Faces By Cassavetes Essay

585 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Social concepts in movies essays

Faces is a black and white movie directed by John Cassavetes in 1968. Cassavetes in his 4th long movie depicts a part of a middle-aged couple’s life, Maria (Lynn Carlin) and Richard (John Marley). In Faces, Cassavetes confronts the viewer with human routine crises and confusions in his own unique way that is influenced by French New Wave. In the late 1950s, a new cinematic movement arose in French that stressed on social and political issues using radical editing and visual style. In terms of form, Psychedelic movement that arose in the 1960s somehow follows the New Wave Pattern. Both of them are rebellious and indomitable, and try to make confusions. Inspired by French New Wave, Cassavetes directed his chaotic movie, Faces, that explains …show more content…

In Faces, alcohol is medicine for relieving from the everyday pain, and in the same time, it releases the pain of regret. The very first rising incident in the movie’s plot starts right after drinking when three drunk persons enter in a house and talk about almost everything and also anything. Alcohol takes control of the storyline and characters follow their drunk instinct. Cassavetes, with his Faces, illustrates a sad and lonely human who struggles with his daily life and shows himself as a lucky and happy person. Everyone in the movie dances, smiles, and laughs; however, nobody is lucky or happy. Going forward in the movie plot, Cassavetes unhides the fake happiness for the viewer through the insane and psychedelic actions. In addition, betrayal is an inseparable part of the movie. Betrayal comes after another one, and Cassavetes denounces it in a deeper layer; however, he shows it in a delicate appearance. Similar to Faces, Psychedelic art is a polished and delicate face of a sick mind. This sickness usually was created intentionally with drugs to reach the psychedelic states of consciousness. Faces also depicts the post-drinking actions and decisions and its

Show More
Related

  • Heroes Francis Cassaavant Character Analysis

    589 Words  | 2 Pages

    Have you ever felt so much guilt and shame that you want to kill yourself? Francis Cassavant in Heroes, by Robert Cormier, is a realistic and relatable character who has suffered from this feeling ever since he was little. Even as a child, he has felt unusual and out of place compared to everyone else. Francis’s characteristics determine his actions throughout his story and motivate him to join the army, beginning his expedition as a so-called “hero”.

    Read More

  • Film Noir Paul Shrader Analysis

    186 Words  | 1 Pages

    Film Noir, as Paul Schrader integrates in his essay ‘Notes on Film Noir,’ reflects a marked phase in the history of films denoting a peculiar style observed during that period. More specifically, Film Noir is defined by intricate qualities like tone and mood, rather than generic compositions, settings and presentation. Just as ‘genre’ categorizes films on the basis of common occurrences of iconographic elements in a certain way, ‘style’ acts as the paradox that exemplifies the generality and singularity at the same time, in Film Noir, through the notion of morality. In other words, Film Noir is a genre that exquisitely entwines theme and style, and henceforth sheds light on individual difference in perception of a common phenomenon. Pertaining

    Read More

  • Nicholas Carr The Shallows Essay

    775 Words  | 2 Pages

    The social generation has taken over. If you don’t tweet on the daily, receive dozens of instagram likes, or know what the heck Tumblr is, you better get Googling because you’ve been left behind. It’s easy to get caught up in all the likes, retweets, comments, and ratings. We seem to need this sense of validation through numbers. We are never offline, we are permanently logged in. In Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows he searches for the consequences in the power of technology.

    Read More

  • Psychedelic Musicians in Rock and Roll

    2740 Words  | 6 Pages

    In 1967 the Beatles were in Abbey Road Studios putting the finishing touches on their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At one point Paul McCartney wandered down the corridor and heard what was then a new young band called Pink Floyd working on their hypnotic debut, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. He listened for a moment, then came rushing back. "Hey guys," he reputedly said, "There's a new band in there and they're gonna steal our thunder." With their mix of blues, music hall influences, Lewis Carroll references, and dissonant experimentation, Pink Floyd was one of the key bands of the 1960s psychedelic revolution, a pop culture movement that emerged with American and British rock, before sweeping through film, literature, and the visual arts. The music was largely inspired by hallucinogens, or so-called "mind-expanding" drugs such as marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide; "acid"), and attempted to recreate drug-induced states through the use of overdriven guitar, amplified feedback, and droning guitar motifs influenced by Eastern music. This psychedelic consciousness was seeded, in the United States, by countercultural gurus such as Dr. Timothy Leary, a Harvard University professor who began researching LSD as a tool of self-discovery from 1960, and writer Ken Kesey who with his Merry Pranksters staged Acid Tests--multimedia "happenings" set to the music of the Warlocks (later the Grateful Dead) and documented by novelist Tom Wolfe in the literary classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)--and traversed the country during the mid-1960s on a kaleidoscope-colored school bus. "Everybody felt the '60s were a breakthrough. There was exploration of sexual freedom and [...

