After 17 years, College of Communication film professor Ray Carney finally found what he was looking for.
The object of his search – an original version of independent filmmaker and actor John Cassavetes’ first film, “Shadows” – was found last year and premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in Holland Saturday night.
Cassavetes filmed two versions of “Shadows.” The earlier version, filmed in 1957 and 1958, was screened only three times in 1958 for selected audiences, according to Carney’s website. Cassavetes used only one-third of the original footage to create a second version, which was publicly released.
Shortly before his death, Carney said Cassavetes told him about the earlier version, which was lost and presumed destroyed.
After a decade and a half of phone calls, announcements and interviews, a friend of Carney’s put him in contact with the woman who eventually found the film. She claimed her father had bought a film with a similar name at a New York City subway lost-and-found sale hoping it was an adult film.
The woman eventually found the two reels of film in an attic and sent them to Carney, who said he had been following other leads in the meantime and did not believe the woman’s prints would be the film he was looking for.
Once the film, which was too fragile to be run through a projector, was transferred to DigiBeta format, Carney said he was able to view the original version of “Shadows” for the first time in 45 years.
Carney said he was happy to find the film, but the search was more exciting. About 10 years ago, he began reconstructing the original film and published his finding in a book entitled “Shadows.”
“Writing that book was some of the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “It was like a crossword puzzle. By figuring out all the downs, I could figure out what the acrosses were. I was about 95 percent correct, but it was almost boring to look at the actual movie after that.”
Carney said he traveled to the Rotterdam Film Festival this weekend to lecture about the film. It re-premiered on Saturday night to approximately 400 film aficionados from around the world. Another 100 people sat for a smaller screening Sunday night.
“[The festival] was a great opportunity to show this film to professionals – a large group of elite, special people.”
COM Film and Television Department Chairman Charles Merzbacher said the film is important to the film community because of Cassavetes’ rising profile as one of the first American independent filmmakers.
“‘Shadows’ was Cassavetes’ first feature and therefore his first stab at a radically personal approach to filmmaking,” he said. “The discovery of an earlier version of this work therefore lets film scholars track more accurately the evolution of Cassavetes’ vision.”
COM film professor Roy Grundmann said Carney’s discovery is also important to the Boston University community.
“It was particularly artists such as Cassavetes who demonstrated that one could make films outside the established industrial circuits that were aesthetically innovative, cheap and commercially viable,” he said. “Carney’s research once more put BU at the forefront of film scholarship.”