Cassavetes' FACES

Cassavetes’ Faces (1968) is a raw blow. You watch it, and you see that this is the meaning of indie cinema. Not Miramax nowadays. Not any of the schlock being put out by smaller distribution outlets owned by the Studio Big Five. Cassavetes did it on a dime. His production team was as tight as possible, with no unnecessary baggage. The film has the grit and honesty you find lacking in a lot of American so-called independent works these days. This is a film that’s dealing with people who hurt, and how they deal with their hurt—often impulsively, with sex, booze and emotionally abusing those they love. It is a film where people have trouble saying things. And it demands to be imperfect.

I was impressed by the film’s ruggedness. You don’t care when, in the beginning, during a drunken, seemingly improvised scene between Gena Rowlands and John Marley and a heavily inebriated friend—you don’t care that the dialogue almost seems made up, that the sound is awful, and the location of the recorder keeps changing, that the location of the lights keep changing (important with film). Continuity goes to the crapper. The editing is choppy. Like Dogme filmmakers would explore nearly thirty years later, Cassavetes cuts for the open wound. And laughter. This is, in many ways, a film about the laughing face.


Because a laughing face can conceal it’s pain. Laughter can affirm and laughter can degrade. Laughter, in most cases, with this film, is a mode of forgetting. Cassavetes shoots his characters laughing at parties while they are cheating on their wives, laughing when they are being hurt, laughing when they are almost dead from alcohol poisoning, laughing when they are sick and exhausted and thrown aside by others. It seems like a perfect approach, what any true filmmaker would do. You approach the idea through something as broad as faces laughing, and wrap the brutally simplistic plot around that: man unhappy with his wife goes off to party with his hooker one night, and the wife engages in similar debauchery.

“The hardest thing for a film-maker, or a person like me…is to find people…who really want to do something…They’ve got to work on a project that’s theirs.” Cassavetes once said. His method of production was non-hierarchical, and his stories depended not so much on a narrative with characters that could clearly articulate their emotions, but on the authenticity and complexity of individual emotional expression. Faces rolls with the punches. It gives us people with problems, and it doesn’t strive for any sort of resolution. His interests in human failure, authenticity, and the complexity of love and relationships would in many ways agressively confront the neatly-packaged, well-produced story lines and affairs that still occur in Hollywood films.