I had a departure. A sudden sense of time being up. And I departed.
Sarah, in draft of screenplay for Love Streams [1]
This is a sweet film. If I die, this is a sweet last film.
John Cassavetes, watching the dailies for Love Streams [2]
At the end of John Cassavetes’s A Child Is Waiting (1963), set in a school for mentally challenged children, the children put on a Thanksgiving play, directed by their music teacher, Miss Hansen (Judy Garland). As George Kouvaros, in his recent book Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point, ponders whether we might find the point at which actor becomes performer in Cassavetes’s work, this scene offers another interesting case study.[3] Actual patients of the Pacific State Hospital played most of the children in the film, and, having performed as patients throughout the film, they now perform the act of performing. The scene is the most arresting one in the film because of the fantastic performances, as we are both amazed by their re-enactments of the story every American child is taught in school – that of the peaceful first Thanksgiving dinner that brought colonial settlers and Native Americans together – while their mistakes are genuinely amusing, each actor on stage helping the other to remember his lines. The director, in the wings, is less effective in feeding lines than the fellow actors on-stage, who turn these miscues into comic bits of business in themselves. We see the authorship over the play disrupted in one moment in particular, when the Indians decide to make their entrance prior to their assigned cue, causing frantic re-arrangements being made off-stage by Miss Hansen. Many critics have noted the presence of performer characters in Cassavetes’s films, as performance – be it on stage or in any social situation – is shown as instrumental in defining one’s identity. Thus it is appropriate that also in this final scene, the child who has been ‘waiting’, Reuben, discovers his voice on-stage while his father can finally appreciate his son’s place in the world.
The use of non-professional actors performing at an exponential level reflects the two strands of criticism one often encounters on the work of Cassavetes that seemingly could be incommensurate. On the one hand, his films have been described as ‘realistic’, while on the other, they may also be described as ‘theatrical’. A possible antecedent for this coalition of the real and the theatrical can perhaps be found not in Cassavetes’s history in the theater, but rather in his television work. As opposed to some of his regular collaborators such as Gena Rowlands or Ben Gazarra, who first rose to prominence on stage, Cassavetes began his career in the ‘golden age’ of American television, the live anthology drama format produced in New York City in the 1950s. While this format required predominant use of interior sets and employed many actors and writers from the New York theater world, this period of television was also celebrated for tackling real, contemporary issues, such as juvenile delinquency, for example, with a new sense of psychological depth and authenticity to its characters. The films Cassavetes later directed deploy a format like that used in live anthology drama of representing ‘real’ or actual ‘lived’ time – the use of the long take being one technique, while his narratives only span a few days at most.[4] According to Erik Barnouw, live television approached a temporality more recognizable as ‘real time’ as opposed to classical Hollywood continuity editing of ‘film time’ – this ‘real time’ being more accustomed to the format of the theater (Barnouw, p. 32).
Cassavetes did perform summer stock in Rhode Island during the early stages of his career, and at one point in 1955 was on the verge of a major stage debut role on Broadway in The Man with the Golden Arm, in the role made famous by Frank Sinatra in Otto Preminger’s film version (also 1955). However, when the property was sold to a different producer, Cassavetes was eventually replaced by Robert Loggia. And while the genesis of Shadows (1959) took place in an acting workshop led by Cassavetes and Burt Lane in a small studio in midtown New York, most of the students joined the class hoping to land jobs in television aided by the name recognition of Cassavetes (by this time, a major star in television). Conversely, for a filmmaker who has rarely been acclaimed as a film stylist and who often expressed disdain for the artifice of the cinema, in the theatrical productions he produced and directed late in his career, he brought the special effects of movie-making to the stage. Indeed, his most explicit examination of the theater in film, Opening Night (USA 1977), signaled a shift, albeit a subtle one perhaps, in his film style, using effects he had never previously used such as superimposition and voice-over. The deployment of the special effects of the cinema to the theater is most exemplary in his most ambitious theatrical effort – three plays staged at a theater he leased and refurbished, collected under the banner title of Three Plays of Love and Hate. One of the plays among the three was Love Streams, which he then adapted to a film, and which will occupy most of my remaining discussion.
One key characteristic that informed Cassavetes’s theatrical productions, and that evoked a film production, was large casts – again, in contradistinction to some of his most famous film works that used a small group of players in low-budget productions. One unrealized work was The Forty Year Old Man, written by Everett Chambers (producer of the television series Johnny Staccato, who also plays the talent agent in Too Late Blues[USA 1961]), offered by The Theater Guild, to be directed by Cassavetes and starring Peter Falk in the beginning of 1969. Producer Philip Langer announced that the play would use the very large amount of twenty-three performers, and was aiming for an Off-Broadway run.[5] In 1983, Cassavetes also directed Thornhill, based on the life of Eugene O’Neill and written by Meade Roberts (who plays the role of ‘Mr. Sophistication’ inThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie [USA 1976/78]). This play also had a large cast of fourteen – including (at various stages) Gazzara, Rowlands, and Carol Kane. It was financed at an unusually large amount of nine hundred thousand dollars, and, as producer Fran Weisler noted, ‘It is going to be hard to make money if we don’t do capacity business’ (Lawson, C2). Rehearsals were held for over a month and a half at Westbeth, the artists’ housing complex in Greenwich Village. This play was only performed three times at the Shakespeare in the Park festival in New York, and due to financial difficulties (partly a result of the large cast and partly due to extensive rehearsal and re-writing time Cassavetes demanded) the play did not make it to Broadway as originally envisioned. Instead, Cassavetes bought out the producers for fifty thousand dollars for the three performances/readings ‘so we could do our piece John’s way’, according to Carol Kane (Kane, ms).
