Shadows and 02/02

My notes from tonight's class with Jonathan Rosenbaum are all over the page. I was scribbling madly trying to absorb as much as possible. Maybe over doing it a bit. But of course, I've got the insane urge to suck the nectar out of this history and use it for my own good.

I was always weary of Cassavetes in the past. I'm not even sure why. But I liked Shadows a lot. Maybe because of the iconography. The architecture and structure of jazz NYC. Cassavetes made films with the artifice of reality and humanism. But at the same time extremely fictionalized. Shadows breaks 180, no eyeline matches (remember Straub: eye line matches is boring Hollywood shit.), editing all over the place. But the 16mm B&W dirty film with its sync off has an extreme reality to it, in the sense that you're so aware of this being an artifact and a document of the time.

Shadows, Cassavetes

Which brings up similar ideas to another class I am in called Bordering on Fiction. Our first assignment is to take Saturday (02/02) and create a piece that is teetering on the edge of fiction and non-fiction. It can be a document of Saturday, or taking an event that has happened on that day in history, and crafting a less than 5 minute film or video. I'll explain what I'm working on later, but I'm choosing a historical event, I'll say that.

Recently I am noticing that the line between fiction and reality is very thin, more so than ever. Imamura's A Man Vanishes was really woke me up from a narrative slumber, a film that seems to be a documentary until that world starts to fall apart and you no longer know what is real and what is fabricated.

Whenever I start thinking about this subject I think about an Antonioni quote a friend passed on to me:
"We need to be more violent to reality."

As for Shadows, it seems so raw and based in such a specific time and place, with the actors names the same as their characters, it could be taken for reality, easy. And maybe it should be.