Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
1. We still don’t have access to the original version of John Cassavetes’ Shadows after critic Ray Carney tracked down the only existing print and showed a video of it twice at the Rotterdam Film Festival in early 2004. I was lucky enough to see it at the time, and even though I regard it more as a fascinating and historically important curiosity than as a lost masterpiece, I agree with Carney, and disagree with Cassavetes’ widow, Gena Rowlands, that it should be available to the general public. In the meantime, however, Carney has posted three clips of this version on his website (scroll down a bit). What he’s made available is only a little over four and a half minutes from the film, and Carney’s name and URL are stamped on every frame, but it’s still enough to give one a taste of Charlie Mingus’s eccentric original score (especially during the credit sequence)–and enough to support Carney’s thesis that this is a finished film, flaws and all, and not a mere work print.
- The treasures to be found at YouTube appear to be endless: Alain Resnais’ first major short, Les Statues meurent aussi (1953, see photo), written by Chris Marker—admittedly without subtitles (though I’ve never seen a subtitled print);
