Shadows (film)
This article is about the 1959 film. For other meanings, see shadow (disambiguation).-
Shadows is a
1959 improvisational film about interracial relations during the
Beat Era. It stars
Ben Carruthers,
Lelia Goldoni,
Hugh Hurd, and
Anthony Ray. It was written and directed by
John Cassavetes; film scholars often consider the film the birth of
independent film in the U.S.
Cassavetes essentially shot the film twice, once in 1957 and again in 1959, removing, adding, and rearranging scenes. The second version is the version Cassavetes favored; he withdrew the first version from distribution and it was for decades thought destroyed. In 2004, after over a decade of searching, Cassavetes scholar
Ray Carney, a professor at
Boston University, announced that he had discovered the last remaining print of the original version of the film, which had somehow ended up in a box in a subway before being bought with a lot of other "lost and found" objects.
[1]Film critic
Leonard Maltin calls Cassavetes' second version of
Shadows "a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema". The movie was shot with a 16 mm handheld camera on the streets of New York. Much of the dialogue was improvised, and the crew were class members or volunteers. Some of the score is by jazz legend
Charles Mingus underlines the movie's
Beat Generation theme of alienation and raw emotion. The movie's plot focuses on an interracial relationship — still a
taboo subject in
Eisenhower-era America.
The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States
Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry.
*
Criterion Collection essay by Gary Giddins