At his home, Cassavetes frequently held readings of plays he had written or was in the process of writing – but which were never produced publicly – with attendees including Richard Dreyfuss, Rob Reiner, Carol Kane, Elaine May, and Peter Bogdanovich. After Three Plays of Love and Hate, which will be discussed in further detail below, Cassavetes also staged A Woman of Mystery starring his wife, Gena Rowlands, and East/West Game, starring his son Nick Cassavetes. East/West Game was set within the context of the movie industry, as a studio executive brings a playwright to Hollywood to work on an adaptation. As one reviewer noted, ‘his characters are outsiders to the industry, as is the playwright [Cassavetes] himself’. In 1987, for A Woman of Mystery(initially titled A Mysterious Woman), Cassavetes used the Court Theatre, a small theater that was rehearsing for a production directed by Richard Arrington until Cassavetes asked if he might postpone his play until later, because Cassavetes’s health was failing. The play also starred Kane, Charles Durning, and Woody Harrelson.
In 1981, Cassavetes refurbished a theater in Hollywood – formerly the California Center for the Performing Arts – with his own money, to be known as the Center Theater. The theater was renovated specifically for the staging of Three Plays of Love and Hate – the three plays were: Knives, Love Streams and The Third Day Comes, and were shown on alternating days. All were directed by Cassavetes, with Knives also being written by Cassavetes and the latter two written by Ted Allan. Knives starred Peter Falk and Shera Danese in a play with twenty-nine scenes and thirty-five actors. The Third Day Comes, which follows the history of a Canadian family from the 1930s through the present day, featured forty-one actors (playing forty-nine roles). Love Streams lasted three hours and featured fifteen different locations and thirty-six characters.
The reviews of the plays were generally poor. Indicative of Cassavetes bringing the power of the cinema to the stage, Sylvie Drake wrote that she ‘went to a theater and saw a screenplay’. Others suspected – correctly of course – that the play would lead to a Cassavetes film production. Perhaps a foreshadowing of the torrential rain at the end of the film Love Streams, Cassavetes actually had it rain on stage with extensive sound equipment to produce the sound of thunder. Not impressed, Drake continued: ‘That the actors managed to remain dry coming in from the storm tells you something about the curious priorities at work here’, as if to describe a spectacular big-budget action blockbuster (Drake, G1). Not all reviews were completely discouraging however, as David Galligan wrote, ‘John Cassavetes has directed it as I would imagine working in live television must’ve been with a continuous flow of action, over an abundance of scenes, played on any number of sets’. Thus again, the influence of television continues to impact Cassavetes, here in his stage work. And as the close-up was required to predominate in live television, Galligan suggested that
[Cassavetes uses] the audience as the camera’s eye while maintaining a total theatrical experience. What is even more thrilling is that Mr. Cassavetes, with all his directorial innovation, has allowed his audience in to feel (for the camera close-up, so to speak). His is a magnificent achievement that will be argued pro and con at theatrical gatherings for a long time to come (Galligan, p. 5).
Cassavetes, of course, did bring one of these three plays to the screen for what is often referred to as Cassavetes’s last work in surveys of his career, the last film he produced himself, Love Streams (USA 1984) (that is, excluding his work on the comedy Big Trouble [USA 1986], which he took over as director after production had begun). One can appreciate the cinematic dimensions of Cassavetes’ staging in comparing the scenes from the play Love Streams to the film, suggesting a cut instead of a lowered curtain would be more appropriate to present them. Also, in the table below that represents an approximate comparison of the scenes in the film and the play, note the variety of locations – similar to the film (in the play, Corsica serves the same function as Las Vegas in the film – a vacation get-away for Robert and his son):
Love Streams (film version, 1984) Love Streams (stage, 1981)
1. Robert’s House
2. Nightclub
3. Judge’s Chambers
4. Nightclub
5. Nightclub parking lot
6. Los Angeles street
7. Susan’s House Act. I
8. Judge’s Chambers 1. Judge’s Chambers
9. Psychiatrist’s Office
10. Paris Station 2. Paris Station
11. Victoria Station / Chicago (telephone) 3. Victoria Station
12. Dream Sequence (Sarah kills family)
13. Robert’s House 4. Robert’s Flat
5. Corsica Hotel Lobby/Bar
14. Las Vegas Hotel Room 6. Corsica Hotel Room
15. Las Vegas Hotel Lobby
16. Las Vegas Hotel Room 7. Robert’s Flat
17. Las Vegas Hotel Driveway 8. Corsica Flat
18. Hallway by Las Vegas Hotel Room 9. Corsica Hotel Room
19. Albie’s House 10. Albie’s House
20. Robert’s House 11. Robert’s Flat
21. Susan’s House 12. Susan’s House
22. Robert’s House/Chicago (telephone call) 13. Robert’s Flat
23. Bowling Alley 14. Bowling Alley
24. Susan’s House
25. Robert’s House/Chicago (telephone) 15. Robert’s Flat
Act II.
