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The idea of
a play built right on stage, encountering production
and performance obstacles, demands the discovery of
active language, both active and anarchic, where the
usual limits of feelings and words are
transcended. Theatre and
cinema: what type of passage can be found from one to the
other? And, moreover, what do we make of a cinematic
practice where theatre and cinema are placed side by
side? At stake in this coming together in John
Cassavetes' films is an investigation into the limits and
possibilities of a particular form of staging in which,
as Thierry Jousse notes above, the spoken word, script
and actions are subjected to a constant process of
destabilisation and rewriting. This
conception of staging carries with it a history. In
"Theatre and the plague" published in 1934, Antonin
Artaud identifies in theatre the possibility of a
"strange sun, an unusually bright light by which the
difficult, even the impossible, suddenly appears to be
our natural medium". [3]
The brilliance of this strange sun "resembles the
plague's freedom where, step by step, stage by stage, the
victim's character swells out, where the survivors
gradually become imposing, superhuman beings".
(19) The plague's
freedom, of course, comes at a cost for both human life
and a certain type of theatrical representation in which
performance and the mechanics of staging are in the
service of a re-presentation of a previous text. This is
a theatre bound to the authority of the script, a theatre
where action and gesture are subordinated to the
psychological requirements of character. Artaud
affirms: In opposition
to this tendency, Artaud prioritises the idea of the
stage as "a tangible, physical place that needs to be
filled and it ought to be allowed to speak its own
concrete language". (25) This concrete language is
"everything that can be shown and materially expressed on
stage, intended first of all to appeal to the senses,
instead of being addressed primarily to the mind, like
spoken language". (26) Words can play a part, Artaud
acknowledges, but only if they are granted the power to
"create their own music according to the way they are
pronounced, distinct from their actual meaning and even
running counter to that meaning - to create an
undercurrent of impressions, connections and affinities
beneath language". (26) The
significance of Artaud's admonitions on staging extends
beyond a specific theatrical context to raise important
questions regarding representation more generally.
Staging, in this account, does not simply abandon
representation. Rather, the unusually bright light
staging shines on words, actions and gestures puts into
question representation as purely a mimetic process. Step
by step, phase by phase, something is brought to light
that has no prior reality other than that of the stage.
This awkward something is not quite a character nor an
element of story but more a kind of pressure or energy
that works against or interrupts character or meaning -
"like sudden silences, fermata, heart stops, adrenalin
calls, incendiary images surging into our abruptly woken
minds". (17) For Artaud,
then, staging is a theatrical operation involving the
coordination of corporeal and scenic elements, as well as
a form of disturbance inherent within this very process.
Hence those who partake in such a process are not at its
centre, controlling or interpreting the performance, but
find themselves subjected to an energy and power that
carries them away. During the
course of his career, Cassavetes scrutinised the relation
between theatre and cinema from many different vantage
points. Beginning with Shadows (US 1959), his
career is marked by a dual pathway whereby the theatre,
defined and created on the run, served as a crucial
laboratory for an experiment continued within the cinema.
The idea and basic premise for Shadows emerged out
of a series of theatrical workshops Cassavetes
established with Burt Lane. Although it was never
performed, A woman under the influence (US 1974)
was originally written as a series of plays designed to
be staged over successive nights. In 1981 Cassavetes
opened the Center Theater in Los Angeles with three
one-act plays in repertory under the banner of "Three
plays of love and hate". This production was intended as
a way of presenting and revising the plays prior to
making movies of all three. Of these, The third day
comes and Love streams were collaborations
with the playwright Ted Allan; and the third,
Knives, was written by Cassavetes
himself. Late in his
career, as Cassavetes' health began to deteriorate and
the chances of finding financial backing for his films
became ever more remote, he turned increasingly to the
theatre as a way of securing some sort of production for
his work. [4]
One of Cassavetes' last productions was a three-act play,
A woman of mystery, starring Gena Rowlands and
Carol Kane. According to Jonathan Rosenbaum, who offers
one of the few available accounts of this production,
Cassavetes was also hoping to turn this play into a film
shortly before his death. [5]
Except for some tantalising remarks in Rosenbaum's
description of A woman of mystery, not enough is
known of the precise nature of these productions and the
particular type of stagecraft employed by Cassavetes. Do
any of the play scripts survive? Is there any
audio-visual documentation of rehearsals or performances?
And what of their critical and commercial reception?
These empirical, historical questions concerning
Cassavetes' theatrical productions need to be answered in
order to more accurately assess the nature of his body of
work and its legacy across different media. Even with the
bare outlines provided by what is already known, however,
it is still possible to piece together a history of
mutual relations out of which emerges an understanding of
cinematic writing defined in and through a relationship
to the stage - the stage as both a physical place and as
the catalyst for a scenario carried through into the
cinema. In terms of the films themselves, this
consciousness of the stage as a generator for the fiction
is reflected in the way Cassavetes builds into his
scripts situations in which the various life crises of
his characters are structured around, and framed by,
questions of performance and theatricality. In a
comparison between Cassavetes and Orson Welles (for whom
theatre-and-cinema also forms a constant refrain),
Rosenbaum observes: In
Husbands (US 1970), each person that Harry, Gus
and Archie engage with on their extended drinking spree
provides them with a new opportunity to rework their
various routines and performances. Time is infused with
emotions rising from alcohol; it is made subject to
unforeseen consequences and outcomes. In A woman under
the influence the situation of the actor performing
to and (in a sense) at the mercy of an audience is played
out in much more harrowing terms. The attempts of Mabel
(Gena Rowlands) to orchestrate a party for her children
and those of her neighbor Mr Jensen (Mario Gallo),
complete with costumes and Swan Lake imitations, end up
going horribly wrong when Nick (Peter Falk) arrives home
with his mother (Katherine Cassavetes) to find the house
in a mess and his young daughter, Maria (Christina
Grisanti), running around naked. In the aftermath of
Nick's violent response, Mabel's breakdown is played out
in front of Nick, her mother-in-law and the
uncomprehending Dr Zepp (Eddie Shaw), who observe and
appear to precipitate Mabel's collapse. While
Cassavetes minimises the number of cuts or camera
movements in this extended scene, preferring to allow the
actor's movements to dominate, the camera is never
completely stationary. It is always adjusting position in
order to accommodate the actors. This mise en
scène is a key part of the way theatrical
space is made both visible and responsive to the work of
performance. The theatrical
scene for Cassavetes is not a hierarchical or script
bound entity but an affective space open to a number of
influences and crossings. "[T]ime is necessary
here," writes Gilles Deleuze, "a certain time is
necessary which constitutes an integral part of the
film". [7]
Time allows the actor and camera to explore and develop a
set of gestures and viewpoints. "I get the idea that
there's some kind of conspiracy going on here", Mabel
tells Dr Zepp and Nick. In the '70s critic
Jean-André Fieschi used conspiracy as a metaphor
for mise en scène: the idea of something
coming together almost without notice, gradually.
