Ray Carney

Ray Carney, also known as Raymond Carney, Ph.D, is a prolific and controversial American scholar and critic, primarily known for his work as a film theorist, although he writes extensively on American art and literature as well. He is most well known for his study of the works of actor and director John Cassavetes. He teaches in the American Studies department at Boston University and has published several books on American art and philosophy. [1] He is a self-described film critic.

Background

Carney was educated at Harvard (magna cum laude) and Rutgers. Professor Carney taught literature at Middlebury College and Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin. He was also a William Rice Kimball Fellow at Stanford, working on a study of performance art, particularly the stand up comedy of Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce.[2]

He met Cassavetes during the last years of the director's life, and was the first American scholar to write books on the director.

Alternate Cassavetes works

Carney has discovered alternate versions of Cassavetes's seminal works, Faces and Shadows. The longer version of Faces he discovered is stored at the Library of Congress, but has been suppressed by Gena Rowlands, the widow of Cassavetes and executor of his estate.[3]

The alternate Shadows, also known as Shadows I or the Ur-Shadows, was created two years before the 1959 version. It was largely improvised, critically touted at the time of its screening but it confused most of the public in attendance, causing walk-outs. Cassavetes himself found the entire thing too technical, but he never — as is wrongly supposed — suppressed this work. He hired a Hollywood scriptwriter, rewrote and reshot over the next two years, creating an entirely different film — only about a third of the Ur-Shadows remains in the final product.

The film was thought lost for many years, but Carney managed to find a pristine copy that apparently had only been screened two or three times before it was lost.[4] Carney has posted three video clips from Shadows I for viewing on his website to verify the film's condition and indicate the presence of a complete credits sequence, which demonstrates that the version he possesses is a final edited copy, not a rough version. [5]

Rowlands's response

Gena Rowlands has stated that no such film ever existed. She does believe, however, that as Cassavetes's widow, and the owner of several of her husband's films, including the released Shadows, she has legal ownership of any work-in-progress; she also argues that the film is "stolen property"[6]. And so, she has started a number of legal proceedings to confiscate the film from Carney and destroy it.

Carney cites U. S. copyright law, which states that a work in progress or an alternate version of a work is not protected by the same copyright as the finished product, and so is in the public domain. He also has discovered documentation that gives ownership of the Ur-Shadows not to Cassavetes (and ultimately Rowlands) but to the cast and crew.

Carney and Rowlands have always had a testy relationship. Carney was a close friend of Cassavetes in the director's final years, and used a number of private conversations, as well as documented sources, to form his book, Cassavetes on Cassavetes. Cassavetes on Cassavetes, widely acclaimed by both aspiring filmmakers and established figures such as Harmony Korine and Xan Cassavetes (Rowlands's daughter), presents its subject warts and all, the good side and the bad. Rowlands did not read the book, but heard about some of the more unseemly aspects of her husband's personality covered within, and, according to Carney, began discrediting Carney's work, going so far as to have him fired from the Criterion Collection Cassavetes box-set — after his work as scholarly advisor had been completed. [7]

Carney, for his part, admires Rowlands greatly as an actress, but has also called her an idiot who has no idea what she's talking about when she interprets her husband's films. Carney compares Rowlands to Norma Desmond, the Gloria Swanson character in Sunset Boulevard, and accuses her of whitewashing her husband's life, denying bouts of depression and doubt.[8]

Rowlands has not spoken to the press about the matter, but some, such as Jonathan Rosenbaum, have suggested that it might have less to do with trying to destroy or suppress the film and more to do with Carney's name being attached with its find; Carney's caustic personal style, coupled with his usurping of the name Cassavetes for his own website [9], has irritated members of the Cassavetes estate. The argument, again neither confirmed nor denied by Rowlands, is that they'll be more than happy to release the film once it has been distanced from Carney.

However, past actions taken by Rowlands make Carney's supporters quite skeptical: for example, when the UCLA mounted a restoration of Cassavetes' film Husbands, she asked for (and was granted) the removal of ten minutes of the film that she found offensive, including the famous and controversial vomiting scene. After the premiere of the Ur-Shadows at the Rotterdam Film Festival, an apologia was issued at the behest of the Cassavetes estate, which states that the Ur-Shadows was an unauthorized working cut never meant to be shown to the public, and that only the official and complete version of Shadows was meant to be seen.[10] This flies in the face of the idea that they would be "more than happy to release it" once Carney's name has become detached from the find.