1. Robert’s House 1. Robert’s Flat
2. Pet Store (Farm) 2. Pet Store
3. Robert’s House 3. Robert’s Flat
4. Dream Sequence (Sarah’s jokes) 4. Susan’s House
5. Robert’s House 5. London Bar
6. Dream Sequence (Opera) 6. Nancy’s Flat
7. Robert’s House 7. Police Station
8. Outside Robert’s House 8. Robert’s House
9. Robert’s House 9. London Bar #2
10. Outside Robert’s House 10. Robert’s House
The adaptation for the film Love Streams was written by Cassavetes and Ted Allan, the Canadian playwright and novelist who wrote the original play, which had undergone various transformations before coming to Cassavetes. Cassavetes first met Allan when acting in The Webster Boy(also known as The Middle of Nowhere), a British film released in 1962, directed by Don Chaffey with a script co-written by Allan. Allan was associated with the social realist literary tradition among the Canadian left in the 1930s, writing regularly for the Toronto-based magazine, New Frontier. He was a member of the Communist Party of Canada and the International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, and one of his most celebrated works, the novel This Time a Better Earth, is set among the Loyalist volunteers in Spain.[6] Allan had, at age 17, become a newspaper reporter in Montreal, and two years later joined a unit of the International Brigade headed by Dr. Norman Bethune, who would be the subject of another major literary achievement of Allan’s career. Allan co-wrote with Sydney Gordon a fictional biography of Bethune – the Canadian doctor and progressive political activist who worked in Spain, Russia and China. The resulting The Scalpel, the Sword, begun during the 1930s and published in 1952, became a widely read text among the Canadian left. In the 1950s, Allan – sometimes credited by his full birth name ‘Ted Allan Herman’ – left Canada as advertising agencies became hesitant to continue using his teleplays for Canadian television and moved to London, and through the 1960s and 1970s, had some success writing for the stage in England (Billington, p. 33). One of these plays, I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons, featured a main character much like Allan, a Canadian man of letters living in expatriate in London; and this play would later be redeveloped over several different versions while remaining the original source material for Cassavetes’s film, Love Streams. Although Allan’s political sentiment became less of a concern in his later work, after leaving Canada, he indeed constantly referred to it, and such detached sentiment can be seen for example in My Sister’s Keeper, a revised version of I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons. Sarah (the same character as that to become played by Gena Rowlands) and Robert (equivalent to the later Cassavetes role) are discussing with amusement their late mother. Sarah says: ‘Her best line was when Dad got hit by a truck and hurt his leg and one of the neighbours asked what was wrong with Dad’; Robert continues: ‘My husband is sufferin’ from socialism of the leg. That’s a disease that’s always goin’ to get better…’; and they both finish the joke together, ‘…later!’ (Allan: 1969, pp. 61-62).
I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons premiered in London on 17 November 1969, directed by Sean Connery, at the New Oxford Theatre before moving to the Fortune Theatre in the West End theater district. Starring Robert Hardy as Robert Harmon (Rip Torn was interested in performing in the London show but scheduling did not permit it) and Diane Cilento (then married to Connery) as Sarah, the only set for the two-character play was Harmon’s flat in London. The show did not last long, closing in the beginning of January 1970 without much financial (or critical) success. Various versions of this play as titled I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons were revised over the next few years, submitted, for example, to New York theater producers.[7] The play was revised slightly and presented under the title My Sister’s Keeper at the Lennoxville Festival in 1974. My Sister’s Keeper was revised again, and for its American premiere in 1979, the setting had shifted to New York City. Program notes for this show mention that Allan was working on a screenplay of My Sister’s Keeper, and incorporated elements of that screenplay into this stage version, in the winter of 1979 at the Hudson Guild Theater (Allan: 1979).[8]
The blacklisted actor Howard da Silva expressed interest circa 1970 in producing and directing a film version of I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons (Allan: 1970), and Sean Connery also was interested in bringing the play to the screen, but it was Cassavetes and Sam Shaw (the film’s producer) who first purchased the option to I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons, with the new tentative title Love Streams already in usage, in August 1978. There are differences as well as similarities in the stories of the film Love Streams and its source material, although there is not one line of dialogue in either I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons or My Sister’s Keeper that is used in the film Love Streams. In the film, the stories of those close to Robert and Sarah are explored on screen – for Robert, his lover Susan and his child from a previous marriage; for Sarah, the failing relationship with her ex-husband and daughter – whereas in the original Allan plays, only Robert and Sarah appear on stage, confined to the setting of Robert’s apartment (alternatively London or New York – whereas of course Love Streams takes place in Los Angeles). In the original London stage versions, Sarah shows up unexpectedly at her brother Robert’s apartment in London. She has left her husband and is constantly in hysterics, often hinting at a possible incestuous encounter between the two as teenagers – often these hints made (over the telephone) with a flair of envious anger to Robert’s current love interest, Susan.
The incest theme is just barely suggested in Cassavetes’s film but is more explicit in the previous stage versions. In an early version of the screenplay, Harmon is arrested on charges of raping his sister, but this scene does not appear in the film (Allan and Cassavetes: 1981). In the film, when Sarah is first introduced, her relationship with Robert is not clear, leading his son Albie to ask, ‘Do you love her?’, ‘Not in the way you mean’, Robert (Cassavetes) scolds him. However, in Allan’s plays the possibility of incest having occurred between brother and sister is more explicit, though it can be discounted as the ravings of the often hysterical Sarah, obviously jealous of Robert’s affection for Susan. Sarah periodically refers to a passionate, mutually shared love affair among brother and sister in the past, as well as being drugged and the guilt of Robert being the family member delegated to secretly commit her at a psychiatric facility. In the New York staging of My Sister’s Keeper, reviewer Clive Barnes reported that Sarah strips to tempt her brother, but is rejected by him (Barnes: 1979). At one point early in the play, Sarah says to Susan:
You haven’t visited this place since I arrived have you? If you had you’d have noticed the dent on the left-hand side of his bed…He sleeps on the right hand side…How come there’s a dent on the empty pillow on the left side? …You want to hear something even funnier? …You sure?…Our whole family’s that way. My dear Daddy did it to me and that’s why we’re all mad…But I’m the one they lock up (Allan: 1969, p. 45).
