Avis des critiques

[Shadows] is sloppy in a lot of ways, and in a lot of the same ways Cassavetes would make sloppy films throughout his career. But it has a beautiful, musical rhythm that suggests Cassavetes the B-actor was really an art director trying to get out.

Shadows may be all ‘about’ race and racism, but its originality lies in the unresolved complexity with which Cassavetes treats those perennial subjects.

Jubilant energy feeds the film and finds a correlation in the movie's grainy starkness, its disjointed dialogue, jumpy editing, occasionally incongruous mise-en-scene, and its aggressive shifts in focus and lighting. Unaffected performances by Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, and Hugh Hurd... are aided by Cassavetes' penchant for long takes; when a scene went wrong, he would start at the beginning in order to give the actors room to settle in and resume the characters to their fullest realisation.

The fringes of the fringes, John Cassavetes' turf, an impressionistic whirl worth a thousand fumbled words... A highly variegated snapshot of diner booths, sidewalks, studios and terminals, a sustained rediscovery of the face in close-up, volatile and vulnerable. The drama and the comedy spring from "a problem with the races, that's all" (cf. Daves' Kings Go Forth), the hippest spot in town is not immune to a prejudice that can terminate a romance with a single glance.

What matters [in Shadows] is less the story... than the electric atmosphere and edgy performances... With a blue and moody Mingus soundtrack and steel-grey photography, [the film is] still a delight.

The foundation stone of American independent cinema... Cassavetes dispensed with conventions of neatly trimmed scenes and momentous melodramatic upheaval to explore real life and real love... [and] Shadows showed viewers the world Hollywood was missing.

[Shadows is] a raw, kinetic, jazz-scored dispatch from bohemian New York that [is] frank about sex, progressive on race, and intoxicated with youth. The film radiates a sense of urgency, even desperation... like something Cassavetes just had to get out of his system.

The film isn't told through drawn-out scenes where we observe keyed-up performers doing abrasive verbal somersaults; it's more of a collage that freely jumps back and forth between a series of brief flirtations, and it's as if the viewer were marching through a block party catching little snippets of activity. At 80 minutes, its cinematic flash fiction, and a suitable entry point into the lively body of work Cassavetes made.

Independent filmmaking, warts and all: the first available film by Cassavetes (an earlier version of SHADOWS has only screened once since it was made, and has been withheld from view by Gena Rowlands) contains every error and every virtue of a non-studio creation. It's still an unprecedented experience, filled with a bursting energy that makes every cut, every line of dialogue a world unto itself.

Rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film. It’s contemporaneous with early masterpieces of the French New Wave and deserves to be ranked alongside them for the freshness and freedom of its vision.

Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.

A work of its time that honestly captures its time, it is consequently a work of our time as well. It has no hero, no villain, no linear plotline, no gerrymandered suspense, no practiced comedy, and only as much sex and violence as just about all of us have encountered. Like any honest work of art, Shadows shows that life's costumes, settings, and slang change, but human situations remain relentlessly constant.