[8]
When Nick violently claps his hands together under
Mabel's nose in an effort to bring her back to earth it
is as if we too are shocked, as brutally as if someone
had called 'cut'. Nick's sudden gesture both arises from
the emotional arc of the scene and shifts it
course. This sudden
shifting can also be seen during the spaghetti breakfast
when one of Nick's work mates suddenly finds his voice
and begins to serenade Myrtle. Both moments remind us of
the dynamic potential that defines the nature of the
scene in Cassavetes' work: a capacity for a sudden and
sometimes violent interruption to work against the very
foundations of a scene, as well as our ability to define
its general direction. "Theatre is
probably less considered, whether as a positive or as a
negative influence on the cinema, by film historians
today than at any other time", [9]
suggest Lea Jacobs and Ben Brewster in their study of the
influence of stage pictorialism on early feature
filmmaking. Taking my cue from the type of theatricality
that marks Cassavetes' mise en scène, I
want to suggest another way of considering the
relationship between cinema and theatre: not as a series
of historical and formal influences but an idea of
representation at its limit, pushed along and placed in
check by the physical processes and mysterious energies
that are central to the act of staging. It is not a
question of one form working upon or interrogating the
other, rather, a process in which cinema and theatre are
mutually implicated and displaced. Near the
halfway point of Cassavetes' career, two films produced
back to back bring this dual relation always present in
the films into direct relief. At the end of The
killing of a Chinese bookie (US 1978), Cosmo Vitelli
(Ben Gazzara) stands outside the club whose
proprietorship he has tenaciously defended. As part of
his efforts to retain control of the club, Cosmo manages
to perform a seemingly impossible hit and also to turn
the table on the mobsters who tried to double-cross him.
Cosmo's triumph is signaled in his penultimate scene
when, for the first time in the film, he abandons his
position in the wings as the unseen announcer and maestro
and walks on stage to quell his audience's hostility and
impatience at the show's delay. Cosmo is last seen
standing outside the club gazing at the blood which seeps
through his coat pocket - seemingly more annoyed than
actually concerned about the mortal threat the bullet
wound poses to his life. "You think
you're gonna live with the bullet in you": these words
spoken by Betty (Virginia Carrington) resonate within the
film's final moments. The
wound in Cosmo's side is a low priority bit of business
that must wait for more important matters such as the
show. Given Cosmo's apparent indifference, it seems
appropriate that Cassavetes' camera does not dwell on his
discomfort and instead returns one final time to the
stage of the Crazy Horse West and Mr Sophistication
(Meade Roberts), who is struggling through a rendition of
"I Can't Give You Anything But Love". In his painted on
suit and tie, pancake makeup and deadpan expression Mr
Sophistication is both master of ceremonies and fall guy
to the Delovelies who taunt and disrupt his act much in
the same way that the gangsters had taunted Cosmo when
they first visited his club in pursuit of the
debt. The on stage
entertainments over which Mr Sophistication just barely
presides are a strange combination of ribald strip tease
and lowbrow cabaret. Mr Sophistication's slow, half
spoken, half sung numbers cover the stage with a hypnotic
sense of world-weary exhaustion. There is something truly
grotesque in this odd combination of forms and styles
that works against any harmony or unity of approach; a
mélange of theatrical forms high and low. The only
pattern guiding the numbers performed by this bizarre
theatrical troupe is comprised of interruptions, false
starts and errors. None of the numbers are allowed to
flow to the end; they are cut off half way through by the
film which switches its attention elsewhere. The applause
that greets Mr Sophistication, as well as the lyrics of
his theme song, are echoed during the first few minutes
of Opening night (US 1978): "they want to be
loved. They have to be loved. The whole world . . .
Everybody wants to be loved". These words are spoken by
Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands), Broadway theatre star. When the
film begins, Myrtle is getting ready to go on stage. She
walks towards her entry point accompanied by her dresser
and the props boy, who provides her with one last drink
before she goes on. As she moves towards her entrance,
Cassavetes cuts to a shot from the point of view of the
audience watching the play. On the stage, Virginia -
Myrtle's character - has just arrived home, unaware that
Marty is sitting on the stairs waiting for her. The set
design is of an open plan living room and entrance area.
At the back of the room a set of stairs lead to an upper
level door through which the members of the cast exit and
enter. What grabs our attention, however, is a banner
size photograph of an old Greek woman dressed in the dark
garb and head dress common to village widows. The
photograph covers the entire height of a double wall.
Just to the other side of the stairs is another
photograph, not as large, of what looks to be the same
woman's face. And to the left of this photograph is yet
another large photo - which we only just glimpse - of a
small girl naked from the waist up. Their sheer size
dwarfs the actors, thus immediately establishing a
spatial disproportion. This
disproportion between the actors and the images coincides
with an overlapping and multiplication of temporal
destinies. "I can stand here. I can look at this woman,
this old lady, and I can count every wrinkle on her face.
And for every wrinkle there is a pain and for every pain
there is a year and for every year there is a person,
there's a death, there's a history, there's a kindness.
And you look at this kid over here, she's not kind".
Marty's words draw attention to the way that the stage in
Opening night is populated not just by Virginia
and Marty but other figures and, importantly, other ages
that loom large: middle age, old age, youth. The play being
performed by Myrtle and Maurice, we will discover, is on
one level about aging, most particularly as it effects
Myrtle and the relationships in her life. Questions of
aging, the passage of time and its corrosive effects
inform all of Cassavetes' films. Like a coat too large or
too heavy, time weighs down the actions and gestures of
the characters in Faces (US 1968) and
Husbands, who are burdened by what Jan Dawson
aptly described as a sense of "emotional fatigue".