The threat of psychoanalysis and hospitalization of the leading female character in Allan’s plays is consistent with the film version as well as Cassavetes’s earlier film, A Woman under the Influence, in which one of the lead characters, Nick (Peter Falk) feels compelled to have his wife committed. Reviews of I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons lament the unfulfilled suggestion of incest: ‘…incest is only a carrot and there is nothing profound in the play’s treatment of the nature of insanity. We are told merely – and yet again – that love equals possession and that we destroy each other’ (Dawson: 1970; also, Border: 1969, p. 19). In response to the poor reviews and poor turnout, the play’s producers purchased a full-page advertisement in London newspapers featuring a letter from medical professionals, including R.D. Laing, lauding the educational value of the play’s treatment of incest and finding it to be the best representation ever on stage of modern psychiatric issues (Zwerin, p. 8). Reviews of the New York production noted the clinical dimensions of the story, with the New York Times describing it as ‘a two-character psychological play that may be clinically accurate but is dramatically unconvincing. So much so that by the second act his people seemed to be demonstrating psychoanalytical propositions in a textbook rather than the conflicts of genuine human beings’ (Lask, C21). In preparing the screenplay for Cassavetes’s film, Allan attempted to base the psychiatrist character, played by Rowlands’ brother David Rowlands, on Laing. In his notes, Allan writes this character should be ‘very famous…very witty…very cold…’. Rather than cold (or witty) Rowland’s characterization produces deadpan humor, suggesting to Sarah that she should go to Europe since she has money, and ‘have some sex… Otherwise, [she will] have to go back to the bughouse’. It is also during this scene that the film’s title is referenced: ‘Love is a stream’, Sarah says, ‘it doesn’t stop’. ‘Yes, it does’, the doctor answers, pointing out that her husband no longer loves her and her daughter chooses her father over her. The animosity between brother and sister does exist in the play, but not in the film – evidently a development made by Cassavetes. Again, in Allan’s notes, he writes:
In the play she has a ‘thing’ against him. He once doped her and brought her to a mental hospital telling her he was taking her to a party…because she was behaving outlandishly… John wants to lose this. Should we? Isn’t this a guilt he lives with…that he betrayed the one person he loves above everyone else…because she frightened him… (Allan, box 35).
Allan’s notes refer to differences of opinion with Cassavetes on development of the Love Streams script. ‘I’m not very authoritative in these discussions. Why? In the context of my work and my relationship’, he writes (Allan, box 7). With frequent references to Allan’s sister and other family members, I suspect the key source of contention was the shift away from the autobiographical inspiration for Allan’s original work. ‘I was also pathologically jealous, so I married a woman I didn’t like very much’, and for Allan, the play ‘turned on jealousy’ between Sarah and Robert. Referring to the two author’s respective backgrounds, and perhaps suggesting the rage and loud behavior of Cassavetes’s characters, he writes: ‘There’s Jewish jealousy and Greek jealousy. We don’t offer to fight. No machismo here…’. In Cassavetes’s Love Streams, the jealousy of Sarah in Allan’s play is transformed to an obsessive, possessive love of her family. ‘Love is a stream, it doesn’t stop’, she continues to insist. She makes a bet that she can make her deflated daughter and husband laugh, wagering love itself. Referring to Cassavetes’s performance as Robert, Allan writes, ‘John showed [Robert’s] jealousy in script different from my Robert, but John’s Robert gives us the beginning of a real character, and not the shadow of the play’. But, ‘John’s fantasies are different from mine’ (Allan, box 7). Cassavetes originally did not want to play the lead role of the womanizing best-selling author Robert Harmon, preferring the original actor from his stage version, Jon Voight, to play in it. However, because Voight wanted to also direct the film version, he was dropped from the production and Cassavetes took over the role (Carney, p. 474).
Cassavetes was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver before the production of Love Streams – a condition due possibly to hepatitis he contracted early in his career in the Virgin Islands, when filming Virgin Island. Throughout Love Streams, allusions to death repeatedly occur, while at the same time Cassavetes’s character is subjected to various forms of violence upon his body – car crashes, heavy drinking and smoking, beatings, and falling down stairs. One particular violent scene is of interest here, that of Harmon’s first encounter with the nightclub singer Susan (Diahnne Abbott). In a drunken stupor, Harmon forces himself into her car to drive her home, crashes, struggles for control of the car keys, and finally arrives at her house. He tries to ascend the stairs up to her front door, but falls down, back into the space behind him, in an image not unlike that of the death of the henchman in The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), who is shot in the back and falls down, his face to the camera, down the subway stairs toward the street. When Cassavetes reemerges into view, we see that he is bleeding badly. This fall is critical to an understanding of the configuration of the body in the film.[9] The sight of Cassavetes’s cut body is uncanny, in that a seemingly innocent movement up a short flight of stairs has suddenly given way to an immediate and horrific image, one not static, but rather in an imperceptible duration. Cassavetes’s body is already emaciated and damaged, due to his illness, and it comes as a shock that he adds injury to injury, cutting through any loose generic expectations we might have of the film as a love story, a parlor drama, or a contemporary tragedy.[10] In his diary written on the set of the Love Streams production, Michael Ventura wrote:
He’s gained weight in the oddest way I’ve seen any man gain weight. His face, arms, legs and butt are skinny, but his stomach has ballooned. He looks almost pregnant. His belly is as big and tight as a drum. His shirt looks like it’s been buttoned with difficulty over a basketball.
It was not known to many at the time that in fact Cassavetes was not gaining weight, but rather a distended stomach was a symptom of his liver infection. Cassavetes eventually did make less public appearances as his condition deteriorated, but during Love Streams, Ventura continues:
Most Hollywood actors of star caliber, about to play a major role, would walk through fire to get that belly down. Cassavetes is willing to play it as part of his costume. His character in Love Streams, Robert Harmon, will be weighed down with Cassavetes’s belly; it will be an emblem of the dead weight of his life(Ventura: 1984).
