Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...have Faces, which is a film by John Cassavetes about upper-middle class America. Again, the idea is to make something that we would never see--or, in this case, never notice too well--real for us. Again, Cassavetes uses this phony cinema verite. But it is cinema verite without the verite, only the trappings of a spontaneous film: the pictures are grainy, the sound is very poor, the actors talk over each other's lines, the camera is made to seem like a spy or an intruder...
...effect of all this, even more clearly than in the Watkins film, is distance. We do not get close to the characters at all this way for two reasons. First, Cassavetes is unwilling to admit that he is making a film, unwilling to admit the limitations of two hours of two dimensions on canvas. The reality that has to be created within those limitations is its own reality, the reality of the film, not the reality of people who just happen to walk in front of a camera. For what Cassavetes was trying to do, the most effective thing would...
...MORAL of this film is "Tut, tut, middle class." Yes, here we have marvelous adulterers right before our very eyes. Middle class boozers who cheat on their wives. Fat old men who tell dirty jokes, bad dirty jokes. Cassavetes is working with a theme that has been sucked dry by better men than he. But Cassavetes is desperate. This is about Faces after all, so he keeps flashing close-ups of faces on the screen, quickly, back and forth. Sure, it is shocking. The same as seeing an oversize knee jerking out at you. Cassavetes has discovered something about film...
Whether this film is real to you or not depends on who you are. This review is only to show why this film was not real to me, why I was offended by it, cheated...
People were giggling during certain scenes in Casablanca that seemed to be a bit too real for them to take. I did not hear them giggling at Faces, and, perversely, I conclude that it is because the film was not real enough to move them to embarrassment...