Ben Gazzara on John Cassavetes: ‘He wasn’t a filmmaker; he was a poet’

 

‘It breaks my heart to have this era come to an end. Ben meant so much to all of us. To our families. To John. To Peter [Falk]. To have them gone now is devastating to me.’ Gena Rowlands

Sadly, the actor Ben Gazzara has died. He was involved in many notable films but was defined by his collaboration with John Cassavetes, for his roles in Husbands (1970); Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1975) and Opening Night (1978).

Above is the documentary the BBC made on the filming of Husbands, which starred Cassavetes, Gazzara and another (recently deceased) Cassavetes’ stalwart, Peter Falk.  The documentary captures something of Cassavetes’ intensity as an artist and his working methods, though these are wrongly described in the introduction to the programme as relying on improvisation.

In fact, rather than improvisation, Cassavetes’ method was to revise and rewrite his scripts during rehearsals in light of things he and his actors discovered about the characters and story. Other directors would approach their films having already decided what lines their actors would speak and made up their minds as to how and where they expected actors to move and behave. But for Cassavetes’, film – all art – was not a technical endeavour; it was a process of exploration, an odyssey, a way of life, so that the film was shaped and emerged only in the making of it.

The myth of Cassavetes’ improvisational style – only his first film Shadows was properly improvisational – obscures his brilliance as a writer; his ability to convincingly convey the impression of spontaneous speech and deeply-embedded emotion – the inarticulate outpourings of men and women struggling to fathom their lives or the world. His characters often appear to be improvising, to be making it up as they go along, because Cassavetes wrote it that way and because this is what Cassavetes believed people do in real life, make it up as they go along. A lot of Cassavetes’ genius, as well as the hostility with which mainstream critics and audiences reacted to his films, can be attributed to his determination to show, against Hollywood, that people don’t know what they’re doing, that they can never make sense of themselves no matter how hard they try and that we all make it up as we go along, with all the danger, awkwardness and inevitable failure this implies. In other words, for Cassavetes, echoing another Greek: all that we can know is that we know nothing, and that, not unlike Socrates, Cassavetes pokes and prods – even tortures – his characters, takes them apart (always sympathetically, never cynically) to reveal to them their flaws and weaknesses and make them think again about who they are.

Below is a clip of Ben Gazzara talking only last year about working with Cassavetes on Husbands:

Laurel and Hardy and the Greek exaltation of poverty

‘Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight… I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.’  (Albert Camus)

Poverty (Penia) is a goddess with two sisters, Amykhania (helplessness) and Ptokheia (beggary). In Plato’s Republic,  poverty is a terrible evil, a source of meanness, viciousness and discontent. Similarly, Aristotle, in the Politics, regards poverty as a social ill, the parent of revolution and crime. In Wealth (Plutus) – read an excellent, Australian-dialect translation here, by George Theodoridis) – Aristophanes asks what would happen to society if everyone suddenly became rich and answers, paradoxically, that inequalities, conflict and misery would increase. In the play, the goddess Penia appears as an old hag, who warns those who think bestowing wealth on all Athenians will be an unmitigated blessing that:

‘[Poverty] is the very fountain of all joy! Of all life, even!… If Wealth were to… spread himself around to everyone, who’d be doing any of the work then or even any of the thinking?'’

The goddess then goes on to suggest that the poor are in fact more virtuous than the rich:

’And let me tell you another thing about the poor. They are modest and civil, whereas the rich are all arrogant.’

The virtues – or otherwise – of poverty become of increasing interest in Greek ethics. Although never endorsing the alleged moral advantages of penury, Socrates does make clear, in the Apology, that he is indifferent to wealth and that a preoccupation with wisdom is far more important than, and perhaps even incompatible with, any pursuit of money or luxury.

The belief that neither wealth or poverty have much to contribute to virtue is shared by the Stoics and Epicureans – who regard poverty as just one of life’s many misfortunes, fear of which should be confronted and overcome. (Seneca advocated living rough from time to time, for a period of three to four days, to get used to poverty in case we should fall victim to it).

The Cynics, however, didn’t just denounce wealth as a prohibition to virtue, they went one stage further and developed a cult of poverty, embracing indigence as a positive way of life, ‘an unending task in which one strives for a more and more complete renunciation of possessions and the desire for material possession’.* Previous Greek virtues of beauty, honour and independence were turned on their head by the Cynics, who valorised, instead, ugliness, humiliation, dishonour (adoxia) and dependence – begging and, more radically, slavery, were positively accepted.**

Finally, we note that it was not a big leap from Cynic humiliation to Christian humility, from Cynic destitution to Christian asceticism, and from the Cynic exaltation of poverty to Christian love of the poor.

 *E. McGushin: Foucault’s Askesis.
**M. Foucault: The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II).