Thinking about "Faces" (1968). Some preliminary notes.

Draft. 30 April 2012.

This film poses the question: To what extent are 'faces' (e.g., surfaces) readable (interpretable)?

These characters are lost and found to each other. Where does that leave us, as the 'audience'? Is it the case that they are readable only to the extent that they allow themselves to be? Perhaps that has been part of the problem and the intrigue all along. But there are little clues, how Lynn Carlin shakily smokes her cigarette ... In this film, there isn't anything rigidly conceptual going on - it's intuitive, and I think that's why Cassavetes hasn't always been received the way he ought to be, doesn't always get the credit he deserves in those golden filmic circles where movies are discussed, correctly, as more-than-entertainment but not often correctly discussed. Anyway, he does and he doesn't. Get the much-deserved credit, that is. 

Seems stupid, that indecisiveness, because Faces is a film that clearly works. And, for the right reasons. The pairings in this film don't work like Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney. They are creepier, more fragile, and in the process of dissolving before our eyes. Faces isn't a mystical film, it isn't Ordet for chrissakes - actions can often be explained after repeated viewings of the film - but there is a resistance to having them explained as we proceed through the film, and there are actions that, even after repeated viewings, cannot be neatly decoded, in spite of all the various explanations that could be given. I have watched this film more than a dozen times. It is one of the films I turn to, and so I feel it is time to write a bit about it. The first time I watched the film, I was angered by it. It really did make me very angry, the way it was made - it did my head in. It practically gave me the worst cinematic hangover of my life, or so I felt at the time. I knew I had to give it another chance, tho. The second time I watched the film, it worked. And thus a serious love affair was ignited. The film knocks me out philosophically, visually, and yes, personally, as the setting is my hometown of Los Angeles - there are scenes that are exactly right in their pitch and portrayal of haunted L.A. streets, abysmal drunkenness in the wee hours, and one of my favorite image-moments: the character Richard Forst who has been stranded for quite some time, anxiously pacing about in the Loser's Club (I believe this is the name of the place!), who then impatiently pushes through these oh-so-L.A. lush padded double doors out into the Californian night, to the tune of "Love Has Conquered Man", still waiting for Jeannie to appear. He's supposed to be above this kind of restlessness, but this scene tells you just how much he's not. You have to see this split-second of a moment, as to my mind it's nonchalant perfection.

Ray Carney, THE Cassavetes scholar, says some absolutely brilliant things about the film. I am going to make a point of reading more of his stuff. I've been going over his chapter on Faces in "The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism, and the Movies", a chapter entitled "Noncontemplative Art". It is a must-read for discussion of the aesthetic principles and values at work in this film. Carney truly understands Cassavetes' treatment of his characters - how they are at once autonomous agents for their own acts of self-creation and frightened beings who withdraw "from the prospect of ontological openness" (Carney 109). Carney shows us that (i) some directors, such as Hitchcock and Welles, use their actors as relatively passive vehicles (sometimes inexpressive, sometimes highly expressive - this doesn't change their function, unfortunately) for the extrapersonal stylistic effects that are controlled to express abstract meanings, and that (ii) Cassavetes, and directors who work in his vein, use actors who move contrary to or independently of the meanings the directors have chosen to deploy. Abstract meanings are jostled and overturned, and in the case of Faces, this is achieved quite literally through the use of FACES: faces that exhibit a high degree of changeability, in keeping with the violent fluctuations of their lives. The eccentricities of expression, then, are not merely on display, but actively work against semantic stability.

If, as Carney argues, meaning is not inherited in this film but is created anew, and revised minute by minute (see Carney 103), then there is a difficulty that requires sorting out. What I wish to ask is: How do these characters simultaneously have the endowment of this impressive self-consciousness yet not have the ability to step outside of themselves to understand themselves more dispassionately? Are the characters just being difficult, while the abstract meanings are still, in fact, being communicated? As I am in agreement with Carney on the major points of his analysis of Faces, I will try to work out an answer to this question in my follow-up piece, to be written shortly...