[10]
Routine, habit, going through the motions, drinking too
much in an effort to stay alert: this is exactly what
Myrtle seems to be doing at the start of Opening
night. Hanging over this scenario is the threat of
burn out, voiced by Myrtle towards the end of the title
sequence: "when I was seventeen I could do anything. It
was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface . .
. I'm finding it harder and harder to stay in
touch". Opening
night deals with the way Myrtle is shocked out of
dissociation and lethargy. The crisis Myrtle experiences
is initiated by the death of a young fan, Nancy (Laura
Johnson), knocked down by a car just outside the theatre.
But, as horrific as this incident is, it is merely a
prelude to a crisis that attains its full dimensions in
and through a relationship to the stage.
The stage in
Opening night is not a comfortable place that
allows one to 'stay in touch'. It is, as Jousse
suggests: The first
version of The killing of a Chinese bookie was
released in 1976. It was greeted with mixed reviews and
poor box-office returns. Cassavetes then went on to
direct Opening night. After completing that
film, however, Cassavetes went back and
extensively re-edited The killing of a Chinese
bookie, shortening its length but also adding
segments not in the first version. "I'd like to make that
film about four or five more times", Cassavetes tells an
interviewer at the time, "because it had interesting
characters, interesting people". [11]This
inability to be done with the characters in The
killing of a Chinese bookie was a trait that marked a
number of Cassavetes' productions. The result is
a sometimes explicit, sometimes subterranean
crossing-over of dramatic scenarios, characters and even
musical elements from one film to the next. The tendency
is clearest in the carrying-over of the central
relationship - and performers (Rowlands and Seymour
Cassel) - from Minnie and Moskowitz (US 1971) into
Love streams (US 1984), in a sense the chronicle
of a couple from first meeting to divorce.
[12]
More mysterious are instances such as the brief
appearance of Falk, dressed in the same style tuxedo that
he wore in Husbands, in the theatre foyer at the
end of Opening night. The obsessive, memory-laden
nature of Cassavetes' films and mise en
scène contradicts widespread assumptions
concerning their supposed lack of structure. At stake here
is cinema's capacity to register a sense of lived time.
Walter Benjamin wrote of Proust: "his true interest is in
the passage of time in its most real - that is,
space-bound - form, and this passage nowhere holds sway
more openly than in remembrance within and aging
without". [13]
We can identify something similar in Cassavetes' films.
By going back over and revisiting characters and
relationships, Cassavetes creates a sense of time made
visible through an act of recognition in which aging and
remembrance operate simultaneously. "In the theatre",
writes Stanislavsky, "a living being alarms us, consoles
us, makes us happy or unhappy, while everyone and
everything in the cinematograph is as if alive".
[14]
Cassavetes' films complicate this distinction through the
creation of a cinematic duration that passes from one
film to the next, from one performance to the next, a
time in which character and actor seem to age
simultaneously. If theatre and
cinema are always present in Cassavetes' films, caught in
a process of reciprocal exchange, why, we might ask, does
he feel the need to literalise this scenario in The
killing of a Chinese bookie and Opening night?
These two films reveal something rarely associated with
Cassavetes: an attempt to theorise the impulses and
drives at work in his films. This theorisation, however,
does not take place somewhere apart from the films; it
emerges in tandem with the work of performance. By
turning towards the world of theatre, Cassavetes is not
taking a step away from cinema but looking at it from a
certain vantage point, taking in a particular truth of
the work. In this sense,
the different theatrical environments explored in The
killing of a Chinese bookie and Opening night
also link up with a number of other important films and
discussions which utilise the theatre and the idea of the
theatrical scene as an oblique mirror on the cinema. Of
contemporary filmmakers, it is probably Jacques Rivette
who has made greatest use of the kinship between theatre
and cinema. In films such as Paris nous appartient
(France 1960), L' amour fou (France 1968) and
Out one/spectre (France 1973), Rivette continually
turns to the theatre as a way of reflecting upon and
redefining the nature of cinematic practice. Rivette
argues that by focusing on the theatre, the cinema is
able to examine its own operations yet also maintain as
part of this self-reflection a certain distance:
"[I]f it looks at the theatre, [the
cinema] is already contemplating something else: not
itself but its elder brother". [15]
He argues: A key to
Cassavetes' investments in staging theatre and cinema
side by side can be found in Rivette's comments regarding
his impetus for returning to the world of theatre in
L' amour fou. In an interview with Cahiers du
cinéma he notes: "I hadn't forgiven myself for
the way I had shown the theatre in Paris nous
appartient, which I find too picturesque, too much
seen from the outside, based on clichés". (10)
With L' amour fou it was a case of doing justice
to "the feeling that work in the theatre was different,
more secret, more mysterious, with deeper relationships
between people who are caught up in this work, a
relationship of accomplices". (10) In L' amour
fou this relationship of accomplices works across a
number of different levels. Perhaps most obviously it is
figured in terms of the complex interpersonal networks
connecting those working on the play and their past and
present relationships. In turn, this network of relations
serves to reshape our understanding of the play in
rehearsal. In L' amour fou the theatre is
understood as a place of conspiracy - both real and
imagined - where intersecting plots come together and
where a double parallel life is formed. The director's
wife, Clare, is convinced that her husband is unfaithful
and a conspiracy exists amongst the cast to drive her
mad. And slowly what evolves before our eyes is a drama
of possible relations between the drama on stage and the
one unfolding in the spaces surrounding the stage. The
apartment where Clare and Sebastian live becomes its own
stage where Clare's obsession and paranoia gather force
and the last rites of a relationship spinning out of
control yet desperately trying to find a new point of
connection are enacted. Obsession seems to be the
inevitable outcome in a situation where domestic life and
professional life, acting and being are from the start
intertwined. Like L'
amour fou, The killing of a Chinese bookie and
Opening night fall into that category of films in
which there is a constant metastasis of energy, emotion
and role from the stage to the world around it. In these
films the dilemma faced by the characters is not, as
Deleuze identifies in Renoir's films: "where, then does
theatre finish and life begin?" (86), but something more
practical or mundane: how to continue to work and survive
in an environment where performing and being are
synonymous? As Lesley Stern puts it, for Myrtle the
problem of "how to act" is "acutely professional and
therefore practical, but insofar as it is a matter of
identity, it is not separate from her personal or
'private' life". [16]
The questions of "will she make it?" or "will the play
take place?" work hand in hand with another set of
imperatives, more mysterious and harder to fathom, in
which at stake is the simultaneous multiplication and
dispersal of the stage. This is an
affirmation of cinema's capacity to open up and multiply
the boundaries of a theatrical scene that, from the
