Both the conception and the style of Shadows were indebted to the neorealists. The young actor went to the Thalia frequently in the fifties and was deeply affected by the work of Visconti, de Sica and Rossellini, which was just making its way to the United States at that point. Cassavetes was also familiar with other New York-based independent film that preceded his own work. Commentators who regard him as ‘the first independent’ are only displaying their ignorance of the history of independent American film, which goes back to the early 1950s. Cassavetes was personally fond of the work of Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin and Shirley Clarke, which he had seen before he began Shadows. He was particularly fond of Engel’s The Little Fugitive, Lovers and Lollipops and Weddings and Babies, and Rogosin’s On the Bowery. (I would note that although Cassavetes mentions Godard in the following statement from the mid-seventies, the works of the French New Wave had not been released in the United States at the time Shadows was begun.)