Charles Kiselyak

A Constant Forge

A Constant Forge

Charles Kiselyak’s A Constant Forge—The Life and Art of John Cassavetes is a detailed journey through the career of one of film’s greatest pioneers and iconoclasts. Assembled from candid interviews with Cassavetes’ collaborators and friends, rare photographs, archival footage, and the director’s own words, the film paints a revealing portrait of a man whose fierce love, courage, and dedication changed the face of cinema forever.

Film Info

  • United States
  • 2000
  • 200 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.33:1
  • English
  • Spine #256

Special Features

  • Biographical sketches of the actors Cassavetes used in many of his films, written by Tom Charity (John Cassavetes: Lifeworks)
  • Poster gallery for Cassavetes’ Faces, Shadows, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Available In

Collector's Set

John Cassavetes: Five Films

John Cassavetes: Five Films

Blu-ray Box Set

5 Discs

$99.96

Special Features

  • Biographical sketches of the actors Cassavetes used in many of his films, written by Tom Charity (John Cassavetes: Lifeworks)
  • Poster gallery for Cassavetes’ Faces, Shadows, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night
  • English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
A Constant Forge
Cast
John Cassavetes
Gena Rowlands
Ben Gazzara
Credits
Director
Charles Kiselyak

Current

Sean Baker’s Top 10
Sean Baker’s Top 10

Sean Baker is a writer/director and cocreator of the television show Greg the Bunny. His movies include Prince of Broadway (2008), Starlet (2012), and Tangerine (2015).

Daniel Lopatin’s Top 10
Daniel Lopatin’s Top 10

Daniel Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never, is a Brooklyn-based experimental musician. His fifth album, R Plus Seven, is now available from Warp Records.

Explore

John Cassavetes

Subject

John Cassavetes
John Cassavetes

John Cassavetes’ emotionally naked human dramas are benchmarks of American independent cinema. Having started out in New York as an actor, Cassavetes brought to his directorial efforts the same kinetic, heightened realism that marked his film and theater roles—a wily danger, the sense that at any moment things could explode from the inside. Shadows (1959), the first film he directed, self-financed for a mere $40,000, didn’t find much of an audience upon its small initial release, but it garnered Cassavetes some notice from critics (including a Venice Film Festival Critics Prize)—as well as studios, resulting in a couple of impersonal projects in the 1960s (Too Late Blues, A Child Is Waiting). He dove back into personal filmmaking later in the decade with the devastating domestic drama Faces (1968). Though hardly a crowd-pleaser, that film—made, like Shadows, wholly independently—was an art-house success, resulting in three Oscar nominations. From that point on, Cassavetes was synonymous with uncompromising, anti-studio American fare, working with a rotating cast of brilliant actors like Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, and, of course, his wife, Gena Rowlands, to touch raw nerves with such films as A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1976). Cassavetes died in 1989.