start, is understood as fundamentally unstable and open
to renegotiation. To borrow Jean Narboni's evocative
description of Straub and Huillet's Othon
[West Germany/Italy 1969], we might say that
Opening night "combines the construction of a
theatre stage and its cinematic transformation in
a single operation; it simultaneously effects a
theatrical setting and its subversion". [17] As in L'
amour fou, in Opening night we are lead along
by a series of echoes and possible connections from one
scenario to the next, from the drama on stage to the
drama that takes place in the world surrounding the
theatre. Myrtle's ex-lover Maurice (Cassavetes) plays her
lover on stage. There are also references to Myrtle's
past involvements with both the director and producer of
the play. From the snippets of The second woman
that we see in performance and rehearsal, it seems that
Myrtle's stage character Virginia is also caught between
various relationships and emotional dilemmas. As a result of
this echoing and doubling of roles, it is at times
impossible to tell when the actors are sticking to the
script or reflecting on their lives. The script that
guides the performances is less a stable index of the
events unfolding on stage than a complex network of
allusions and coincidences that, as is the case for
Myrtle, leaves one dizzy and out of sorts. Early on in
the rehearsals Maurice tells Myrtle, "I was very much in
love with you, Virginia"; and she replies, "when was
that? I really want to know". From the tone of her voice
and Maurice's bemused and evasive response, we assume
that the rehearsal has broken down and Myrtle is
reflecting upon her relationship with Maurice. It is only
later, when these remarks are repeated during an actual
performance, that we realise Myrtle's comments are in
fact part of the script. This continual rewriting of
expectations and responses ensures that the dilemmas
presented in the film are not just Myrtle's; they are
incorporated into the very process and structure of the
film. As Laurence Giavarini puts it: Although it is
assumed that Myrtle is suffering from a confusion of
reality and fiction, it could also be argued that she is
the least confused of all the characters. When Myrtle
attempts to explain to the playwright, Sarah, the
problems she is having with the role of Virginia, she
tells her: "once you're convincing in a part, the
audience accepts you as that". It is those characters in
Opening night who attempt to maintain a clear-cut
distinction between theatre and life that fall into
confusion. During a rehearsal, Myrtle collapses on stage
after being slapped by Maurice. While Myrtle lies prone
on the stage screaming and unable to continue the
rehearsal, David, the producer, calls from the audience,
"bravo!", interpreting Myrtle's display of anguish as a
clever performance. Although at first it seems that
David's response is inappropriate, it is impossible to
judge, because of the constant blurring of role and
character, to what extent Myrtle's collapse is genuine
(in terms of either her role in the film or the character
she is playing on stage) and to what extent it is a
performance directed at those watching the rehearsal. In
Opening night the stage provides a crystallisation
of fears and anxieties that inhabit everyday and
theatrical life. The sense that
events on- and off-stage have become irredeemably
intertwined is heightened by Cassavetes' approach to the
filming of the performances. Just after the film begins,
the camera positions itself within the audience watching
the play. We see the play from the perspective of the
audience, our view of the stage partially obscured by the
heads of the spectators sitting in front. At this point,
we are still able to separate the manic events and
preparations taking place back-stage from the smooth
unfolding of events on stage. As the film proceeds, and
the border separating the actors from the characters they
are performing starts to dissolve, Cassavetes' camera is
physically drawn into the apparent chaos unfolding on
stage. On a number of
occasions we are presented with close-ups of Myrtle's
face as she moves across the stage. The most notable of
these moments occurs in the scene involving Virginia's
visit to her ex-husband. Confused and unable to deal with
the situation she has placed herself in, Virginia appears
to panic. The camera leaves the perspective of the
audience watching the play and follows Virginia into the
bathroom where we are shown the actress raising her hands
to her eyes and struggling to maintain her composure. Our
immediate response is to assume that Myrtle can no longer
"perform" and that she is, in reality, close to collapse.
However, the proximity of Myrtle's situation to the
crisis of confidence that she must act out in her role
prevents us drawing definitive conclusions about the
situation. The disorientation brought about by this
overlapping of roles is heightened by the way in which
Myrtle's hotel room in New Haven resembles a cavernous
stage. The red bedspread and furnishings match the red
carpet and decor of the stage set upon which she performs
the role of Virginia. And, just as Virginia and Marty
conduct most of their conversations in The Second
Woman from either side of a bar in their living room,
an almost identical bar appears in Myrtle's room. Even
the staircase in the centre of the stage seems to echo
the one leading up to Myrtle's apartment. The movement
of Cassavetes' camera across the footlights during the
opening moments of Opening Night serves as the
founding gesture for a series of other movements,
passages and shifts that are played out. Myrtle and her
co-performers are continually framed entering and exiting
various spaces, moving from one audience to another, one
performance to the next. On a number of occasions,
Cassavetes matches a shot of Myrtle passing through a
door in one particular location and at one particular
point in time with a shot of her emerging in a completely
different location and at a different point in time. Near
the beginning of the film we see Myrtle return to her
dressing room. She takes a long drink from a bottle and
prepares to go back on stage. Cassavetes dovetails the
shot of Myrtle leaving the dressing room with one of her
emerging from the back entrance of the theatre and being
swamped by autograph hunters. Such deliberately
misleading match-cuts serve as the visual equivalent of
the growing disorientation that affects the performance
of the play. On other
occasions, Cassavetes uses the characters' movements
through a doorway to initiate a subtler - yet no less
effective - shift in perspective. Such a moment occurs
when Myrtle and the play's director, Manny (Gazzara),
whom we assume have just spent the night together, are
shown approaching the back entrance of the theatre. They
are surrounded by beseeching fans and reporters. As they
make their way through the crowd and enter the theatre,
the camera cuts to a shot just inside the theatre taking
in their confrontation with Manny's wife, Dorothy (Zohra
Lampert). While Myrtle quickly departs, Cassavetes'
camera remains on Manny and Dorothy. Nothing is said
between the couple, just a sense of shared resignation
and a barely audible sigh. In the space of a single edit,
Cassavetes shifts our perspective on Manny and Myrtle
from amidst the crush of adoring fans to the private
space of a highly charged personal drama unfolding
between husband, wife and former lover. These rapid
shifts of perspective are an essential part of what
Jousse refers to as Cassavetes' "contrapuntal
composition" (15). We see the production of The second
woman from a range of different and often competing
perspectives: that of the producer, the audience, the
stagehands, the personal dressers, the playwright, the
director, the director's wife and the resentful co-star.
