The Films of John Cassavetes

The first book to tell in detail the story of a maverick filmmaker who worked outside the studio system. Providing extended critical discussion on six of his most important films (Shadows, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams), Ray Carney argues that Cassavetes' work is a distinctly life-affirming form of modernist expression that is at odds with the world-denying modernism of many of the most important art works produced in this century. Cassavetes is revealed to be a profoundly thoughtful and self-aware filmmaker and a deeply philosophical thinker, whose work takes its place in the American tradition along with the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. The six films treated here emerge as expressive interpretations of the bewildering challenges in contemporary American cultural experience.

• Cassavetes is a major counterculture figure, very big in Europe
• Carney is well known as an authority on Cassavetes, attracting large audiences for speaking engagements and publishing in French and English on Cassavetes and other American filmmakers
• first critical study based on conversations with Cassavetes' friends and co-workers (more than 100 hours of interviews)