    Read More

  • Critical Analysis Of Dosess And Mimosas By Cherub

    1516 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the music video, “Doses and Mimosas,” the Cherub successfully portrays that drugs and alcohol is the road to happiness. The Cherub shows the viewers that using drugs and alcohol will resolve all problems. Their video promotes joyous times will occur when your under the influence. In each scene, everyone is bored out of their minds. Once drugs or alcohol gets involved, everyone’s reaction changes. They become alive. They become excited. Their body languages and their moods change in an instant.

    Read More

  • Lsd And Mainstream 1960s Media

    1888 Words  | 4 Pages

    Despite the negative portrayal in mainstream 1960s media, justifications expressed by counterculture activists for further investigation, education and experimentation under government control of LSD were rational and valid arguments. Sex, drugs, protests, war, political upheaval, cultural chaos, and social rebellion; the many comforts TV dinner eating, republican voting, church going, suburbia conformists tried to escape through conservative ideals, town meetings, and The Andy Williams Family Hour. National consciousness in 1960s United States was alive, but existed differently in every mind it dwelled, and stirred uninterrupted in every life to which it was introduced. A dream of money, success, and a house with a white picket fence still existed within the pandemonium of the nation and many still relished in the idea of “Americanism.” Television was a base for a magnitude of world news and national information. Television situation comedies created ideal families and contenting distractions from unsettling national realities. Mainstream media, both fact and fiction, influenced the nation’s minds resulting in the effect of political change and further media influence over the government. The new decade, along with the effects of the Vietnam War and the strong influence of television, began to leak from the cracks of the nation a new counterculture of rebellious teenagers, unfamiliar narcotics, and a wave of promiscuity. Among the many issues and events molding our nation into a new decade, came the question of government and mind control. For some it was the next step into human evolution, a potential tool for mind control, a liberator of human kind, but for most LSD helped define 1960s counterculture, in which it was deeply rooted.

    Read More

  • Pablo Picasso's Surrealism: A Cultural Movement

    203 Words  | 1 Pages

    Surrealism was considered a cultural movement of the time and started in the early 1920s. The aims of the Surrealists of this time seemed to follow day to day life and all they tried to show in their works were to target dream and reality. It targeted the inconsistent of the reality and dreams. They also aimed to target the element of surprise.

    Read More

  • Basquiat, Bansky and the Power of Discourse

    1039 Words  | 3 Pages

    Creativity occurs within the context of society: this is unavoidable as even artists who view themselves as outside of the 'mainstream' are constructs of society: their social construction of reality is inevitably grounded in the discourse and belief structures of the society they inhabit and were formed by, however much they choose to struggle. Indeed, philosophers such as Foucault argue that it is impossible to escape one's own society due to the effects of language and meaning being so closely intertwined. Within the context of our own society post-modernist art, especially film making, seeks to undermine the dictates of broader society in relation to meta-narratives – yet to make movies that can be easily inserted into the market costs money. Here I discount mass-market pulp-fiction success such as 'Paranormal Activity' as these are not aiming to be an expression of pure art. Those movies that aim to have a story that challenges the 'norms', that undermines the capitalist/materialist meta-narrative of the major movie production houses therefore face a struggle that in some ways parallels the struggle that young artists themselves face. This struggle can, for young artists just as much as for any citizen, be a stressor that leads to drugs and death.

    Read More

  • 60’s in America

    886 Words  | 2 Pages

    The United States, during the 1960’s was a very progressive time for our country; the way people lived there life changed dramatically and has not been the same since. The sixties counterculture is the leading role in this progressive time period; from a wide spread of drug use, to the British invasion of music, and very importantly, feminism. After the Korean War, the CIA came across information that prisoners were being brainwashed with a “truth serum.” They acted quickly and started during human research; the research was called MKULTRA. They gave LSD and other hallucinogens to their test subjects. After the research was finished, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, started doing testing of their own; this testing included close friends and family. The popularization came from their, acid tests, which included many more people. Following the new drug scene, it played an important role in music. The sixties changed the classical rock the new psychedelic rock. This new form of music came from the drug use and people wanting art music, versus the normal rock. The first large wave of feminism came from the flappers; in the sixties the second wave came and it was larger...

    Read More

  • The Use of Expressionism in Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari and Shutter Island

    1657 Words  | 4 Pages

    The link between expressionism and horror quickly became a dominant feature in many films and continues to be prominent in contemporary films mainly due to the German expressionist masterpiece Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari. Wiene’s 1920 Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari utilized a distinctive creepiness and the uncanny throughout the film that became one the most distinctive features of externalising inner mental and emotional states of protagonists through various expressionist methods. Its revolutionary and innovative new art was heavily influenced by the German state and its populace in conjunction with their experience of war; Caligari took a clear cue from what was happening in Germany at the time. It was this film that set cinematic conventions that still apply today, heavily influencing the later Hollywood film noir genre as well as the psychological thrillers that has led several film audiences to engage with a film, its character, its plot and anticipate its outcome, only to question whether the entire movie was a dream, a story of a crazy man, or an elaborate role play. This concept of the familiar and the strange, the reality, the illusion and the dream developed in Das Kabinett des Doctor Caligari, is once again present in Scorsese’s 2010 film Shutter Island.