As Jousse notes, the effect of this composition is to
engage the viewer in the tension of the performance, to,
in a sense, lift us out of the comfort of our seats and
force us to experience something of the confusions,
anxieties and competing perspectives which inform the
play's production. The tension
between competing viewpoints is often played out within a
single shot. Near the end, Myrtle storms out of the
theatre during a rehearsal and David and Sarah chase
after her. Just near the entrance to the theatre, Myrtle
pleads with them to take her crisis seriously. In this
scene our ability to focus solely on Myrtle's dilemma is
undermined by the silent presence of Dorothy standing
just behind and to the side of Myrtle. This coupling
suggests that the story of The second woman not
only bears upon Myrtle's predicament but also resonates
with Dorothy's situation. And a key part of the film's
mystery is the way Dorothy - quite literally a background
character in the story - negotiates her own relationship
to the drama surrounding Myrtle's performance, neither
subsumed to nor removed from the scene. Dorothy is, as
Jousse observes: The
confrontation outside the theatre illustrates how
Opening night accords a special place to those
ambiguous spaces backstage, in the wings and outside the
theatre - fluid, in-between spaces that are at once part
of and apart from the stage. In Cassavetes'
films, both cinema and theatre are figured in the
crossings and passages between actor and character,
off-stage and on stage. It is within these very spaces of
passage, we could say, that Cassavetes' cinema takes
place. "I dream funny
dreams . . . I'm not myself". In Opening night the
turmoil surrounding the rehearsals and the actual
performances seem to be, for Myrtle, part of the work of
making the role meaningful. "I'll do anything to make my
character more authentic", Myrtle states at one point, "I
always have". In Opening night this process is
both controlled by the actor - a key part of their
training and art in bringing characters to life --mdash;
yet also beyond their control. "It is often unclear
whether we are watching, in Myrtle's hysterical
reactions, a consummate drama queen going over the top,
or simply a woman cracking up" (Stern, 29). Opening
night highlights an understanding of performance and
acting as not simply a process of imitation but something
more akin to a process of possession by roles, feelings
and physical urges, some of which are clear and spelt
out, while others more vague and barely
acknowledged. In a
discussion of Maggie Cheung's performance in Irma
Vep (France 1996) - a performance in which she is
both playing herself and at the same time taking on the
role of an actress struggling to make sense of a role -
Olivier Assayas describes a process of theatrical
possession similar to that found in Opening
night: Assayas goes
on to note that "this relationship, basically, only takes
on its meaning because the possibility exists that it
might go too far; what legitimates it are precisely those
moments where it goes too far" (64). Both Irma Vep
and Opening night suggest that the end result of
this going too far is a type of possession that effects
both the actors and the films themselves. In both films
the narratives draw much of their fictional energy from
the everyday exigencies of constructing a performance.
Yet, at certain key moments, both films pass from this
everyday world into the realm of the supernatural, the
realm of ghosts and doubles. Such
supernatural figures indicate a fundamental uncertainty
between the actual and the imaginary. In Opening
night this is first intimated during the opening
credit sequence when the sound of audience applause and
laughter is an ominous roar of discontent akin to the
opening of a horror film. The imbuing of the cinematic
landscape in Opening night with a supernatural
element is made overt by the appearance of Nancy in
Myrtle's dressing room. Myrtle is shown in close-up
gazing at her reflection in a mirror. This is followed by
a series of extreme close-ups of Myrtle's face and hands.
It is only when the camera pulls back to a side-on shot
of Myrtle that we notice the blurred outline of a head in
the extreme foreground and realise that someone else is
in the room. There are no traditional rhetorical tropes
to indicate that Myrtle's encounter with the dead fan is
an elaborate hallucination. The particular space in which
Nancy appears has stayed the same. Yet, through the dead
fan's presence, it has also quite suddenly become
transformed - it has become a space given over to the
sway of imagination and extraordinary forces. At first it
seems as if Nancy has been conjured into being by Myrtle
as a device for the performance - an attempt to "stay in
touch" with a set of emotions that are fast receding and
a way of transforming the scenario of aging and passivity
built into the role of Virginia. What quickly becomes
apparent, however, is the danger of such conjurings,
registered in the dead fan's brutal actions and Myrtle's
equally violent, final response. As Myrtle is pummeled by
Nancy, the threat of madness that hovers over her
struggle with the role of Virginia is steered away from a
question of psychological crisis to one of physical
disintegration. Despite Myrtle's assurances that she has
created Nancy and can make her appear and disappear at
will, Opening night never resolves the issue of
Myrtle's relation to the dead fan or the place of this
apparition in relation to the rest of the
film. In an
interview conducted soon after the release of the film's
release, Cassavetes himself voiced an uncertainty
as to Nancy's place: Nancy is
neither simply a figment of Myrtle's imagination - her
presence is too carnal and the final exorcism too brutal
- nor a separate, paranormal presence seeking vengeance
for an act of neglect outside the theatre. She is, over
and above these other possibilities, a physical force or
energy of disruption that overwhelms not just Myrtle but
the film's own time and space. If a defining feature of
Cassavetes' films is the capacity to take on and be taken
over by states of extreme emotion and corporeal crisis,
then Nancy serves as a mark of this affective exorbitancy
or sudden fall under the influence taken to its
limit. Nancy is quite
literally a coup de théâtre.
