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Shadows
Directed by	John Cassavetes
Produced by	Maurice McEndree
Written by	John Cassavetes
Starring	Ben Carruthers Lelia Goldoni Hugh Hurd Anthony Ray
Release date(s)	November 11, 1959
Running time	87 min
Country	United States
Language	English
IMDb profile

Shadows is a 1959 improvisational film about interracial relations during the Beat Generation. It stars Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni, Hugh Hurd, and Anthony Ray. It was written and directed by John Cassavetes; film scholars often consider the film the birth of independent film in the U.S.

Cassavetes essentially shot the film twice, once in 1957 and again in 1959, removing, adding, and rearranging scenes. The second version is the version Cassavetes favored; he did make the first version available for screenings, but he eventually lost track of the print, and for decades it was believed to have been lost or destroyed. In 2004, after over a decade of searching, Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney, a professor at Boston University and manager of a web site devoted to the director, announced that he had discovered the only print of the original version of the film, which had somehow ended up in a box in a subway before being bought with a lot of other "lost and found" objects.^[1] The film Carney managed to find was a pristine copy that apparently had only been screened two or three times before it was lost.^[2] Carney has posted three video clips from Shadows I for viewing on his website to verify the film's condition and indicate the presence of a complete credits sequence, which demonstrates that the version he possesses is a final version, not a rough assembly.^[3] This discovery has led to a considerable amount of open hostility towards Carney from Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes' widow.^[4]

Film critic Leonard Maltin calls Cassavetes' second version of Shadows "a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema". The movie was shot with a 16 mm handheld camera on the streets of New York. Much of the dialogue was improvised, and the crew were class members or volunteers. The jazz-infused score, some of which is composed by jazz legend Charles Mingus, underlines the movie's Beat Generation theme of alienation and raw emotion. The movie's plot focuses on an interracial relationship — still a taboo subject in Eisenhower-era America.

The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

• Shadows at the Internet Movie Database
• Criterion Collection essay by Gary Giddins
• Dan Schneider Review of Shadows
• Nick Schager Review of Shadows
• The quest for the first version of Shadows

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