Ray Carney, also known as Raymond Carney, is an American film theorist. His primary field of study is the works of actor and director John Cassavetes. He teaches at Boston University and has written two books on Cassavetes.
Alternate Cassavetes works
Carney has discovered alternate versions of Cassavetes's seminal works, Faces and Shadows. The longer version of Faces he discovered is stored at the Library of Congress, but has been suppressed by Gena Rowlands, the widow of Cassavetes and executor of his estate. [1]
The alternate Shadows, also known as Shadows I or the Ur-Shadows, was created two years before the 1959 version. It was largely improvised, critically touted at the time of its screening but it confused most of the public in attendance, causing walk-outs. Cassavetes himself found the entire thing too technical, but he never-- as is wrongly supposed-- suppressed this work. He hired a Hollywood scriptwriter, rewrote and reshot over the next two years, creating an entirely different film-- only about a third of the Ur-Shadows remains in the final product.
The film was thought lost for many years, but Carney managed to find a badly-worn sixteen millimeter print. Gena Rowlands has stated that no such film ever existed, and has started a number of legal proceedings to confiscate it from Carney and destroy the film. [2] She has also succeeded in having him fired as scholarly advisor to the Criterion Collection's recent Cassavetes box-set-- after his work had been completed. [3] Recently, he has discovered paperwork which states that the rights to the Ur-Shadows belongs to the cast and not Cassavetes. All of this is detailed on his website.
Other works
Besides his work on Cassavetes, Carney has written on Carl Theodor Dreyer, Frank Capra, and Mike Leigh. He is also known for his strident essays attacking popular culture, Formalist film theory, and kitsch.
Criticism
Critics of Carney find him to be both elitist and obscurist, as he often champions films and filmmakers that the mainstream (and even fellow film critics) have never even heard of. In addition to the works of Charles Burnett, Dreyer, Cassavetes, Tom Noonan, and Yasujiro Ozu, he has championed some filmmakers like Andrew Bujalski, whose Funny Ha-Ha [4] has never gotten a theatrical release (outside of festivals and college campuses). The stridency with which Carney attacks mainstream (and even outside-the-mainstream) culture and works may seem to some to border on fanatical.
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