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Camera Obscura 19.2 (2004) 104-139


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Free Indirect Affect in Cassavetes' Opening Night and Faces

Homay King


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
In the middle of things: Opening Night (dir. John Cassavetes, US, 1977). Courtesy Photofest
[End Page 104]
How to make the affect echo?
—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

In the Middle of Things: Opening Night

John Cassavetes' Opening Night (US, 1977) begins not with the curtain going up, but backstage. In the first image we see, Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) has just exited stage left into the wings during a performance of the play The Second Woman. In this play, Myrtle acts the starring role of Virginia, a woman in her early sixties who is trapped in a stagnant second marriage to a photographer. Both Myrtle and Virginia are grappling with age and attempting to come to terms with the choices they have made throughout their lives. In the wings, Myrtle bustles about discontentedly, whispering to a stagehand that there has been a problem with the props. She quickly takes a drink from a bottle of [End Page 105] liquor before returning to the wings and readying herself for her next entrance. The film cuts to a shot of knobs on a lighting control board, then to a mobile, low-angle image of a red curtain rising above the stage. In this unusual shot, the camera follows the edge of the curtain up to the rafters, then pans rapidly down to the edge of the orchestra pit. The image is momentarily washed out with illumination as the camera swings past the row of bright footlights. From here, the film cuts to a long shot taken from the stage of a crowded audience. The point of view this shot provides is ambiguous—we do not yet know what kind of play we are watching, who exactly is playing the scene, or where the actors stand, and Myrtle has not yet entered the stage.

These three shots cannot be associated with any particular figure's point of view. The next one, however, situates us in a highly specific location. The film now cuts to a poor view of the stage taken from a seat in the middle of the audience toward the back of the theater. The silhouetted head of a theatergoer seated in the next row blocks the camera's line of vision, taking up almost half the film frame. As the camera cranes its neck, we are able to discern a set onstage representing the interior of a commodious apartment. The set is sparsely decorated in a modernist style; the most conspicuous design elements are several large black and white photographs, including a greatly enlarged portrait of an older woman wearing a black hood and work apron. Onstage, we see Maurice (John Cassavetes) in character as Virginia's husband, Marty, seated at the top of a staircase. Myrtle now enters as Virginia, and the two actors begin to play a scene in which they argue after she has returned home late from shopping and drinking alone at a bar. After this brief scene, the film's opening credits begin.

This introductory sequence is an unusual prelude to the rest of Opening Night, one that establishes a wholly unconventional relationship of the spectator to the action both of the film and of the play within it. The film's first shot places us in the wings: we do not yet know what kind of play is being performed or that the play has not yet opened officially (at this point, The Second Woman is in a trial run at a small theater in New Haven before [End Page 106] debuting on Broadway). The shots of the lighting controls and rising curtain are similarly disorienting. Cassavetes shows the curtain rising not in a fixed long shot from the audience, but in close-up with a mobile camera which is positioned at the very edge of the stage. Where we might expect the film camera to reduplicate the proscenium arch, we are instead placed on the border...

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