SHADOWS

FACES

A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE

OPENING NIGHT

CRITERION DVD

THE BEST APPRECIATION of John Cassavetes' films was scholar Ray Carney's description, "We [usually] watch how the frame is composed, how a character is lighted, how the camera moves or doesn't move, etc. Cassavetes' work cultivates different ways of seeing and hearing. We are not looking at the lighting or framing, but attending to butterfly flutters of feeling in a character's face; we are not listening to the sound design, but vibrating to birdsong vocal tremulations in a character's voice."

Carney's devotion is borne out by this DVD collection (unaccountably without Carney's commentary) of Cassavetes' best-known films. The case for taking Cassavetes' films seriously was made best by Carney's defense of the actor-turned-director's intransigence. No amount of explanation can make Cassavetes a great visual artist, but the sensitivity to behavior that Carney noted surely vivifies each film in this box set.

It was Cassavetes who made a virtue of improvisation in film, taking the next step after the Method's 50s triumph by bringing a realistic delving into emotion to the big screen representation of common, "undramatized" life. His first film, the 1960 Shadows shares history with Alfred Leslie and Robert Franks' Pull My Daisy simply by the force of Cassavetes' ambition that actors stay true to the world they came from. This documentary quality slipped out of the films as Cassavetes became more ambitious. He attempted to hide his proficiency by staying rough, but the professionalism of his actors tell a different story: Long moments of improvisation slowly, but surely, give way to revelation.

The middle-class exposé Faces and the theatrical exposé Opening Night are full of real-time affectations but they are still impressive for defying what would normally be called entertainment, insisting that viewers re-focus on real life. No doubt much of Mike Leigh's new British realism starts here. In all, this box set is a lesson in the tenacity it takes to re-make cinema. That is, to make your own cinema.

In retrospect, it is exactly those "butterfly flutters of feeling" and "birdsong vocal tremulations" that keep one attentive to that one-woman three-ring domestic circus A Woman Under the Influence. It is Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands dreaming the potential for film honesty that ultimately commands respect.

These films stand as examples to the current era of independent filmmaking that so often betrayed Cassavetes' vision by drifting off into cliché, petulance and fake rawness. Cassavetes was the first director to literalize the dictate: Keep It Real.