would make his most necessary contributions to the art of cinema as a filmmaker.  Though for the most part, those great contributions went largely unappreciated in his lifetime.

 

During the course of his three decades of filmmaking, Cassavetes stubbornly, courageously (and some say, insanely) soldiered on with his work despite the apathy and sometimes outright hostility of his audiences (which he at times encouraged with an almost perverse glee), and the misunderstanding, derision, dismissal, mockery and lack of attention from “Sunday morning news film reviewers” and almost all of America’s major film critics of that time like Vincent Canby, John Simon, Andrew Sarris, and arch-nemesis Pauline Kael. 

 

It’s a cliché but a prophet is never indeed welcome in his own birthplace, or recognized in his own time, and Cassavetes was indeed that living example of what some stereotypically term as “an artist ahead of his time”.        

 

Using his own money earned from acting in Hollywood films to produce his own deeply personal “home movies”, he pioneered an artistic process that encouraged and celebrated actors as equal collaborators in the filmmaking process.  Cassavetes and his informal repertory of actors and film crew members that included family and friends like his wife – the mercurial and unforgettable Gena Rowlands – lifelong friends like Seymour Cassel, acting contemporaries who became close friends like Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara – created films that defy conventional narrative cinema from both its commercial and “art house” veins.  Filmmaking was not something one used to tell a story of one’s life experiences or to make statements, but an experience of life itself: life lived at its most sensitive and terrible.

 

Often misunderstood or criticized as “improvisation” or “actorly overindulgences”, he was one of the few filmmakers whose films capture and express the messy, turbulent, tumultuous, spontaneous and ecstatic experiences of living.  Not the general “appearance of life” as most filmmakers mistakenly do, but a specific and particular experience of it.

 

Where audiences looked for cinematic virtuosity, Cassavetes gave them roughness and rawness. Where audiences looked for predetermined narratives, he invited them to genuinely explore and learn from “being in the moment” of uncertainty.  Where audiences looked for “moral lessons, “political statements” and “easy understandings”, he defied dogma, ideology and psychology to return us to complicated, personal, ephemeral, and intimate interactions.  Where audiences looked for “rewards”, he gave them deeper and empowering lessons of failures.  Where audiences looked for judgment and satire, he gave them tough love and the responsibility to understand and respect perspectives other than their own.   

 

Now proclaimed posthumously (and in some quarters hypocritically) “the patron saint of independent filmmaking” his work and legacy outlives its detractors.  Earning the admiration and respect of filmmaking legends like Akira Kurosawa, Jonas Mekas, and Jean-Luc Godard, mentoring filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Rob Nilsson, Tom Noonan, and inspiring generations of filmmakers from diverse backgrounds and nationalities like Robert Altman, Henry Jaglom, Abel Ferrara, Jim Jarmusch, Maurice Pialat, Bela Tarr, Lav Diaz, Pedro Almodovar, Sean Penn, Steve Buscemi, Harmony Korine, Vince Gallo, Gary Oldman, Cassavetes’ independent spirit struggles and stumbles onward into our present.      

 

Pop-Up Cinema Club No. 5 is proud to screen a deeply personal tribute to a true maverick and inspiration to filmmakers, artists, and to all those who believe in the transformative powers of cinema.