    Read More

  • The History of the Psychedelic Movement

    4799 Words  | 10 Pages

    In an attempt to synthesize my own personal academic area of interest, that is: the history of the psychedelic movement in twentieth century America, with the content of the Asian Religions course, I have elected to study the relationship between the influx of Buddhist philosophy and the psychedelic counter-culture movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The subject, although highly specific, has nonetheless generated intellectual interest substantial enough to warrant a sub-field of study, in terms of Buddhist/American History examination. This paper will focus on the thought of the main harbingers of this movement, specifically Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Dr. Timothy Leary. This study will also examine the corruptions of classical Buddhist philosophy wrought by these intellectuals concerned with integrating the psychedelic experience in an Eastern context. The connection between Buddhism and psychedelics in the American experience is a subject of contention because of the controversial associations of chemically altered perception as compared to traditional Bodhicitta, or the mind of enlightenment. The author Emma Layman, in her book Buddhism in America, asserts:

    Read More

  • Drugs and Music

    700 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the 1960s, “hippie” culture and the use of hallucinogenic drugs, in particular LSD, became...

    Read More

  • Lettrism and Situationism: Examining and Comparing Expressionism Movements.

    2551 Words  | 6 Pages

    Art has been always seen as a form to express self emotions and ideas; an artist creates an idea and shapes it by culturally known objects and forms to send encrypted message. Through the times both, ideas and materials used, separates art in to different periods and movements. In late 40’s and late 50’s two art and culture movements emerged, one from another. The first one, Lettrism, was under the aspiration to rewrite all human knowledge. From it another movement, Situationism, appeared. It was an anti-art movement which sought for Cultural Revolution. Both of these movements belong to wide and difficulty defined movement of experiment, a movement whose field is endless. Many different people create experimental films because of the variety of reasons. Some wishes to express their viewpoints which are unconventional. But most of them have an enthusiasm for medium itself. They yearn to explore what prospects the medium has and wishes to open new opportunities to create and to explore, as well as to educate. Experimental filmmaker, differently from mainstream filmmakers, wishes to step out from the orthodox notions. The overall appreciation is not the aim that the experimental filmmakers would seek for. Experimenters usually work on the film alone or with a small group, without the big budget. They intend to challenge the traditional ideas. And with intention to do so Lettrism tries to narrow the distance between the poetry and people’s lives, while Situationism tries to transform world into one that would exist in constant state of newness. Both of these avant-garde movements root from similar sources and have similar foundations. Nonetheless, they have different intentions for the art and culture world and these movements...

    Read More

  • The Origins of Surrealism

    2002 Words  | 5 Pages

    Green 1 Controlled Chaos: The Impact of Surrealism on the Art World The Surrealist movement that began in the 1920’s, was unlike anything the art world had ever seen before. While Surrealist painters borrowed techniques from previous “ism” movements, for example Impressionism and Cubism, the prominent painters of this movement had acquired a new, shocking style all their own. Surrealism, as an art movement, stressed the importance of expanding one’s mind in order to welcome other depictions of ‘reality’. Surrealist artists channelled their subconscious and their works reflected images of total mind liberation. Unlike the art movements before it, Surrealism came the closest to truly reflecting the human dreamlike state. While this essay will explore the purpose, techniques and lasting impact of the Surrealist art movement, it should be noted that this movement transcended the boundaries of the image arts world. The influence of Surrealism can be felt in the fields of literature, film, music and philosophy, among others. The Surrealist movement started in 1920’s Europe, with Paris as the unofficial basis for the movement. Surrealism is usually linked with the Dada movement. Dadaism attacked the conventional forms of aesthetics and it stressed how absurd and unpredictable the process of artistic creation was. They created pieces of ‘non-art’ to show, out of protest, how meaningless European culture had become (de la Croix 705). The Dada movement was declared dead around 1922 when it had become ‘too organised‘ a movement, but it planted the seeds for Surrealism (de la Croix 706). While the Dada movement provided the basis for Surrealism, Surrealism was lighter and much less violent than its predecessor. Dadaism provided a basis for Su...

    Read More

  • Surrealism Essay

    1491 Words  | 3 Pages

    Unlike Dadaism, Surrealism was not about angry young men and women who were disillusioned by the horrors of the 1st world war and a bourgeois society that did not care. Surrealism was a movement dedicated to ‘the exploration of the realm of the unconsciousness and the dream. They were seeking what might be called the language of the soul. For the surrealists, it was not so much a type of work as a spiritual orientation.’ (Waldberg, 1965)

    Read More

More about Faces By Cassavetes Essay

Open Document