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Ray Carney, also known as Raymond Carney, is an American film theorist. His primary field of study is the works of actor and director John Cassavetes. He teaches at Boston University and has written two books on Cassavetes, as well as books on Carl Theo. Dreyer, Frank Capra, and Mike Leigh.
Alternate Cassavete's works
Carney has discovered alternate versions of Cassavetes's seminal works, Faces and Shadows. The longer version of Faces he discovered is stored at the Library of Congress, but has been suppressed by Gena Rowlands, the widow of Cassavetes and executor of his estate.
The alternate Shadows, also known as Shadows I or the Ur-Shadows, was created two years before the 1959 version. It was largely improvised, critically touted at the time of its screening but it confused most of the public in attendance, causing walk-outs. Cassavetes himself found the entire thing too technical, but he never-- as is wrongly supposed-- suppressed this work. He hired a Hollywood scriptwriter, rewrote and reshot over the next two years, creating an entirely different film-- only about a third of the Ur-Shadows remains in the final product.
The film was thought lost for many years, but Carney managed to find a badly-worn sixteen millimeter print. Gena Rowlands has stated that no such film ever existed, and has started a number of legal proceedings to confiscate it from Carney and destroy the film. She has also succeeded in having him fired as scholarly advisor to the Criterion Collection's recent Cassavetes box-set-- after his work had been completed. Recently, he has discovered paperwork which states that the rights to the Ur-Shadows belongs to the cast and not Cassavetes. All of this is detailed on his website (http://www.cassavetes.com).
Other works
Besides his work on Cassavetes, Carney is also known for his attacks on popular culture, "kitsch", and the formalism approach to film criticism espoused by David Bordwell. His denouncements of such films as those of Quentin Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, Steven Spielberg and Schindler's List, David Lynch, Spike Lee, and Oliver Stone have given his critics cause to call him an elitist. His supporters find his devotion to truth and his championing of such filmmakers as Yasujiro Ozu, Cassavetes, Tom Noonan and Charles Burnett inspiring.
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