Looking for Imperfection

Gilberto Perez

• John Cassavetes: Lifeworks by Tom Charity
  Omnibus, 257 pp, £10.95, March 2001, ISBN 0 7119 7544 2
• Cassavetes on Cassavetes edited by Ray Carney
  Faber, 526 pp, £17.99, March 2001, ISBN 0 571 20157 1

‘I’m really against nudity in movies,’ Julia Roberts said a while ago. ‘When you act with your clothes on, it’s a performance. When you act with your clothes off, it’s a documentary. I don’t do documentaries.’ Quoting this bit of wit and wisdom in a recent New Yorker piece on Roberts, Anthony Lane wrote: ‘it shows . . . how remote she is from any European visions of cinema – not just from the relaxed, Old World attitude toward sex but from the European assumption (found lingering in the work of Americans like Robert Altman) that the scent of documentary can and should be allowed to flavour a fictional method.’ Lane is thinking of American cinema as Hollywood. But there is a strong tradition of American documentary, from Robert Flaherty to cinéma vérité (which despite its name was American before it was French) to Errol Morris. And as for allowing into fiction the scent of documentary, no fictional method has more of a documentary flavour than the way of making movies devised by John Cassavetes. His movies have been more admired in Europe, it is true; they are nonetheless distinctly American.