Editing Shadows (1959 film) (section)

==Legacy==
The film was shocking to American audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s because it turned the "concept of race upside down".<ref name=Macadams2012/> Two of the principal actors portraying African-Americans were not actually black: Goldoni was born in the U.S. to [[Sicily|Sicilian]] parents, fully European in heritage, and Carruthers was only one-sixteenth black.<ref name=Macadams2012/> Carruthers used a sunlamp to darken his skin during the 1957 shooting of the film, but in 1959 for the new scenes, he abandoned this effort.<ref name=Charity2004/> Carruthers and Goldoni were married in 1960, but quickly divorced.<ref name=Macadams2012/>

After ''Shadows'' was honored by the Venice Film Festival, the international publicity helped it become the first American film to see success outside of the Hollywood system. It joined ''Pull My Daisy'' and [[Shirley Clarke]]'s ''[[The Connection (1961 film)|The Connection]]'' to establish a new wave of American independent films.<ref name=Macadams2012/>

In 1994, film critic [[Leonard Maltin]] said the film "was considered a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema".<ref name=Maltin1994>{{cite book |title=Leonard Maltin's Movie Encyclopedia |url=https://archive.org/details/leonardmaltin00malt |url-access=registration |year=1994 |last=Maltin |first=Leonard |author-link=Leonard Maltin |publisher=Dutton |page=[https://archive.org/details/leonardmaltin00malt/page/137 137]|isbn=9780525936350 }}</ref>

===2003 rediscovery===
The second version of the film, the result of the reshooting and reworking Cassavetes did in 1959, is the one that Cassavetes considered to be the final product, and he refused to show the 1958 version. In time, he lost track of the first version's only print, and for decades it was believed to have been lost or destroyed. In the 1980s, Cassavetes said he may have donated the film to a school far away. In fact, the 16&nbsp;mm print of the first version had been left on a New York City subway train, taken to the subway's lost-and-found department, and then purchased by a second-hand-goods shop owner as part of a box of unclaimed items. The shop owner saw "Shadows" scratched into the [[Film leader|leader]] on the first reel, but he did not recognize the film's name. The shop eventually went out of business, and the owner retired. The reels of film were stored in an attic in Florida, and, in November 2003, they were given by the shop owner's daughter to film professor [[Ray Carney]], who had been searching for the print of the first version of ''Shadows'' since the 1980s.<ref name = "Guardian"/> A digital copy was shown at the [[International Film Festival Rotterdam]] in late January 2004.<ref name=Guerrasio2004/> Since then, few people have seen this version, as Rowlands and the Cassavetes estate have been involved in a legal dispute regarding Carney's use of the film.<ref name=Thomson2006/><ref name="Rosenbaum2007">{{cite web|last1=Rosenbaum|first1=Jonathan|author-link1=Jonathan Rosenbaum|title=Cassavetes' Prelude and Postscript|url=https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2021/09/cassavetes-prelude-and-postscript/|website=JonathanRosenbaum.net}}</ref>