Shadows (film)

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This article is about the 1959 film. For other meanings, see shadow (disambiguation).

Shadows

Directed by	John Cassavetes
Produced by	Maurice McEndree
Written by	John Cassavetes
Starring	Ben Carruthers Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd Anthony Ray
Release date(s)	November 11, 1959
Running time	87 min
Language	English
IMDb profile

Shadows is a 1959 improvisational film about interracial relations during the Beat Era. It stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, and Anthony Ray. It was written and directed by John Cassavetes; film scholars often consider the film the birth of independent film in the U.S.

Cassavetes essentially shot the film twice, once in 1957 and again in 1959, removing, adding, and rearranging scenes. The second version is the version Cassavetes favored; he did make the first version available for screenings, but he eventually lost track of the print, and for decades it was believed to have been destroyed. In 2004, after over a decade of searching, Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney, a professor at Boston University, announced that he had discovered the last remaining print of the original version of the film, which had somehow ended up in a box in a subway before being bought with a lot of other "lost and found" objects. ^[1] This discovery has led to a considerable amount of open hostility from Gena Rowlands and Al Ruban towards Carney.

Film critic Leonard Maltin calls Cassavetes' second version of Shadows "a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema". The movie was shot with a 16 mm handheld camera on the streets of New York. Much of the dialogue was improvised, and the crew were class members or volunteers. Some of the score is by jazz legend Charles Mingus underlines the movie's Beat Generation theme of alienation and raw emotion. The movie's plot focuses on an interracial relationship — still a taboo subject in Eisenhower-era America.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.