John Cassavetes, Shadows, 1959

With the proliferation of the Internet and low-cost means to produce movies, independent film has fully entered the mainstream. Sundance has become more of a photo-op for Hollywood's 'Who's Who' to wear their latest skicaps, than it is a venue to introduce innovative new filmmakers such as when Steven Soderberg made his debut with Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989).

Today's independent filmmakers can all thank John Cassavetes for becoming the grandfather of the independent movement. Cassavetes' directorial debut, Shadows, is remarkable on multiple fronts. First, Shadows is simply the coolest American film you will ever see made prior to 1960. Its uncompromisingly different than anything that was made up to that point, anywhere in the world. If Shadows had been a French language film it would have been known as the founding film of the French New Wave (Godard's Breathless wasn't issued until a year later).

However, because this film also deals with very American topics such as inter-racial dating and the Beat movement, it is solidly an American classic; you expect Neil Cassidy and Kerouac's "On the Road" crowd to show up and hang out with the Shadows protagonists as they roamed the streets of New York City. You'd be hard pressed to find a black protagonist in almost any other film of the era; keep in mind, this film was made almost a decade before Sidney Poitier played his infamous role in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (1967)!

Finally, there's a real feeling that the characters are not acting but are actually living the life portrayed on the screen. Jazz music underscores the film and gives it its pace, at one moment slow and reserved, the next moment bursting with energetic passion, sometimes even with violence. The sound quality and scratchy-ness of the film is sub-par but just having the opportunity to watch Shadows in any format is a treat.

Back to the Past

Bono once said that “Every artist is a cannibal. Every poet is a thief”, a quote which I think he stole from Picasso. This statement may seem self evident to every student at USC Film School but to the average movie consumer, our opinion of what’s new and innovative in the film we just viewed while eating a large tub of buttered popcorn is often subject to rash overstatement. We are easily impressed, as evidenced by the fact that we’re up to the fourth installment of the Saw horror series.

One of the reasons for this is that most people don’t watch many old movies so, with the exception of a handful of classic films which have spanned generations of viewers, most of us don’t really know what’s come before us. I spend a lot of time watching old films, which I find in most cases fascinating. Old films are really used in two major ways by modern directors and movie execs:

The first is the least interesting objective of pure revenue generation / exploitation with the primary example being sequels. When Disney saw an opportunity to slap a modern face on the classic Parent Trap (1961) and released a “modern” version of it in 1998, their primary motivation was the dollar sign. In most cases, sequels are marginally successful from a financial standpoint but result usually in watered-down imitations from an artistic standpoint.

What’s fascinating is the second use of old film: when a great director uses their film to open a dialogue with a director of a classic film by borrowing elements of older films which inspire them while adding new value to it. Most people were blown away by Ridley Scott’s futuristic vision of the Earth in Blade Runner (1983), a screen shot of which is shown on the right. However, many elements of Scott's (and Philip Dick) vision were contained and clearly influenced by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), as shown below. In fact, Metropolis is clearly the ground-zero film which influenced not only Blade Runner but a whole host of favorites such as Back to the Future (1985) and Hudsucker Proxy (1994) and The Matrix (1999). While most people have not seen Metropolis, Robert Zemeckis, the Coen Brothers and the Wachowski Brothers clearly have.

Finally, no discussion of re-visiting old films would be complete without Quentin Tarantino, the self-professed film junkie who may be most adept in the world at taking old film concepts, stealing the best parts of them and creating a truly uniquely new and modern product from them, a la Pulp Fiction. Indeed, generations of future directors will be using his style of non-linear storytelling for many years to come.

Bottom line: there are a ton of great old films out there and hopefully this blog can serve to highlight some of the ones which have aged well and are worthwhile for a wide range of today's movieviewers to watch.