Acting cinema

In a two-part text ¹ devoted to Hans Namuth’s renowned POLLOCK (1951), Hubert Damisch, considering the hypothesis of a cinematic equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s art, said: ‘I will only retain one of the many suggestions, the one that bases its argument on the narrative processes that characterize the work of John Cassavetes to identify a kind of acting cinema, in the sense in which we refer to Jackson Pollock’s action painting.’ ² Damisch himself draws on a passage from Ray Carney’s book on the films of John Cassavetes, in which the author claims that the latter:

refuses to straighten out narrative loops and twists so that individual scenes will smoothly advance the plot. The acting releases energies that the story can’t control. The fidelity to impulse makes Cassavetes’ films the Jackson Pollocks of cinema. He would rather be true to the scribble of his characters’ inchoate expressions and to their undefined swirls of feeling than to the straight line of the story. ³