One might expand on this description of Cassavetes using his body to affect his characterization of Harmon, consistent with how Kouvaros has described Cassavetes’s character – particularly with regard to The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, and Love Streams – that ‘the bodies of the characters bear the weight of time’; in this gesture of the fall, Cassavetes is certainly more susceptible to the powers of gravity, as time advances to this final stage of his career (Kouvaros, p. 173). The fall also puts time into the body of Cassavetes as he loses any center of gravity, and the subject, therefore, is qualitatively decentered. The frontal framing of the fall conflates a horizontal field with one of depth. While he is falling down the stairs, which could easily be graphed in a line of a slope, Cassavetes is also moving back into deep space. The movement-image here has reached a crisis. Bruce Nauman studies the confusion of dimensions, complemented by the perpetual image of durée, with similar effects in his Bouncing into a Corner video series (USA 1968-1969), in which a man falls back and forth from the foreground to the background. The irregular act of someone falling upright into the middle of a 90-degree angle is further confused – or made uncanny – when the camera angle itself shifts 90 degrees, making Nauman appear to be in a prone position.
As previously mentioned, performance and the practice of the theater also provide important plot devices for many of his films, which often feature performer protagonists: In Shadows (USA 1959), a jazz singer whose career is in decline is forced to play on stage with a ‘girlie show’; Dickie (John Marley) and Freddie (Fred Draper) recount their college-day vaudeville routines in Faces (USA 1968); a jazz band is content to play in a park pavilion just ‘for the birds’ in Too Late Blues; a drunken singing contest forms one of the crucial scenes in Husbands (USA 1970); a Broadway play is produced in Opening Night; and the aforementioned striptease show provides the setting for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Important dance sequences also appear in A Woman Under the Influence (USA 1974) and in a dream sequence in Love Streams. In the former, Mabel (Rowlands) directs a group of children at a party in a performance of ‘Swan Lake’, which climaxes when she pleads with them to ‘die’ for a visiting parent and all fall down.[11] The gesture of the fall is used throughout Cassavetes’s films – and usually is performed by Gena Rowlands. For example: in Minnie and Moskowitz, after a night of drinking, Minnie Moore (Rowlands) falls down a flight of stairs but quickly recovers after landing, resuming her elegant pose and demeanor. In Opening Night, a drunk Myrtle Gordon arrives at the theater on opening night, struggling to stand on her two feet and constantly falling down, while her director (Gazzara) orders that no one help her. In Love Streams, during a meeting among lawyers and a judge over custody of her daughter, when Sarah learns her daughter prefers to live with her father, Sarah leaves the room, and suddenly collapses in the middle of a hallway, lying there unconscious. The experience of falling is a departure from Hollywood cinema’s dimensions, as articulated by classical perspective – its axis no longer, for a moment, required to be fixed on the ground. How to fall is a necessary technique to be studied by the dancer, while in a founding text for dance theory, The Art of Making Dances, Doris Humphrey found the central aspect of human motion to be a relationship with gravity based on ‘fall and recovery’ (Humphrey, p. 106). The simple act of the fall inspired a number of explorations by the choreographer Trisha Brown to move beyond the limits of up or down, vertical or horizontal. Such examples of Brown’s work might include Lightfall (1963), Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1970), Falling Duet (1968), Falling Duet II (1971), and Set and Reset (1983).[12]
A strenuous series of repeated falls occurs in a number of Brown’s dances, and this particular affect of repetition can describe a common trait of a Cassavetes performance. The phenomenon of repetition is central to Freud’s argument in his essay, ‘The Uncanny’ (Freud, pp. 219-252). Consider a passage that effectively summarizes this argument, relating it to the affinities of death and the cinema, in the final chapter of Tom Gunning’s book on the German filmmaker Fritz Lang. Gunning writes that the sense of uncanniness in repetition elicits:
a profound sense of the untimeliness of history, the knowledge that nothing can truly be repeated, and that in repetition lies not so much the promise of rebirth as the harbinger of death. Repetition involves a profound mourning for the passage of time. (Gunning, p. 457)
Herein lies the ontology of the film image as an uncanny suggestion of death, for it is the persistence of vision that repeats an image only incrementally distinct from the previous that suggests movement – and the passage of time. For Cassavetes, I would apply a sense of repetition on a micro-level, that is, to the level of gesture. The repetition of gesture and of snippets of dialogue is a characteristic that follows Cassavetes throughout his career, and particularly in his own performance, in both his own films as well as those directed by others.
