 CASSAVETES ON CASSAVETES
Edited by Ray Carney
Faber and Faber $25
"If somebody says there's an art picture — I don't want to go!" John Cassavetes exclaims at one point in this generous, ambitious book. "I'm not a highbrow or an intellectual. I'm a street person. I just believe that all the things that I can think everybody else can feel."
Getting those thoughts, by hook or crook, into movies for 30 years resulted in Cassavetes' place today as the spiritual father of American independent film. As editor (and he is so much more), Ray Carney, summarizes it, "Cassavetes pioneered a new conception of what film can be and do."
Carney spent 11 years compiling, distilling and shaping mountains of material into what became "the autobiography that Cassavetes," who died in 1989, "never lived to write." He takes Cassavetes' words, culled from interviews and the director's own writings, and alternates them with a clarifying editorial narrative, supported by information from colleagues and friends, to deliver a seamless chronological study. (If only there were a filmography and an index!) There is a good balance between setting records straight and providing the immediacy of Cassavetes' passionate, opinionated, compelling voice.
"Don't worry about the words!" you can hear him yelling when describing how he dealt with actors while shooting his most well-known and best-reviewed picture, Woman Under the Influence (1974). "...I don't care if there is not one word right. Go through your mind what the attitude would be if there were no lines." On creating his first movie, Shadows (1961), he says, "It didn't matter to me whether or not [it] would be any good... It was an experiment all the way, and our main objective was just to learn."
Cassavetes, who directed by acting out scenes himself, kept an in-the-moment energy in his process that always wound up on the screen. Thanks to Ray Carney, it is also here on the page.
 EYEWITNESS: A FILMMAKER'S MEMOIR OF THE CHICANO MOVEMENT
By Jesús Salvador Treviño
Arte Publico Press $15.95
"Your weapon of choice!" a film school instructor said to his little class of wannabe filmmakers in 1968. He had brandished a Konica Super 8mm camera high in the air, then passed it around to the mostly African-American and Mexican-American students at the federally funded New Communications School in Hollywood. When the camera was handed to then 22-year-old Jesús Salvador Treviño, it was, "a sacred moment," as he stared, lost in a trance, at "the instrument that would come to dominate [his] life."
But Eyewitness is not a show about how making movies saved one man's hide or only another validation for disadvantaged youth getting an education, though both elements are true. It is a deeply personal, detailed account of what one passionate social activist witnessed firsthand in the burgeoning Chicano movement of the late '60s and early '70s, and how he grew to serve the cause most effectively through his pioneering, creative films.
Treviño, who won the 1988 DGA Award for Best Daytime Drama with Gangs, began making documentaries (and breakthrough programs like Ahora!) for KCET public television in Los Angeles. Eventually directing episodes of such popular series as Star Trek: Voyager and The Practice, the co-executive producer of Resurrection Boulevard learned that he must remain "a high-profile player in mainstream media ... to continue [his] efforts for social change."
Much of this inspiring memoir's appeal is in following Treviño's journey toward that conclusion — and, for Anglos, having our eyes opened, if only a little, to the struggles of U.S. Latinos as seen through those of a sensitive filmmaker.
 KUBRICK: THE DEFINITIVE EDITION
By Michel Ciment
Faber and Faber $50
The 1980 French edition of Kubrick became a classic — then nearly impossible to find. The present volume, with an added chapter on Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is revised, amplified and absolutely deserving of its "definitive" subtitle.
Stanley Kubrick, who was known to avoid commenting on his work, gave three interviews to respected French film critic, Michel Ciment, and revised them in 1981. His voice is again recorded in a chapter on Full Metal Jacket (1987), in response to a series of questions Ciment had sent. "I'm always surprised by the reactions to my films," Kubrick says. "There is usually enough truth in [them] to be sure of offending somebody."
There are more than 400 photographs here, frequently from frame enlargements, and engrossing interviews with members of casts and crews. The filmography is a dream, not only crediting everyone involved in each picture, but giving story synopses too. As Sydney Pollack says about Ciment and this opus, "[H]e is as meticulous and painstakingly thorough as Kubrick himself."
 THE HITCHCOCK MURDERS
By Peter Conrad
Faber and Faber $25
In the course of a book with chapters called "Portraits of the Artist as a Killer" and "Crimes of the Camera," Peter Conrad does not examine Alfred Hitchcock's films in chronological order. He believes that the director's concerns and tactics had not "changed significantly in ... a career that lasted half a century."
This makes you work harder (especially without a filmography) to absorb all the cross-cuttings among titles, years, genres and theories. But it drenches you in Hitchcock's world with the exciting intensity of a ride on the merry-go-round in Stangers on a Train (1951). And if, occasionally, some of the analyses seem a little far-fetched, so much the better.
Take Conrad's riff on the sinister nature of teeth. "Each tooth is like a tombstone," he writes, pointing out that the dentist in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) "would sooner kill than cure." In The Wrong Man (1957), "Henry Fonda's financial woes have their origins in the mouth of his wife" and her impacted wisdom teeth. There are plenty of other forays into objects of Hitchcockian symbolism — the clarifications of which, Conrad admits, the director probably wouldn't have appreciated. "Hitchcock, keen to defend himself against demystification ... did his best to frustrate inquisition."
Conrad's comparisons between the films and their literary sources are fascinating. And particularly valuable are his sections on Hitchcock's use of the camera as both character and culprit. Think of the lacerated Tippi Hedren near the end of The Birds (1963). "The camera closes in to inspect the damage. She glares at it and wildly beats it away with flapping hands."
Though Hitchcock's work is more complex than the macabre pigeonhole to which it is usually consigned, its repeated emphasis on the creative possibilities of death warrant the serious investigation given here. As John Dall reminded us in Rope (1948), "Murder can be art too."
 BRAVE FILMS, WILD NIGHTS: 25 YEARS OF FESTIVAL FEVER
By Brian D. Johnson
Random House Canada $24.95
Published to celebrate the silver anniversary of the Toronto International Film Festival, this big paperback also looks at "what happens to art when it enters the mainstream." As one of the world's largest and most influential film festivals, probably second only to Cannes in importance, Toronto has launched such films as Chariots of Fire (1981), American Beauty (1999) and Michael Moore's landmark documentary, Roger & Me (1989).
Brian D. Johnson, film critic for Maclean's, reflects over the festival's failures, triumphs, tributes (Warren Beatty, John Cassavetes, Martin Scorsese) and tribulations (battles with Canadian censors; the high maintenance of Hollywood stars). Unfortunately, poor cropping obscures parts of the text and there are no dated headings or years cited after film titles. Even so, it is worth having this one-of-a-kind collection of historic photos, and fresh interviews with the people who helped make Toronto, and whose careers Toronto helped make.
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