According to Samuel Weber, this concept can be defined as
"a stroke or blow, something that more or less violently
interrupts an expectation or a conscious plan".
[21]
Such abrupt, violent turns of events interrupt and call
into question "unity of meaning, of action, of the
subject, and above all, of time, space and place".
(18) As a coup de théâtre, then,
Nancy cannot be said to simply belong to Myrtle - a
manifestation of her crisis, something she controls;
rather, she represents that point or moment of
disturbance when Myrtle and the film itself are taken
over by the work of performance and staging. In their
treatment of dreams and visions, Cassavetes' films recall
Artaud: The dreams and
visions in Opening night and Love streams
serve as a reminder of the proximity of Cassavetes' films
to a theatre which "reforges the links between what does
and does not exist, between the virtual nature of the
possible and the material nature of existence". (Artaud,
"Theatre and the plague", 17) This is a type of theatre
that "can only happen the moment the inconceivable really
begins, where poetry taking place on stage nourishes and
superheats created symbols". (17) Intriguingly,
Artaud came to believe for a time that this type of
theatre could be better executed in the cinema than on
the stage. In "Witchcraft and the Cinema" he proposes
that the cinema manifests "an unexpected and mysterious
side which we find in no other form of art: The
hallucinations and visions found in Opening night
and also Love streams have been replaced in The
killing of a Chinese bookie by a theatrical space
that from beginning to end verges on the hallucinatory.
This is perhaps the most abstract of Cassavetes' films.
As a number of writers have pointed out, the film is full
of harsh variations of lighting and colour. Both Carney
and Richard Combs comment on the way it deftly translates
the harsh tonal juxtapositions of classic '50s film noir
into the medium of colour film stock. [24]
During the course of the film, we continually move
between the glare of spotlights and the afternoon sun to
darkened corridors and corners that seem to both draw us
in and hide their contents. Most of the action takes
place at night or under the garish artificial lighting of
the club. In this nocturnal environment the faces and
expressions of the characters are isolated against
backgrounds that are often either out of focus or
shrouded in darkness. The killing
of a Chinese bookie seems to retrace one of cinema's
first lessons, about light and its capacity to both bring
forth an image or action yet also lose it in an uneven
flow and distribution of luminous force. How is it
possible to build and maintain a figure in the midst of
this uneven luminous wash? What are the attributes of
this figure that is at once both flesh and blood and shot
through with light? In Alexandre Astruc's account of
Murnau's films he describes a tension between composition
and annihilation in the very construction of the
image: At times,
Cassavetes' filming seems to eat away at the characters
and situations. When Cosmo is bundled into a car by
mobsters and given his instructions on how to perform the
hit, the ensuing scene is filmed in almost total
darkness. It is impossible to tell where all the voices
are coming from and who is speaking. Like Cosmo, we
remain suspended in a world whose contours and borders
are always at the point of receding into
darkness. This
perceptual transformation of the world is crucial to the
film's effect and its construction of a specifically
cinematic form of theatricality. In terms drawn from the
work of Jean-Louis Schefer, Deleuze describes the
cinema's capacity to replace the presence of bodies found
in theatre with a different type of presence: It is just
such a disturbance that one finds in The killing of a
Chinese bookie. In the blink of an eye, day turns
into night and night back into morning. "Jesus Christ,
it's night," exclaims Cosmo as he steps out of the movie
theatre at the end of fruitless trip to Chinatown to
locate the bookie. Cosmo's startled response captures the
sense of something happening too fast, of time getting
away. No sooner does Cosmo pay off the debt than he once
again plunges back into debt. Between these two events
there is no cataclysmic turning point or moment of fatal
error but rather a series of low-key incidents - often
just to the side of where we imagine the central action
to be occurring. Each has its own mystery and drama: a
solitary drink in a bar, the preparations for a night
out, the boredom and discomfort of Cosmo's female
entourage waiting for him to finish the game, and the
final humiliation of waiting to be called in by the
mobsters to render an account, trapped in a florescent
hell of white walls, nautical themes and deck
chairs. These events
follow on from each other in a consecutive pattern, yet
what has been lost or curtailed is the motivating
connection that could adequately explain how we have come
to be where we are, how we get from one point to the
next. The various events that push the narrative forward
lack a gravitational pull and tend to constantly deviate
our attention away from the central drama. ("Nothing
remains fixed, and everything becomes ominous", as
Rosenbaum said of Out one/spectre).
[26]
Deleuze identifies this breakdown in the line or fibre
that connects and prolongs events as a defining feature
of a certain sector of post WWII American cinema beyond
Hollywood. In Altman's A wedding (US 1978),
Nashville (US 1975) and Cassavetes' The killing
of a Chinese bookie: If one face of
time in Cassavetes' films is about repetition, habit,
fatigue and the elongation of actions to the point where
meaning is lost or overturned, time in The killing of
a Chinese bookie is more elusive, yet also more
abrupt. For Jean Epstein, cinema's ability to mark an
event or an emotion with a sense of constant temporal
dispersal constitutes one of its principal links to
modern life: "you look at your watch, the present
strictly speaking is already no longer there, and
strictly speaking it is there again, it will always be
there from one midnight to the next". [28]
There is a gnawing senses of distraction in The
killing of a Chinese bookie, of always being too soon
or too late. It is as if the turning point that could
reveal events and their significance is always just about
to happen or has already happened prior to our
arrival. This
disturbance of tempo is strikingly reflected in the
centrepiece of the film's rereading of the gangster
genre: Cosmo's performance of the hit on the Chinese
bookie. After receiving an extraordinarily complex set of
directions, Cosmo finds his journey to the bookie's house
suddenly interrupted by a blowout on the freeway. He uses
this unexpected delay to make a quick phone call back to
the club to check on the progress of the act. When
neither Vince nor Sonny are able to tell him which number
is being performed, Cosmo is forced to sing into the
receiver a few bars of Mr Sophistication's signature
tune, "I can't give you anything but love". The neon
light of the phone booth seems to operate as Cosmo's own
personal spotlight demanding that he come up with an
appropriate performance. During such
moments the execution of the hit seems to fade into the
background, pushed aside by a movement of performance
that, much like the routine acted out on the stage of the
Crazy Horse West, seems continually on the verge of
dissolution. The trials and interruptions that waylay
Cosmo indicate that the tempo of an event is not
something inherent to it but have to be performed and
staged step by step, subject to possible rearrangements.