An excellent example of repetition, which intersects with the uncanny feeling of forgetfulness, occurs in Love Streams, when Harmon returns to his hotel room in Las Vegas, having left his son alone all night while he was out pursuing women. His son, Albie, is distraught, and as soon as he opens the door, is on the verge of tears and asks to be taken back to his mother. ‘Wait a minute’, Harmon says, ‘Didn’t I tell you’, ‘Didn’t you say you were gonna be a man and I was gonna be a man? Didn’t I tell you… Didn’t I tell you I was going to be out all night? … Wait a minute’. And it goes on like this for a few more cycles, as if only the barrage of repeated phrases will ever be convincing, his performance putting on hold the flow of the film and other characters’ opportunity to respond.[13] Finally, Cassavetes falls to his knees, resting his head on Albie’s chest, looking for support. This rebirth, or return to childhood, evokes an image from A Woman Under the Influence, in which the children rush to lay their head upon Mabel, their mother, walking into the bedroom after a six-month stay at a psychiatric hospital; with a still from the production, we can see Cassavetes blocked out this scene himself, taking the role of the children, on his knees laying his head onto the body of the mother (and his wife), Rowlands. [14] The eruption of the infantile one may find in Cassavetes’s films is consistent with Freud’s description, as he writes:
How exactly [can one] trace back to infantile psychology the uncanny effect? […] For it is impossible to recognize the dominance in the unconscious mind of a ‘compulsion to repeat’ proceeding from the instinctual impulses and probably inherent in the very nature of the instincts – a compulsion powerful enough to overrule the pleasure principle, lending to certain aspects of the mind their demonic character, and still very clearly expressed in the impulses of small children; a compulsion, too, which is responsible for a part of the course taken by the analyses of neurotic patients. (Freud, p. 229)
Of course, neurotic characters, and patients, appear throughout Cassavetes’s films, including Love Streams, with Rowlands, playing Harmon’s sister, again visiting a psychiatrist. The regression to, or memory of, childhood satisfies the condition of reaching something unfamiliar in the familiar. This is also achieved via the breakdown of hierarchy between adults and children in Cassavetes films: for example, the ‘man-to-man’ talk between Harmon and his son as they share a beer and smoke cigarettes in Love Streams, or, in Gloria, Gloria’s alliance with ‘the little guy’ (that is, her newly orphaned neighbor) in their fight against the mob. This sliding interval between childhood and adulthood echoes Humphrey’s formula of ‘fall and recovery’ that might be also read as suggesting the decay of the body, as performing age should be commensurate with portraying a greater susceptibility to gravity (Humphrey, pp. 106-107). Cassavetes wrote in an article for The New York Times after the film’s release: ‘In the film, Harmon is running from childhood and is trying to create another family without any of the prescribed values… As I studied the script, I thought it was because he is the child’ (Cassavetes: 1984, p. 15).
What these scenes of childhood ultimately evoke is a perspective on what Freud described as the heimlich, usually translated as the homelike or homely in opposition to the unheimlich, or the uncanny: the return to childhood is a return to the home. And Cassavetes’s characters are frequently at home in his films, as his own home was used as a set on a number of occasions, including Love Streams. Allan and Cassavetes shared interest in the site of home, and writing about family life – for example, in The Third Day Comes, the story revolves around the contentious decision to mortgage the family’s home. [15] When Rowlands’s character is first introduced after many years away from her brother, Harmon welcomes her into his home and offers to show her around the house. Of course, she knows the house well, since it is Rowlands’s house! [16] The curious deployment of special effects and spectacle in this film is especially ‘unhomely’ as it is frequently used at the Cassavetes home – we are no longer in the realm of the handheld camera of Cassavetes’s early career. The intermittent use of special effects suddenly evokes an action film or a big-budget Hollywood production – think of Sarah’s dream of her vengeful car crash, a scene more at place perhaps in a Dukes of Hazzard episode than a Cassavetes character study. A bit of surrealism, or tongue-in-cheek dark humor at least, can be found in a fleeting image in this scene, one that is difficult to notice upon viewing at normal speed as it just flashes briefly. After Sarah drives over her daughter and ex-husband, their blood has splattered onto the car in the shape of a heart, reinforcing the sense that this violent act is an act of love, and that violence, love, and family are inextricably intertwined. The more uncanny effects come as the mechanics of a Hollywood production are brought down upon their home, with wind machines, camera dollies and cranes; or, in a more organic spectacle, the parade of farm animals brought stomping through the house. This must be uncanny, or unhomely, with the unfamiliar in the most familiar of places. And, understandably, the sensation of the unhomely occurs in this meditation on life and death. A documentary was produced on the set of Love Streams, entitled I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes – the Man and His Work (Michael Ventura, 1984), and one particular image suggests an uncanny sense of the macabre. It is a close-up of a note left on the refrigerator by Rowlands, addressed to crewmembers who are required to turn off the refrigerator during shooting to prevent the machine’s buzzing noise from interfering with the sound recording. Crewmembers are instructed to remember to turn it back on, because the previous night’s forgetfulness has left all the food in the family refrigerator ruined. She signs the note ‘Gena’, with a skull-and-cross showing a frowning face. A perfect conflation of toughness, horror, humor, and the familiar has left a trace. [17]
Another curious, almost surreal image is that of the character of Jim the dog. During her trip to the farm, in addition to the miniature horses and numerous other animals, Sarah purchases a dog named Jim – taking the dog away from its faithful companion, the silent farm hand. He later sleeps in Sarah’s bed during her dream-nightmare in which she kills her family. Jim the Dog was a character in the stage version of Love Streams, played by Neil Bell, who wore a dog costume and moved about on his hands and feet. After Sarah leaves Robert, Cassavetes is left alone, drinking and listening to music with Jim (who Harmon calls ‘Dog’) sitting on the chair next to him. He turns, and when he looks back, there is no longer a dog but a naked man sitting in his place (played by Bell). Cassavetes offers a look of surprise, or rather one that seems as if nothing more could ever surprise him. Upon seeing him, Robert (Cassavetes) laughs and asks, ‘Who the fuck are you?’. In an early draft of a screenplay for A Sister’s Keeper, Allan includes a scene in which Sarah and an ‘attendant’ walk through an animal shelter in Battersea district of London, passing ‘the area of caged dogs’, when her eyes meet one in particular (Allan: 1978). Jonathan Rosenbaum writes about this moment in the film as ‘yet another telling example of Cassavetes’s existential method whereby existence precedes essence and presence becomes meaning: the fact that Bell was around essentially led to Cassavetes using him’ (Rosenbaum, pp. 55-56).
