Esther Kinsky’s Celluloid Dreams

In Ray Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes, the filmmaker John Cassavetes is asked by a friend, Burt Lane, what makes him tick. The two are sitting in a restaurant, their table set with silverware, salt and pepper shakers, and condiments. Cassavetes grabs each object one by one, brings it close, and then drops it to the floor. Lane interprets the performance as an answer: “He was telling me that he felt a void inside himself that he couldn’t fill no matter how fiercely he grabbed for things.” Iconoclastic, collaborative, combative, Cassavetes made art to wage a war with that void. He knew it was futile. “The idea of making a film,” Cassavetes once said, “is to package a lifetime of emotion and ideas into a two-hour capsule form, two hours where some images flash across the screen and in that two hours the hope is that the audience will forget everything and that celluloid will change lives. Now that’s insane, that’s a preposterously presumptuous assumption, and yet that’s the hope.”