A Woman Under the Influence

The article suggests understanding Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence (1974) through the dimension of the voice. Two key theoretical references thus become Michel Chion and Mladen Dolar. The voice is a phenomenon that stands at the intersection of body and language, but belongs to neither. The analysis identifies the scenes in which Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) is confronted with voices and the questions of their invisible, absent sources, while Cassavetes’ art of directing builds its specific space exactly on such gaps between the seen and the heard, around the breaks of the audio-visual chain, where he does not simply edit images, but combines attitudes. By doing so, he “puts time into body, as well as thought into life” (Gilles Deleuze). The study of A Woman Under the Influence positions Cassavetes as a master modernist, an equal contemporary of Rossellini and Jean-Luc Godard.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!