I would like to return to the polemic of the ‘falling’ and its mobilization in psychoanalysis for a discussion of trauma and mourning in Cassavetes’s work. Cathy Caruth notes that trauma for Freud is implicated in the act, or the accident, of departure. Freud resettled in London following Vienna’s capitulation to the Nazis, and it is an interesting coincidence (or accident) that Cassavetes had an affinity for London as well. In Love Streams, Sarah reluctantly follows her psychiatrist’s advice and goes on vacation to Europe, to ‘try to meet someone’ and ‘get some sex in her life’, as he bluntly orders. Cassavetes’s success as a director undoubtedly was helped by the enthusiastic London reception of his first film, Shadows (1959), which led to a deal with British Lion to distribute the film in America. He also reputedly wrote a London scene into Husbands (1970) as an excuse to go on a trip there, having enjoyed his time filming The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1967) in England. Caruth writes that for Freud:
The trauma of the accident, its very unconsciousness, is borne by an act of departure. It is a departure which, in the full force of its historicity, remains at the same time in some sense absolutely opaque, both to the one who leaves, and also to the theoretician, linked to the sufferer in his attempt to bring the experience to light. Yet at the same time, this very opacity generates the surprising force of a knowledge, for it is the accident, in German, the Unfall…Between the Unfall, the accident, and the ‘striking’ of the insight, its auffallen, is the source of a fall, a falling which is transmitted precisely in the unconscious act of leaving. It is this unconsciousness of leaving which bears the impact of history (Caruth, pp. 190-191).
It is interesting, in relation to Cassavetes, that Caruth’s adoption of Freud’s language resounds with articles of the cinema: ‘bringing an experience to light’ or ‘the “striking” of the insight’, as if striking the lamp on a projector. The connection Caruth makes between the fall and the act of the departure is particularly appropriate for Love Streams – people are always leaving in the film, especially Robert Harmon. He, of course, has divorced his second wife and left his son, Albie, to grow up without knowing him. As soon as his sister arrives, unexpectedly, he immediately leaves for Las Vegas with Albie. Upon arriving in Las Vegas, he leaves Albie alone in the hotel room overnight. Returning to his home to find Sarah awake, he leaves again for Susan’s house.
Travel in Cassavetes’s films has often been a mode of travel for travel’s sake, to depart from the home always to return. Europe – a European rest cure of sorts – is the destination in Love Streams and Husbands. As Giuliana Bruno writes: ‘Home is merely a concept, necessary to travel from or to leave behind. It exists only as the price of being lost and is perennially sought. In this logic, voyage is circular: a false move in which the point of return circles back to the point of departure’ (Bruno, pp. 85-86). Such a circular trip is the exact sensation described by Freud in his analysis of ‘the unhomely’ when he recounts strolling through a strange village and, while not necessarily lost as no particular destination was intended, he ends up unwittingly right back where he started. In addition, considering the home as ‘the price of being lost’ can account for the mourning or sense of loss in Love Streams in particular – but also, the young fan killed in a car accident in Opening Night, the friend who dies in Husbands, and the disappearance of Mabel (and the recurring absence of Peter Falk’s character due to his work schedule) in A Woman under the Influence. The narrative arc of many of Cassavetes’s films hinges on a character’s need to eventually return home: the most obvious example occurs for the three men in Husbands, two of whom will return home from London to their wives. In Love Streams, Sarah leaves Robert’s house in the middle of the night with a man she has met at a bowling alley. This leads to the final shot of the film, Robert left alone at home looking out into the stormy night. With Cassavetes’s declining health and the sense that this would be his last film, Ventura remarked of this last shot: ‘It seemed like this was John waving goodbye to us’ (Ventura). The cycle of departure was also present in the original play as well. As Sarah tells Robert: ‘There is your truth and there is my truth. Or are you staying to find out? You go to Corsica and leave me. You go to Susan and leave me. You go to England and leave me. How can I ever leave you? My home was a jungle. I’m a part of your life’ (Allan: 1969, p. 49). The difference of course in the film, is that eventually, Sarah leaves Robert – and the final image of the film is of Robert alone at home – and, also of course, Cassavetes alone at home.
Cassavetes was obviously aware that Love Streams might be his last film and a final farewell, but the ending of his last film on record – one he tried to disown – is perhaps poignant in its own right. The end of Big Trouble features a reunion party as a family prepares to send its children away to college. The final lines of dialogue fade away as the credits roll, disturbing father Leonard Hoffman (Alan Arkin) as he tries to listen in peace to his children’s musical performance. Leonard remarks to his wife, satisfied with his sense of closure, that ‘sometimes things just work out right’, but his wife pays no attention, lost in a trance with the music. With the film’s story now seemingly concluded, the con-man Steve Rickey (Peter Falk) does not want the story to end, and is curious what happens next. ‘What I mean is, are we going to be together after the concert? Are we going to go on and do something together or are you going back to her?’ Although Big Trouble may be a departure from the rest of Cassavetes’s work, this final scene seems to bear the mark of his signature. Chaos ensues, in comic fashion, as Leonard and Steve get into a fight, and bodies become entangled. The dialogue of numerous characters overlaps in what seems like an improvisation. The credits roll but the pushing, shoving, laughter, and talking continue. Like the end of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, here the show must keep going on, and other narrative strands are still possible – an appropriate open ending to appreciating the possibilities with which Cassavetes’s films leave one.
Works Cited
T. Allan to Shirley Bernstein, Ted Allan Fonds: Library and Archives Canada, 10 January 1970.
Allan, My Sister’s Keeper, University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1976.
Allan, untitled and incomplete screenplay, Ted Allan Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, 1978.
Allan and Cassavetes, Love Streams, Ted Allan Fonds, Library and Archives Canada, July 1981.
Allan, Notes on I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons, box 35, as above, n.d.
Allan, Notes, box 7, as above, n.d.
C. Barnes, ‘A Steamy “Sister” in from Canada’, New York Post, 18 December 1979.
E. Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States vol. 2, Oxford University Press: New York, 1970.