In his book on the pre-cinematic motion studies of
Etienne-Jules Marey, François Dagognet provides an
apt description of the implications that arise once our
view of an action or gesture is subjected to a temporal
discontinuity: "the universe knows only surges and drops,
fragments that we reassemble and that we thereby
diminish. We ourselves fabricate a smoothed-out, rounded
spectacle". [29] When Cosmo
arrives at the bookie's house, the camera travels through
a series of exits, corridors and doorways following Cosmo
but also at times seeming to lose him in the maze.
Eventually the camera stumbles upon an old man contently
humming to himself and splashing around in a large
communal bath. For a time the film seems to forget about
Cosmo, intent instead to observe the playful behavior of
the old man. When the old man moves to a different bath
in an adjoining room, he glances a number of times in the
general direction of where we assume Cosmo is standing,
without registering his presence. When he finally
acknowledges Cosmo's presence, the old man blinks hard as
if trying to assure himself that what he is seeing is not
a ghost. The only verbal contact between the two occurs
just before the old man is shot, when he mumbles in a
barely audible tone, "I'm real bad. I'm so
sorry". After
completing the hit and making it back to the club, Cosmo
is taken by Flo (Timothy Carey) to a warehouse for
execution. In the ensuing scenes, Cosmo manages to
outplay each of the hit men sent to dispose of him. The
first, who seems to fall apart in front of Cosmo, is
dismissed as "an amateur" and told to "take a walk". The
second is caught unaware by Cosmo's ability to appear out
of nowhere, and the third blindly wanders through the
warehouse while Cosmo patiently waits in a dark corner
until he is able to escape. In Cosmo's final performance,
he manages to return to the club, soothe Mr
Sophistication's wounded ego and get the show back on the
road. Cosmo's triumph is signaled when he goes on stage
to address his audience and introduce the act. In a film
dominated by truncated framings, oblique angles and
disjointed representations of space, Cassavetes' framing
of Cosmo's on stage appearance in a classic medium
close-up shot is one of the few moments in which the
central character is located within a stable
representation of space. This moment suggests that,
despite everything, Cosmo has finally achieved that state
of grace he describes simply as "being comfortable". But
the light that shines on Cosmo's face as he addresses his
audience carries with it a sense of menace. The
illumination is too bright, almost erasing facial detail.
The intensity of this illumination suggests that it is
not just a matter of light but also the generation of
heat burning a hole within the image and placing the
figure it illuminates under an intense pressure. Like the
fires that Artaud identifies in his description of the
painting Lot and his daughters, there is a
violence carried by this illumination, "something
horribly forceful and disturbing . . . like active,
changing features in a set expression". (23) This intense
illumination burning away at the end of The killing of
a Chinese bookie serves as a reminder of the
unpredictable, often volatile and highly dynamic nature
of theatrical space in Cassavetes' films. (To
return to your place in the text, simply click on the
endnote number) [2]
Antonin Artaud, "Production and metaphysics", in
Collected works, vol. 4, trans. Victor Corti
(London: Calder and Boyers), 28. Further references to
this text appear as page numbers in
parentheses. [3]
Antonin Artaud, "Theatre and the plague" in Collected
works, vol. 4, 19. Further references to this text
appear as page numbers in parentheses. [4]
For a summary of Cassavetes' plays and unfinished film
projects, see Ray Carney, "Unfinished business", Film
comment, (May-June 1989): 48-49. [5]
Jonathan Rosenbaum, "John Cassavetes", Sight and
sound 60, no. 2, (Spring 1989): 102-103. For another
eyewitness account of the play, see Bill Krohn,
"Post-scriptum", Cahiers du cinéma 417
(March 1989): 30-32. Cassavetes' program note for the
play is reproduced both in Krohn and Rosenbaum,
Placing movies: the practice of film criticism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
156. [6]
Rosenbaum, "Love films: a Cassavetes retrospective", in
Placing movies, 161. [7]
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the time-image, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989), 154. [8]
Jean-André Fieschi, "Jacques Rivette" in
Cinema: a critical dictionary vol. 2, ed. Richard
Roud, (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 876. [9]
Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to
cinema: stage pictorialism and the early feature
film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
5. [10]
Jan Dawson, "Faces", Monthly film bulletin
(December 1968): 192. [11]
Ray Carney (ed), Cassavetes on Cassavetes (London:
Faber and Faber, 2001), 405. [12]
Carney relays the story concerning Cassavetes' insistence
that, for his role in Love streams, Cassel regrow
the walrus moustache that was such a memorable part of
his earlier characterisation of Seymour Moskowitz in
Minnie and Moskowitz. See Ray Carney, "Love
dreams: the work of John Cassavetes", Persistence of
vision, vol. 6 (Summer 1986): 46. [13]
Walter Benjamin, "The image of Proust" in
Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (Suffolk: Fontana,
1982), 213. [14]
Konstantin Stanislavsky, Cine-phono, 1914, no. 16,
23. Quoted in Yuri Tsivian, Early Russian cinema and
its cultural reception, trans. Alan Bodger (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 158. [15]
Jacques Rivette, "Time overflowing", in Rivette: texts
and interviews, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum, trans. Amy
Gateff and Tom Milne (London: BFI, 1977), 27. [16]
Lesley Stern, "Perhaps I want to be Gena Rowlands",
Real time, 4 (December-January 1994-95):
29. [17]
Jean Narboni, "Vicarious power", in Cahiers du
cinéma: 1969-1972: The politics of representation,
ed. Nick Browne (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1990) 156. [18]
Laurence Giavarini, "You can make it", Cahiers du
cinéma, nos. 455/6 (May 1992): 12. [19]
Olivier Assayas, "Apropos of Maggie", Metro
no.113/114 (1998): 64. [20]
Carney (ed), Cassavetes on Cassavetes,
410. [21]
Samuel Weber, "The greatest thing of all: the virtuality
of theatre", in 100 years of cruelty: essays on
Artaud, ed. Edward Scheer (Sydney: Power Publications
and Artspace, 2000), 17. [22]
Antonin Artaud, quoted in Jacques Derrida, 'The theatre
of cruelty and the closure of representation', in
Writing and difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978), 243. [23]
Antonin Artaud, "Witchcraft and the cinema", in The
shadow and its shadow: surrealist writings on cinema,
ed. Paul Hammond (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1991),
113-114. [24]
See Carney, American dreaming: the films of
John Cassavetes and the American experience
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 226;
and Richard Combs, "The killing of a Chinese
bookie", Sight and sound vol. 40 no. 1 (Winter
1976/77): 61. [25]
Alexandre Astruc, quoted in Lutz Bacher, The mobile
mise-en-scène: a critical analysis of the theory
and practice of long-take camera movement in the
narrative film, (New York: Arno Press, 1978),
217. [26]
Rosenbaum, Placing movies, 145. [27]Gilles
Deleuze, Cinema 1: the movement-image, trans. Hugh
Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986), 207. [28]
Jean Epstein, quoted in Leo Charney, "In a moment: film
and the philosophy of modernity", in Cinema and the
invention of modern life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa
R. Schwartz, (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995), 287. [29]
François Dagognet, Etienne-Jules Marey: a
passion for the trace, trans. Robert Galeta with
Jeanine Herman (New York: Zone Books, 1992) quoted in
Charney, "In a moment", 290.
