Lesson 4 New Hollywood Cassavetes new aesthetic low

Lesson 4 New Hollywood

Cassavetes’ new aesthetic • • • low budget aesthetic improvisatory acting style overlapping dialogue rough and ready camera choppy editing sound recorded on location real locations available lighting feel new music clear eye turned on sex, race, violence rejection of classical narrative

Classical Hollywood • • • • Technical polish/professionalism. Balanced composition. Smooth/unobtrusive camera & editing. Elaborate studio set. High production values. Subtle lighting geared to verisimilitude. Key Term =INVISBILITY Star lighting. Presence of recognisable stars. Stylised acting. Economical script. Glamorous aesthetic/sense of escapism. Manipulation of audience emotions.

Italian neo realism: a post world war 2 movement that used an increase in realist techniques such as location shooting, long takes and non professional actors, to explore post war struggles in Italy Project a slice of life (reality) Not use literary adaptations but go for the real Focus on poverty, unemployment – so rampant in post war Italy. To guarantee realism – dialogue and language =natural, non-professional actors should be used. Location shooting rather than studio Documentary in style, shot in natural light, with a hand-held camera and using observation and analysis.

"To give people what they expect is the ultimate rip off in film. I like to make films that are difficult, that make an audience scream, make an audience walk out. And, in that sense, our work is not like a movie. A movie tries to pacify people by keeping it going for them so that it's sheer entertainment. Well, I hate entertainment. There's nothing I despise more than being entertained". http: //www. film 4. com/features/article/john-cassavetes

‘ He studiously declines to take viewer by hand (or eyes and ears) he wants us to get a little lost. . . throw us back on our own resources, force us to blaze our own paths through the work – one viewers path may be different from another. Deliberately refuses to tell us what to feel or what we should pay attention to as he wants us to make us fully fledged participants in the meaning- making process. He avoids – things other films use to italicise importance of particular scenes/ help a viewer interpret them. Use of mood-music orchestrations, editorial framings/ expressive lighting on characters faces, key lighting. . . or positioning of significant props. For same reason – use of visual metaphors kept to bare minimum. . . ’ Carney 94

• Powerful realism informs Cassavetes’s work • Distrustful of fixed style, Cassavetes’s films violate Hollywood’s elegant framing and smooth pacing. • Films are often improvisational. . . • He had a singular voice in a standardized time. • Theatrical and distinctly cinematic • Small no of characters engaged in seemingly simple domestic stories • Actor driven • The originality and intensity of his work make him America’s most idiosyncratic and least categorizable filmmaker. • His films resist static, formulaic ways of ordering and presenting interactions, attempting a new way of seeing and of visualizing human experience.