The legal proceedings involving Ur-Shadows has been very costly for Carney, both emotionally and financially. Rowlands, he argues, being a major Hollywood star with substantial finances at her disposal, has nothing to lose in this case; Carney, a university professor whose lawyer's bills costs "thousands of dollars an hour", says he stands to lose both his house and his job. Carney remains resolute that he will never surrender the film to Rowlands.

Other works

Besides his work on John Cassavetes, Carney has written on Carl Theodor Dreyer, Frank Capra, and Mike Leigh. He has also written extensively on American literature (particularly the works of Henry James) and art (particularly pre-modernist painters such as Sargent and Hopper).

Popular culture, kitsch, and symbolism

Carney is highly critical of much mainstream art, and the way it is approached from an academic standpoint. He is well-known, and in some circles reviled, for the stridency with which he attacks artists as diverse as Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, the Coen Brothers, and Quentin Tarantino, whom he perceives as tricksters, using empty style and pseudo-intellectualism to score points with an "in" crowd (he often refers to Spielberg's output after Schindler's List as Steven "Please take me seriously" Spielberg movies.)

One well-known example was his 1989 essay on Woody Allen, Modernism for the Millions [11] . In this piece, Carney argues that Allen uses humour in his films to diffuse situations that he, the filmmaker, is uncomfortable with, such as drug use and depression. At the same time, says Carney, Allen wants to get credit for bringing up these issues, as that's what serious artists do.

Carney is as critical of the academic establishment that gives plaudits to these artists as he is of the artists themselves. He feels that symbolism is a "high school" understanding of art, and that this kind of decoder ring approach is in place because it's easier to grasp and makes those that teach feel more important and esoteric.

Pragmatic aesthetic

While Carney decries surface style and finds using symbols to gain meaning from a work promotes a shallow understanding of art, he believes that the meaning of the work lies at its surface. He posits a world where art is appreciated for what the work actually contains rather than what is read into it, an aesthetic he refers to as pragmatic.[12] Living moment to moment, he argues, one can, for example, just appreciate the acting in a film and gain meaning from that, from what the characters actually say and do, and the tonal shifts that accompany these actions.

Carney's supporters

Carney's dedication to film as an art form in general, and his decidedly anti-mainstream stance in particular, have made him something of a hero to many aspiring and first time filmmakers. His website has a large archive of letters [13] from like-minded spirits. In addition to the amateur opinion (though Carney would never use the word disparagingly), he has supported and in turn received support from such independent luminaries as Charles Burnett, Tom Noonan, Andrew Bujalski, Robert Kramer, and Mark Rappaport.

Criticism

Critics of Carney find him to be both elitist and obscurant, as he often champions films and filmmakers that the mainstream film critics (and even fellow "elitists") have never even heard of. The stridency of his essays and opinions have caused some to call him a fanatic; others find him annoying, cloying, and childish, particularly when he throws around words like "idiot" to describe his fellow scholars, critics, and film professionals. Additionally, Carney has recently come under fire due to a blog posting he made on a Boston University website. His blog is critical of his graduate students at the school's College of Communication. Carney states: "The school ends up with an awful lot of third-rate grad. students... they have virtually NO artistic curiosity or intellectual passion. If they had, they wouldn't have ended up here because they would have been admitted to, and given scholarships at, better schools." [14]

Some are quick to point out that Carney is the self-described expert on the work of Cassavetes, and that he has a tendency to dismiss other opinions on the matter in toto. Noted critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, himself a target of some of Carney's attacks, noted that in Carney's book Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Carney does not list his sources, "setting up obstacles to other researchers that are so formidable that he effectively seems to be staking a territorial claim and announcing ‘No Trespassing' to other scholars." [15]

External links

• The John Cassavetes Pages
• Interview with Cynthia Rockwell
• Interview with Shelly Friedman
• Ray Carney and Off-Off-Hollywood