Shadows
Alternate title(s):
Foreign Title:
Date: January 01, 1959 to December 31, 1959
Dates Note: 1959
Country of Origin:
United States
Place of Origin: United States
Languages:
Color: B&W
Silent: No
Based On:
Additional Info:
Script improvised by the actors, from ideas by Cassavetes.
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Faces Distribution Corporation, with funding provided by The Ahmanson Foundation, The Film Foundation, and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
Curator Notes
Film Series/Exhibition Title:
Personality Is Plot: The Films of John CassavetesDescription:
Cassavetes’s first film stripped the American screen of a treasured possession—narrative closure—and left the ambivalence of real emotions. The film owes a debt to Italian neorealism, but with its poetry of immediacy, its riffs by jazz musician Charles Mingus, and its racial theme already evolved into an existentialism of marginality, Shadows was quintessentially American. Cassavetes centers his tale on three Black Manhattanites—Lelia (Lelia Goldoni) and her brothers, Ben (Ben Carruthers) and Hugh (Hugh Hurd). To say that each suffers an identity crisis, to use the lingo of the day, is to minimize the breadth of their truly remarkable performances.
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