The filmmaker who, above all, was making Hollywood new at the time was John Cassavetes. Despite the apparently familiar mode of naturalistic drama in which he worked, he exploded the very notion of character and plot by finding the interstitial moments that emerge from stories, the explosions and the intimacies that are the surprising and unpredictable mark of people rather than characters. Cassavetes filmed with a combination of passionate proximity and gestural freedom that both reveals actors in intense physicality and abuts the hard, unbreakable nucleus of inner opacity. He created a cinema of being, in which the furious performances of some of the best actors of his time (including himself; his wife, Gena Rowlands; Peter Falk; Seymour Cassel; and Ben Gazzara) outstripped the assignation of traits and the calculation of rationales in screenplay construction and gave a sense of the vast wonder and terrifying force packed into ordinary lives.
他创造了一种展现人性的电影，当这些最为出色的演员――包括卡萨维兹他自己，他的妻子吉娜?罗兰兹(Gena Rowlands)，彼得?福克(Peter Falk)，西莫?卡塞尔(Seymour Cassel)和本?戈扎那(Ben Gazzara)――激情四溢地表演时，他们不再受限于角色本身的特点，不再仅仅是按照剧本合理地将故事情节向前推进，而是展现出平凡的小人物创造的惊人奇迹并赋予他们震撼人心的力量。
Of course, “The Godfather” isn’t about ordinary people but about potentates of crime, modern-day Borgias, whose psychology and tactics are boiled down to a visual and textual language and a performance style that renders them transparent to ordinary viewers. The pair of movies strips away mystery and wrenches the characters from their web of context. For example, I’ve never understood the veneration of Marlon Brando’s performance as Vito Corleone. Brando is certainly one of the best, most fascinating actors ever to appear in a movie, but in “The Godfather, ” the artifice of the composed role overwhelms even his titanic nature (he is, by contrast, harrowingly present in “Apocalypse Now”). Take the death scene; as the aging Don frolics with his young grandson, Coppola lets the camera roll. For a few extended moments, the director seems to be having fun watching this grand character―not Corleone but Brando―cut loose and clown around as if the camera weren’t watching. It’s a terrible disappointment to see, when the scene winds up with Corleone’s collapse, that the japery was staged solely for its dramatic outcome. Brando’s best role is himself, and he was never better than in the Maysles brothers’ 1966 documentary portrait, “ Meet Marlon Brando.”
以去世那一段戏为例，当年迈的唐跟他的小孙子戏耍的时候，科波拉任由摄像机拍摄。在有些镜头里，导演似乎很享受的看着这个伟大的角色摆脱束缚，就好像摄像机不存在一般的在耍宝，只是他眼中的角色不是柯里昂而是白兰度。当画面以柯里昂的死告终时，我很失望的看到闹剧的上演仅仅是为了铺垫戏剧性的结果。白兰度扮演过最好的角色就是他自己，他在1966年梅索斯兄弟制作的纪录片《认识马龙?白兰度》(Meet Marlon Brando)中的表现是他最完美的表演。
As I watched Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) in his rustic Italian exile attempting to court the dark-eyed Apollonia, I was suddenly reminded of John Ford’s “ The Quiet Man.” That 1952 film featured an American courting a local beauty in an old-world Catholic and tradition-bound homeland―and Ford makes sure to sketch in the particulars of the lovers’ supervised promenades. The question of the relevance of traditions, of the negotiations and the boundaries, to the plot of Coppola’s film is beside the point. By contrast, with Ford, it’s precisely the open-ended and irrepressible curiosity, the desire to see and to hear, to know not just what conveys the essence of the story but to fill the movie with the stuff of life, that makes him an ultimately more forward-looking and contemporary filmmaker.
当我看到迈克尔?柯里昂(阿尔?帕西诺饰演)像意大利乡巴佬一样向黑眼美女阿波罗尼雅求爱的时候，我突然想起了约翰?福特(John Ford)的电影《沉静的人》(The Quiet Man)。这部拍摄于1952年的电影描述了一个美国人爱上一个美丽的乡村姑娘的故事。故事发生在一个受天主教传统教条束缚的地方，福特通过这对恋人在监视之下散步的细节来表现这一点。关于传统、协商和界限的问题在科波拉的电影里少有涉及。与之相比，福特有着毫无界限和压抑不住的好奇心，他渴望目睹渴望聆听，他不仅清楚用什么去传达故事的精华还让电影充满生命的活力，这些都让他最终成为了更具有前瞻性和时代性的电影制作人。
Compare the performance of John Marley, playing the movie producer Jack Woltz, in “The Godfather, ” with the same actor’s leading role as Richard Forst―husband, executive, and lover―in Cassavetes’s “Faces.” It’s the difference between skill well-deployed to connect the dots and an overflowing soul filling the screen. In Coppola’s film, he inspires admiration; in Cassavetes’s, shock and wonder.
演员约翰?马利(John Marley)既在《教父》中饰演电影制片人杰克? 沃尔茨(Jack Woltz)，又在卡萨维茨导演的《面孔》(Faces)中饰演主角理查德? 福斯特(Richard Forst)――这一角色同时是丈夫，长官和情人――两者的区别甚大，一个是通过精心施展的演技来连接情节，另一个却是在屏幕上洋溢着人性的光辉。在科波拉的电影中他赢得了敬佩，而在卡萨维茨的电影中他却创造了震撼和奇迹。
There’s a sort of mental dividing line between those who see the first two “Godfathers” as the great movies of the time and those who consider Cassavetes’s films to be the era’s supreme creations. And I’d bet that, if the former were to be sounded, they’d also turn out, by and large, to be partisans of the modern serious television series, starting, in all likelihood, with “The Sopranos.” The very mode of analysis invoked by a series―in which the parsing of character and study of intention take precedence―is the one for which “The Godfather” seems to have been created, and which, for that matter, those films may have created. Francis Ford Coppola should properly be considered the founder of modern television. What Cassavetes has inspired are the strongest currents of the independent cinema.
这种剖析人物和分析剧本的模式成就了《教父》系列电影，此后的现代电视剧则同其如出一辙，弗朗西斯?福特?科波拉应该被视为现代电视剧的鼻祖，而卡萨维兹则引领了现代独立电影最强劲的潮流。
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