English term or phrase: distributed nature/ sets of relationships | There was more to Shadows than its roughness. One of the most innovative aspects of the film is the “distributed” nature of the narrative. The various characters live different lives and act out independent destinies, generally presented in separate scenes and sets of relationships. This is true in both versions of Shadows, though it was even more obvious in the earlier print, where Hugh’s, Ben’s, and Lelia’s stories were kept so separate for the first 45 minutes that most viewers were unaware that they were siblings, which was in fact one of the things that confused the audience at the Paris Theater screenings when the film finally revealed that they were a sister and two brothers. But the centrifugal nature of Cassavetes’ presentation goes even further than creating separate narrative lines. Not only does Cassavetes jump from character to character and from one storyline to another from scene to scene, but even within a single scene, he creates a universe that allows for genuinely different points of view and a range of different emotional relationships to experience. Shadows is built out of scenes where one character may be laughing or smirking, while another may be crying, pleading, or complaining, while a third may be doing or feeling something entirely different or not even paying attention to the other two. Watch the sequence near the end of both versions where Lelia self-defensively keeps Davey Jones waiting, while he fumes and complains, while Hugh and Tony mug and laugh about it, followed by the moment when Tony shows up to apologize to Lelia, and Ben can hardly keep a straight face at how ridiculous he thinks the apology is; or, earlier in the film, the scene where Rupert, Hugh, and their girlfriends stay up and talk all night (even longer and more complex in the first version of the film than the second) and each of them is allowed to express a different view of what happened a few hours earlier at the party; or, still earlier, the scene (only present in the first version) when David comes up to Ben on the street to express concern about the fact that Lelia has run off with Tony and pleadingly tells him how much he loves Lelia, while Ben mocks and laughs at what David is saying, even as Tom and Dennis on their part are too busy trying to pick up girls in the background to pay attention to either of them. Characters are allowed to have independent emotional registers and genuinely different relationships with experience. Scene after scene in Shadows honors the simultaneous presence not only of different but downright opposed emotional and imaginative spaces. When Ben, Tom, and Dennis cruise the streets, go to the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden, drop into bars trying to pick up girls, or clown around doing voices on the telephone (as I noted, there are even more of these kinds of events in the first version of the film than in the revised print, and some of the preceding scenes are even longer in the earlier version), each of the boys figures not only a different but a clashing emotional, social, and imaginative position. If we don’t see this from Shadows, we only have to wait a few years in Cassavetes’ career: Faces stands as one of the greatest illustrations of it in all of cinema. It’s a kaleidoscope of different points of view, reactions, and feelings about the same things, at the same moments, in the same scenes. |
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