Films:

Filmography: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/16/cassavetes_filmo.html

Some Key Films (as Director):

Shadows (1959): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_%28film%29
http://www.theyshootpictures.com/review_shadows.htm

* Shadows (1959). Carney likes to polemically pit Cassavetes against Orson Welles, and especially Citizen Kane, which he has described variously as "pure melodramatic hokum. Fake art. Kitsch" and "fashionably postmodern" (not a bad achievement, really, for a film released in 1941). Yet an early, key scene in Cassavetes' first feature is pure Kane, only extended further in its exploration of form and content. Ben (Benito Carruthers), Tom (Tom Allen) and Dennis (Dennis Salas) descend upon three girls in a bar. From a shot containing all six of them as they start up a conversation, Cassavetes proceeds to an analytical division in three pairings. Each pair is framed (a high angle from the side) and positioned (next to each other and close at a table) in exactly the same way; but everything else about the three rapid-fire pick-up vignettes is different. We notice acutely the difference between the manners and personalities of the male friends, as well as the stark differences between the women they have encountered. Brenez suggests that the scene sets out to establish three "relationship modes" - young love, prostitute and client, mother and son - which it will be the task of the rest of the film to break apart and leave behind. In this dazzling three minute scene, Cassavetes both atomises the three pairs and finds every possible way of articulating the comparison between them - as Lubitsch often did in comedy, and as Welles did in the famous 'breakfast montage' of Kane. It is a virtuosic demonstration of how a scene can knit itself together through a gradual alternation between diverse points of interest, working though relations of sameness and difference: Cassavetes cuts on matching gestures of drinking; transforms one person's laugh into another's; places a statement as if it were an answer to or contradiction of a previously heard statement at another table. The scene abruptly ends on a striking inversion: the "hi" spoken by Ben's companion (Nancy Deale) after the image has already faded to blackness. And it is in the nitty-gritty of all these split-second transformations and confusions - of light and dark, of voice and body, of space and directionality, of outward act and inner desire - that Shadows explores most deeply, without ever explicitly signposting the issue in dialogue, the fraught relations of sex and race. - from: http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/01/16/cassavetes_forms.html

A Child Is Waiting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Child_Is_Waiting

Faces (1968): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faces_%28film%29
http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/cassavetes.html

A Woman Under the Influence (1974): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Woman_Under_the_Influence

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killing_of_a_Chinese_Bookie
http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=254&eid=378&section=essay

Opening Night (1977): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opening_Night


Some Key Films (as Actor):

The Killers (1964): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Killers_%281964_film%29

Rosemary's Baby (1968): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosemary%27s_Baby

Husbands [Director and Actor] (1970): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Husbands_%28film%29

Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whose_Life_Is_It_Anyway%3F

Tempest (1982): http://filmfanatic.org/reviews/?p=101