In John Cassavetes's A Woman Under the Influence (1974), certain very simple acts are initially incomprehensible. The man (Garson Cross) whom Mabel (Gena Rowlands) picks up at the bar, caressing his neck as soon as she notices him, only then asking his name, laughing—does she know him or not? Because of his undecidability (close friend? A regular visitor? Friendly because still unknown? A pure possibility? Friendly because he is just another man?), the next day, Mabel can recognize in this passerby the too-intimate figure of her husband Nick (Peter Falk). The film thus places Cross's silhouette on its edges as the visible emblem of what it interrogates: What can I know of a body? Is there something to know about it? Is recognizing it not already to lack it? A Woman Under the Influence latches on to what might best mobilize filmmaking's figurative powers: the plasticity of creatures.

Inversely, certain phenomena that are very difficult, delicate or among the oldest in the history of representations are given a resolutely clear treatment, not playing with indefinite values, but establishing definite categories: madness, brotherhood, “performance.”

Consequently, a few cinema-specific descriptive procedures are very rigorously employed in an economy of the unexpected. John Cassavetes points out one of them which connects his film's constructive work with the tradition of modern research on the structuration of an oeuvre. For instance, the force that a temporal syntax attributes to weak temporalities or the appropriate discretion for treating devastating events: “When you see this woman alone on the phone for two minutes, you have to feel that she could go crazy. In life, an orgasm or boredom can make us go crazy. But how do you show on screen that a woman can go crazy because she's left alone for thirty seconds?