Under the Influence but in Glory: Gena Rowlands in the Films of John Cassavetes

Izabela Paja

Abstract

Paja analyses Gena Rowlands’s acting style, which was created in close association with John Cassavetes, the actress’ s husband and director of many films she played in. Cassavetes made his films with and in cooperation with a group of friends and his family. The films were shot at their homes, and the way the actors and actresses wore clothes, their hairstyles, the way they moved and gesticulated derived from their natural predispositions and likings. Rowlands’s acting image is repeated in successive films. She played women struggling through difficult periods of their lives, wives and mothers who were oversensitive, tired, whimsical, uncompromising and embroiled in obligations, seeking to regain personal freedom, and women in the mood for love but finding it difficult to communicate with the surrounding world. Their fate is expressed in the situation described by one of the heroines: I have no real problems; I am just lonely. Cassavetes placed the heroines in the centre of the represented world, their mental experiences lent dynamism to events and determined meanings.