9831 words
Abstract
[T]heatre
for Cassavetes restores that vital link between the
spoken word, the script and physical actions that are
forever rearranged in a surprising way, ready to come
apart at any moment . . . In short, a script is
necessary but not sacrosanct, since it is always being
rewritten by life itself.
Thierry Jousse [1]
Antonin Artaud [2]I Burning
down the house
I am
well aware that a language of gestures and postures,
dance and music is less able to define a character, to
narrate man's thoughts, to explain conscious states
clearly and exactly, than spoken language. But whoever
said theatre was made to define a character, to
resolve conflicts of a human emotional order, of a
present-day psychological nature such as those which
monopolise current theatre? ("Production and
metaphysics", 28)
II A dual
pathway
it
might even be said that 'acting' was the subject of
all of their films - not merely because of their
passionate interest in actors, but also because their
view of human nature and behavior had a lot to do with
performance and the notion that everyone is an actor.
[6]
III A pocket
full of blood
IV Staying in
touch
[a]
fluid space, subject to variations of mood, the
feeling of the moment, the unpredictability of the
present moment, when a moment of madness could at any
time cause the scene to shift and jeopardise the
performance and the very idea of performance itself.
(16)
V As if
alive
VI A
relationship of accomplices
if
you take a subject which deals with the theatre to any
extent at all, you're dealing with the truth of the
cinema . . . . It isn't by chance that so many of the
films we love are first of all about that subject, and
you realise afterwards that all the others - Bergman,
Renoir, the good Cukors, Garrel, Rouch, Cocteau,
Godard, Mizoguchi - are also about that. Because that
is the subject of truth and lies, and there is no
other in the cinema: it is necessarily a questioning
about truth, with means that are necessarily
untruthful. (27)
VII Will she
make it?
[t]here
are not two scripts in Opening night, a theatre
fiction and a film fiction, but a single script with
an assumed ambivalence, a deliberate, voluntary
ambivalence equally valid for on stage and off-stage
and which makes up the one visual space of the film.
[18]
VIII A
contrapuntal composition
[T]his
game of variation and combination of point of view is
part of what makes the energy level spin in all
directions, capturing the unexpected wherever it may
arise, depriving the audience of its conventional
position, seated in its chair, by involving it in the
risks of performance and, most importantly, toppling
this performance down from its pedestal.
(15-16)
a
witness who sees all, a guarantee that all has been
witnessed by an effectively virtual audience, so that
we do not leave the framework of a performance in a
truly theatrical sense of the word. (87)
IX "I have
this dead girl"
I
mean that if one films in the first person, one only
looks for one thing, first of all, which is to
reproduce real feelings, that is to say, ones that are
lived. And the actor puts himself in the position of
embodying them, being the intercessor, letting them go
through him as a medium would do. And in these
medium-like instants, the I of the actress - or actor
- is entirely taken over, absorbed by the spirit of
the fiction - which at that moment, is precisely no
longer there - it is no more than pure mediation.
[19]
X Coup de
théâtre
here's
a theatrical story, and suddenly this apparition
appears - and I started giggling. Everybody knows I
hate that spooky-dooky stuff, and they said, are you
going to leave that in? [20]
XI A strange
sun
to
consider the theater as a second-hand psychological or
moral function, and to believe that dreams themselves
have only a substitute function, is to diminish the
profound poetic bearing of dreams as well as of the
theater. [22]
even
the most arid and banal image is transformed when it
is projected on the screen. The smallest detail, the
most insignificant object assume a meaning and a life
which pertain to them alone, independently of the
value of the meaning of the images themselves, the
idea which they interpret and the symbol which they
constitute. (...) Essentially the cinema reveals a
whole occult life with which it puts us directly into
contact. [23]
the
shooting angle, the placement of the people within the
frame, the distribution of lights - all serve to
construct the lines of a dramatic scene whose
unbearable tension will end in annihilation . . . Each
image is an unstable equilibrium, better still the
destruction of a stable equilibrium brought about by
its own élan. [25]
it
spreads an 'experimental night' or a white space over
us; it works with 'dancing seeds' and a 'luminous
dust'; it affects the visible with a fundamental
disturbance, and the world with a suspension, which
contradicts all natural perception (Deleuze,
201).
ellipsis
ceases to be a mode of the tale (récit),
a way in which one goes from an action to a partially
disclosed situation: it belongs to the situation
itself, and reality is lacunary as much as dispersive.
Linkages, connections, or liaisons are deliberately
weak. Sometimes the event delays and is lost in idle
periods, sometimes it is there too quickly, but it
does not belong to the one to whom it happens (even
death . . .). [27]
XII A golden
life
Endnotes
[1]
Thierry Jousse, John Cassavetes (Paris: Editions
de l'Etoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1989), 17. Further
references to this text appear as page numbers in
parentheses.
