Personality Is Plot: The Films of John Cassavetes

April 22–May 14, 2017

A tribute to one of the great American independent filmmakers and to the indelible characters he and his actors created.

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Shadows
Faces
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
Love Streams

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

Love Streams
- Sunday, May 14 7 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1984
Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands star in this film about the blows and buttresses of family. “A mighty, intimate, kaleidoscopically subjective, bravely self-searching summation of a career, an era, and a life” (The New Yorker).
Gloria
- Saturday, May 13 5:30 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1980
A former gangster’s moll (Gena Rowlands) takes on the mob—while protecting a Puerto Rican orphan—in pre-gentrification, graffiti-tagged early 1980s New York. “A commercial film . . . turned into a slice of pure avant-garde” (Dave Kehr).
Husbands
- Friday, May 12 7 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1970
Restored 35mm Print

Three middle-aged suburban buddies (Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk) go on a forty-eight-hour bender after another friend’s funeral in this savagely funny, unsentimental dissection of the blustering, bilious midlife male.
Opening Night
- Wednesday, May 10 7 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1978
Cassavetes’s tribute to acting, actors, and the search for artistic integrity centers around a successful stage actress (Gena Rowlands) grappling with her character. “Cassavetes's most cleverly constructed film” (The New Yorker).
Shadows
- Saturday, April 22 6 PM
- Sunday, May 7 4:15 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1959
Restored 35mm Print

Time never caught up with Cassavetes’s first film; his tale of three black Manhattanites is still inherently hip, mordantly funny, terribly sad, and very New York.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
- Friday, May 5 7 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1978
Cassavetes’s Sunset Strip neo-noir is centered around a “classy” strip club and its proprietor (Ben Gazzara). “The curdled charm of Gazzara's lopsided grin has never been more to the point” (Time Out).
A Woman Under the Influence
- Sunday, April 30 7 PM
- Wednesday, May 3 7 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1974
Restored 35mm Print

Cassavetes’s masterpiece retains the power to unnerve with its raw, often harrowing depiction of a blue-collar Los Angeles family, with Gena Rowlands in an Oscar-nominated performance as a housewife on the verge.
Minnie and Moskowitz
- Saturday, April 29 8:15 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1971
Cassavetes’s take on the screwball comedy stars Gena Rowlands as Minnie, a beautiful, refined museum employee unlucky in love.
Faces
- Sunday, April 23 4:15 PM
John Cassavetes
United States, 1968
Restored 35mm Print

Gena Rowlands, John Marley, and Seymour Cassel star in this unflinching night-long journey through a marriage on the rocks, a film “against all people that know and for people that just feel” (Cassavetes).

Personality Is Plot: The Films of John Cassavetes

April 22–May 14, 2017

In Cassavetes’s work personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something—a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.

—Ray Carney

In Cassavetes’s work personality is plot; behavior is narrative. Living does not involve doing anything but being something—a much harder task for both a character and a viewer to deal with.

—Ray Carney

Resolutely independent, John Cassavetes shunned commercial conventions and Hollywood expectations to depict the subtleties and struggles of human relationships in new ways, creating characters whose desires and emotions set them on a collision course with friends, lovers, family, colleagues, and themselves. Cassavetes was an accomplished actor, and his genius as a director lay in creating the conditions by which his performers could become the characters he conceived, lending their energy and imagination to the work and opening it up to new perspectives. He believed that “stylistic unity drains the humanity out of a text,” while “the stories of many different and potentially inarticulate people are more interesting than a contrived narrative that exists only in one articulate man’s imagination.” The authentic personalities that populate Cassavetes’s films are among the most unforgettable in cinema. Lelia, Ben, and Hugh in Shadows, Nick and Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence, Cosmo Vitelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Sarah Lawson and Robert Harmon in Love Streams are but a few of the dozens he created in collaboration with Lelia Goldoni, Ben Carruthers, Hugh Hurd, Peter Falk, Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, and others. Cassavetes was relentless in his exploration of the power and mystery of human emotion, the construction and performance of the self and the ways we relate to one another. The pile-up of subjectivities that emerge in Cassavetes’s films imbues them with a realism that challenges conventional narrative structure to depict the layered complexity of life itself.

Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator

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We thank Brad Deane and Andrew Tracy, TIFF Cinematheque; Todd Wiener and Steven Hill, UCLA Film & Television Archive; Mark Balsam, Westchester Films; and Al Ruban, Faces Distribution, for their assistance.