D. Billington, ‘Expatriate Allan Home for a Change’, The Gazette, 12 July 1974.
R. Border, London Observer, 21 December 1969.
G. Bruno, Atlas of Emotions: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, Verso: London, 2002.
R. Carney, Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Faber & Faber: London, 2001.
C. Caruth, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, Yale French Studies 79, 1991.
J. Cassavetes, ‘How Love and Life Mingle on Film’, New York Times, 19 August 1984, 1, p. 15.
H. Dawson, ‘I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons’, Plays and Players, February 1970.
S. Drake, ‘Cassavetes Directs Voight and Rowlands’, Los Angeles Times, 12 May 1981.
S. Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ in James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Hogarth Press: London, 1953 [1925].
D. Galligan, ‘Love Streams’, Hollywood, 14-20 May 1981.
T. Gunning, The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, British Film Institute: London, 2000.
D. Humphrey, The Art of Making Dances, Barbara Pollack, ed., Dance Horizons: Princeton, 1987 [1959].
C. Kane, untitled, undated, unpaginated manuscript, Museum of Modern Art Film Study Center
G. Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point, University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2004.
T. Lask, ‘Play: My Sister’s Keeper: Staged by Hudson Guild: Battling Siblings’, New York Times, 17 December 1979.
C. Lawson, ‘Play About O’Neill is in the Works in a Westbeth Studio’, New York Times, 28 October 1982, C2.
My Sister’s Keeper programme note, Hudson Guild Theatre: New York, 1979
J. Rosenbaum, ‘Book Review’, Cineaste 27:1, 2001.
M. Ventura, ‘Zen and the Art of John Cassavetes: A Journal about Life, Love, the Pursuit of Happiness, the Importance of Intensity, Making Movies, Altman, Kurosawa, George Lucas and Nicolas Roeg. Whew!’, L. A. Weekly, 21-27 September 1984.
M. Zwerin, ‘Outside: London Nevertheless’, The Village Voice, 8 January 1970.
Endnotes
[1] T. Allan and J. Cassavetes, Love Streams: Screenplay, Ted Allan Fonds, Library and Archives Canada.
[2] Quoted in M. Ventura, ‘The Ability of Not Knowing’, L. A. Weekly, 17 May 1991, p. 10.
[3] G. Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004.
[4] Kouvaros discusses the idea of ‘lived’ time in Cassavetes’s work in the fourth chapter of his aforementioned book, addressing the relationship between the theater and film in Cassavetes’s work. Cassavetes’s films in the 1960s however did have a markedly faster editing pace than those he directed in the 1970s. Using statistical data gathered with the online Cinemetrics tool, I have measured the average shot length (ASL) of Shadows(1959) as Cassavetes’s fastest film at an average of 7.1 seconds per shot; the films with the longest average shot length are Husbands (1970) at an ASL of 16 seconds, the 1976 cut of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie at 16.1 seconds, and Love Streams at 15.5 seconds. See the Cinemetrics database, developed by Y. Tsivian and G. Civjans, http://www.cinemetrics.lv
[5] L. Calta, ‘Peter Falk Due in Show’, New York Times, 11 December 1969, p. 64. According to a notice in the New York Post, Cassavetes was filming scenes of rehearsals of The Forty Year Old Man, although I have never seen this material nor found another reference to the possible filming. See L. Lyons, New York Post, 20 December, 1969.
[6] Much of my information on the Canadian progressive literary tradition comes from J. Doyle, Progressive Heritage: The Evolution of a Politically Radical Literary Tradition in Canada, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2002.
[7] One draft, undated but most likely sometime between 1970 and 1972, was sent to Margery Vosper in New York, who would handle other New York productions written by Allan. T. Allan, I’ve Seen You Cut Lemons: A Play in Two Acts with Two Characters, London, n.d., Ted Allan Fonds, Box 35, Library and Archives Canada.
[8] My Sister’s Keeper, Programme note, Hudson Guild Theatre, New York, 1979.
[9] Kouvaros offers a comprehensive analysis of theories of the body, in connection with Love Streams, in the fifth chapter Where Does It Happen?, op. cit.
[10] The ghost story in Opening Night or the front-lit close-up of a bloody, mutilated face in Love Streams suggest Cassavetes’s incorporation of certain elements of a genre most often discussed in the (dis)figuration and sensation of the body, the horror genre. This is an interesting coincidence with his concurrent acting assignments in mainstream horror films of the time, starting most famously with Rosemary’s Baby (1968) but also Incubus (1981) and Fury (1978) – which ends with Cassavetes’s character spontaneously combusting.
[11] An important essay on this scene is N. Brenez, ‘“Die for Mr. Jensen”: Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence’, Senses of Cinema, no. 16, 2001.
[12] Maurice Berger discusses Brown’s interrogations of gravity in ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ in H. Teicher (ed.), Trisha Brown: Dance and Art in Dialogue, 1961-2001, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, 2002.
[13] There are a number of such scenes in Cassavetes’s films – too numerous indeed to mention here. Kouvaros describes a similar repetitious string of dialogue in Shadows, in Where Does It Happen?, p. 7.
[14] This photo by Sam Shaw was reproduced in R. Carney, John Cassavetes: Autoportraits, Cahiers du cinéma, Paris, 1992, p. 114.
[15] Allan, ‘The Third Day Comes. Notes’, 1990, Ted Allan Fonds, volume 8, Library and Archives Canada.
[16] A family dynamic is reinforced in the environment of many of his films, as Cassavetes frequently cast members of his extended family, including his children, his parents, his mother-in-law, and brother-in-law.
[17] This image is also discussed by Brad Stevens’s review essay, ‘Places in the Heart: Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point by George Kouvaros’ Senses of Cinema no. 33, 2004.
Created on: Sunday, 17 June 2007