Richard Brody at The New Yorker:
Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, at the age of ninety-four, is, of all the actresses I’ve ever seen onscreen, the greatest artist. She’s the one whose performances offer the most surprises, the most shocks, the most moment-to-moment inventiveness, and, above all, the most almost-unbearable force of emotional expression, combining extremes of strength and vulnerability, of overt display and inner life. Her mighty talent is also a peculiar one, the strangeness of which is exemplary of the art of movies: it might never have come so fully to light were it not for her marriage to John Cassavetes and for the movies that they made together—especially the personal six that extend from “Faces” (filmed in 1965, released in 1968) to “Love Streams” (1984).
That’s not at all to diminish Rowlands’s art or its basis in her innate talent and hard work, but to locate its essence in the nature of cinema: it’s an art of collaboration, in which more or less every major artistic advance has resulted from two or more people making common cause.
more here.
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