Amateur improvisational casting produced a socially daring film

Evidence

The two weeks of filming coincided with John Cassavetes’s shooting retakes for his independent 16mm feature, Shadows. Not yet thirty, Cassavetes had fashioned an impressionistic drama from thirty hours of footage shot during the summer of 1957. The movie was largely unscripted; it was cast with Cassavetes’s acting students and based on dramatic improvisations. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 37

Categorization

• XREF: The interracial-family subject matter and Times Square locations connect to wider claims about how bohemia’s geographic density enabled encounters with difference.