Which came first?
This film or the French New Wave?
sharewell...The first verison of Shadows was shot in, I believe, 1957.
The French New Wave began with Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and/or Godard's Breathless (1960), if I'm not mistaken.
I would say Shadows was first.
Yeah but the beginnings of the new wave came earlier the Truffaut and Godard like Bob le flambeur (1955) and Et Dieu... créa la femme (1956), which may or may not have had an effect on Shadows.
shareBut the French New Wave didn't hit the United States until AFTER Shadows was released, so it had no impact on the making of this film.
shareAlso, though those films were in some ways precursers to the New Wave, they were hardly New Wave films at all--very slick in style and not very radical in content. Nothing like the way the New Wave directors experimented with form. They were as much "precursers" to the New Wave as the films of Hitchcock were (in fact, Hitchcock was more a precurser/influence than those films), except that the films you mentioned were French.
However, the New Wave directors were making shorts at that time--The Mischeif Makers by Truffaut and, among others, Charlotte and her Boyfriend Jules by Godard--while Cassavettes was first shooting Shadows (400 Blows began shooting in 1958). So I'd say Shadows and the New Wave were rather concurrent, very hard to say one came before the other, especaiily condiering the rather miniscule likelihood the shorts I mentioned were shown in the U.S. at that time.
I'm not an expert on Cassavetes, but I read that his "first version" of "Shadows" in 16mm (1957/1958) was screened for a small audience and met with very little enthusiasm. So in 1959 he shot new scenes that eventually made up for something like 70% of the final film, which was only released in the US in 1961 (at least it's what IMDb says in the movie's page release dates).
A good hint about these new shots is the sequence early on in "Shadows", with Lelia Goldoni stopping to look at a movie poster of "Les Bijoutiers du Clair de Lune" (Heaven Fell that Night), a film by Roger Vadim starring Brigitte Bardot, which was released in the US in late 1958. Of course, "Les Bijoutiers" is hardly a French New Wave movie, but I think it's very likely Cassavetes was interested in what was happening in France, and I produce three evidences: 1) his mention of Sartre (in the party scene); 2) Rupert Crosse telling Hugh Hurd they should go to Paris to try a new shot in their careers; and 3) the tribute reference to Bardot. Lelia's character has a sexual candor and whimsical, independent behavior ("Who do you belong to?" asks Tony Ray; she answers "I belong to me!") that carry strong traces of the "Bardot effect" (let's not forget Bardot was by then a world-wide star and had changed forever women's sex behavior in the movies -- and in real life, for that matter).
I would say the most detectable influences in "Shadows" are the improvisational technique with the actors, which is analog to the improvisation in modern jazz (everyone musician gets to solo, including the drummer; almost every actor in "Shadows" gets to solo too); + the influence of the Beatnik revolution that took NY literary and poetry scene by storm, + the fact that Cassavetes was filming with a 16mm camera with a cameraman who had no previous experience as a DP, with no money and almost "natural" lighting, which may avow for the now hailed "rough" look in "Shadows".
But I also suggest it's very likely that Cassavetes may have seen Louis Malle's highly influential and ground-breaking "Les Amants" (The Lovers) with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Marc Bory performing then-daring bed scenes as intimate as Goldoni/Tony Ray's in "Shadows" -- let's not forget "Les Amants" had won the prestigious Venice Film Festival in 1958 and was released in the US in 1959 to a "succès de scandale". Cassavetes may also have seen Malle's 1958 "L'Ascenseur pour L'Échafaud" (Frantic), which had a night atmosphere not unlike "Shadows" with a beautiful long scene of Jeanne Moreau walking through the streets of Paris with Miles Davis' improvised jazz score on the soundtrack.
All suppositions, of course, but perfectly plausible :)))